(2006) In 1999 a vicious civil war is raging in Sierra Leone between the rebels, the Revolutionary United Front, and the government over the country's diamond fields. At one point a character says: "Government bad, rebels worse."

Returning to his village with his catch, Solomon Vandy (Djimon Housou), a fisherman, witnesses an attack by the rebels, who slaughter his neighbors, chopping off hands to prevent males from voting for the government, and take him to work in a diamond-mining camp; his young son Dia, daughter, and baby girl escape with their mother Jassie.

Though the miners are carefully watched and searched to make sure they are not stealing diamonds (executed on the spot if caught), Solomon finds a large pink diamond and manages to bury it but not before he's seen. Just in time he's saved from death (as will happen repeatedly) when government troops attack the camp. Taken to prison along with captured rebels, including the rebel guard, minus an eye, who saw him with the diamond, Solomon vehemently denies, stripping off his clothes and screaming that his family and everything else has been taken from him, the RUF's accusation that he has a great diamond in his possession.

Also in the prison, privy to this scene, is a nihilistic mercenary, Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio, who continues to impress me with each role he takes on), a former Rhodesian who when nine years old watched his mother raped and then shot and his father decapitated in 1978, who has been smuggling diamonds into Liberia after obtaining them from the rebels in exchange for weapons. Pulling strings with people he knows in the government, in particular Colonel Coetzee, with whom he's had an association of a dozen years and a business arrangement, Danny the opportunist gets himself and Solomon out of the prison and begins ingratiating himself to earn Solomon's trust, eventually promising Solomon the optimist that together they will first find his family before going back for the diamond.

Meanwhile, political activists have convinced politicians in Washington, London, and elsewhere that there are terrible costs in lives associated with conflict diamonds being taken out of Africa: prohibitions of rough diamond imports begin taking effect. Solomon's preadolescent son Dia, captured by the RUF and indoctrinated by the same one-eyed rebel who'd seen Solomon with the pink diamond, becomes a child soldier (plied with drugs and propaganda to believe he's invisible and invincible), calling himself See Me No More. Jassie and her two girls end up in a refugee camp in Guinea with a million others.

Danny, drawn by another desire, takes an interest in Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), an American journalist, who wants detailed information about the international diamond-trading company (a stand-in for De Beers) Van De Kaap's collusion in the blood-diamond trade in order to convince brides and grooms that their diamond engagement rings and storybook weddings come at the price of severed hands and massacres of thousands of innocent men, women, and children. Without names and figures, she says, reports such as hers will remain nothing more than brief interruptions on CNN between the sports and the weather, getting nothing more than a few tears and checks for victims.

In need of her for favors, Danny replies to Maddy's accusation of exploiting Solomon: "I'm using him, and you're using me, and this is how it works." Danny, a cynic without fealty other than to his own survival, having no wife, no children, no family, no home, says of Africa: "God left this place a long time ago." Nevertheless, he begins to develop a conscience as he and Solomon repeatedly escape tight scrapes where everyone else gets shot and everything gets blown up - the weaponry probably courtesy of Danny - as they find their way back to the diamond camp.

Since 2003 the Kimberly Process has significantly restricted the trade in blood diamonds. (Months before we were married in 1979, instead of an engagement ring with a diamond, I gave my bride-to-be a Navajo squash blossom of red coral embedded into silver.)

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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