Blood diamonds and non-state actors.

• Author: Smillie, Ian

TABLE OF CONTENTS I. WAR II. ACTIVISM III. REGULATION IV. POLITICAL WILL AND POLITICAL WON'T V. CONCLUSIONS I. WAR

During the 1990s and into the 2000s, rebel armies in several African countries--bereft of the great-power backing that proliferated during the Cold War--began to finance their efforts through the illegal exploitation of natural resources. (1) While he controlled the Port of Buchanan, for example, Liberian warlord Charles Taylor sold tropical hardwood and even iron ore to eager and unprincipled international buyers. (2) In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), rebel armies are still looting gold, tantalum, tin, and tungsten. (3) Diamonds, however, were central to the funding of the most brutal and protracted wars in a generation.

In Angola, Uniao Nacional para a Independencia Total de Angola (UNITA), thwarted in the run-up to independence in 1974, fought a brutal war against the government for almost two decades thereafter. Almost half a million people died, and half the population was displaced. (4) Until the fall of the Berlin Wall, this was a proxy war, with nearly a thousand Russian officers and 45,000 Cuban troops backing the government against the South African forces and American money supporting UNITA. (5) But by 1991, the game had changed, and UNITA turned more industriously to an asset that it had dipped into in the past--diamonds. By the mid-1990s, UNITA was said to be exporting over a million dollars a day worth of diamonds to pay for weapons, ammunition, and heavy armor. (6)

Between 1991 and 2002, a terrible war took place in Sierra Leone, lasting as long as the First and Second World Wars combined. While the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) claimed it was fighting for justice and democracy, it waged its war almost entirely against civilians, chopping the limbs off innocent children and adults who happened to get in its way. (7) The brutality, often characterized as unfathomably mindless, had a clear objective. Once bitten and twice shy, terrorized civilians fled from towns and villages if they heard the RUF were coming, allowing the rebels to forage with impunity, (8) More importantly, the country's diamond fields were abandoned to the RUF giving it access to the resources required for a protracted conflict. (9) Sierra Leone's war was closely allied with Charles Taylor's rampage to power in Liberia and with the additional conflicts he helped foment in Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire. (10)

In the DRC, a country rich in mineral resources, diamonds played a central role in sustaining the venal government of Mobutu Sese Seko for three decades through the mid-1990s. (11) Over the following decade, diamonds sustained his successor, Laurent Kabila, and a series of warlords, rebel factions, and marauding armies from neighboring countries. (12) The International Rescue Committee has conducted detailed studies in the DRC and estimates that 5.4 million more people died between 1998 and 2007 than would have if there had been no conflict. (13) To make matters even worse, with the breakdown in law and order, rape became a common terror tactic. According to a recent study, as many as 1.8 million Congolese women have been raped during their lifetimes. (14)

Diamonds did not cause this carnage. The rebel armies and their leaders were much less interested in wealth than in power. Diamonds were simply the means to an end, but without them the wars would not have lasted as long as they did, and the human cost would not have been nearly so high.

There are three aspects to diamonds that have made them so attractive to warlords. The first is their very high weight-to-value ratio. Diamonds are tiny, and a small pouch of quality stones could finance a rebel army for days if not weeks. The second is that, unlike the deeply buried diamonds of Canada, Botswana, and Russia, those of Angola, Congo, and West Africa are mostly alluvial in nature, found very close to the surface, and scattered over hundreds of square miles. (15) These diamonds are as easy to mine as they are difficult to police, and with appropriate terror tactics, rebel armies had no difficulty in gaining access to them.

