Bling, bling, you're dead: Obsession for Diamonds Leading to Death of Africans
Tuesday, October 19, 2004 at 05:39AM
TheSpook
While we continue to display our childish lack of
self-esteem by adorning our bodies with things that others can't afford
- in particular, diamonds - then African children, mothers and fathers
will continue to be slaughtered. With our love of bling, we in the west
heedlessly fuel the unimaginable misery of millions of Africans. Brutal
civil wars in Angola, Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone are mostly
fuelled and funded by "conflict diamonds", an illegal trade where armed
militia control mines, and even entire diamond-producing regions, in
order to trade the rough diamonds directly for guns. In the 70s there
was an eerily similar trade in Jamaica: guns for ganja - a straight
swap with American gangsters. The crucial difference is that the
Jamaican gunmen moved into the local town to prosecute criminal
activity; they didn't visit systematic rape and massacre upon the
locals until they had all accepted the invitation to leave. Three
million people were murdered in Congo alone over the past five years as
a result of this disgusting trade. So why not make conflict diamonds
illegal, remove their value to the murderers and ethnic cleansers, and
consequently the cause for the killing? [more 
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Article originally appeared on (http://brownwatch.com/).
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