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With our Blood Diamonds are For Never campaign, One Sky and campaign participants worked hard to end the trade in conflict diamonds by strengthening the Kimberley Process. The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme began in 2003 and has brought about some significant progress, especially in Sierra Leone. In Sierra Leone, records of diamond exports were almost nil prior to the agreement and were reported as $142 million in 2005. From Partnership Africa Canada's recent review of the Kimberley Process, it is obvious that there are some loopholes and a need for greater political will to ensure that conflict diamonds don't become a reality once more. And the question still remains…

Is your Diamond considered clean?

In November 2003, One Sky and the Conservation Society of Sierra Leone (CSSL) travelled to the Eastern war-torn region of Sierra Leone into the heart of the diamond mining region of Kono. It was here that diamonds were the focal point for a brutal and vicious civil war that resulted in forced amputations, human rights abuses and the displacement of the vast majority of Sierra Leone's rural population by the Revolutionary United Front, a rebel group armed and financed by Liberia's infamous Charles Taylor.

The delegation revealed a landscape devastated by indiscriminate alluvial diamond mining during which miners, many of them only children, have dug up the riparian valley bottoms in search of diamonds. The result has been the wholesale loss of rich agricultural soil and farming fields to mining debris. Today the land is scarred with tens of thousands of unregulated mining pits, overturned soils and pools of stagnating mosquito- infested water. The nearby forests, having been exploited heavily for fuel wood and charcoal production are now the only source of agricultural land. There are no regulations to restore former placer mining pits. In the words of a local paramount chief, the discovery of diamonds "has not been a blessing but a curse".

One Sky with CSSL are now working in partnership to turn some of this devastation around. We're in the process of developing agreements with local officials and paramount chiefs to restore alluvial diamond sites in Kono - a combination of native species plantation, creek restoration and agriculture land cultivation. We are inviting you to help clean or “green” your diamond by supporting diamond mining restoration in Sierra Leone and bringing development and alternative livelihoods to those in need.

>> more info from our previous blood diamonds campaign info