Measuring a Diamond’s True Price
~YG
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IN 1997, while covering the election of Charles Taylor — a warlord who had raised whole armies of child soldiers — as president of Liberia, I half-jokingly suggested to an aid worker that her group design a poster. 
Abu Bakarr Kargbo, 31, was one of the thousands of amputees afflicted by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) atrocities during the civil war that devastated Sierra Leone from 1991-2002.
It would show a young woman displaying the stump of her chopped-off arm. Below, it would say to American brides, “I can’t wear a wedding ring so that you can.â€
Someone in Leonardo DiCaprio’s new movie, “Blood Diamond,†has stolen my line. A character says, “People back home wouldn’t buy a ring if they knew it would cost someone else their hand.â€
I still feel strongly about this. I got married this month, and my long-suffering bride was kind enough to go along with my refusal to buy a diamond: she has an opal engagement ring and a sapphire wedding ring.
(As a result, one of my better-read buddies gave me grief about exploiting the child laborers who polish sapphires in India and mine emeralds in Brazil. I should have bought a flawless industrial diamond at $80 a carat.)
But the truth is, the situation is more complicated. I’m right; my buddy is right; Global Witness, the human rights group, is right; Russell Simmons is right; and Nelson Mandela is right.
Mr. Simmons, the hip-hop mogul, and Mr. Mandela, the living saint, have both defended the diamond industry in the face of “Blood Diamond.â€
Mr. Simmons, who owns a jewelry company, has started a Diamond Empowerment Fund to teach Africans to polish rough stones so that value-adding step can be done there instead of in Israel, Belgium or India.
They argue, correctly, that 99 percent of all diamonds come from places that are not presently at war: South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Tanzania, Russia, Canada, Australia, even Arkansas. Countries where diamonds fueled grotesque atrocities in the 1990’s — Sierra Leone, Liberia and Angola — are at peace, although eastern Congo and Ivory Coast are not.
Of all those countries, Namibia and Botswana are as dependent on diamonds as Kuwait is on oil, and even mighty South Africa would be badly shaken if prices plummeted.
Moreover, many miners in AIDS-ravaged southern Africa, who get relatively good pay and decent health care, would be thrown out of work.
The paradox is that all that human welfare, like all that spilled blood, flows from a carefully constructed fantasy.
I once visited Namibia’s “Forbidden Zone,†the 180-mile-long beach where the DeBeers company sifts diamonds out of the sand where the Orange River sweeps the diamond pipes of Lesotho and Kimberley out to sea. The clean, well-run mining town is the engine of Namibia’s economy.
It is an eerie place. Since 1936, no vehicle has ever left, in case diamonds are hidden in it. Pet pigeons are forbidden, because they have been caught with gems sewn into tiny jackets. No visitor leaves without a full-body X-ray. Mine detected gravel in my boot soles, so a guard picked out each speck. If one had been a diamond, I could have spent 10 years in jail.
The lust for that glittering gravel, extending unbroken from African thieves to British royals to domestic Bridezillas — is manufactured. Hard carbon, as even Nicky Oppenheimer, the charming chairman of DeBeers, has admitted, has no intrinsic value except as grit. DeBeers, which manages the cartel that has kept diamond prices up far more efficiently than OPEC ever did with oil, fosters that romance. It has run the “A Diamond Is Forever†ads since 1948 and still quietly advises gullible grooms that it is “customary†to spend two months’ salary on a ring.
Creating new markets is the genius of DeBeers. Getting African-American men to wear bling works for them as well as their 1950’s campaigns to get Japanese brides to demand solitaires. To my mind, bling shootings and pre-marital tiffs over the rock just prove that any diamond can aspire to be a conflict diamond.
But true blood diamonds do offend the world’s conscience. While it is possible to laser-etch each stone with an invisible license number, as some Canadian mines do, it is expensive. Instead, the industry has faced the issue with the Kimberley Process: shipments of rough diamonds get certificates of origin. In 2003, Congress passed the Clean Diamond Trade Act, making it illegal to import rough diamonds without certificates.
However, said Corina Gilfillan of Global Witness, the process is flawed.
Diamonds from war-torn areas get mixed in with others. Corrupt officials can forge certificates. Diamonds are easily smuggled.
Most damning, many buyers and many jewelers do not care. Ms. Gilfillan described a documentary in which British film-makers took an actor posing as an African military man into Manhattan dealerships offering diamonds without certificates. He found ready buyers.
In September, the Government Accountability Office reported that the law was not enforced. “Because of weaknesses of the system,†it said, “the United States cannot ensure that illicit rough diamonds are not traded.â€
Mr. Oppenheimer has spoken very sharply on the topic, asking the World Diamond Congress in Tel Aviv in June to “drive out, isolate and eject from our business those who refuse to accept and embrace the absolute imperative to operate in an ethical and morally responsible manner.â€
A cynic would note that his company also dislikes illegal competition. But Mr. Oppenheimer, like his father Harry, has often pointed out that the industry owes its very life to the Africans who are grinding out of their own continent the baubles that so please the rest of the world.
Diamonds, by the way, are not a part of traditional African weddings. In those, the bride is paid for in cows or camels. And Mr. Oppenheimer must be worried more about his industry’s image than its future: diamond sales in China are soaring as post-Mao brides demand white weddings. Fortunately, Leonardo DiCaprio is a big star there.
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Profound!!