An excerpt from the Prosecution's first expert witness to testify in the Charles Taylor trial, January 2008:
"Q. You have studied and written about diamonds' role in
conflict. Can you tell us is there anything about the
characteristics of diamonds that gives them a role in conflicts?
A. Well, diamonds are the most concentrated form of wealth on earth.
You could put five million dollars' worth of diamonds in
your pocket and it wouldn't show. It wouldn't show up on a metal
detector going through airport security. It would show up an on
an x-ray machine, but very few airports have x-ray machines. So
they are very small, they are high value, they are easy to move,
they hold their price, historically they have held their price
very well, and so they have become - not so much today, but in
the 1990s, the period that were talking about, they were an
alternative to hard currency in countries where there was no hard
currency, or where people wanted to hide the movement of money."
Available at http://www.sc-sl.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=sSJXuExCeYM=&tabid=160
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