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By Bart Mongoven
After a few years on the back burner, the conflict diamond issue is heating up again. Former Liberian President Charles Taylor, whose despotism was facilitated by his regime's strong position in the diamond trade, appears destined for trial at The Hague. Meanwhile, a major motion picture starring Leonardo DiCaprio, "The Blood Diamond," is expected to hit theaters in September -- and diamond company De Beers, anticipating the potential impact of the movie, has hired Nelson Mandela to spearhead a pre-emptive public relations campaign.
Amid all of this, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are moving to capitalize on the controversies -- seeking to raise new criticisms of the diamond industry and potentially broaden their influence over the mining industry generally.
The diamond industry has little to gain from the brewing controversy over conflict diamonds -- but the situation seemingly gives some NGOs a rare opportunity to make considerable progress toward their overarching institutional goals. Diamonds play a minor role in the agendas of most of the NGOs so positioned, but these groups appear to be looking at the conflict diamond issue as a way to increase their influence dramatically in shaping broader voluntary rules that corporations are following in developing countries.
Public Perceptions and the Kimberley Process
The diamond industry, from miners to retailers, has invested millions to ensure that companies are not portrayed as accomplices in torture, terrorism or genocide. Concern about these issues was born when industry players realized just how narrowly they had avoided permanent damage to the gleaming reputation of diamonds -- and, of course, their profits.
In 2001 and 2002, the world watched in horror as marauding mobs in Sierra Leone, supported by Liberia's Taylor, attacked ethnic minority groups -- hacking limbs (and occasionally heads) in a bid to extend Taylor's control of the country's diamond trade. In the same period, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, diamonds funded both sides of a civil war. Angola, meanwhile, was just beginning to recover from a decades-long civil war. In each of these conflicts, diamonds played a central role: They either acted as a key driver or, as in the case of Angola, a source of funding that allowed rebels to continue to fight.
NGOs, led by London-based Global Witness, began a campaign in the late 1990s to draw public attention to that role. Members of the activist coalition argued that the mining companies, trading firms and even jewelers were playing a role in sustaining the conflicts, and they called on each of these actors in the industry to address the issue. Around the same time, in 1999, a United Nations study of the war in Angola cited diamonds as a key factor in warring factions' ability to procure weapons and transport. The report argued that many countries were helping to smuggle and launder Angolan diamonds for the rebels, and the U.N. concluded that the monitoring systems that were in place were "wholly inadequate" to monitor an illegal diamond trade.
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