Without a conflict to fuel, diamond miners still work for just 12p a day

The brown waters of the swollen Meya river thunder down eastern Sierra Leone's hills sweeping with them sticks, earth, pebbles and some of the world's finest diamonds. At Koidu town, on a wide bank where the deafening flow subsides, Rahman and a couple of thousand other men stand knee-deep in the water, bent double over their sieves.

"There are a lot of diamonds in this water but it can take three weeks or so to pick one up,'' says Rahman, dressed in nylon shorts and a hat, and covered in mud splashes.

Another man takes a breath, secures the end of a long piece of garden hose between his teeth and dives to the bottom. A few hundred metres downstream, a bridge has collapsed because men like Rahman decided to look for diamonds in its supports.

In the centre of the war-ravaged town, still rebel-controlled, a whole section of buildings has fallen down after diamond hunters looted their foundations. This is where "conflict diamonds" come from – those gemstones that buy guns which fuel African wars. Rahman is at the beginning of the chain – a long, long way from the "civilised" world of jewellery shops. A middleman sent from Freetown pays him 500 leones (12p) a day plus a cup of rice. "This is the only job around here because the war has ended our agriculture," he says.

Some people say peace has come to Sierra Leone after 10 years in which tens of thousands of people died so that the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) could enrich itself by winning control of the country's lucrative alluvial diamond deposits. In fact, even though some measure of disarmament is going on, elections are planned and a sponsor of the war, the Liberian President, Charles Taylor, is subjected to United Nations sanctions, little has been done to control the diamond trade.

After years of fighting, only a few houses in Koidu have a roof. In one of them sits a young man wearing a heavy gold chain and the kind of "hood" gear you might expect to find in South Central Los Angeles. Brigadier Issa Sessay, leader of the RUF, says he is 30 years old, but looks younger.

"Everyone is mining for diamonds here," he says. "There are people mining for the government, for the civil defence forces and for private individuals – not just the RUF."

Mr Sessay's rebels have been responsible for hundreds of child abductions, rapes and amputations. But he is speaking the truth: the Freetown government is also deeply involved.There is nothing illegal in that – the diamonds are here, and they are among the finest and cheapest to exploit in the world. What is tragic is that, in the process of ending the fighting in Sierra Leone, neither the United Nations nor Britain have managed to regulate the diamond trade – the root cause of the war.

Morlai Kamara, from the Canadian-backed Campaign For Just Mining, says: "You could say there are no longer blood diamonds coming out of Sierra Leone. But children are still being put to work by middlemen and the conditions endured by the miners continue to be appalling."