Blood Diamond

Cracking the Facade

With help from Hollywood,

the effects of the blood diamond trade

on Sierra Leone finally get the attention they deserve


By Greg Campbell with photos by Chris Hondros

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The heart of the matter: Diamonds from Sierra Leone have fueled almost 10
years of civil war. Hollywood now forces the diamond industry to take an
unflinching look at the role it played in the violence.



It’s an amazing irony that drugged and illiterate rebel soldiers fighting
in the some of the poorest countries on earth threaten to crack the
hardest substance known to man—diamonds.

Throughout the 1990s, rebel groups in three African countries mined and
sold diamonds in order to continue funding their wars. Although even at
the height of rebel mining these so-called conflict diamonds amounted to
just 4 or 5 percent of global rough diamond production, it’s a testament
to their power and allure that they are estimated to have caused some 4
million deaths over the past 15 years. These diamonds made their way into
legitimate channels and were sold to an unsuspecting public as treasured
jewelry. Despite an unprecedented amount of attention brought to the
conflict diamond trade—first by human rights organizations, and then by
journalists, including myself—diamonds’ reputation, honed and strengthened
throughout the past century to the point where it’s nearly as impervious
as the stones themselves, was more than enough to overcome any negative
publicity.

Until now.


On Friday, the Warner Bros. film Blood Diamond opens to audiences
nationwide, audiences that will undoubtedly begin questioning the origin
of their own beloved jewelry. For the first time—thanks to an awareness
that only a big-name Hollywood production can demand—consumers will
realize that these tokens of love, honor and commitment have also been
used to fund some of the most atrocious wars of the past decade.

It’s a reality that the diamond industry would rather not dwell on. A
consumer backlash against diamonds could cripple the industry and, along
with it, the economies of some of the only stable and growing nations in
Africa that depend on diamonds to survive.

But for the people of Sierra Leone, some 20,000 of whom had their limbs
amputated by rebels and will never be able to wear jewelry of their own,
the movie is a long-overdue acknowledgement of the horrors they’ve
suffered over a resource known the world over as the unblemished icon of
love and devotion.

For them, diamonds are a curse, not a blessing.


***


Throughout the 1990s—and continuing at least to some extent
today—insurgents have captured diamond mines in the African countries of
Sierra Leone, Angola, Ivory Coast and Democratic Republic of Congo,
extracted the gems at gunpoint and smuggled them into the mainstream
channels of the diamond industry. Sold cheaply in the bush, the proceeds
paid for machine guns, helicopters, surface-to-air missiles and light
artillery, more than enough equipment and armaments for the rebels to
continue their campaigns to capture more diamond mines. Human rights
abuses by these groups were mind-numbing and ran the gamut from abducting
children as young as 10 to fight, using forced labor to mine for diamonds,
and—in the case of Sierra Leone’s rebel group, the Revolutionary United
Front—a special depravity in the form of civilian amputation to spread
terror among the population.

The entire point of the war in Sierra Leone was to steal diamonds.
Proceeds from their sale into the mainstream funded not only the RUF, but
also Al Qaeda terrorists who laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in
Sierra Leonean diamonds in the weeks leading up to the attacks of 9/11.

It’s little wonder then that the diamond industry has taken an especially
keen interest in countering what is sure to be a poor impression of
diamonds from movie audiences who have never given a second thought to the
origins of the diamonds in their jewelry. Led by the World Diamond
Council, an organization specifically tasked to address negative publicity
about diamonds, the industry has reportedly spent $15 million advertising
its educational Web site, www.diamondfacts.org, and buying full-page ads
in such newspapers as USA Today, the New York Times and the International
Herald Tribune. Despite this unprecedented PR campaign, WDC Chairman Eli
Izhakoff insists that the diamond industry is happy the movie will raise
awareness of conflict diamonds among consumers.

“It makes my job easier. This helps,” he said in an interview last week
from Tel Aviv. “This movie will bring (our campaign) to their attention
and will bring our Web site to their attention. … When all is said and
done, thank God for the movie.”

Of course Izhakoff has yet to see Blood Diamond … he may well not be as
optimistic when it opens to national audiences. Indeed, after an advance
screening in New York two weeks ago, I found little that the diamond
industry could anticipate other than outrage.

Set in Sierra Leone in 1999, the movie is unflinching in its depiction of
the war. RUF soldiers are breathtakingly brutal, children are drugged and
indoctrinated into their ranks, unarmed civilians are shot in the back or
amputated with a homemade ax after being asked if they would prefer a
“long sleeve or short sleeve” blow to the arm.

