btw, Gem, Hollywood is not real life<g>
"Friends have told us that you are in a film, The Blood Diamond, which shows how badly diamonds can hurt. We know this. When we were chased off our land, officials told us it was because of the diamond finds," they said in a public letter to Di Caprio.... left some 400,000 people dead.
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Diamond strife
November 1, 2006
The global gemstone industry is spending millions of dollars to counter fallout from a new Leonardo Di Caprio film about so-called "conflict diamonds" that have helped fuel war and misery in Africa.
The World Diamond Council is spending about $US15 million ($A20 million) on an awareness campaign, funded by heavyweights such as South Africa's De Beers, ahead of the release of the film, set in the western African nation of Sierra Leone.
"Blood diamonds" or "conflict stones" are defined as rough diamonds obtained through coercion or military and brute force and exploited by many rebel movements to finance their activities, mainly in mineral-rich Africa.
Di Caprio, who plays a smuggler looking for a rare pink diamond hidden by a co-prisoner, has a memorable line in the film when he tells a journalist: "In America, diamonds are bling bling, in Africa they are bling bang."
De Beers chairman Guy Leymarie has openly voiced his worries, telling CNN Money the film "is absolutely a concern for us".
To add to the company's woes, San Bushmen in Botswana, the world's biggest diamond producer where De Beers has a major company, have sought DiCaprio's help to return to their ancestral land, where they say they were chased out because of diamonds.
"Friends have told us that you are in a film, The Blood Diamond, which shows how badly diamonds can hurt. We know this. When we were chased off our land, officials told us it was because of the diamond finds," they said in a public letter to Di Caprio.
De Beers spokeswoman Lynette Hori said that while the film was "emotive" it was "set in the past" and the diamond trade had since undergone a sea change.
"In the 1990s the illegal trade in diamonds to fund conflict accounted for a very small percentage of global diamonds, about four per cent," she said in an interview.
"Today significantly more than 99 per cent of diamonds are certified to be from conflict-free sources through a United Nations-mandated process," she added.
Former Liberian president Charles Taylor, now awaiting trial before a UN tribunal for crimes against humanity, is widely seen as the single most powerful figure behind a series of civil conflicts in Liberia and neighbouring Sierra Leone between 1989 and 2003, that left some 400,000 people dead.
Taylor chose to arm and train a notorious Sierra Leonean rebel group in exchange for "blood diamonds", fuelling a 10-year war that left scores of thousands dead and thousands of others who had their limbs chopped off. |
