The Heart of the Matter: Sierra Leone, Diamonds & Human Security : Complete Report

Front Cover
DIANE Publishing, 2000 - History - 88 pages
How diamonds have been the cause of widespread death, misery, & destruction for almost a decade in the West African country of Sierra Leone. Through the 1990s, Sierra Leone's rebel war became a tragedy of major humanitarian, political & historic proportions, but the story goes back 60 years, to the discovery of the diamonds. The diamond mining sector has become influenced by organized crime & by the smuggling not just of diamonds, but of guns & drugs, & by vast sums of money in search of a laundry. No peace agree. would be sustainable until the problems of mining & selling diamonds had been addressed, both inside Sierra Leone & internationally. Tables.
 

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 14 - Friedman, an internationally famous economist and proponent of what has come to be known as the libertarian philosophy: . . . [There] is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition, without deception and fraud...
Page 65 - ... international agreement or any contract entered into or any license or permit granted prior to the effective date of this order, the following are prohibited: (a) the direct or indirect importation into the United States of all diamonds exported from Angola on or after the effective date of this order that are not controlled through the Certificate of Origin regime of the Angolan Government of Unity and National Reconciliation; (b) the sale or supply by United States persons or from the United...
Page 21 - ... Africa, although diamond producing countries such as Lesotho, Botswana, Angola and Namibia are not mentioned. According to Harry Oppenheimer, the present chairman of DeBeers Anglo—American and several other large companies: - A degree of control is necessay for the well-being of the industry....
Page 41 - Rightly he made it his central purpose to create: 'a welfare state based upon African socialist principles, adapted to suit Ghanaian conditions, in which all citizens, regardless of class, tribe, colour or creed, shall have equal opportunity, and where there shall be no exploitation of man by man, tribe by tribe, or class by class.
Page 5 - ... stolen Sierra Leone diamonds have been a major concern to successive Sierra Leone governments since the great diamond rush of the 1950s. What was different and more sinister after 1991 was the active involvement of official Liberian interests in Sierra Leone's brutal war - for the purpose of pillaging rather than politics. By the end of the 1990s Liberia had become a major centre for massive diamond-related criminal activity, with connections to guns, drugs and money laundering throughout Africa...
Page 1 - ... strong critique of prevailing orthodox explanations of conflict, which tend towards state-centric and non-economic explanations. Traditional economics, in fact, as well as traditional political science and military history are of little assistance in explaining Sierra Leone's conflict. The point of the war may not actually have been to win it, but to engage in profitable crime under the cover of warfare.
Page 39 - Kono district, from all parts of the country and outside it, and they had the areas 'verging on anarchy, with armed bands of as many as 400 to 500 men raiding SLST... areas, and on occasion doing battle with the police'.17 This was the era of the 'Great Diamond Rush...
Page 82 - Paul Richards, Fighting for the Rainforest: War. Youth, and Resources in Sierra Leone (Oxford: James Currey, 1996).
Page 3 - UK, depending on their journey from one trading centre to another. • while the Government of Sierra Leone recorded exports of only 8,500 carats in 1998, the HRD records imports of 770,000 carats; • annual Liberian diamond mining capacity is between 100,000 and 150,000 carats, but the HRD records Liberian imports into Belgium of over 31 million carats between 1994 and 1998 - an average of over six million carats a year; • Ivory Coast, where the small diamond industry was closed in the mid 1980s,...
Page 71 - The one exception reflects the provisions of the International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries adopted by the General Assembly in 1989.

Bibliographic information