The role of diamonds in facilitating this conflict is always front and
center, with Leonardo DiCaprio playing a smuggler who—like his European
buyers—couldn’t care less how the diamonds are mined so long as he can
turn a profit from them. Sierra Leone is wasted and forgotten by the
developed countries that willingly—eagerly, even—buy up its diamonds in
the form of engagement rings and tennis bracelets.

In the interview, Izhakoff claimed that the diamond industry knew nothing
about the conflict diamond trade until 1999-2000.

“We never thought that diamonds killed,” he said. The industry reacted
immediately, he said, “when people first made the connection between
diamonds and killing and death.”

The industry did react, but only because business dictated that it do
so—the suggestion that the industry was ignorant of where some of its West
African diamonds were coming from during the 1990s is simply not
believable. A UN ban on diamond exports from Sierra Leone did not change
the volume of diamonds coming from West Africa, it just changed where they
were coming from. Neighboring countries like Liberia and Guinea suddenly
began exporting diamonds well in excess of their known production
capacity. Even The Gambia, a small country with no diamond mines at all,
recorded diamond exports to Belgium between 1996 and 1999 worth $100
million annually. Sierra Leone is the only country in the region that
could account for this sudden crush of diamond exports.

Publicity about the role diamonds have played in such conflicts was slow
to surface. The diamond industry is opaque and generally accountable to
nothing but itself, a function of its structure as a monopolistic
enterprise set up to serve a cartel headed by industry titan De Beers. And
under that structure, the less the jewelry-buying public knew about where
some of its diamonds came from, the better. Until 2000, De Beers bought
rough diamonds on the open market—meaning wherever they were being sold in
the world, including West Africa—and hoarded them in London in order to
maintain diamonds’ high value. It’s virtually inconceivable that the
company was unaware that some of those diamonds sold on the open market
were financing insurgencies. In fact, De Beers’ 1996 annual report boasts
of the company’s record purchases of Angolan diamonds at a time when UNITA
rebels controlled 70 percent of the country’s mines.

“The CSO (De Beers’ Central Selling Organization) buys diamonds in
substantial volumes on the open market, both in Africa and in the diamond
centres, through its extensive network of buying offices, staffed by young
diamond buyers often working in difficult conditions,” wrote Julian
Thompson, who was De Beers’ chairman at the time. “Purchases in 1996
reached record levels largely owing to the increased Angolan diamond
production. Angolan diamonds tend to be in the categories that are in
demand, although in the main these buying activities are a mechanism to
support the market.”

Blood Diamond underlines the industry’s complicity in funding these wars
to devastating effect, and perhaps overly so. The most relevant criticism
of the film’s handling of the diamond issue, especially as concerns
Izhakoff and the industry he represents, is the exaggeration for effect of
how conflict diamonds enter the mainstream. In the film, there is a direct
connection between a Sierra Leonean refugee and a highly placed diamond
industry villain, a man more accustomed to the boardroom of the film’s
fictional equivalent of De Beers than the horrors of the Sierra Leone
jungle. In truth, conflict diamonds were laundered through as many as a
dozen countries and just as many hands before making their way onto the
cutting wheel, a circuitous chain of “don’t ask, don’t tell” transactions
that afforded the diamond industry a very high degree of plausible
deniability. Yes, the diamond industry couldn’t help but know where some
of its diamonds originated and the death and suffering they had caused,
but the movie’s unnecessarily blatant connection implies a more purposeful
guilt than may be warranted.

In this way, Izhakoff has his work cut out for him—for many who see the
film, it will be a cut and dried indictment of an industry struggling hard
to overcome the stigma of conflict diamonds.

Unfortunately, the argument he has to fall back upon—that a certificate
guarantee program adopted by almost all diamond importing and exporting
countries in 2003 has successfully eliminated conflict diamonds from
entering the mainstream—was recently dealt a serious blow to its
credibility.

In fact, it’s questionable whether the Kimberley Process, as it’s called,
works to ensure anything except to make the movement of conflict diamonds
around the globe harder to detect.


