Blood Diamonds: A River or a Droplet?

The United Nations does not agree. It strictly distinguishes between diamonds smuggled in peacetime and diamonds mined by rebels during conflict.

Interested in avoiding the whole debate? Well, some Canadian diamond suppliers are telling people just to buy Canadian and avoid African diamonds altogether, a marketing tactic that is frowned upon by the World Diamond Council.

Cut and polished diamonds (as opposed to the rough diamonds fresh from the earth) are a $60-billion-a-year business, whether from countries in Africa or from Canada, Brazil, Russia, Venezuela and elsewhere.

"Diamonds are associated with positive events in people's lives," says Cecilia Gardner, general counsel for the World Diamond Council. "Any association with anything violent is something that has to be addressed by our industry and has been addressed and will be addressed."

In its own public relations campaign to head off damage to the diamond's mystique, the industry has touted 1 percent as proof of its success in largely eradicating conflict diamonds (though the flow of conflict diamonds basically stopped with the end of the diamond wars).

Conflict diamonds came mostly from the wars in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone, the country depicted in "Blood Diamond." Rebels seized diamond territories in those countries and press-ganged miners into searching for the stones in riverine or alluvial deposits. While those wars raged, rebel stones made up to 15 percent of the world's diamond trade.

With the wars now largely ended, governments are attempting to legitimize their national diamond trades through a global regulatory system called the Kimberley Process. It is the Kimberley group, made up of 71 nations, which says the flow of conflict or blood diamonds has slowed to a trickle.

They are coming from rebel-held areas of Ivory Coast, skirting a U.N. diamond embargo there and smuggled through neighboring Ghana or Mali. The U.N. says the value of those Ivory Coast conflict diamonds is about $23 million, way less than 1 percent of the production of rough diamonds, which is about $12 billion a year.

Under the Kimberley system, governments are supposed to be able to certify their rough diamonds from the time they are mined to the time they arrive at a cutting and polishing center. From there, diamond suppliers like the De Beers Group, which produces 40 percent of the world's diamonds, are supposed to guarantee that their stones were sourced through the Kimberley Process. It takes the diamonds only a matter of weeks to move from mine to market.

Activists say that the Kimberley Process is deeply flawed because it is not a treaty but merely a commitment without enough oversight to ensure countries really are regulating their diamonds. And that means no number can be trusted.

"The first thing is, there's no way to be sure, because there's no accurate accounting," says Lynn Fredriksson, Amnesty International USA's Africa advocacy director.

"But for the time being what we believe, based on U.N. reporting, is that at least $23 million worth of diamonds have been coming out of Ivory Coast, and those would be considered conflict diamonds."