Blood Diamonds and Non-State Actors

• Author: Ian Smillie
• Position: Served as the Research Coordinator for Partnership Africa Canada during the negotiations that created the KP

1003

Vanderbilt Journal

of Transnational Law

VOLUME 46 October 2013 NUMBER 4

Blood Diamonds and Non-State

Actors

Ian Smillie*

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. WAR ............................................................................... 1003

II. ACTIVISM ....................................................................... 1007

III. REGULATION .................................................................. 1012

IV. POLITICAL WILL AND POLITICAL WON’T ........................ 1014

V. CONCLUSIONS ................................................................ 1020

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

* The author served as the Research Coordinator for Partnership Africa Canada

during the negotiations that created the KP. He served on a UN Security Council

Expert Panel that investigated the connection between diamonds and weapons in

Sierra Leone’s long-running war, and he was the first Witness at Charles Taylor’s war

crimes trial. The Special Court for Sierra Leone tried Charles Taylor at the

International Criminal Court chambers in The Hague. The Author has also written

BLOOD ON THE STONE: GREED, CORRUPTION AND WAR IN THE GLOBAL DIAMOND TRADE

(2010). This Article reflects his own experience and views.

1. See Mats Berdal & David M. Malone, Introduction to GREED AND

GRIEVANCE: ECONOMIC AGENDAS IN CIVIL WARS 3–9 (Mats Berdal & David M. Malone

1004 vanderbilt journal of transnational law [vol. 46:1003

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, União Nacional para a Independência 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

eds., 2000) (“In many of these cases, the benefits of war are closely linked to the

presence of an access to natural resources in the area of conflict.”).

2. STEPHEN ELLIS, THE MASK OF ANARCHY: THE DESTRUCTION OF LIBERIA AND

THE RELIGIOUS DIMENSION OF AN AFRICAN CIVIL WAR 90–91 (1999).

3. See Pete Jones & David Smith, Congo’s Army Accused of Rape and Looting

as M23 Rebels Win Image War, THE GUARDIAN (Nov. 26, 2012, 7:10 AM),

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/26/drc-army-accused-rape-murder-congo

(discussing the continued looting activities of rebel armies in the DRC).

4. LESLIE ALAN HORVITZ & CHRISTOPHER CATHERWOOD, ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF

WAR CRIMES & GENOCIDE 19 (2006).

5. IAN SMILLIE, BLOOD ON THE STONE: GREED, CORRUPTION AND WAR IN THE

GLOBAL DIAMOND TRADE 65 (2010).

6. Id. at 66.

7. See LANSANA GBERIE, A DIRTY WAR IN WEST AFRICA: THE RUF AND THE

DESTRUCTION OF SIERRA LEONE 153 (2005) (describing the perpetration of atrocities

against civilians, in particular, mass amputations by the RUF).

8. See id. at 64 (discussing the scare tactics employed by the RUF).

9. See id. at 153 (characterizing diamonds as the “mainstay of the warlord

economy”).