Data Module · Visual Intelligence
Blood
Diamonds
Conflict, Death & the Kimberley Process Failure
In 2008, the Zimbabwean army walked into the Marange diamond fields and killed over 200 artisanal miners. Helicopter gunships. Mass graves. The Kimberley Process reviewed the case and ruled it did not meet the definition of conflict diamonds. The definition requires rebel movements. The army is the government. The system worked exactly as designed.
0M+
Dead in diamond wars
0
Civilians mutilated
0M+
Displaced (historical)
0
Ways to trace cut stone
0M+
Displaced in DRC now
001 · The Wars
What the stone cost.
The DRC bar is on a logarithmic scale because if it were linear, you wouldn\u2019t see Sierra Leone. You wouldn\u2019t see Angola. Six million dead is a number that breaks the chart. It\u2019s also a number that breaks the Kimberley Process claim that conflict diamonds are \u201cless than 1%.\u201d They redefined the problem until the statistic improved.
Sources: UN Truth & Reconciliation Commissions, UNHCR, ACLED, Human Rights Watch. DRC figure includes all causes (conflict, disease, displacement).
002 · Live Data · ACLED 2024
Diamond zones. Conflict events vs fatalities.
This is not history. This is now.
ACLED counts every act of political violence on the continent. Date, coordinates, who did it, who died. In North Kivu alone, they counted 3,100 events in 2024. The ADF — pledged to Islamic State — killed 1,300 civilians. The most violent actor toward civilians in the Great Lakes. Then in January 2025, M23 took Goma. February, Bukavu. March, the mining hub Walikale — the farthest west they’ve ever reached. The grey bars are the violence. The red bars are the dying.
Source: ACLED (acleddata.com). Conflict Watchlist 2025, Great Lakes analysis. Free registration for full dataset download.
003 · Where the People Went
Seven million people with nowhere to go.
The red band grows every year because the fighting doesn’t stop. 780,000 people displaced between November 2024 and January 2025. Three months. 100,000 refugees crossed into Burundi, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania. Before the latest M23 offensive, 21 million Congolese already needed humanitarian aid — the highest figure of any country on earth.
Source: UNHCR Operational Data Portal, HDX (data.humdata.org), UN OCHA. Figures in millions.
004 · The Kimberley Process
Designed to produce a statistic. Not to solve a problem.
Global Witness spent years building the Kimberley Process. In 2011, they walked away. Called it a “fig leaf.” Their own creation. Six things the system was supposed to do. It does none of them. The radial has no green because there is nothing to fill.
Definition excludes state violence, forced labor, and child labor.
No scientific method to trace a cut diamond to its origin.
Countries certify their own exports. No independent verification.
Smuggling routes from CAR, DRC, Zimbabwe remain intact.
Changed “15% conflict” to “<1%” by redefining conflict.
Blockchain traces from entry point. Problem is before that — in the mines.
005 · Smuggling Routes
Mine to market. How origin disappears.
Follow the flow from left to right. A stone leaves a mine in eastern DRC controlled by M23 — a group backed by Rwanda with 4,000 troops. It crosses into Uganda. Uganda exported $2.25 billion in gold it doesn’t produce. Nobody asked. The stone reaches Surat, where 90% of the world’s diamonds are cut. Once cut, no laboratory on earth can tell where it came from. It enters Antwerp as a legitimate stone. Origin: erased.
Sources: Global Witness, UN Panel of Experts, KP Statistics, UN Comtrade bilateral asymmetry analysis. Flow widths proportional to estimated volume.
006 · Timeline
1991 — 2025
1991
Sierra Leone civil war. RUF mines $125M/year in diamonds.
1998
Global Witness publishes ‘A Rough Trade.’ Diamond-war nexus exposed.
2000
Fowler Report names countries and individuals. UN Resolution 1295.
2002
Sierra Leone + Angola wars end. 4 million dead across both.
2003
Kimberley Process launched. 82 countries. Self-certification.
2008
Zimbabwe army seizes Marange. 200+ miners massacred. KP: not conflict.
2011
Global Witness withdraws from KP. Calls it a ‘fig leaf.’
2013
CAR civil war. KP suspends exports. Diamonds fund both sides.
2018
Wagner deploys to CAR. Russia gains influence in diamond zone.
2024
KP lifts CAR embargo (Nov). M23 resurgent in DRC.
2025
M23 takes Goma, Bukavu, Walikale. 7M+ displaced in DRC.
007 · Connected Intelligence
The pattern.
De Beers built the demand that made diamonds worth killing for. The economic collapse and the human cost — two sides of the same stone.
Gold replaced diamonds as the preferred conflict mineral. Wagner/Africa Corps in CAR — same territory, same extraction, different mineral.
Al-Shabaab’s $200M/year revenue comes from the same shadow economy model diamond-funded armed groups pioneered.
The armed group business model — control territory, extract resources, build parallel governance — was perfected in the diamond wars.
Sources & Open Data
ACLED — Conflict events database (acleddata.com)
United Nations — Security Council Resolutions, Fowler Report, Panel of Experts
Human Rights Watch — Marange, DRC mining documentation
Global Witness — ‘A Rough Trade’ (1998), KP withdrawal (2011)
UN Comtrade — Diamond trade flows, bilateral asymmetry analysis
UNHCR / HDX — Displacement data (data.humdata.org)
Kimberley Process — Production statistics, CAR embargo decisions
Amnesty International — DRC conflict minerals, child labor
WorldPop — Population grids (worldpop.org)
Copernicus / Sentinel-2 — Mining site satellite imagery
Data compilation, visualisation & analysis: Dancing with Lions
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