Blood Diamonds

Blood Diamonds are the diamonds mined and sold by revolutionary groups and insurgents to fund military conflicts. Most of these diamonds come from various nations in Africa. A myriad of initiatives have been proposed, enacted and debated by governments, international organizations and the diamond industry itself. They are also known as “conflict” or “war” diamonds.

Blood diamonds are getting a greater exposure in popular culture with the release of such movies as the Die Another Day (2002), Lord of War (2005), and Blood Diamond (2006) as well as numerous television shows. The process of mining these illicit diamonds is often violent, as the wealth-seeking group often forces innocents to work themselves to illness and death in horrible conditions to get the gems, killing those who resist working, are poor miners, or if they were thought to have stolen any stones. Until the international community started efforts to stop the illegal trade, hundreds of millions of dollars of blood diamonds were purchased yearly by the diamond industry. In addition to insurgent groups in Africa, there are indications that al-Qaeda is helping launder the diamonds, using the hard to trace stones as a substitute for more easily traced currencies.

Governments agreed to create a voluntary import and export system called the Kimberley Process in 2002. This process attempts to create a non-forgeable paper trail for diamonds that will indicate when, where and how they were mined and it is showing signs of progress.. However the system is voluntary, there are no controls, oversight or enforcement mechanisms and blood diamonds do continue to find their way onto the market.