'Blood on the Stone' is a gripping account of the cartel, warlords, gun runners and shadowy traders who populated Africa's bloody diamond wars, and the faltering, decade-long effort to clean up an entire industry.
Ian Smillie has lived and worked in Africa and Asia. He taught high school in Koidu, the centre of Sierra Leone's diamond area, in the late 1960s. He was a founder of the Canadian development organization, Inter Pares, and was Executive Director of CUSO, then Canada's largest NGO. He has worked as a development consultant for many years and is the author of several books on development themes, including 'The Charity of Nations: Humanitarian Action in a Calculating World' (with Larry Minear, 2004) and 'Freedom from Want' (2009).
During 2000 he served on a UN Security Council Panel investigating the links between illicit weapons and the diamond trade in Sierra Leone. Until July 2009 he served as Research Coordinator on Partnership Africa Canada's 'Diamonds and Human Security Project' and he currently chairs the Board of the Diamond Development Initiative (DDI). He has written extensively on diamonds, including an entry for the 'Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Modern World' and a chapter in the Praeger 'Encyclopaedia on Globalization and Human Security' . In 2008 he was the first witness at the war crime trial of Charles Taylor in The Hague. He was a leading NGO participant in the Kimberley Process from its inception until he resigned in 2009. Ian Smillie was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2003. ?
