Diamonds Are the Heart of the Matter - Ian Smillie and Lansana Gberie on role of diamond trafficking on funding war in Sierra Leone - Interview

UN Chronicle, Summer, 2000 by Horst Rutsch

Africa has long been ravaged by major civil wars. Only recently has it become clear to what extent armed conflicts are fuelled by greed for a country's wealth in natural resources, rather than by political, ethnic or religious grievance. In particular, the role of the diamonds-for-arms trade has come under world scrutiny. For years, the conflicts in Angola and Sierra Leone have been funded by "conflict diamonds"--extracted from diamond areas under rebel control.

The United Nations is fighting the culture of impunity by imposing sanctions targeting the rebels' ability to trade diamonds for small arms. In 1998, the Security Council banned all Angolan diamonds traded by the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). Earlier this year, it strengthened its sanctions against UNITA by establishing a monitoring mechanism on sanctions violations. Similarly, the Council on 5 July 2000 banned diamonds from Sierra Leone. It established an expert panel to explore the link between Sierra Leonean diamonds and the arms trade. The Council also recently decided to form an expert panel on the illegal exploitation of natural resources in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The shared concern for deaths, destruction and devastation caused by the diamonds-for-arms trade has led to a global coalition pushing for reform of the diamond industry. Together with the United Nations, leading diamond-producing countries, concerned Governments, civil society, as well as the diamond industry itself, have generated an enormous momentum to outlaw all conflict diamonds. At the recent World Diamond Congress, the industry proposed a number of measures to improve transparency and accountability in the diamond trade, including the establishment of an International Diamond Council, with representation from Governments, the diamond industry and outside expertise. The Security Council Sanctions Committee on Sierra Leone has just held its first-ever public hearing to assess the role of diamonds in the conflict. The exploratory hearing, chaired by Committee Chairman Anwarul Chowdhury of Bangladesh, was attended by representatives of interested States, regional and international organizations, the diam ond industry, civil society, as well as individual experts in diamonds and arms. Ambassador Chowdhury remarked that the broad spectrum of presentations revealed the "complexity and magnitude" of the problem but also made clear that the international community was "ready to participate in a global certification of origin regime" to control the illegal diamond trade.

The key role of diamond trafficking on funding the war in Sierra Leone was detailed in The Heart of the Matter: Sierra Leone, Diamonds and Human Security a far reaching report released earlier this year by Partnership Africa Canada, Authored by Ian Smillie, Lansana Gberie and Ralph Hazleton, the report also recommends ways to curb the dissemination of conflict diamonds. The momentum spurred by the report has intensified calls by leading representatives of the main diamond trading organizations to self regulate the industry and tighten controls on the illicit diamond trade.

On l8 April 2000-two weeks before the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) attacked UN peacekeepers in Sierra Leone--Horst Rutsch of the Chronicle spoke with Ian of Smillie and Lansana Gberie about some of the larger implications of their findings for the diamond industry and the international community. At our request, Mr. Gberie also contributed an article which takes a look at the UN involvement in Sierra Leone; it follows this interview as the Chronicle Essay "Fighting for Peace: The United Nations, Sierra Leone and Human Security".

Your report on Sierra Leone has very broad implications on the role of diamonds in financing Africa's wars.

Ian Smillie: When we began, we were not sure how big the issue really was. What we discovered was how tightly organized the diamond industry is. De Beers, as everybody knows, is a very large company--it controls about 70 per cent of the world's diamonds. De Beers sells a high proportion of its diamonds to traders, cutters and polishers in Antwerp, Belgium-the world centre for rough diamonds. And because Antwerp also buys them independently, the combination of the diamonds that it gets from De Beers and from independent sources means that 70 per cent of the world's diamonds also go through Antwerp. So De Beers and Antwerp serve as two very narrow funnels through which all of the world's diamonds go.

Most of these diamonds are legitimate, most of them are mined and exported legally from countries like Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. But what we discovered was that a great many of them are coming from countries that have very few diamonds at all. So we have a huge discrepancy in some places between what is being mined and what is being exported. The reality is that if you take Belgian import statistics seriously, huge amounts of diamonds are going out of countries that actually produce very few themselves--like Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea and Liberia.