News Archive: December 2006
Blood diamonds: Miners risk lives for chance at riches December 15, 2006
Blood diamonds: Miners risk lives for chance at riches
POSTED: 5:30 p.m. EST, December 15, 2006
By Jeff Koinange
CNN
MBUJI-MAYI, Democratic Republic of the Congo (CNN) -- At a bend in a tributary of the mighty Congo River, dirt-poor villagers feverishly pan for the shiny stones that have proved as elusive as they are rare -- diamonds.
Hundreds stake their claims here hoping to strike it rich in this, the fourth-largest diamond-producing country in the world. Officials say that last year, diamond exports from the Congo grew to $2 billion, nearly one-fifth of the country's gross domestic product.
But what these villagers don't know -- or hardly care about -- is the fact these are some of the precious stones that have, according to experts, indirectly fueled some of Africa's dirtiest wars from Sierra Leone to Liberia and from Angola to Congo. They're known as conflict diamonds or, more bluntly, blood diamonds. And in this corner of the Congo, men and boys constantly mine, hoping to find a way out of poverty.
To get to Congo's diamond district, visitors fly to Mbuji-Mayi at the center of this vast nation, then drive for about 90 minutes on dirt roads until they arrive at Dipumba.
Once a village, the entire landscape is now pockmarked with holes the size of water wells, holes that a man can barely squeeze into.
But squeeze they do, and villagers like 40-year old Jean Pierre Mbenga and his five-man team arrive at daybreak. Their tools are simple -- an old pick, a simple rope, a torn sack. They don't have shoes, gloves, hard hats or flashlights.
Mbenga makes his way down into the tiny well. The mine shafts are deep, dark, cold and very dangerous. The walls are unsecured. Accidents are frequent and many miners have been buried alive in these pits.
Yet Mbenga knows he has to keep digging. He has a wife and eight hungry children at home, including a two-week-old son.
"It's terrible here," he says. "All we do is work from morning to evening and most of the time we come up empty. I can't think of a worse way to make a living."
But many here don't have a choice. Work is hard to come by and many are tired of fighting in the various militias that roam these badlands. These men and boys want to make an honest living.
But to them it just seems that the poor seem poorer than ever.
Mbenga, who's been digging for diamonds for more than two decades, says he once dug up a one-carat stone that he sold for $500.
He thought he had finally struck it rich, but by the time he divided the earnings among his team and paid the man who leased the land where he digs, he had less than $50 left.
"That's the life of a miner here," he says, "We work and work until our hands bleed and all we end up with is peanuts."
I ask Mbenga who buys his diamonds.
"Anyone," he says, "just as long as they have the money."
And that's exactly the problem.
Legitimate diamond sellers and activists have argued to change the system for the past decade. They want to curtail the illicit sale of diamonds to unscrupulous middlemen and, in some cases, militia warlords who use the diamonds in exchange for arms to fuel Africa's endemic civil wars.
It happened in Sierra Leone in the 1990s, where as many as 200,000 people were reportedly killed and many others had their limbs hacked off by rebels determined to take control of the country's rich diamond deposits.
Sierra Leone is the setting for the new movie "Blood Diamond." Leonardo DiCaprio plays a crooked Zimbabwean ex-mercenary who searches for a rare pink diamond. (The film was produced by Warner Bros. Pictures, which like CNN.com is owned by Time Warner.)
It's a movie that should stir controversy about just how careful the precious gem industry has been in making sure diamonds are bought and sold legally.
In the Congo, a country that has seen its fair share of civil wars and where corruption and mismanagement are rife, it's hardly conceivable that diamond sales can be fully monitored, when lawlessness and a frontier mentality are prevalent in cities like Mbuji-Mayi.
Most of Congo's diamonds are exported through a state-run company, but in a country that was overrun by one dictator after another for more than 40 years, experts say that getting diamonds out of the Congo illegally has been an-all-too-common occurrence.
That has fueled war, coups and more war, leaving many Congolese poor and desperate.
On this day, Mbenga finds nothing and on his way home he buys his family the only thing he can -- a tiny loaf of bread. He knows he has to go back down into the shaft first thing tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that.
