Why There May Still Be Blood on Your Stones

•

Photo: Jennifer Wilmore Scroggins

As a woman who has been exposed to more engagement ring advertisements than I care to recall, I never would have guessed that the first time I would be offered a diamond would be by a stranger. Or that he would have plucked it from a stream himself.

It was a small, orange diamond, the man told me as he pulled it from his mouth (where he held it to keep it safe), and offered to sell it to me for the equivalent of about twenty U.S. dollars. We were in the diamond fields of West Africa, where artisanal miners such as this man wade into streams every day armed with sifting pans and the hope of a better life.

I spent last summer working with a nonprofit organization in Sierra Leone, a country known for its precious stones that fueled a devastating 11-year civil war during the 1990s. Due in large part to the conflict in Sierra Leone, diamond-producing countries, NGOs and the UN labeled the stones “conflict diamonds” and, in an effort to curb the sale of the illicit stones, these groups and other governments worked with the international diamond industry to establish a certification scheme known as the Kimberley Process (KP) in 2003. Endorsed in the same year at the UN General Assembly’s 83rd Plenary Meeting and by Security Council Resolution 1459, the scheme monitors the production and trade of rough diamonds worldwide.

Polishing the diamond on his shirt, the man said he typically finds small stones like this one, of varying quality, once every two or three months. An average income of $20 over a period of months may not sound like a great deal, but most of the miners are also given meals by the owners of the land they mine, he said.

My colleague, Aminata, is an expert on mining and extractives and an active member of the Kimberley Process’s civil society coalition. Talking with her back at her office, I realized that while these miners struggle to make a living, at least they are not being attacked and beaten when they go to work. On the other side of the continent, she said, diamond miners are not so fortunate.

She told me that in Zimbabwe’s Marange diamond fields, police and private security guards employed by mining companies have been shooting, beating and unleashing attack dogs on local unlicensed miners who stray onto company lands. There have also been reports of forced labor in the mines.

The Kimberley Process suspended diamond exports from Zimbabwe in 2009 due to allegations of widespread abuses and killings by security forces at Marange. But in March 2011, the chairman of the KP unilaterally cleared diamonds from Marange for export.

Last June, Aminata went to discuss the situation at a KP meeting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). When she returned to Sierra Leone, I asked her how it went. “Terrible,” she said. “We walked out!”

The civil society members of KP had declared a vote of no confidence and left the meeting in protest. They also boycotted a KP meeting in the DRC in November 2011, during which the KP officially ratified an agreement to allow export of diamonds from Marange. The civil society coalition claims that putting the KP stamp of approval on the Marange diamonds in light of the abuses occurring there damages the scheme’s credibility. But does it?

Many participants in the Kimberley Process have argued that human rights concerns do not fall within the certification scheme’s jurisdiction, saying it is only supposed to certify that shipments of rough diamonds are “conflict-free” — not free from involvement in general human rights abuses.

The issue here seems to be one of semantics. The KP defines conflict diamonds as rough diamonds used by rebels to fund conflicts against legitimate governments. None of the KP’s official documents expressly state that the certification scheme intends to generally prevent human rights abuses. Thus, it has no mandated responsibility to prevent the sale of diamonds associated with abuses such as those documented in Zimbabwe, and the KP’s declaration that some Marange mines are in compliance with its standards in no way guarantees that there is not blood on those stones.

But the public seems to have developed a wider definition of what constitutes a conflict diamond.

I recently spoke with a diamond broker from Montana, who said that she requires all of her suppliers to sign a statement confirming that their diamonds are conflict-free. She expressed concern that the Kimberley Process is not working, referring to the controversy surrounding the Marange diamonds. Even this professional in the industry associates abuses such as beatings and forced labor with conflict diamonds, and I would bet that most consumers in search of clean stones share a similar definition.

So why must the Kimberley Process restrict itself to only those abuses which take place within the context of a rebel movement?

Diamonds systematically tainted with blood cannot be declared clean just because the blood was not spilled in a rebel war. If the KP wants to uphold its credibility and its expressed interest in the “safety and security of people in affected countries,” it must officially incorporate human rights guarantees in its documents and certification procedures, as the KP’s civil society coalition has demanded.

The leadership should make its first order of business at its next meeting to push for inclusion of respect for human rights in its minimum standards and revision of its conflict diamonds definition to include all gross human rights violations that occur at any stage of the diamond production process. Because if consumers, industry professionals and the diamond mining communities themselves are not splitting hairs over definitions, why should the world’s regulatory body?