The third part of the mix has to do with regulation. Rough diamonds were, in most countries, completely unregulated during the better part of the twentieth century. (16) De Beers had a lock on much of the world's production, and it controlled or influenced most of the rest, giving it effective management over as much as 90 percent of all rough diamond distribution. (17) But this was not public regulation, and it was not transparent. It was regulation by cash register, with few questions asked about provenance or any of the darker issues that might lurk in a diamond's background. (18) Governments were only tangentially involved. Most were satisfied with mining royalties, license fees, and export taxes, and beyond these basics, they asked few questions. (19) The most glaring example of governmental apathy took place in Belgium. The city of Antwerp is the center of the world's diamond trade, and either before or after De Beers handles them, some 90 percent of the world's diamonds pass through the city on their way to India, Israel, or China for cutting and polishing. (20) Many pass through Antwerp again, on their way to the showrooms of New York, Paris, and London. (21) During the 1990s, Belgian customs recorded the importation of billions of dollars' worth of rough diamonds from Liberia, a country with a negligible diamond resource of its own, and a country wracked by civil war. (22) Hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of diamonds were being imported from countries with no diamond mining whatsoever: Gambia, Burkina Faso, Zambia, and others. (23) Whatever a Belgian importer wrote on an invoice was dutifully recorded as fact by Belgian authorities. (24) Although nobody with knowledge of diamonds would have believed the statistics, they were never questioned.

Therefore, it was a simple matter for warlords to sell their ill-gotten diamonds into the legitimate trade. And it was as simple, in a post-Cold War world awash in illicit weapons, for them to find gunrunners and fly-by-night airlines willing to accept diamonds in payment. (25)

2. ACTIVISM

   By the middle of 1998, the humanitarian situation in Angola was dire. Four UN peacekeeping missions had ended in failure, (26) and all that remained was a toothless United Nations Security Council Resolution prohibiting the purchase of Angolan diamonds not controlled by the Angolan government. (27)

   This is where the civil society campaign against conflict diamonds began--at the lowest ebb of UN authority in Angola, at the worst point in the diamond-fueled wars that were raging across Africa, and at the zenith of the diamond industry's apathy toward its own responsibility. A small, newly formed British nongovernmental organization (NGO), Global Witness, produced a report at the end of 1998 called A Rough Trade: The Role of Companies and Governments in the Angolan Conflict. It detailed the death and destruction of the ongoing civil war, and estimated that UNITA had generated $3.7 billion in diamond sales between 1992 and 1998 to pay for it. (28) It described the worthlessness of UN sanctions. In addition, the report chastised De Beers for its indiscriminate purchase of rough diamonds, quoting De Beers Chairman Nicky Oppenheimer who had written about "the increasing outflow of Angolan diamonds to the major cutting centres, much of which De Beers was able to purchase through its outside buying offices." (29)

   A year later another NGO, Partnership Africa Canada (PAC), produced a similar report: The Heart of the Matter: Sierra Leone, Diamonds and Human Security. (30) PAC, which had come to the issue independently of Global Witness, built on what the British NGO had found by detailing the open scandal in Belgian import statistics and adding more details to the diamond industry story. (31) Human Rights Watch and several American NGOs began to take up the issue, finding strength in the common cause and shared research with Global Witness and PAC. (32)

   In 1999 the Government of Canada accepted the chairmanship of the UN Security Council Sanctions Committee on Angola and decided to get to the bottom of UNITA's ability to circumvent the diamond embargo. (33) Canada's UN ambassador, Robert Fowler, convened a first-ever independent "panel of experts" to look into sanctions-busting of diamonds, oil, and weapons. (34) The panel leaned heavily on the work that NGOs had done. When the Fowler Report was released in March 2000, it confirmed what the NGOs had already written, adding even more detail to the international calumny behind conflict diamonds. (35)

   With several countries enflamed by diamond-fueled conflict, the media--driven by a growing NGO voice that now played on the mystique created by diamond advertising--began to pick up on the story. Diamonds, NGOs said, might be a girl's best friend, but not an African girl's. (36) A new slogan, "diamonds are a guerrilla's best friend," became commonplace, and in a play on the famous advertising slogan, diamonds were said to be more "forever" for those killed in the diamond wars than for those who wore diamonds on their fingers. (37) In the United States, two American congressmen--a Democrat, Tony Hall, and a Republican, Frank Wolfe--cosponsored a bill called the Consumer Access to a Responsible Accounting for Trade Bill (CARAT), which aimed to require forgery-proof certificates of origin for any diamond entering the United States worth more than $100. (38) They were backed by a powerful group of American NGOs, including Physicians for Human Rights, World Vision, and Oxfam America. And in Europe another coalition called Fatal Transactions was forming. (39)

   Alarmed by the growing clamor from civil society, the industry began to move from denial to engagement. Nicky Oppenheimer spoke out about the disastrous cost a boycott would inflict on conflict-free...