Blood Diamond

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Although the immediately obvious cause of the suffering depicted in Blood Diamond was a civil war, multinational corporations also have a hand in the tragedies that took place in Sierra Leone in the 1990s.

Without the diamond revenue being pumped into this West African nation, its major rebel combatant force, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) would have run out of money, food, gasoline, methamphetamines, AK-47s, ammunition and IEDs much more quickly than they did.

The worst part is that de Beers and other huge diamond companies knew full well who their diamond suppliers were and what they were doing. This isn't to say that the Freetown government was any better than the RUF or vice versa, but certainly the diamond money allowed a conflict that might otherwise have had a chance to be settled peacefully, to continue to cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

The causes of poverty shown in Blood Diamond were primarily bad government and military conflict, but multinational corporations certainly helped to prop up the rebel groups and allow the fighting to continue.

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