Kayne West’s song “Diamonds from Sierra Leone” may have climbed up the charts, but does anyone ever stop to think about what he’s actually talking about when he says “Good morning, this ain’t Vietnam still/ People lose hands, legs, arms for real/ Little was known of Sierra Leone/ And how it connect to the diamonds we own.”

Diamonds mined from Sierra Leone are just one example of “conflict diamonds,” or “blood diamonds,” as they are also called. In the 70s in many poor African countries, rebel factions seized control of diamond mines and local citizens have been forced to mine them in deplorable conditions, while the rebels use most of the profits to fund their actions. Money from the sale of such diamonds have been used to fund ethnic cleansing and civil wars in which civilians are raped, maimed and brutally murdered. Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Angola all mine conflict diamonds, and Liberia, Uganda, Rwanda, Burkina Faso, United Arab Emirates, Cyprus, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zambia have been found to help smuggle these conflict diamonds to legitimate sources.

In one diamond mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo, workers mine diamonds for extremely low pay. There are no other job opportunities in the area that pay enough to support a family, so many people, whether they hold jobs at the mine or not, sneak into the mine after dark and steal diamonds. The mine is policed by guards from private companies and several different factions of government, including guards from Zimbabwe. There is little communication between the sections, and many are not trained in law enforcement. Unarmed smugglers are routinely shot, and houses close to the mines often become caught in the cross-fire. When Amnesty International delegates made a trip to the mine, they were held at gunpoint. The smugglers who are not shot are routinely held in detention facilities with no bathrooms, no food and no medical care.

Sierra Leone is worse. The Revolutionary United Front, a rebel group in Sierra Leone, has taken control of the mines. Children are kidnapped and enslaved, forced to serve in the RUF army or to mine the diamonds. They routinely have their arms cut and packed with cocaine. Slave miners, many of them children, are shot or have limbs cut off if suspected of stealing diamonds or not working fast enough, or even if the guards get bored. Al-Qaeda has used these diamonds to launder money.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Worldpress have all raised alarms over the issue for some time, but it was not until the past decade that the United Nations formally acknowledged the situation. Even still, legislation to recognize the problem and put an end to the sale of blood diamonds has not been passed. Many governments are recognizing the Kimberly Process, which would attempt to create an un-forgeable documentation of where diamonds come from. However, once a diamond has been mined, it is impossible to tell which mine it came from, and it is easy to smuggle blood diamonds across borders into countries with legitimate diamond mines. Diamonds pass through so many hands and countries before reaching the consumer that it is currently impossible for consumers to know for a fact what kind of mine their diamond came from.

Of all the diamond companies, De Beers is the worst. De Beers holds shares in the diamond mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo listed above, despite company policies stating “the injury and hardship suffered by local populations (and the potential for it) when conflicts arise in diamond producing areas are unacceptable, as is seeking to profit from such conflicts.”

If rappers can recognize a problem and speak out about it, then it is time for government leaders to do the same. As a diamond company executive is said to have seen in a nightmare, “Amputation Is Forever.”