Blood Diamonds: A River or a Droplet?

By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 27, 2006

What a fuss a number can make -- one little number. And here it is: Fewer than 1 percent of diamonds on the market today are "conflict diamonds."

The number seems surprising, considering all the attention focused on the gems since the film "Blood Diamond" came out this month. For if that 1 percent is true, it means that 99 percent of the world's diamonds are conflict-free, which certainly does seem to throw a bucket of cold water on the movement against conflict diamonds.

No wonder the diamond industry loves that little number. And no wonder the conflict diamond movement is pleased to have Hollywood on its side -- the better to reenergize a flagging social cause.

At the film's Hollywood premiere, "Blood Diamond" director Edward Zwick reportedly called 1 percent "a funky number" that doesn't capture the breadth of the problem. Zwick has positioned his film as a galvanizing tool to warn consumers about diamonds illicitly mined by rebel armies during wartime.

Zwick also has taken aim at hip-hop impresario Russell Simmons, who has been highlighting the benefit of diamonds for African economies. Simmons's position echoes that of former South African president Nelson Mandela, who wrote to Zwick earlier this year about how the movie might hurt diamond sales and destabilize diamond-producing countries.

The movie, with box office receipts of more than $25 million, follows Kanye West's 2005 hit song "Diamonds From Sierra Leone." Up next is a History Channel documentary, "Blood Diamonds," airing Saturday, and early next year a VH1 documentary called "Bling: A Planet Rock," which will feature hip-hop stars traveling to Sierra Leone to highlight the issue.

The irony is this: Conflict diamonds are far rarer than they were just a few years ago. Back then, when rebels in Sierra Leone were hacking off the hands of civilians in a war funded by diamonds, activists could barely get Hollywood's attention.

"Yeah, in those years back in 2000, 2001, it was a little lonely," says Rory E. Anderson, a conflict diamond expert with the charity World Vision.

Sierra Leone is at peace, by the way. Its war ended in 2002. But that seems not to matter. All this delayed outrage over conflict diamonds still can be useful in the battle for hearts and minds. Activists stop short of calling for a diamond boycott, but they do want to put diamond retailers on notice by urging consumers to become more aggressive in asking about the origins of their stones.

But how to spark all this consumer concern when only 1 percent of the stones are considered conflict diamonds?

Question the little number. Global Witness, the British advocacy group that first alerted the world to the problem in 1998, now says that conflict diamonds are part of a controversial stream of stones that also includes smuggled diamonds and diamonds mined in abusive labor situations all over the world. Put all that together, and the flow of controversial diamonds, says Global Witness, really is more like 20 percent.

"It all boils down to definitions," Alex Yearsley, campaign coordinator for Global Witness, wrote in an e-mail. "We're not attempting to conflate the issue," he wrote, but added that "the issue of illicit [diamonds] is intimately connected to conflict diamonds."

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."

She suspects that even more conflict diamonds still are flowing from other troubled areas of Africa and is not prepared to accept the 1 percent figure.

"But even if it were only that amount, that's a lot of small arms and rifles and grenades that could be used" in conflicts.

Most of Africa's diamonds are mined in well-established industrialized mines in Namibia, Tanzania, South Africa and Botswana, all peaceful countries.

Simmons, who traveled to the latter two of those countries this month on a fact-finding trip, has launched a fund to train more Africans in diamond-related skills.

But because the trip was sponsored by the Diamond Information Center, the publicity arm of De Beers, Zwick, who declined to be interviewed for this article, reportedly suggested that Simmons had been used by the diamond industry.

Simmons defended himself, saying his contacts at De Beers are "smart businesspeople" for arranging the trip. De Beers is a supplier of Simmons Jewelry.

"But to suggest I'm a sellout is wrong," he told the New York Daily News.

Later, Simmons wrote on an industry Web site, "The entertainment industry, including Warner Brothers and those involved in the film 'Blood Diamond,' need to remember that the message they send about diamonds from Africa out into the world can have serious negative repercussions for the African people in countries which rely heavily on the revenue from diamonds to sustain themselves and to grow."