blood diamond

blood diamond, as defined by the United Nations (UN), any diamond that is mined in areas controlled by forces opposed to the legitimate, internationally recognized government of a country and that is sold to fund military action against that government.

The very specific UN definition of blood diamonds was formulated during the 1990s, when brutal civil wars were being waged in parts of western and central Africa by rebel groups based in diamond-rich areas of their countries. Three specific conflicts—in Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sierra Leone—directed world attention to the destructive role of diamonds, though the problem arose in other countries as well. Rough diamonds mined in rebel-controlled areas were sold directly to merchants or were smuggled into neighbouring countries, where they were merged into stocks of legitimately mined diamonds and then sold on the open market. Proceeds from diamond sales were used to buy arms and war matériel for the rebel groups, some of which conducted extremely violent campaigns that brought great suffering to civilians.

Once a conflict diamond had entered the processing stream and been cut and polished, it was virtually identical to any other diamond. Worldwide concern arose over the entry of these gemstones into the huge consumer markets in the West, where purchasers were unable to distinguish conflict diamonds from legitimate gems and where the origin of the stones could not be verified. Diamond traders, for their part, became worried that growing revulsion against blood diamonds might lead to calls for a boycott of all the gems. Indeed, in 2000 the UN Security Council issued a report on the presence of conflict diamonds in world markets that specifically implicated De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., the Anglo–South African company that controlled about 60 percent of the global trade in rough diamonds. The report also criticized the world’s largest diamond market, in Antwerp, Belgium, for not verifying the origin of the diamonds traded there. Trade associations therefore joined human rights groups and the UN in establishing the Kimberley Process, a certification scheme that in 2003 began to verify whether exporting countries’ diamonds were “conflict-free.” Since then, as the worst of the African civil wars ceased and as central governments restored control over rebel-held areas, the share of blood diamonds in the global diamond trade fell from as much as 15 percent in the 1990s to less than 1 percent by 2010.

However, some human rights activists noted that those figures may be meaningless, reflecting only the UN’s specific definition of blood diamonds as gems that fund rebellion against a country’s government. Citing Zimbabwe as a specific example, observers pointed out that, even in countries certified as conflict-free, it is entirely possible for officials of recognized governments to use their control over legal diamond operations to enrich themselves, preserve their power, or promote their associates—often at the expense of diamond miners and other workers, who can be treated with brutality and denied basic human rights. Abuse of the legitimate diamond trade in Zimbabwe prompted calls to redefine blood diamonds as gems whose trade is based on aggression or violence of any kind. Such a redefinition would expand the campaign against blood diamonds to some diamond-rich countries where the denial of human rights is common.