Sierra Leone: The Stones That BledSierra Leone · 1991–2002“The candle again, my friends. This is a story about how a diamond is only a stone until someone decides it is worth a country.”The Revolutionary United Front crossed from Liberia in 1991 with a patron — Charles Taylor — and a business model: take the diamond fields, trade the stones through Monrovia, buy the guns, repeat. State weakness and a generation of abandoned young people supplied the rest.The lesson the elders kept: A valuable resource does not cause war by itself — but it can pay for one indefinitely, and accountability must reach the financiers, not only the fighters.