Fighting diamond smuggling in Africa

Liberia lifts its six-year-old moratorium on the mining, sale, and export of diamonds on Monday.

from the July 30, 2007 edition

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The Kimberley Process was established specifically to prevent the trade in blood diamonds used to fund rebel groups, but Ms. Dunnebacke argues that smuggling any diamonds undermines that process by allowing the trading networks to persist.

Leon Boksenbojm, a diamond expert and consultant to Sierra Leone's government, acknowledges that smuggling goes on. "The problem of smuggling is not specific to West Africa but it is more acute because the borders are porous," he says. In a recent documentary released as part of the two-disc Blood Diamond DVD, Sierra Leonean filmmaker Sorious Samura showed just how easy it is to walk across the border with a pocketful of diamonds and trade them to dealers without any certificates to guarantee that the diamonds are conflict-free.

Sierra Leone leads the way

To combat smuggling, the Sierra Leonean government last month launched the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), which calls on companies to publish what they pay and governments to publish what they receive, bringing transparency and accountability to a notoriously secretive industry.

Mr. Bokensbojm says the answer is to harmonize legislation and tax codes in the region thereby removing the incentive to smuggle. Implementing EITI across West Africa is an important step toward this, he says, pointing out that other countries lag behind Sierra Leone.

Are your diamonds 'conflict-free'?

Among the designer clothes stores on London's Bond Street are a number of retailers, including De Beers and Graff, who sell some of the estimated $62 billion worth of diamond jewelery bought worldwide each year.

Paying lip-service to the Kimberley Process, one Bond Street jeweler confidently asserted that all his new diamonds were conflict-free. He claimed to have certificates proving this but could not produce them. A survey by Global Witness and Amnesty International in May found that most British retailers were not doing enough to ensure that the diamonds they sell are conflict-free.

Whether or not a particular retailer's stones are conflict-free, the disparity between the consumer and producer ends in the diamond chain remains stark.

A half-carat diamond engagement ring selling for close to $6,000 on Bond Street may have begun its journey in a wooden sieve wielded by a man such as Kelly Koroma, who earns $1.50 a day standing thigh-deep in muddy water in one of the pits that ring Koidu.

"Life is difficult here," he mumbles between shovelfuls of gravel. "I am just surviving."

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