He is determined to find wealth down there no matter the cost, human and otherwise, or how long it takes.
Star-studded, flawed diamond December 08, 2006
'Blood Diamond' tries to mix African politics and action.
By Peter Rainer | Film critic of The Christian Science Monitor
Hollywood has found Africa. On the heels of such films as "The Constant Gardener," "Hotel Rwanda," "The Last King of Scotland," and "Catch a Fire," we have "Blood Diamond," set in Sierra Leone in 1999 when rebels are waging war on the government.
Much more so than those earlier films, "Blood Diamond" freely combines political grandstanding with action-adventure heroics. The filmmakers demonstrate how the diamond trade in Africa perpetuates corruption and bloodshed, but they also want to deliver a rip-roaring saga.
It is not easy to make this sort of combination work; usually one or the other element falls down. In this case, the spectacular action sequences take precedence over the more didactic political material. Still, one understands the impulse on the part of director Edward Zwick and screenwriter Charles Leavitt to make something grander than a conventional political thriller.
The film begins with a rebel attack on a village. A local fisherman, Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), is enslaved and his family is forced to flee. Laboring in the mining camps, Solomon unearths an enormous diamond and, before escaping during a government raid, hides it.
Zimbabwean diamond smuggler and self-described soldier-of-fortune Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) learns of the diamond and attempts to coax the wary Solomon into retrieving it to save his family. An American journalist, Maddy Brown (Jennifer Connelly), gets wind of Danny's machinations and tries to enlist him in her investigation into the trafficking of "conflict stones" - diamonds mined in war zones and laundered by Western buyers.
To the filmmakers' credit, the relationship between Solomon and Danny never devolves into buddy-buddyism. Solomon is right not to trust Danny, whose charm is just one of many tools in his survival kit. (His stunning brutality is another tool.) The movie also doesn't overdo the romantic angle between Danny and Maddy, at least for most of the way. Maddy is so wised-up to Danny's ploys that, for her, yielding to him would be tantamount to defecting to the dark side.
The most powerful sequences in the movie are the raids that suddenly erupt out of nowhere. Rebels barge through the landscape in their trucks, with hip-hop music blaring like some infernal anthem. When Solomon's 12-year-old son Dia (Caruso Kuypers) is kidnapped by them and brainwashed into being a child soldier, the story's full horror comes through. This bright boy and good son changes into a zombie, and his transformation stands in for all the horrors that war wreaks.
Zwick in the past has often attempted to mix polemics and action and sometimes, as in "Glory," he has succeeded remarkably well. But too often in "Blood Diamond," Leavitt's script lets him down. Especially in the first half of the movie, the characters, particularly Maddy, are mouthpieces for the exposition. The dialogue is stiff. Granted, it's extremely difficult to score political points and still keep everything sharp and lifelike. But it can be done. Roger Spottiswoode's great "Under Fire," about journalists in Nicaragua in 1979, is the best proof.
As strong as "Blood Diamond" is in its best moments, I wish it had been even harder-edged. DiCaprio is remarkable - his work is almost on par with his performance this year in "The Departed" - but ultimately he is playing a swashbuckling good guy. He's in the cynical-on-the-outside soft-on-the-inside Bogart mold from "Casablanca."
By contrast, Hounsou's Solomon, although his part is underwritten, has a gravity and force that makes most of the movie's romanticisms seem forced and inauthentic. His son is the real diamond to be retrieved and he never lets us forget it. Grade: B+
• Rated R for strong violence and language.
Diamonds aren't forever December 07, 2006
A new Hollywood movie is raising tough questions about Africa's bloody diamond trade. Fortune's Vivienne Walt reports from the pits.
By Vivienne Walt, Fortune
December 7 2006: 12:13 PM EST
(Fortune Magazine) -- Sahr Amara is stooped low, knee-deep in a muddy river, in the fifth hour of his workday. As he has each day for the past week, the 18-year-old will earn a stipend of only 7 cents, enough to buy himself a bowl of porridge to see him through the day.
Yet he returns every morning to dig in the wilting heat on the edge of Koidu, a town in eastern Sierra Leone, hunting for the one thing he says could transform his life: a diamond. Since he is the oldest of six children - three others have died of diseases - much of his family's future rests on his prospects.
