“This study is about how diamonds – small pieces of carbon with no great intrinsic value – have been the cause of widespread death, destruction and misery for almost a decade in the small West African country of Sierra Leone. Through the 1990s, Sierra Leone’s rebel war became a tragedy of major
humanitarian, political and historic proportions, but the story goes back further – almost 60 years, to the discovery of the diamonds. The diamonds are, to use the title of Graham Greene’s classic 1948 novel about diamond smuggling in Sierra Leone, The Heart of the Matter.”
