No One’s Best Friend

Throughout the 2000s, the issue of blood, or conflict, diamonds gained manifold and unique expressions in western pop culture. In 2005, Kanye West recorded the song “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” which won a Grammy award. The accompanying video attempted to depict the working conditions in Sierra Leone’s diamond fields and ended by urging viewers to “please purchase conflict free diamonds.” The next year experienced the release of the movie Blood Diamond, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Connelly. It captured, albeit through a Hollywood lens, the violence of the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone and the role of diamonds in fuelling that conflict. No less a persona than Oprah Winfrey featured the movie’s cast on her program, which undoubtedly introduced millions of her viewers to the issue. In the hip hop community, Chuck D of Public Enemy narrated a documentary entitled Bling: Consequences and Repercussions about conflict diamonds. Fashion watchers and pop culture lovers likely remember supermodel Naomi Campbell’s equivocal, summertime testimony at the former Liberian president Charles Taylor’s war crimes trial last year. It was alleged that Taylor gave her a rough diamond after a dinner hosted by former South African president Nelson Mandela.

Blood on the Stone: Greed, Corruption and War in the Global Diamond Trade, by Ian Smillie, part memoir, part history and part polemic, arrives somewhat late on bookshelves, since the conflicts in question have been over for a few years now. Still, the book merits attention because of its author. Smillie, a member of the Order of Canada since 2003, served as one of three principals in Partnership Africa Canada, the Ottawa-based non-governmental organization that played an essential role in unfurling the connection between diamonds and Sierra Leone’s civil war in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Without the work of PAC and Global Witness, the London-based NGO that studies how resources fund conflict, the pop culture explosion leading to expanded public knowledge of the issue would likely never have occurred. That Smillie served as a member of a United Nations Security Council expert panel on diamonds, weapons and war in Sierra Leone only enhances his credibility. With his activism and knowledge, there are few people on this planet better positioned to write a book lacerating the diamond industry for its opacity and its ease in dealing with men such as Taylor and Foday Sankoh, the dead leader of the RUF in Sierra Leone. Certainly, there are very few, if any, authors on this subject who share Smillie’s commitment to stemming the flow of conflict diamonds. Through his individual work and that with PAC, he played an important role in the establishment of the Kimberley Process, the joint governmental industry-NGO initiative that strives to weed out conflict diamonds. He is a legitimate authority on this subject, worthy of admiration.

Diamonds exist as a glittering contradiction. More than a decade into the 21st century, the gemstones remain an inevitable part of courtship and marriage in western circles. Engagement rings destined for one’s beloved usually contain diamonds, adhering to the custom of the showier the better. Wedding rings and anniversary gifts cleave to the same principle. If that was not enough, the hip hop term “bling-bling” (or just “bling”) is now entrenched in popular culture, evoking the sound of light hitting silver, platinum and diamonds. The legions of bejewelled professional athletes and musicians demonstrate that diamonds can be anyone’s best friend, male or female.

Yet these gemstones of desire simultaneously defy fundamental economic principles. As Smillie points out, diamonds are a poor investment ; there is no second-hand market for them as there is for gold. The pricing system is based on four criteria: cut, colour, clarity and carats. Two diamonds of approximately the same size, 1.5 carats, can vary by thousands of dollars in price because of slight imperfections and tints. The use of objective and subjective factors bolsters the belief that the value of diamonds is artificial. It is not predicated on supply and demand because, unlike oil, there is no commodity market for diamonds. Instead, they are part of a luxury market that plays by its own rules. Finally, Smillie reveals the dominance of the De Beers Group, which used to be able to impose prices but now merely sells to a select list of preapproved traders, cutters and polishers. Competition, while improved, is far from robust. Nevertheless, economics is not Smillie’s primary concern.

What drives him is the extreme opacity of the global diamond trade and how it “fuelled” wars in Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone. The sector is opaque because after rough diamonds arrive from sub-Saharan Africa in Belgium, India or New York, they can be sorted, traded, resorted and re-traded before reaching a cutting and polishing factory.

“Diamonds have always lent themselves to theft and smuggling,” he writes, “and they have served a wide variety of interests as a ready alternative to both soft and hard currency. They are small; they have a high value to weight ratio; they may not be a great investment, but they keep their value. And historically, they have been completely unregulated. Most governments gave up long ago trying to tax diamond exports and imports in any meaningful way because diamonds have been virtually impossible to trace and to police.”

This problem was compounded by customs agents who cared about “country of provenance,” referring to where the gemstones were shipped from, as opposed to “country of origin.” Statistics were fraudulent because the origin of the diamonds was obscured. According to Smillie, this system abetted conflict diamonds, ones mined and stolen by rebel groups to buy weapons and wage war. They were smuggled past customs and subject to a false customs declaration in the diamond trading centres. Dealers would also travel to the four African countries and purchase them directly from the rebel groups or a third party. Smillie sagely explains that this system of trade, which is not subject to market forces, invites money launderers, tax evaders, thieves and rebel groups to take advantage of it.