The prize: A seller displays two raw diamonds on the streets of Koidu in Sierra Leone.
The pits: Hundreds of miners search for diamonds at Congo Creek outside Koidu in eastern Sierra Leone, part of an army of one million Africans who earn pennies a day in the $60 billion industry.
The diamond dealer: Abdollai Koroma runs his trading business from a chair under a shade tree in a back alley of Koidu.
CNN's Ali Velshi looks at the history of diamonds and it may have you thinking blood, not bling. (December 7)
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"If I find a big diamond, I can afford to go to school, I can learn, and then I can help my family and even my village," he says. So far the plan has proved elusive; he has found no gems during his first week of work. "It's not easy," he says. "I think it depends on God."
Whether or not divine intervention leads Amara to a big find, his tale is anchored in a much more earthly economy: the $60-billion-a-year diamond industry, which has built its growth on dreams of love rather than of raw survival.
Koidu, whose diamonds have been mined since the 1930s, is thousands of miles away - and a galaxy removed - from the glittering displays in jewelry stores in New York, Tokyo and London. It is set in a country where the average man earns $220 a year and dies at 39. In the dwellings along Koidu's dirt tracks, residents eat dinner by candlelight not because it is romantic but because there is no electricity in town, just as there are no telephone lines and little indoor plumbing.
In short, it is hard to imagine a starker contrast between Amara's world and that of the people who might one day wear whatever diamond he finds, and they live in deep ignorance of each other. When asked what diamonds are used for, Amara draws a blank. "I only know they are valuable," he says.
Hollywood weighs in
But after 130 years of diamond mining in Africa, that ignorance is unraveling fast as the two worlds collide over the image of diamonds. The conflict, which has rocked the industry in recent years, may reach fever pitch this month with the release of the movie "Blood Diamond." Set in wartime Sierra Leone during the late 1990s, the film depicts a South African diamond smuggler, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, trying to recover a rare pink stone from a local fisherman whom rebels have forced to dig in the diamond pits.
The story line - a mixture of villainy and heroism - is classic Hollywood. But its roots are fact: In the 1990s rebels in Sierra Leone and Liberia financed their carnage from diamonds plucked out of the rivers and traded for arms. During a decade of war about 50,000 people were killed, and thousands had their hands hacked off by rebels.
Months before it opened, the movie had garnered media attention, aided by a marketing blitz by Warner Bros. (owned by Time Warner (Charts), parent of Fortune's publisher) and a $15 million counterattack by the World Diamond Council, an organization founded by more than 50 producers and dealers to end illegal diamond trading.
"We have been engaged in a massive educational campaign," says Eli Izakhoff, chairman and CEO of the council, which is heavily financed by De Beers, the company that sources about 40 percent of the world's diamonds, all of them from Africa. "This movie gives the industry a great story to tell." The council's message: More than 99 percent of diamonds are now from conflict-free sources, and millions of Africans have schooling and health care thanks to diamond revenues.
The movie is indeed a period piece: The civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia ended a few years ago. But the war over perceptions is just warming up. Many in the industry fear that as the end credits roll, moviegoers might glance down at their diamond rings and wonder under what circumstances the gems were dug. Unlike oil prospecting or coal mining - essentials for modern life - those questions could roil an industry whose lifeblood is ephemeral.
Controversy affects value
"Diamonds are essentially worth nothing," says Mordechai Rapaport, whose Rapaport Group price list is the industry standard. It's all about what they signify, he explains: In the case of a wedding ring, it's the guy, not the one-carat diamond. By that logic, he adds, "when a guy gives a woman a diamond and someone was killed for it, it is not worth anything."
Diamond producers and dealers did not need Hollywood to reach that conclusion. As war raged in the past decade, they realized that so-called blood diamonds carried a risk to their business that was far out of proportion to the tiny number of stones. Even during the bloodiest years no more than 15 percent of the world's diamonds were controlled by rebels in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The vast majority of diamonds, then and now, come from deep-level mines run by well-ordered international corporations, including Koidu Holdings, Sierra Leone's newest such operation, which opened in 2003 and exports $2.5 million in diamonds a month.