***


In response to mounting criticism of the diamond industry over its funding
of conflicts in Africa—whether tacitly or directly—it instituted a
voluntary program whereby parcels of rough diamonds are accompanied from
their first points of export onward with a certificate guaranteeing that
they are from conflict-free areas. Called the Kimberley Process after the
famous De Beers diamond mine of the same name in South Africa, it boasts
of 90 participating countries and claims a success rate of thwarting
conflict diamonds of 99.8 percent. Moving the Kimberley Process forward
and helping participating countries pass statutes that give its provisions
the force of law has been Izhakoff’s primary mission as chairman of the
WDC.



From its inception, the problems with the Kimberley Process have been
many. For example, the only control over diamonds from their points of
extraction to their first point of export is the word of the exporter.
Clearly, given diamonds’ value, there is little incentive to keep
unscrupulous diamond dealers from mixing conflict diamonds with those
mined legitimately. Diamonds are among the easiest commodities to smuggle
and they are by far the most valuable by weight. Diamonds don’t set off
metal detectors and it’s practically impossible to trace them to their
point of origin. No one can tell by looking where a rough diamond came
from. Just as it was before the Kimberley Process was adopted, importers
must simply trust the word of the person they’re buying from that their
diamonds are conflict-free.

Izhakoff says that the diamond business is so lucrative that no one would
risk being banned from it by lying about the sources of exported diamonds.

“Today everyone that sells rough diamonds must declare on his invoice that
those diamonds are conflict-free,” he says. “If he is in violation of
that, the industry will expel him from any organization that he belongs
to, practically barring him from doing any business. He’s then subject to
government punishment.”

But finding anyone in violation of the Kimberley protocols is perhaps the
larger problem. Earlier this year, the U.S. Government Accountability
Office issued a scathing report on how well the United States is complying
with the Kimberley Process and the conclusion was not favorable.

“U.S. systems … for controlling imports and exports of diamonds … are
still vulnerable to illicit trade of rough diamonds,” the report
concluded. Investigators documented instances in which White-Out was used
on the supposedly tamper-proof Kimberley Process certificates and found
that no one was explicitly responsible for verifying to the exporting
authority that a parcel of diamonds had been received, a critical step in
tracking diamond movement around the world. Worse, the report noted that
no one along the chain of custody—from Customs to Homeland
Security—actually verifies that the parcels contain what the certificates
say they do. Eighty percent of all rough diamonds enter the United States
through New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport; in the years
that the Kimberley Process has been in effect, inspectors examined diamond
parcels on just two occasions.

Izhakoff readily acknowledges Kimberley’s flaws and insists earnestly that
the diamond merchants of the world want nothing more than a foolproof
system of eliminating conflict diamonds from legitimate trade, if only
because the future of their business depends on it.

“Since the year 2000, the World Diamond Congress in Antwerp put together
systems and created a movement to eradicate these conflict diamonds once
and for all,” he says. “It just made good business sense to do it. … I
feel that we really, really—in an unprecedented way—tried and have
achieved something here. We’re vaccinating ourselves for the future. We
believe that once we do all these things, we’re cleaning our business for
the future too.”

It can’t happen soon enough. A UN report released last month alleges that
rebels in the diamondiferous northern region of Ivory Coast have been
smuggling diamonds into neighboring Ghana. There, they are certified as
Ghanaian and exported under the blessing of a Kimberley Process
certificate. Some can see this as a complete breakdown of the scheme since
it’s likely been going on since a UN sanction on Ivorian diamonds was
instituted a year ago.

But Izhakoff says that if it weren’t for the Kimberley Process, the
trafficking might not have been detected at all—one of the provisions is
that diamond-producing countries must report their production capacity.
Without that data, investigators may not have noticed that Ghana was
exporting more diamonds than it could produce.

“They found out because of statistical information that they were
exporting more than they can mine there,” he says. “This is how the whole
thing was brought up and this is how they got caught. This only shows how
the system is working.

“I think that we have to work on the Kimberley Process,” Izhakoff
continues. “This is not over and we have to make sure it’s foolproof. We
have to watch it very closely. We are working very hard, night and day, to
make sure that this thing is over with.”

After seeing Blood Diamond, there may be more people than ever before
watching closely as well. On its own, the industry has seen only limited
success in ending the conflict diamond trade, as evidenced by the
situation in Ivory Coast and Ghana. Perhaps market forces, in the form of
consumers who demand verifiable proof of origin for their diamond
purchases, will have better luck.

Izhakoff sees this as a good thing, not just for the industry, but also
for those who stand to benefit from it, many for the first time.

“For myself personally,” he says, “I want to see a better Africa.”

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