In the lead-up to Valentine’s Day, people across the world rush to buy diamond engagement rings. By now most will know that in the past, many diamonds were mined in African war zones where rebel groups used the proceeds to fund their violent insurgencies. To assuage any guilt that may taint the romantic gesture, the diamond industry tells us that today, 99 percent of diamonds are now “conflict-free.”
It’s true there has been progress. A generation ago, as much as 15 percent of global diamond production was believed to be linked to conflict. But in 2003, thanks to public pressure and awareness campaigns by organizations like Global Witness, a certificate system known as the Kimberley Process was born. Backed by a United Nations resolution, the system allowed for rigorous tracking that is supposed to keep so-called blood diamonds from being sold in global markets.
The reality is that there’s still virtually no way of knowing whether a diamond is or isn’t connected to some kind of atrocity. The system is riddled with problems: Monitoring is lax, enforcement is nearly nonexistent, and the definitions of “conflict” are so narrow that they exclude the many other forms of violence and abuse that plague the trade. Some of the system’s own architects have abandoned it. Without genuine change, consumers may decide that the only ethical stones are those that haven’t been mined at all.
The price of a diamond — unlike, say, cobalt, another mineral linked to human rights abuses — has little to do with its actual utility, though diamonds do have some uses. These crystals of carbon, which form naturally in the unfathomable heat and pressure of the earth’s mantle, are one of the tightest configuration of atoms in the known universe. Their hardness is ideal for rock-coring drills, and their conductivity allows them to dissipate heat in electronics. Because industrial-grade stones are typically small, aesthetically flawed and relatively common, most sell for a pittance.
Storytelling has always been essential to the creation of a diamond’s financial worth. De Beers, the international diamond giant, is as much a marketing operation as a mining company. In the late 1930s, it hired a New York advertising agency to promote the idea that “A Diamond Is Forever” and that a diamond engagement ring is the truest expression of love. The campaign worked so well that the idea came to seem like an ancient tradition to consumers.
When the story of blood diamonds emerged, it was something no would-be fiancée wanted to hear. This may help to explain why the industry itself, through an organization called the World Diamond Council, eagerly participated in the creation of the Kimberley Process. Under the system, rough diamonds can be exported only with certification that they did not finance anti-government rebels in any country. A database maintained by participating countries and industry groups also tracks imports and exports to prevent undeclared diamonds from one country from being falsely declared as legal in another. At first, it all seemed to work: Within a few years, conflict diamonds had plunged to just 1 percent of global production.
Unfortunately, the Kimberley Process failed to address a glaring gap: Armed insurgents are far from the only offenders in the diamond trade. When we think of blood diamonds, we usually think of war-torn countries like Sierra Leone or the Democratic Republic of Congo. But they can also be found in countries such as Brazil, a nation that has no modern history of civil war.
I spent six years reporting on an Amazonian Indigenous group in Brazil known as the Cinta Larga, whose world was upended twice by the diamond trade. In the 1960s, after a highway pierced through their rainforest home, many of the Cinta Larga people died of diseases brought by men panning for diamonds. Fortune-seekers killed others outright.
Then, in 2000, a prospector from Suriname found the mother lode that was the source of the diamonds that had been showing up in the tribe’s rivers. Cinta Larga chiefs got in on the trade, becoming “diamond barons” who spent vast sums on cattle, imported cars and brothel visits. Their society became bitterly divided, and they failed to control the thousands of new prospectors who flocked to the mine. The chaos brought dozens of murders, rape accusations and the introduction of guns, alcohol and drugs into their villages. The Cinta Larga leader Nacoça Pio told a Brazilian journalist, “Diamonds are worse than cocaine.”
In the early 2000s, an estimated $20 million worth of undeclared diamonds left the Cinta Larga mine each month, more than 10 times the country’s official diamond exports. Brazilian law prohibits mining in Indigenous areas. In a typical workaround, one foreign buyer allegedly laundered Cinta Larga diamonds by falsifying documents from licensed mines elsewhere in the country. The method worked so well that he also smuggled African blood diamonds into Brazil to apply for clean Kimberley certificates. Then he exported them to Europe, where they could be sold to consumers as “conflict-free.”
The Kimberley Process has proved to be such a disaster that some of its early proponents have withdrawn their support. Beyond its overly narrow definitions and easily dodged rules, some critics rightly denounce the lack of independent monitoring of each country’s certification process and penalties for diamond-exporting countries that engage in fraud or state-backed violence. Others lament that the use of child labor, which is widespread in African mines, doesn’t disqualify diamonds from certification.
Ian Smillie, a human-rights campaigner who played a key role in creating the Kimberley Process, is among those calling for reform. He insists on broader definitions of what constitutes a blood diamond, to include associations with “gender violence, human rights abuse, theft and also what you’ve seen with the Cinta Larga,” he told me recently. He wants to see regular monitoring, independent reviews and real enforcement. He’s not very optimistic because countries that benefit from the status quo — through state-owned mining companies or tax revenue — are unlikely to agree to changes. “The troublemakers,” he added, “have always been governments.”
In the meantime, what is an ethically minded consumer, determined to fulfill the not-so-timeless dream of a diamond engagement ring, to do?
One alternative is to buy synthetic diamonds. Manufacturers can now produce stones that are purer than any natural diamond, because they lack even trace amounts of foreign elements such as nitrogen. And they’re less expensive. Little wonder that lab-grown diamonds now account for at least 14 percent of the market.
The traditional diamond industry has responded by decrying the carbon emissions involved in making these stones — as if mines didn’t ravage the environment. It also argues they threaten the livelihood of desperate African miners — as if that makes up for the human rights abuses. But its main tactic is tried-and-true: Sultry ads highlighting the mystique of “real, rare” natural diamonds, which, by implication, the synthetic ones lack.
Of course, they also lack the bloodstains.
The post A Reminder on Valentine’s Day: That Diamond Might Not Be Conflict-Free appeared first on New York Times.
