Diamonds are a girl's best friend, or at least that's what companies like DeBeers would have you believe. But if you want a different opinion, maybe you should check with the people of Sierra Leone. For more then ten years the tiny West African country was torn apart by civil war because the multinationals who control the diamond mines in the country have no interest in any of the money staying in Sierra Leone.

According to information on the website of the movie The Empire In Africa Sierra Leone is a country fabulously wealthy in natural resources, specifically diamonds, while being one of the poorest countries per capita. Any time a government has been elected since independence in 1961 that looked to try and nationalize some of the diamond money, a coup would conveniently occur that would re-establish a government that would retain the status quo.

In 1991 a group of disaffected army officers, intellectuals, and political activists began a rebellion in hopes of establishing a regime that would share the wealth amongst all the people. What followed was one of the bloodiest and ugliest ten years of civil war that any country in Africa had seen. At one point a coup was effected and the new government signed peace treaties with the rebel forces and gave them seats in parliament. The first act of the new parliament was to vote to nationalize the diamond mines.

An embargo was immediately implemented preventing any medical supplies, food, or oil from reaching the country. With the help of mercenary soldiers, paid for by selling diamond concessions to Thai business interests, the former government attacked Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, and turned it into battlefield, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee for their lives.

That's the way it always is of course, it's the innocents who suffer in cases like these. No matter what anybody says they are fighting for, the non-combatants are going to suffer horrendously. Refugees flooded into neighbouring Guinea for what they thought would be short stays of around three months and ended up in some cases waiting ten years before repatriation.

When your life is totally disrupted you look for any straw you can hold on to that will give you a semblance of normalcy. This was the motivation behind the formation of Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars. In 2002 an American documentary film crew was filming musicians in the refugee camps throughout West Africa when they came across the band rehearsing in a camp in Guinea. Out of that meeting came the documentary bearing the name of the band, Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars.