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.