First, information on the war the OP briefly mentioned:
From March 23rd, 1991 to January 18th, 2002, the small west African country of Sierra Leone was ravaged by civil war. Sierra Leone was once the pride and joy of the UK's African colonies. It was a tourist hot spot and flourished under British rule. Then the British started pulling out in 1961, and the country started to slowly degrade and fall apart like so many African countries after the colonial powers left.
In 1985, Joseph Momoh took power and began expelling opposition groups. One of the men expelled was Foday Sankoh, who would later return to haunt Sierra Leone. The expelled students mostly found themselves in Libya and received secret military training from the Libyan government. These students, under Foday Sankoh, eventually formed the Revolutionary United Front, a rebel organization with the full backing of Liberian president Charles Taylor.
The primary goal of the RUF was to topple the government of Sierra Leone and gain complete control of the diamond industry. The Kono District, which contains much of Sierra Leone's diamonds, was a primary target. The RUF's early goal was to take these diamond fields and use them to fund their war until they won, but more on that later.
In 1991, the RUF, leading an element of Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia rebels, launched an invasion of the Kailahun District, just south of the Kono District. Their motto was "No more slaves, no more masters. Power and wealth to the people." At first, they were welcomed by the people of Sierra Leone. The government was extremely corrupt, and the RUF brought promises of liberation. This soon proved to be too good to be true.
The RUF were barbarians. They looted, raped, murdered, and enslaved everyone in their path. They mutilated those who they didn't outright kill. It was common for RUF rebels to rape women while their family watched, then mutilate the woman's genitals, then kill the woman's family while she watched. If she was pregnant, they would often beat her stomach, attempting to kill the baby. Carving "RUF" into the chests of victims was also common.
During elections, the government used the slogan "the power is in your hands." In response, the RUF would cut off the hands of civilians so that "they no longer had the power." They would cut off the hands of government troops so that they "could no longer raise arms against their brothers." They would cut off the hands of legitimate diamond miners so that they "could no longer support the government by mining diamonds."
The RUF also made heavy use of child soldiers. They would take away young children, some as young as 9, and begin brainwashing them. They would beat them, hammer their twisted ideologies into their heads. They would force them to take cocaine laced with gunpowder, or some other type of local concoction, as a method of control. The children would become highly addicted to drugs, to the point that they needed them. This made it easier to keep controlling them, rewarding the children with the drugs their body now depended on for killing civilians and fighting government troops. The children were little more than cannon fodder in combat. They had entire battalions of child soldiers, sent as the first waves while the older, more experienced rebels came in the rear to finish up. Girls, in addition to being forced to fight in combat, were also kept as sex slaves by ranking RUF rebels.
Able-bodied adults were sent to the diamond mines. They searched for diamonds from dawn till dusk, with no food, in filthy, disease-ridden conditions. Anyone caught trying to steal a diamond was shot where they stand, and just left there floating in the same water everyone else is mining diamonds from. The diamonds that were found were smuggled into Liberia. From there, the diamonds were sent to India and mixed in with legitimate, non-conflict diamonds. Sometimes the RUF would deal with rogue governments, trading rough diamonds for weapons. This was especially true in the early years of the war, when the USSR was falling apart. Rogue Soviet generals, now out of jobs and in charge of thousands of small arms, would fly in cargo planes full of weapons and were paid in diamonds. Once these diamonds get into the market, it is nearly impossible to track where they came from.
In 1995, the Sierra Leone government contracted the famed South African PMC Executive Outcomes to fight the RUF. In just over a year, Executive Outcomes retook Sierra Leone with minimal casualties and forced the RUF into a peace treaty. However, as soon as EO's contract ended and EO left, the RUF re-invaded Sierra Leone.
Finally, after they Useless Nations stopped having a dick waving contest, they sent in peacekeepers in 1998. The peacekeepers just sat there in Sierra Leone, trying to keep a peace that hasn't been there in years, basically just wasting money. Not even a year later, most of the nations in the peacekeeping force had already pulled out in frustration.
In May of 2000, the British finally sent in a force to guard the main airport in Freetown, the capital. Days later, the British effectively united the remaining UN peacekeepers, the battered Sierra Leone military, and Sierra Leone's handful of mercenary contractors into one coherent offensive. Within a year the British-led force decimated the RUF, forced them into peace negotiations, retrained a new army for the government, established a powerful peacekeeping force, and started pulling out. The war finally officially ended on January 18th, 2002.
How is all this relevant? Well, for one, the war went on as long as it did because of conflict diamonds, and it was the primary motivating force for the RUF. They wanted to topple the government to gain full control of all of the country's diamonds, and squander the wealth. This war directly lead to the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme, a plan by the UN to help ebb the flow of conflict diamonds and prevent more conflicts like the Sierra Leone Civil War. It has worked, to an extent; the number of conflict diamonds on the market is much less than it was at the peak of the conflict in Sierra Leone.
However, it isn't fool-proof. Conflict diamonds still get into the market, and there are many reasons why.
For one, the government of countries like Sierra Leone are HIGHLY corrupt. While the price of a diamond-mining license is low, the process to get one involves many, many bribes and under-the-table handjobs. When it is all said and done, getting a diamond-mining license costs several thousand dollars...in a country where the majority of people make less than a full dollar a day. This means that illegal diamond mining is a huge problem.
Diamonds mined this way aren't hard to sell, either. It is just a matter of sneaking across the border and finding an illicit trader. Most African countries have woefully under-defended borders, and smugglers can easily just walk right into another country.
Once you get to a major city, you just start dropping hints that you might have a diamond to sell. Within minutes you will probably have a ton of potential buyers. You make the sell and that's it. The illicit trader makes another sell. It goes on and on and the diamond eventually finds its way to a country like, say, India, at which point it mixes with the legit diamonds and no one can tell you if it is or isn't a conflict diamond.
If you go to an American or British jewelry store with a diamond to sell, under the Kimberly Process they are SUPPOSED to check it out, and you must have an authentic certificate saying it was mined legitimately in a non-conflict zone. However, many of these stores, particularly pawn shops and jewelry stores that aren't part of a chain, will often let this little technicality slide and buy it anyway...At which point they will forge a certificate saying it is conflict-free. This means that simply asking to see a legitimate certificate when purchasing often means very little. Most of them couldn't tell you were the diamond came from anyway, even if they did get it from a supposedly legit supplier. Once again, once the diamond gets to India, it is almost completely impossible to determine where it really came from after it circulates into the market.
And there you have it folks. A brief yet honest lecture on the diamond trade's dirty little secrets, from Sierra Leone to today. Now, the vast majority of diamonds are legit. Even if they were mined and smuggled illegally, the number of true conflict diamonds is much lower than it used to be. Chances are very good that, when you buy a diamond, it probably IS legit and conflict free...But there is still that tiny, tiny chance that it isn't.
As for who should be held responsible...Easy. The US and Europe (Europe as a whole, I mean). We are the biggest consumers of diamonds. These terrible things wouldn't happen if diamonds weren't so valued in our bloated, rather wealthy societies here in the West. Reforms should be made to clean up the governments in these corrupt countries, to make legitimate mining more favorable to illegal mining. Security should be increased to stop smugglers. However, this is all much, much easier said than done. Cleaning up corruption in Africa is like trying to stop the sun from rising every morning. The corruption infesting the diamond trade will continue, and there is little we can do about it.
