Full playlist: www.youtube.com Documentary series exploring infamous historical events. This instalment examines the little-known truth about how the worldwide diamond trade has funded wars across western and central Africa, leading to the deaths of millions of people. Sierra Leone on Africa's west coast is one of the poorest nations on earth, with an average income of just 220 US dollars. Conversely, the country is rich in natural resources, with verdant tropical forests stretching for miles and a plentiful source of high-quality diamonds below ground. In some cases, diamond mines are used to cement the economy of a poor nation and drag the populace out of poverty, but in Sierra Leone they have brought only chaos and misery. Blood diamonds or 'conflict diamonds', explains Alexander Yearsley, senior campaigner for international pressure group Global Witness, "are diamonds mined and sold by rebel movements, particularly in Africa, that are used to finance arms purchases." Between 1991 and 2001 in Sierra Leone, a brutal civil war between government forces and a rebel group called the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) raged, with 75000 people being killed and two million being displaced. For many of the survivors, lasting reminders of the conflict exist in the form of deliberate amputations, which were to become a trademark atrocity of the RUF. "They committed every war crime in the Geneva Convention, then invented one of their own," explains Greg Campbell, author of the book ...