Will Hollywood's latest cause put Africans on ice?

I don't know the glitzy side of diamonds. My wife doesn't wear one; I've never bought one. I only know the desperate side, the civil war side, the side that comes with 12-year-old soldiers who chop off limbs with machetes.

So forgive me if I have little sympathy for the concerns of the diamond industry, which is getting squirmy over the impending release of Blood Diamond on December 8. The Warner Bros. film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Connelly is set in late 1990s Sierra Leone, amidst a civil war that saw doped-up children forced into combat and rebels who raped and terrorized at will. It tells the story of Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), a destitute villager who has found a rare diamond, and the kidnapping of his son by guerrilla soldiers. Vandy hides the diamond and embarks on a mission to rescue his son, aided by Danny Archer (DiCaprio), a mercenary who is also keen on knowing the diamond's hiding spot. The bitter struggle that ensues is fiction, but the essence of the tale—and the gruesome bloodletting that accompanies it—is, for Sierra Leone, all too real.

Sierra Leone's civil war raged for more than 10 years, fueled by a crazed lust for control of the country's diamond mines. The war—along with conflicts in Liberia, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—sparked outrage in the international human rights community over the sale of diamonds mined for the sole purpose of funding lawless armed factions, giving rise to the term "conflict diamond."

I visited an amputee camp in Freetown and met dozens of men, women, and children with stumps where their arms and legs should have been. They were trying to re-learn how to eat, bathe, and walkI saw the impact of conflict diamonds first-hand on a trip to Sierra Leone in May of 2002, four months after the war. I visited an amputee camp in Freetown, the country's seaside capital, and met dozens of men, women, and children with stumps where their arms and legs should have been. They were trying to re-learn how to eat, bathe, and walk. A few of the more enterprising ones were being trained in the art of soap making, in hopes that they might some day be able to eke out a living. Many of them had jagged scars just above their stumps, marks left by drunken rebels who'd tried and failed to chop off a limb with the first whack.

These were just a few of the casualties of that vicious war, in which an estimated 75,000 were killed and thousands more maimed. The conflict began in 1991 and eventually required the deployment of more than 17,000 United Nations peacekeeping troops—at the time, the largest force ever assembled by the organization. Outside the Freetown camp, amputees hobbled around on makeshift crutches, begging at intersections and cafes. I saw former child soldiers in rehab, fighting withdrawal from drug addiction and trying to map out their path back into society, or what was left of it.

All this suffering came courtesy of Sierra Leone's diamond mines. It's that fact, almost five years after the war's end, that has the diamond industry worried sick—to the tune of $15 million. According to an announcement from the managing director of De Beers this June, that's the amount the industry spent on a PR campaign to counter potential backlash from the movie. De Beers, the world's largest diamond company, is well known for its efforts to control the diamond market. According to the New Yorker, De Beers reacted to West African attempts to undermine its control over world prices in the 1950s by creating a paramilitary team of mercenaries in Sierra Leone that wreaked havoc on the regional diamond market, ambushing caravans of gemstones as they made their way to neighboring Liberia and on again to the world market. The caravans soon ceased to exist, and De Beers's control was restored.

Now, with Blood Diamond coming out so close to Christmas, the industry is bracing for the chilly effect the film might have on holiday sales.

"This movie is going to jar people," says Bonnie Abaunza, who runs Amnesty International's celebrity outreach program. (Amnesty is an adviser for the film.) "I don't know how you can watch it and not stay up all night thinking about child soldiers and conflict diamonds."

That people in the multibillion dollar diamond game tend to avoid commenting on their concern publicly comes as no surprise, but the industry's recent behavior speaks volumes. While the movie was in the early stages of production, the World Diamond Council, an organization set up by diamond companies in 2000 following pressure from human rights groups, sent a three-page letter to Ed Zwick, the film's director, that took great pains to point out the strides the diamond industry has made to remove conflict diamonds from the market.

The movie's story "would be incomplete without the message of hope contained in the unprecedented international effort to eliminate conflict diamonds," the letter stated. "There is a real risk of associating diamonds with African conflicts permanently and undermining consumer confidence in the product unintentionally."

In September the council created a website, which attempts to outline how diamonds benefit the economies and people of Africa. It explains that nearly all of the world's diamonds are conflict-free thanks to the Kimberley Process, a certification system set up to track diamonds all the way from the pit mine to a woman's ring finger. The process, says the council, "has virtually eliminated the trade in conflict diamonds."

"After the movie comes out, do you think people will want diamonds from Sierra Leone? The jewelers won't want to touch them. I don't give a crap about the development groups or the diamond industry. I care about the African diggers getting their asses kicked in"The World Diamond Council maintains that the Kimberley Process has reduced conflict diamonds to one percent of the world market. But according to Global Witness, a human rights group that works to combat the proliferation of conflict diamonds, the system is gravely flawed. The organization maintains that in war-divided Ivory Coast, for example, about 300,000 carats of diamonds are mined per year, mostly in the rebel-held north. In September the United Nations reported that diamonds mined in Ivory Coast were providing the rebellion with up to $23 million per year. Ivorian rebels smuggle the diamonds through Mali and Ghana, the report said, where they get a Kimberley Process stamp of approval.

"It's a broken process," says Corinna Gilfillan, the head of the U.S. office of Global Witness. "If De Beers and the others are really concerned about this, they should do more to make sure governments are making their countries adhere to the process."

The industry's public relations campaign has made the human rights community suspicious. "All this publicity begs the question: Why is the World Diamond Council spending all this money?" Abaunza says. "What are they scared of? Pharmaceutical companies didn't launch a campaign before The Constant Gardener came out."

A member of the council's publicity group, who asked not to be named, acknowledged the pre-release impact of the film: "The industry has never made any bones about the fact that it's the movie that got them going on the website and the education campaign. The diamond industry owes Warner Bros. and the filmmakers a debt of gratitude for getting them engaged."

A nonprofit group called the Diamonds for Africa Fund recently launched a parody of the Diamond Council's website that focuses on the unseemly side of the business. The site is critical of the effectiveness of the Kimberley Process, pointing to the smuggling in Ivory Coast as evidence that loopholes in the system still exist. The website also highlights the use of child labor in African diamond mines and the poverty that prevails in Africa even where the diamond market is said to be clean.

The site also offers a solution: buy diamonds from Canada. It's a notion that infuriates Martin Rapaport, a member of the World Diamond Council and publisher one of the industry's most important newsletters. In 2000 Rapaport tried, unsuccessfully, to establish a system in Sierra Leone that would vastly increase the pay that local diggers got for their finds, cutting out the middle men and discouraging smuggling along the way. Now he sees the release of Blood Diamond and the advocacy that surrounds it as reckless and potentially harmful to the very people the human rights groups are trying to help.

"How dare these people effectively create a boycott of Sierra Leone diamonds?" Rapaport says. "After the movie comes out, do you think people will want diamonds from Sierra Leone? The jewelers won't want to touch them. I don't give a crap about the development groups or the diamond industry. I care about the African diggers getting their asses kicked in."

Abaunza at Amnesty International doesn't see it that way.

"We don't want a boycott of diamonds. We want people to ask their jeweler if their diamonds are conflict-free," Abaunza says. "I believe in the power of education. I think people need to understand this. The economies in Africa need to be strengthened—the public will say 'I don't want people starving. I want to know what's going on.'"

As we neared Kono, the pits were no longer occasional blights on the landscape. They were everywhere, like tumors eating away at the communityA year after my first trip to Sierra Leone, I went back again and hitched a ride with a U.N. delegation on a Russian-built helicopter to Kono, the heart of Sierra Leone's diamond-mining district, in the Loma Mountains about 150 miles east of Freetown. The area is near the borders of Guinea and Liberia, and the alluvial mines there were primary rebel targets during the Sierra Leone civil war. From my porthole window I could see the muddy craters that mining had made in the thickly forested hills. But as we neared Kono, the pits were no longer occasional blights on the landscape. They were everywhere, like tumors eating away at the community.

We took a tour of one of the mines, a maze of thousands of pits that had been dug along the banks of a river. Diggers—mostly young men stripped to the waist and knee-deep in thick mud—were scattered over the apocalyptic scene like working ants. While the U.N. officials visited a schoolhouse and were serenaded by a class of elementary students, I slid down the embankment of a pit that was threatening the school's foundation, and I watched as a fistfight broke out among a group of diggers over a stone that had been found. Such fights were apparently common, and sometimes erupted over a find that turned out to be nothing but a hunk of quartz. I don't know the result of the brawl I saw—the U.N. convoy was leaving, and I didn't want to get stuck there.

This was May of 2003, a few months after the Kimberley Process had officially come into being. Though the war was over and the diamonds found in the Kono mines would no longer be classified as conflict stones, it was clear that for the miners life was still miserable. They no longer had to worry about having their arms chopped off, but they were still stuck there in the mud, scraping and fighting and doing some of the world's most onerous work, all for the chance of earning a few coins if they were lucky enough to come across some crystallized carbon.

Even though the Kimberley Process has cut down on the number of conflict diamonds, it's clearly an imperfect process, as the smuggling in Ivory Coast demonstrates. And what about the other human rights violations tied to the industry? Children and adults alike are forced to tolerate working conditions that are half a step removed from slavery. Relentless poverty consumes many mining communities, as De Beers and the rest of the industry's top players get richer.

"The Sierra Leone rebels cut off the hands of civilians, and Ed Zwick makes a movie about it. So Zwick and Hollywood are now making money on the Africans too," Rapaport says. "Everyone's making money on the black people of Africa. It makes me sick. I call them hypocrites. They're as irresponsible in this as anyone else."

Amnesty International and Global Witness plan to use the release of Blood Diamond to raise money for organizations linked to African diamond miners and victims of conflict. A Warner Bros. official who asked not to be named said that a fund had been set up by everyone who worked on the movie—from the stars down to the grips—to help amputees in Sierra Leone.

"I do hope this movie makes money, because that will mean a lot of people went to see it. We want to raise awareness," Abaunza says. "But you have to make a lot of money for a movie to be profitable. This is not a slam-dunk blockbuster. It's not Anchorman. This is a risky film. It's hard to watch."

While some might see Blood Diamond as the latest evidence that Africa is the hottest cause in Hollywood, it's hard to know what good, if any, the film will do for people in Sierra Leone or elsewhere on the continent. For Martin Rapaport, it all comes down to what the impact will be on the diamond miners themselves.

"I hope Amnesty and Global Witness are right and I'm wrong," Rapaport says. "But what's going to happen to the millions of African diggers? Is it good for them or not? That's my measuring stick."