Conflict Diamonds

Koidu, located near the western border of Guinea, was a town that was particularly hard hit during the civil war. The entire town was destroyed during the war and a “watery, lunar landscape of holes and mounds of mud” replaced it. None of the houses have roofing sheets, window frames or doors (Doyle) and some of them actually have small scale mines where there used to be floors. The center of the town was literally converted into one big mine, displacing millions of pounds of dirt and in the outskirts of town there lies many confusing webs of mines that stretch on for miles. Figure 1 shows a long stretch of mines to the West of the center of Koidu. The mines look like large puddles of muddy water because twenty feet of dirt is typically removed to reach the water tables in order to have river-like conditions in which sieves can be used to search through the soil. The bigger mines look how you might imagine the inside of an anta hill to look. The layers are numerous and intricate and certainly the result of many years of back breaking labor.