And although UN investigators recently found that rebels in the Ivory Coast had smuggled millions of dollars' worth of diamonds onto the world market through Ghana, blood diamonds account for only 0.2 percent of today's global supply.
But the industry's problem is far trickier than percentages. Consumers cannot be sure which diamonds are blood diamonds. And therein lies the potential for a boycott, especially since synthetic diamonds now look close to the real thing. "Diamonds are a luxury, so we depend completely on the consumer's faith," says Rory More O'Ferrall, director of external affairs for De Beers. "Anything that affects the integrity of that we need to address."
Tackling the problem took an unlikely alliance: Industry executives joined forces in 2003 with governments and the UN to end the trade of conflict diamonds. The resulting Kimberley Process Certification Scheme is a rare experiment by a major industry to monitor its own abuses. The 71 member countries agree to trade only among themselves. They inspect one another's facilities, then issue certificates declaring their diamonds conflict-free.
In theory, rigorous paperwork tries to trace all diamonds from mines to consumers. Transgressors are ousted: The Republic of Congo was banned in 2004, and Venezuela was threatened with suspension last month after reporting zero diamond exports for 2005.
But the system is hardly flawless, even in the U.S. In September the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that Customs and Treasury officials were only haphazardly enforcing the system, leaving companies to monitor themselves. Last year about 300,000 more carats were exported from than imported to the U.S. - which produces no commercial diamonds itself. Representatives from all 71 countries met last month in Botswana to try to tighten loopholes and squeeze out nonmembers. "There are fewer and fewer countries left that nonmembers can trade with," says Sue Saarnio, the U.S. State Department's representative to the November conference.
The underground diamond trade
A far grimmer assessment of the Kimberley Process can be found in the back alleys of Koidu. As the clammy heat eases off in the late afternoon, dozens of men converge on the neighborhood dubbed by the locals "Open Yei," Creole for "keep your eyes open," a reference to its thriving unlicensed diamond trading.
The action is the area's major entertainment, drawing a crowd of curious men and children. In a dirt clearing between the small wooden storefronts, Abdollai Koroma runs his business from a chair under a shade tree, clutching a yellow calculator and a jeweler's loupe in a weathered pouch. During just one hour eight men arrive with their wares wrapped in scraps of paper stuffed in their pockets. Koroma takes each stone and swirls it in his mouth before examining it briefly under the loupe. "This is 1.20 carats," he says after spitting out a glittering stone the size of a shirt button.
Koroma, who started trading diamonds at age 17, taps on his calculator, peels off a wad of banknotes, and makes his biggest purchase of the day: 200,000 leones, about $66. The previous day the neighborhood trade was equally brisk, as men gathered to sell diamonds to Komba Fillefaboa, a 47-year-old trader who began digging when he was 12. Fillefaboa says he buys dozens of stones on an average afternoon.
"We buy piece by piece and then gather them into a parcel to sell to dealers," he says. Once the parcel of diamonds is sold to a licensed dealer, illegally mined diamonds are easily mixed in.
Fillefaboa says he has no problem finding buyers, despite Sierra Leone's strict licensing laws, which ban illegal diamond dealing. Licenses are regarded as too costly and laws too cumbersome. "We are all illegal here," boasts the neighborhood's chief, Sahr Sam. "If the monitors come, we scatter."
Smuggling
In reality, government monitors rarely come to Open Yei. There are only 200 for the entire country, sharing ten motorcycles donated by the U.S. Agency for International Development. "At every level people say to us, 'If you harass us, we will just smuggle the diamonds,'" says Dan Joe Hadji, a senior monitoring officer in Koidu. "So we allow people to move around and hope and pray that they find religion" -by obeying the law.
Diamond producers and dealers frequently tout Sierra Leone as a Kimberley Process success story, since its official exports soared from near zero in 1999 to about $142 million last year, suggesting that smuggling has plummeted. Not necessarily so: The official statistics cannot be proved, says Jan Ketelaar, mine manager of Koidu Holdings and a former diamond advisor to Sierra Leone's President.
