Laurie,
Quite frankly, I don't care. What I do care about is this G&M article:
'Diamonds are a guerrilla's best friend'
Precious gems and warfare, such as in Sierra Leone, have deep
roots that go back more than a century to the days of Cecil Rhodes
MADELAINE DROHAN
Thursday, January 13, 2000
IN OTTAWA -- Ever since Cecil Rhodes instructed the De Beers foundries to forge guns during the Boer War, the diamond industry has been intimately linked with weapons and war.
Lust for diamonds has sparked bloody conflicts and the gems have provided the financial wherewithal to keep others going.
As yesterday's report by Partnerships Africa Canada revealed, diamonds from Sierra Leone fuelled the brutal conflict in the West African country and helped to pay for the war in Lebanon. The former is known for the mutilation of children, whose limbs have been hacked off to terrorize the populace.
It is a triumph of marketing that an object whose history is so soaked in blood can be promoted as a symbol of purity and eternal love. "Diamonds are not a girl's best friend," Ian Smillie, one of the report's authors, said yesterday. "Diamonds are a guerrilla's best friend."
That three Canadian companies have been accused of opportunistic behaviour in Sierra Leone will prompt some raised eyebrows. Mercenaries, arms dealing and bribery are not usually linked with Canadian companies and their principals. These connections have been strenuously denied by the companies.
The diamond industry encourages corruption, says the report done for Partnerships Africa Canada, a coalition of Canadian and African groups that promote sustainable development policies.
It starts at the mines, where poorly paid workers explore the limits of human ingenuity with their smuggling techniques. It continues at a secretive market in Antwerp, Belgium, where a diamond's provenance is unquestioned by some diamantaires who are more interested in profit than legality.
Of course, there are clean mining companies and upright diamond cutters and sellers, but the report, The Heart of the Matter, calls on Western governments to take a broom to corruption in the industry to help end the misery it has caused.
This is particularly important for Canada, where a new diamond industry is being formed after the discovery of the gem in the Northwest Territories. And it comes at a time of national introspection on another front -- the role Canadian companies, such as Talisman Energy Inc. of Calgary, play in conflict zones on the other side of the world.
To understand the connection between diamonds and crime today, it is necessary to understand its history.
The modern diamond industry was born a little more than a century ago when Cecil Rhodes organized the mines at De Beers and Kimberley in South Africa, forming the global cartel that still controls about 60 per cent of all production.
The empire builder of British South Africa cut a deal with the two main diamond-buying organizations, thus cornering diamond supply. He gradually put in place a diamond syndicate, whose purpose was to keep the price of the gems high. De Beers has operated on this principle ever since.
As diamonds were discovered in other areas of Africa, De Beers tried to control the flow to the market. It largely succeeded with the mines' legal output, but diamond miners have shown incredible ingenuity in spiriting stones out.
In the early days, they would stick them between their toes, in their navels or other orifices, in pounds of butter. Or they would swallow them. Some would cut their arm and let the wound heal over a diamond. Others persuaded visiting dentists to insert them into fillings. X-rays forced them to resort to other methods, even using carrier pigeons.
In the mid-1950s, long-time De Beers chairman Ernest Oppenheimer, a keen reader of spy novels, hired the recently retired head of Britain's MI-5, Sir Percy Sillitoe, to tighten security.
Sir Percy instituted worker camps and X-ray screening, but Sierra Leone posed a problem because diamonds are scattered over large areas. In a harbinger of what was to come in the 1990s, he hired Lebanese mercenaries to lay land mines on paths that crossed the border to Liberia and terrorize the local population.
It worked for a while. When smuggling started again, De Beers set up a sales office in neighbouring Liberia to buy the smuggled stones. The loser was the Sierra Leonean government, which could not collect diamond royalties.
James Bond creator Ian Fleming wrote about Sir Percy's efforts in a rare non-fiction book called The Diamond Smugglers.
Fast-forward to the 1990s. Sierra Leone is in chaos, with a civil war pitting the rural-based Revolutionary United Front against a succession of military governments in Freetown.
One military leader, Valentine Strasser, decides to retake control of the diamond fields by force and employs the South African mercenary group Executive Outcomes to do the job.
Tony Buckingham, a retired British officer, performs the introductions. Shortly afterward, DiamondWorks Ltd., in which Mr. Buckingham is a shareholder, receives diamond concessions in Sierra Leone.
Thereafter, the company was indelibly linked with mercenaries, despite its protestations that there was no corporate connection between DiamondWorks and Executive Outcomes. The mercenaries used air-burst explosives -- which create and ignite a flammable vapour, burning everything and everyone within a certain radius -- in their successful fight to regain control of the diamond fields.
