Greg Campbell - Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the Worlds Most Precious Stones

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Blood Diamonds by Greg Campbell is first-rate journalistic sleuthing, tracing the violence-soaked webs that link the legitimate diamond trade, shady dealers, rebels without a conscience, and organizations such as Hizbollah and al-Qaeda.

Campbell punctures the myth that West Africas descent into hell flows solely from the hands of its warlords and juvenile killers. He locates the sources in London, Amsterdam, and New York, as well as in Freetown and Monrovia. In so doing, he makes the reader fully aware of West Africas dead-last nations, their hellholes and hecatombs. He also insures that the news from that part of the world will never read quite the same.

In Blood Diamonds, a work of impeccable reportage and meticulous research, veteran journalist Greg Campbell argues that Sierra Leones diamonds have inflicted terrible suffering on the region and are now financing global terror.

The book reads at times like surreal fiction, and Campbells skill with language comes through in this gruesome, real-life story. He sets the scene masterfully in the diamond region of eastern Sierra Leone and graphically describes the bizarre, horrific methods of intimidation of the population by the Revolutionary United Front.

O my mountain in the field,
I will give thy substance and all thy treasures to the spoil,
and thy high places for sin,
throughout all thy borders.

JEREMIAH17:1

CYMBELINE:That diamond upon your finger, say
How came it yours?
IACHIMO:Thoult torture me to leave unspoken that
Which to be spoke would torture thee.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Cymbeline

ISMAEL DALRAMY lost his hands in 1996 with two quick blows of an ax. He didntor couldntrecall the pain of the blows. But he remembered being ordered at gunpoint to place his wrists on a wooden stump dripping with the blood of his neighbors who were writhing on the ground around him trying to stem the flow of blood from their arms or staggering away.

Dalramy does recall that it was quick and methodicalthe victim in line in front of him was swiftly kicked away and suddenly he faced a bloody wooden block and an impatient gang of heavily armed teens eager to be done with their days orders. He didnt fight his captors or beg for mercy. Instead, he removed a crude metal ring made by his son from one of the fingers on his left hand and put it in his pocket, one of the last acts his hands performed for him.

Until that morning, when the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) attacked the town with rockets and rifles, speeding through the streets in pickup trucks whose cab roofs had been sawed off to convert them into roofless killing vehicles, it had been easy to think that there would be plenty of time to escape if the need arose. The humid jungle village of Koidu, where Dalramys family had lived for generations, is an epicenter of raw diamond production in eastern Sierra Leone. In the months leading up to the day that Dalramys hands were amputated by the RUF, Koidu had been increasingly surrounded by rebel forces who crept through the jungles dense mesh of palm trees and banana bushes. RUF bandits would enter the town sporadically to steal food and supplies and menace its inhabitants, but an all-out assault seemed unlikely. Though you would never know by looking at itKoidu is like many bush villages in Sierra Leone, composed of brown shacks and red-dirt streetsthe area around the village had long been fiercely coveted in the war that has torn apart this West African nation since 1991. Ever since British geologists first discovered diamonds in Sierra Leones jungles in the 1930s, miners had been extracting some of the most valuable diamond wealth in the world from small muddy pits scattered throughout the surrounding rain forest. These small chunks and bits of milky-white carbon crystals are transformed into precious jewelry displayed on the hands, wrists, necks, and ears of people around the world, many of whom have probably never heard of Sierra Leone. During the RUF war, people like Dalramy paid for this distant luxury with their own hands.