Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World's Most Precious Stones - Mixed Media

New Internationalist, May, 2003

by Greg Campbell

(Westview Press, ISBN 0 8133 3939 1)

Diamonds originating in war zones -- 'conflict diamonds' or, less euphemistically, 'blood diamonds' -- amount for about four or five per cent of global output. While this may be a small percentage -- something stressed repeatedly by De Beers, the cartel which virtually controls the world diamond market -- it has been estimated that this bloody trade has caused 3.7 million deaths and displaced 6 million Africans.

Greg Campbell's absorbing investigation opens in sickeningly graphic but appropriate fashion with an account of a brutal and commonplace atrocity as teenage fighters of the Sierra Leone rebel gang, The Revolutionary United Front, chop off the hands of innocent villagers caught up in the fighting.

Campbell's book clarifies why the bloodiest and most protracted African wars have been fought in those countries -- Sierra Leone, Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo -- with abundant natural resources. These wars, beyond ideology or morality, are simply struggles to control the wealth and funnel it to Western corporations. War, in these terms, is an 'economic endeavour' and the civil war which has destroyed Sierra Leone is, in Campbell's memorable phrase, 'a 10-year-long jewellery heist'.

Blood Diamonds is first-rate journalistic sleuthing, tracing the webs that link the legitimate diamond trade, shady Lebanese dealers, conscienceless rebel groups and, through conduits in neighbouring Liberia and Guinea, organizations such as Hizbullah and al-Qaeda. In laying bare the squalid secrets behind the trade in this 'purest' of gems, Campbell has provided an overdue reminder of the real price to be paid, in suffering, mutilation and death, by the victims of the world's manufactured hunger for diamonds.

Rating ****

www. westviewpress.com

REVIEWERS Peter Whittaker o Louise Gray o Malcolm Lewis. George Fisher

STAR RATING

EXCELLENT *****

VERYGOOD ****

GOOD ***

FAIR **

POOR *