Worse, this year's exports are likely to drop about 10 percent, suggesting that bigger diamonds are being smuggled illegally, says a Western ambassador in Freetown who sits on a high-level diamond committee of diplomats and aid organizations but asked not to be identified. Director of Mines Alimany Wurie admits smuggling is widespread - perhaps as much as one-third of all Sierra Leone's diamonds.
Enforcement is nearly impossible. The frontier with Liberia, whose diamonds are banned from world trade, is just 30 miles from Koidu and riddled with old smuggling routes. Only three of the 36 border crossings into Guinea are guarded, says Hadji, and even those are left unmanned for a few days each month when border officials walk to town to collect their pay.
Yet the rampant smuggling, though illegal, does not kill. And with peace restored in West Africa, it is tempting to think of blood diamonds as little more than a dramatic movie plot. Those who have witnessed Africa's bloodletting up close say it's a mistake to relegate the issue to history, because history could repeat itself.
In any future conflict in the region, diamonds would be one of the surest ways with which to buy weapons. "Diamonds were very much the fuel for the war but not the root cause, and those root causes are still very much with us," says the Western ambassador. "Corruption, unemployment, poverty - I could well imagine another blood-diamond scenario here."
Fair trade
Faced with that stark possibility, diamond companies have begun trying to tackle the crippling poverty at the bottom of the industry, where, according to Global Witness, a British organization that has done extensive research on blood diamonds, about one million Africans earn pennies a day in the backbreaking and increasingly fruitless search for alluvial stones.
Flying low over Koidu in a twin-propeller plane shows how daunting that task is. Hundreds of men can be seen bent low in the rivers around Koidu. "They are working in absolutely horrific conditions in the hopes of striking it rich, but the majority never do," says Susie Sanders, a Global Witness researcher.
Little of the region's innate mineral wealth has filtered down to residents. "A billion dollars' worth of diamonds have come out of Sierra Leone in the last several years, and there is no electricity or water wells," says Rapaport, who toured the villages around Koidu last summer with his father, Martin, chairman of the Rapaport Group.
Shaken by the chasm between the diggers and the diamond buyers, the Rapaports are trying to start a Fair Trade association of producers along the lines of Starbucks (Charts), which buys coffee beans for a premium price from some growers, then sells them for more money to socially conscious coffee drinkers. Rapaport is predicting that the current controversy over diamonds will jolt consumers into asking retailers probing questions about the gems' origins.
If so, they are unlikely to find much information: Two years ago a survey of 40 major American retailers by Amnesty International and Global Witness found that almost none had policies in place against blood diamonds.
Rapaport believes consumers would happily pay a little extra to ensure they are buying African diamonds mined for decent wages under humane conditions. "Our idea," he says, "is that Tiffany (Charts) is going to wake up one morning and see that Cartier is selling fair-trade jewelry and say, 'Oh, my God, we need to do that.' They will change not from an ethical point of view but from greed."
In Koidu a U.S.-funded program trains diggers in how to grade and value the diamonds they find as a way of avoiding being fleeced by local traders. Last year De Beers and two activist organizations founded the Diamond Development Initiative, an international organization to train diggers in safety and economic issues, and ultimately to try to persuade many to grow crops instead. De Beers has begun a similar pilot training project in Tanzania, which it says it will replicate elsewhere in Africa if it is successful.
But for 18-year-old Sahr Amara all those projects seem abstract. His parents grow crops in a village about 20 miles from Koidu and cannot afford to buy his schoolbooks or pay his yearly tuition of 35,000 leones ($11.66). "I would like to find a diamond so I can go back to school," Amara says. "If I stay digging at this site for a long time and find nothing, maybe I will leave and try to find a job somewhere." That would leave Africa's 999,999 other diamond diggers still searching for a dream.
Africa News: 'Blood Diamond,' Congo Inaugural December 06, 2006
Africa News: 'Blood Diamond,' Congo Inaugural
by Farai Chideya and Charlayne Hunter-Gault
News & Notes, December 6, 2006 · The latest news from Africa includes the release of new movie about Sierra Leone's diamond trade -- Blood Diamond -- and a milestone inaugural in the Democratic Republic of Congo.