Advertising today is ridiculous. Anti-drug ads blame teenage
pregnancy, accidental shootings and terrorism on marijuana. Even
more ridiculous are the diamond ads because they makes us believe
that diamonds are unconditionally pure and good.
Like any other American woman, I have been duped into thinking
since the 1940s that a diamond is forever because De Beers has been
telling me so. In our country, diamonds represent love and
commitment. In other countries, diamonds represent slavery and war.
The gruesome truth is that millions of dollars worth of diamonds
each year are produced using slave labor to finance terrorism and
brutal wars.
These “conflict diamonds,” as they are called in
Congress, account for some of the bloodiest wars in the world.
According to Amnesty International, 2,500 people are dying every
day due to slave labor used in the diamond mines and civil wars
fought over the diamonds.
Conflict diamonds are mined from the west African countries of
Sierra Leone, The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola.
Rebel warlords who own the diamond mines in these countries
force their slaves to work for little or no wages and routinely
kill them “for suspected theft, for lack of production or
simply for sport,” says Amnesty International.
Diamond slaves are forced to work without shoes in gravel or in
water for months without a day of rest.
Many of these slaves are children kidnapped from their homes and
forced to mine diamonds or fight in a rebel army. Warlords
frequently slice their arms with knives and fill the open wounds
with cocaine and marijuana in order to drug the children into
submission.
Amnesty International’s Greg Campbell wrote the story of
Jusu Lahia, a 15-year-old boy from Sierra Leone who was kidnapped
and forced to become a lieutenant in the Revolutionary United
Front, an insurgent group in Sierra Leone.
Lahia was hit with a rocket-propelled grenade during a battle
over conflict diamonds. Lahia’s left eye was destroyed and
shards of metal ripped his face, stomach and groin but no one gave
him proper care. A few pieces of tape were applied to Lahia’s
festering wounds and he was left to die on a pile of hay.
Children like Lahia die every day in order to supply the wealthy
and ignorant with sparkly diamonds.
If child slavery isn’t enough to make you angry, the
Financial Times of London claims that Osama bin Laden’s
al-Qaeda network laundered up to $20 million in conflict diamonds
to finance terrorist operations.
Insurgent groups that supply terrorist groups like al-Qaeda
arrive in diamond-rich towns and murder, sexually assault and cut
off limbs from inhabitants as a show of power.
In Angola alone, 90,000 people have been brutally mutilated.
Here, diamonds do not stand for love and affection; instead, they
are a symbol of rape and amputation.
Of the seven billion dollars per year market for diamonds,
conflict diamonds account for 5 to 17 percent of the sales.
Until 1998, diamond producers were not concerned with the origin
of their diamonds. In 1998, the non-government organization Global
Witness exposed the truth about the diamonds’ bloody
path.
Although many diamond stores do not knowingly supply their
customers with conflict diamonds, they regularly end up in their
glass displays. The reason is that diamonds are extremely difficult
to track.
To combat this, a system called the Kimberely Process was
enacted by the United Nations on Jan. 1, 2003 to help trace a
diamond’s origin. Current legislature is not sophisticated
enough to enforce the Kimberely Process.
The Kimberely Process also has a very narrow definition of what
a conflict diamond is, which further inhibits the enforcement.
UCLA’s Amnesty International President Mandeep Kaur Rajpal
says that the most important issue in the United States is to
broaden the definition of a conflict diamond in the Kimberely
Process so all conflict diamonds are illegal to import.
“It is essential that we cover the loopholes of the
Kimberely Process,” Rajpal says. Congress passed the Clean
Diamonds Act in 1998 which made it more difficult for conflict
diamonds to be imported.
Unfortunately, the Bush Administration has amended the act so
that it has the power to ban the importation of conflict diamonds,
but does not require the ban.
Although America has been taught for sixty years that diamonds
are a symbol of true love and promise, remember that the price tag
is not the only cost of the diamond.
The blood may have been washed off the diamond, but the memory
of it will always remain.
Elder is a fourth-year communications student.