Diamonds in the news: From the Kalahari to Malibu

Excerpt:

With NPR's Alex Chadwick, they take a break from their mission to hike the Santa Monica Mountains -- a mostly arid coastal range with winding trails leading down to idyllic beaches.
Sesana's people have lived for thousands of years in an area that is now dubbed the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. In the last several years, most of the people living there have been moved outside the boundaries of the reserve -- voluntarily, the government says.
Botswana's ambassador to the United States, Lapologang Ceasar Lekoa, tells Chadwick that the estimated 2,000 Bushmen remaining in the enormous region had already given up their traditional nomadic ways and were living in settlements, which are not allowed in the reserve. Also, Lekoa says, the Bushmen hunt with guns now and chase game with trucks and dogs. Modern Bushmen would overwhelm the Kalahari's fragile ecology.
But Bushmen dispute those accusations -- they say their culture has survived so long precisely because they are careful hunters, who live in balance with the Kalahari. The U.S. State Department's report on Botswana's human rights practices, released Feb. 24, 2004, states Botswana's government forcibly resettled the Bushmen from their ancestral lands.
Human rights groups say Botswana is more interested in diamond deposits in the

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