The other Canadian companies criticized in the report -- AmCan Minerals Ltd. and Rex Diamond Mining Corp. -- both have concessions in Sierra Leone, but neither is operating there at the moment.
The report condemns all three for trying to make a profit in the midst of civil war. But it notes that very few diamonds have been mined in Sierra Leone by these companies because of the conflict, which began in 1991 and which has only recently given over to a fragile peace.
Yet Sierra Leonean diamonds are making it to the Antwerp diamond market -- a reported 770,000 carats in 1998. The vast majority are being smuggled out by rebels through Liberia. It helps smugglers that alluvial diamonds, which can be mined with just a shovel, are plentiful in Sierra Leone, where three children unearthed a flawless 100-carat gem when they were digging for yams.
The money raised has been used by the rebels to wage a war that "is not about justice or land or democracy or freedom," Mr. Smillie told a news conference yesterday. "It's about loot."
It is this trail of illegal diamonds from Sierra Leone to Liberia to Antwerp and on to the world markets that the authors of the report want shut down. They are highly critical of the Antwerp diamond business, where the industry lobbyist also monitors imports and exports.
"The real issue of the Belgium environment, as it pertains to Sierra Leone or any other diamond-producing country, is the lack of interest and therefore the lack of information on the true source of diamonds entering the country," the report says.
"The Belgium diamond industry, and apparently the Belgian government, are basically not interested in the source of diamonds or how they get to Belgium."
Authorities turn a blind eye to bizarre statistical anomalies, making it easy for smugglers, said Ralph Hazelton, another of the report's authors.
Liberian mines are capable of producing at most 200,000 carats of diamonds a year. Yet the Belgian diamond authorities have registered, without question, imports from Liberia averaging six million carats a year for the past few years. "These are obviously not Liberian diamonds."
Each smuggled diamond makes it more difficult for the Sierra Leonean government to feed and educate its people. The same United Nations Human Development Index that routinely puts Canada in No. 1 spot for quality of life each year puts Sierra Leone in last place.
"Diamonds have brought nothing but horror and war to Sierra Leone," Mr. Smillie said. "It couldn't possibly be in worse condition than it is."
Where does De Beers fit in all of this? The diamond cartel stopped mining in Sierra Leone years ago and has closed its offices there and in Liberia.
But diamonds from the area still may find their way into De Beers's hands. Once out of the ground, it is impossible to determine exactly where they are from.
The report's authors recommend that De Beers go back to Sierra Leone and re-establish official trade. "We would want to help where we can," said Tom Beardmore-Gray, senior vice-president of De Beers Canada in Vancouver, without commenting specifically on whether an office is likely soon.
The authors also say they are not suggesting that De Beers lessen its control of the diamond market. "All would lose if De Beers' monopoly would dry up," Mr. Smillie said. What they are hoping is that De Beers will use its global clout to help end smuggling.
Lansana Gberie, who also contributed to the report, played down the recommendation of a consumer campaign against diamonds, saying this would be a last resort because it would damage legitimate as well as illegitimate business.
Alex Vines, a London-based researcher for Human Rights Watch Africa who has written extensively on diamonds in Africa, said such a campaign probably would not catch on. "Consumers don't seem to care about blood diamonds. They are not as emotive as baby seals."
He suggests that in a global market where there is a glut of diamonds, De Beers may decide to reposition itself as the source for legitimate diamonds, using this as a new marketing technique.
Perhaps the greatest hope for Sierra Leone comes from the newfound willingness of the world's most powerful foreign ministers to tackle issues that are central to diamond smuggling. At a meeting in Berlin in last month, the ministers agreed to make conflict prevention a priority. This means looking into small-arms trade, organized crime and the use of child soldiers, mercenaries and private military companies.
At the United Nations, Canadian Ambassador Robert Fowler has been heading up efforts to stop the diamond pipeline in Angola, where he is currently investigating conditions on the ground. Canada is using its seat on the UN Security Council to push such issues.
If these efforts bear fruit, the connection between diamonds and war first established by Cecil Rhodes may finally be cut.
Madelaine Drohan is a columnist in The Globe and Mail's parliamentary bureau.
THE CASE OF THE MISSING DIAMONDS
Discrepancies between officially reported diamond-production levels and the amount that arrives at a secretive diamond market in Antwerp, Belgium, hints at the scale of smuggling in some West African countries.
Three Canadian companies have concession rights at 3 diamond-mining sites in Sierra Leone.
1998 reported diamond production vs. Antwerp imports from selected countries, in thousands of carats.
Reported production Imports into Antwerp
Sierra Leone 8.5 770
Liberia 150 2,558
Guinea 205 596
Sources: U.S. Geological Survey: government of Sierra Leone; Diamond High Council, 1998 Annual Report
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