Category Archives: Genocide Awareness

I saw Blood Diamond on Friday of last week and It made me realize how much we are blessed in the US that we do not have the same worries that everyday people have in Africa. The fact that the R.U.F is going around city to city just to kill people to overthrow the government and to get diamonds to smuggle is something I did not know Africa had a problem with. The people that are dying everyday and it is not only dieases that are killing people, but people killing other people, is something I did not really think still happened today. People that are from the same motherland are killing each other for greed, politics, and significance. At least fifty percent of the people who were the R.U.F were kids and I could not believe the things that training a person to kill would do.

The perspective that the movie holds is between the men, Soloman and Archer. Soloman was a man who was just trying to fight for his family and to get his family back again. Archer was just a man of greed who throughout the movie softens up and becomes the heart of gold who helps Soloman get his family back.

The only thing that could help out with this is if people do not buy diamonds from Africa or at least Sierra Leone and put the R.U.F down. Something as small as a stone is killing thousands and millions of people, its outrageous.

I watched the movie Blood Diamond over the weekend. I had heard of it in the past and pretty much ignored it because I just wasn’t interested at all in the movie. I decided to give it a shot for the extra credit and found myself wondering how in the hell humans can be so vastly different, yet the same.

The genocide in Africa seems to be such a constant event that it becomes so normal that it is just ignored, I have even thought in the past that it is odd when they aren’t killing each other, an attitude that is very disconnected from the problem.

In this movie the genocide is not what we normally think of with one culture wiping out another. This movie it is rebels within the country of Sierra Leone killing other tribes folk in the country and forcing them into slavery or soldiering. This movie shows how the diamonds are gotten through slave labor and then sold in order to obtain weapons to fight the “gubmint” as they are called in the movie.

This was allowed to perpetuate because people in more “civilized” countries simply wanted the diamonds for their own purposes and not caring about the people who are hurt in the process. This allowed the rebels to overthrow the government and run amok in the country.

The solution from this movie was awareness and desire of the rest of the world to stomp out the “blood diamond” trade. Stop purchasing these diamonds and stop putting money into the hands of rebels or others who would exploit and murder for their own greed.