No Blood For Bling: the diamond trade and its effect on Sierra Leone

international | consumer issues | news report Friday May 20, 2005 14:11 by kevin

Martin Rowan from the Sierra Leone Ireland Partnership sheds some light on the diamond trade.

The African nation of Sierra Leone recently celebrated its 44th birthday of independence. The poorest country in the world, with a GDP of $520 per person (compared to roughly $38,000 in Ireland), was torn apart by a civil war which raged for ten years from 1991 to 2001. The country has been at peace officially for four years. Most of the civil war was funded by diamond smuggling, which is Sierra Leone's greatest export and natural resource.

I met with Martin Rowan from the Sierra Leone Ireland Partnership (SLIP), based on the North Circular Road in Dublin, which campaigns to raise awareness of what is happening in the country. The processes behind the diamond trade are extremely opaque. Along with subsistence agriculture, diamond mining is the main source of employment, with over 120,000 people working in diamond mines and fields, which stretch over 7,500 square miles. The diamonds are alluvial rather than kimberlite, which means that they can be found while digging up the ground. The system is very informal, anyone can start digging. The trade is informal and very difficult to police - it is estimated that 90% of diamonds mined are illegally smuggled out of the country.

The Sierra Leone state does not earn very much from the mining. There is a system of charges for registering mines, and exports are meant to go through the certification process. There are tariffs, but these are low to encourage legal trading. Currently the trade brings in 60 million dollars every year, but this increases as the certification process kicks in and the government gets more resources to police the mines.

Martin explained about how the indsutry is trying to clean up its public face. "The certification process was launched in 2002 in Kimberly in South Africa. This was an attempt to restore consumer confidence in diamonds. Several years ago there was a campaign to equate diamonds with fur. This was launched in Canada, at the height of the "blood diamonds" campaign. The diamond trade was very worried about this. Nelson Mandela even said that a boycott would ruin the economy of Botswana, Namibia and other countries. The diamonds were fuelling wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia, The Congo (DRC), and Angola.

In a sense, the atrocities were a kind of turning point in the history of diamonds. They underlined what kind of a trade it is and galvanised international attention, which led to the beginnings of the Kimberley certification process. There's a passage in Greg Campbell's book Blood Diamonds which talked about the actions of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in trying to get control of the diamond fields. They would come to a village and round up a group of people. They would put little pieces of paper into a hat, which had things like 'cut off head' or 'cut off hand' written on them. They forced the people to reach into the hat and pull out a piece of paper, and then carry out what was written. This was how they got control. So most of the diamonds coming out of Sierra Leone were extremely bloody. The certification process is an attempt to provide some guarantee to consumers that the diamonds they are investing so much emotion in haven't caused human suffering.

The jewellers of Ireland assure me that all their diamonds are certified, which says they were bought from legitimate sources, the whole trail can be traced back to an offical source. We dont have the resources here to do research on it though. Ideally we would like do something like Amnesty and Global Witness did in the UK & US, which is sending people into the stores to say they want to buy diamonds, and then demand to see full ceritifcation. They did it in the US & UK and found that only about 10% of the chains which promised certification had a clue what they were talking about. Coming from that, I'm not sure what that promise actually means in Ireland."

So what practical steps can people take to ensure they are buying clean diamonds? "Anecdotally, most of the people I know who have tried to find a diamond ring they felt comfortable with have ended up buying them from Canada, which have full certification. These diamonds have a small laser engraved polar bear which is a symbol of clean diamonds. The operation is still small scale though, it is a real sub-industry. Its not the complete solution to blood or conflict diamonds but it is there as a small step in the right direction.

Ideally there needs to be more aid given to resources for the mine monitoring officers in Sierra Leone. They check that if you have a mine, you are paying license fees, everything is official, you're paying and looking after your workers properly, you dont have children working for you, and that the diamonds are going through the certification process. At the moment there are only 12 motorbikes for 60 mine monitors. Over 7,500 square miles, that results in very little supervision. The mine officers are also only earning about 2 dollars a day. If someone finds a huge diamond, its very easy to bribe an officer not to go through the process, who can get a years pay in one fell swoop. The monitoring system needs a lot of beefing up."

If people are going to buy diamond rings, the Rough Guide to Ethical Shopping says that a number of companies are now offering "jewellery sourced according to fair-trade principles. As with all uncertified fair-trade, there are no rules and regulations governing exactly what this means, but in general is refers to the retailers working directly with manufacturers, ensuring that they get decent working conditions, a decent slice of the profits, and long-term trading agreements. Obviously, a few ethical jewellery suppliers can't immediately solve all the problems, but at least the fair-traders are also doing their utmost to inject a dose of ethical awareness into the jewellery industry at large."

Links and further reading:
Sierra Leone Ireland Partnership
Global Witness conflict diamond pages
Human Rights Watch on Sierra Leone
The Kimberley Process
Conflict Diamonds site
Canadian Polar Bear diamonds
Cred website
Silver Chilli