Blood Diamonds

Blood diamonds are diamonds that are mined in a war zone and sold to help an army with funding for their activities and are almost exclusively found in Africa. Since many of the militaries that do this are led by horrible warlords, it is considered that buying these diamonds leads directly to issues like child soldiers and murder. The fact that this is an $81 Billion a year business makes this extremely difficult to fix though. To some, this seems like such a foreign issue that it’s hard to wrap your mind around it, but when you realize that in just one country (Congo) there have been 2.5 million deaths and 2 million displaced due to this fighting, it shows how important this is.

In the year 2000 a group met in South Africa to discuss ways to block the trade of these diamonds by the international community. This group created the Kimberley process, where they created a certification system so that people can know where the diamonds they buy came from. This has cause the official sale of these diamonds to plummet. It is estimated that only about

1% of all diamonds from conflict zones made it to stores within 4 years of that decision. The problem is that there are ways around this system that are hard to estimate. People often move the stones to other countries with no conflict or simply bribe someone to change the documentation. For this reason, there are many that claim that around 10% of stones sold come from these countries to this day.

There has definitely been a shift in popular culture when it comes to this issue in the last few years though. The issue of blood diamonds was seen on TV in shows like CSI and Hawaii Five-O and in movies like James Bond and even the award winning movie entitled “Blood Diamond.” The issue can also be found in songs, like Kanye West’s Grammy winning song ‘Diamonds from Sierra Leone.’