Another point that Blood on the Stone takes pains to make is about the role of alluvial diamonds in conflict. These stones are found within a few feet of the earth’s surface, scattered over hundreds of miles and located along riverbeds, in valleys where rivers used to flow, on beaches and on the seabed where rivers deposited them. As Smillie notes, such diamonds are often available to “individual diggers with little more than shovels, sieves and source of water for straining gravel.” This is an altogether different environment from the diamond mines where De Beers or BHP Billiton bore deep underground into volcanic kimberlite pipes to extract the stones. Kimberlite diamond mining, which takes place in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, has not released diamonds into the illicit trading system. It is perhaps no coincidence that Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sierra Leone are dominated by alluvial mining. Liberia, the fourth country in the conflict quartet, has almost no diamonds, alluvial or otherwise, and made its mark by laundering smuggled diamonds from Sierra Leone. One wonders if there is any research on whether kimberlite mines create more stability than alluvial mines. Smillie does not share any with the reader.

The book’s strengths are threefold. The first is that it explains the murky trade in rough diamonds in crisp, compelling prose. Smillie documents how Sierra Leone, Guinea, Gambia and Liberia exported diamonds into Belgium at a combined rate of $660 million per year between 1994 and 1999, which far exceeded what they extracted out of the ground. During this period, almost 10 percent of annual world production was composed of illicit diamonds. The willful ignorance of the industry was shameful and deserved to be exposed. Blood on the Stone makes the need for stiffer regulation of the corporate players and global trading centres absolutely clear. The idea that the diamond industry can regulate itself is ridiculous.

The second strength is that Smillie’s writing on Sierra Leone is excellent. It is one of the best summaries of that country’s civil war and how diamonds bankrolled the RUF. There is intriguing detail on the Lebanese diaspora and how the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah manifested itself through diamonds. When the Shiites fell out of favour in Sierra Leone, Israelis entered to fill the gap. Smillie even devotes some space to the idea advanced by the journalist Douglas Farah that al Qaeda involved itself in the illicit West African diamond trade to buy weapons and launder money.

Third is that he offers memorable observations on the difficulties in launching the Kimberley Process, an action instigated by the United Nations General Assembly’s 2000 passage of a resolution supporting an international certification scheme for rough diamonds. The process involved governments, the diamond industry and relevant NGOs in a regulatory plan, but it was rendered ineffective by a lack of capacity. (Curiously, the book omits Smillie’s decision to quit the Kimberley Process in 2009. Given the coverage in the media at the time, an in-depth explanation of why he made that decision would have given the reader a greater sense of his frustration. One grasps that the process has ended a lot of the trade in stolen and conflict diamonds, although it is failing because it lacks the will to deal decisively with non-compliant countries. Smillie contends that there is little evidence that the Kimberley Process could cope with a “diamond fuelled conflagration … in the Eastern DRC or anywhere else.”)

In spite of its achievements, there are problems with Blood on the Stone. In the first place, as mentioned above, it feels late. By the time it was published in 2010, the political landscape had shifted significantly in three of the countries Smillie uses as case studies. In 2002, the Angolan Army killed Jonas Savimbi, leader of the rebel National Union for the Total Independence of Angola. Positive peace may be lacking, but war is over. In Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is president, and Taylor, the odious former-rebel-turned-president, is on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity before the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone. The country is slowly being rehabilitated. In Sierra Leone, the government of Ernest Bai Koroma is in a similar situation of rebuilding and development. Change in all places may be measured incrementally, but the violence of the 1990s and early 2000s has largely abated.

Moreover, the book too often reads like a victory lap for Smillie. While rich in detail and information, it required a sharper, sustained focus about exactly how conflict diamonds funded civil wars in Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone. It takes Smillie 60 pages to discuss any “diamond war” in detail, which is more than a quarter of the book’s length. This is made worse by the lack of integration between chapters, with key names and points being repeated unnecessarily. Crucial ideas are either dulled or not connected to the civil wars discussed.

And Blood on the Stone seems confused about what kind of book it is. The history is valuable. The memoir aspects, which include Smillie’s testimony at The Hague against Taylor and his heading to Liberia after publishing one of the early PAC reports, can be fascinating. Other details, although courageous, seem self-indulgent. But if he wished to have an authoritative voice on the ongoing polemic, Smillie should have been more explicit about the current situation in the diamond trade in 2010.

Particularly disappointing is Smillie’s failure to consider the resource curse. In brief, this theory posits that having a substantial mineral endowment thwarts economic growth and potentially pollutes the politics of the state. The problematic political consequences of a mineral endowment tend to be most prominent in post-colonial states with pre-existing cleavages of ethnicity, language and religion. Possessing resources, according to this theory, exacerbates these divisions. It is not a coincidence that the four countries covered by Smillie are all weak states, fragmented by ethnicity or geography. Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone are all similarly “blessed” with an array of commodities such as oil, gold, copper, timber and, of course, diamonds. What is not clear is whether diamonds are inherently more harmful to countries than oil or gold. After all, Botswana, the world’s leading diamond producer, is stable and peaceful. “These wars,” writes Smillie, “would never have attended the destruction of so much infrastructure and humanity had there never been diamonds.” Maybe so, but it is worth pointing out that any tradable commodity can be used to wage war. In 2007, Global Witness documented how cocoa exports were funding Côte d’Ivoire’s civil war.

However, Blood on the Stone is not an academic work. It strives to correct the record and to prosecute the diamond industry for complicity and negligence in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Africans. Smillie cannot be blamed if he hates diamonds after his staunch advocacy and activism. Their reputation may fall, as he writes, and consumers may stop buying them one day. But a more coherent book would have hastened the process.