I watched the Leo DiCaprio movie, Blood Diamonds, last night and it shed some light on what was happening in Sierra Leone a few years ago. I was pretty horrified. There was a scene where they were axing off people’s hands and arms — the choice was left to the victim, “short sleeves or long sleeves” meaning above the wrist or above the elbow. This was being done so that people couldn’t vote — “The future is in your hands… no more hands, no more future.”

I came across an article today at the NY Times web site that seems to continue from where Blood Diamonds left off. In a nutshell, it’s basically saying that things aren’t a whole lot better after it became difficult to sell conflict diamonds to the west.

An international regulatory system created after the war has prevented diamonds from fueling conflicts and financing terrorist networks. Even so, diamond mining in Sierra Leone remains a grim business that brings the government far too little revenue to right the devastated country, yet feeds off the desperation of some of the world’s poorest people.

“The process is more to sanitize the industry from the market side rather than the supply side,” said John Kanu, a policy adviser to the Integrated Diamond Management Program, a United States-backed effort to improve the government’s handling of diamond money. “To make it so people could go to buy a diamond ring and to say, ‘Yes, because of this system, there are no longer any blood diamonds. So my love, and my conscience, can sleep easily.’

It’s a pretty sad situation for a country that’s selling something that is prized in most parts of the world.