Despite the valiant efforts of the men and women of the Israeli Defense Forces to degrade the lethal capacity of Hezbollah terrorist organization—and, one might add, notwithstanding the frantic denials of diplomats not wanting to face up to the consequences of admitting the terrible reality of the situation—it has become quite clear that the only way forward to a sustainable cessation of hostilities along Israel’s border with Lebanon will require cutting off the radical Shî‘a group’s access to the external sources which enabled it to amass its arsenal and carry out its operations in the first place.

At the time of this writing, there have been some discussions on the role that Syria and Iran have played not only in fomenting, but also in prolonging the conflict. However, to date, almost no attention has been paid to the third leg of the tripod sustaining the operations of the Hezbollah death cult: its far-flung financial and logistical networks among the Lebanese Shî‘a diaspora, especially in West Africa.

Emigrants from Lebanon, the majority of whom, for a number of historical reasons, happened to be Shî‘ites, began flocking to West Africa in the early 1900s, where they were welcomed by British colonial authorities who saw them as a tool with which to break the hold of the increasingly nationalist-conscious local merchant class on trade with the interior in places such as the Crown Colony of Freetown.

Over time, a combination of governmental favor and their own hard work resulted in the Lebanese achieving dominance not only of the commerce in manufactured goods, but also control of the trade in natural resource commodities like the fabled alluvial diamonds of Sierra Leone. The Lebanese in West Africa have become the region’s “market-dominant minority,” to borrow a term popularized by Yale Law School professor Amy Chua in her study of free market democracy and global instability, World on Fire. As Chua herself observed, “the extent of Lebanese market dominance in Sierra Leone—historically and at present—is astounding.”

Arguably the most successful Lebanese trader in West Africa was Jamil Said Mohammed, a close associate of Siaka Probyn Stevens, the kleptomaniac dictator of Sierra Leone from 1968 to 1985. In his halcyon days in Stevens’s one-party state, Jamil’s National Trading Company held monopoly rights to for the importation of no fewer than eighty-seven commodities. As I documented in my book, Child Soldiers, Adult Interests: The Global Dimensions of the Sierra Leonean Tragedy, so great was Jamil’s influence that he managed to persuade Stevens’s handpicked successor, Joseph Saidu Momoh, to host a 1986 “state visit” of Yasir Arafat, who was exiled to Tunis after his humiliating defeat by the Israeli forces in Lebanon and who was, at least that year, being treated by the international community as a virtual diplomatic leper after a group led by PLO executive committee member Abu Abbas hijacked the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro and pushed overboard a 69-year-old wheelchair-bound Jewish American passenger from New York, Leon Klinghoffer. Arafat offered to pay the cash-strapped Momoh $8 million for the use of one of Sierra Leone’s offshore islands as a training base for his exiled fighters. While, under pressure from Western nations, Momoh turned down the offer, he did allow Jamil to maintain a 500-man “personal security force,” consisting primarily of Palestinians driven out of Lebanon, which effectively enabled the Palestinian leader to achieve the same end of finding a base to keep his fighters together.

During the Sierra Leonean civil conflict (1991-2001), Jamil and another Lebanese Shî‘a merchant, Samih Osailly, whom Belgian intelligence has linked to Osama bin Laden’s financial network, fenced diamonds on behalf of the brutal Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels, who enslaved whole communities to mine them in areas under its control. After the conflict, when it appeared that the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone might prosecute him, Jamil fled back to Lebanon on a diplomatic passport provided to him courtesy of his childhood friend, the Sierra Leonean-born speaker of the Lebanese parliament, Nabih Berri, whose Amal militia-cum-political party is a full partner in Hezbollah’s “Resistance and Development Bloc” in the legislature. (According to intelligence sources, Jamil repaid the favor by giving Berri a substantial cut in the former’s new state-plundering racket, the Zahrani oil refinery.)

While the colorful Jamil may have left West Africa, more than 100,000 of his compatriots remain. In many respects, the fictitious Yusuf “the Syrian” who tried to corrupt Scobie in The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene, who himself served as an intelligence officer in Sierra Leone during the Second World War, was actually a composite figure summing up these traders from the Levant who, even as they prospered in Africa, maintained close commercial and personal ties with their homeland, followed events in the Middle East, and were willing to use every artifice to further their ends.

In 2004 Larry Andre, the deputy chief of mission at the United States Embassy in Freetown told the Associated Press:

“One thing that’s incontrovertible is the financing of Hezbollah. It’s not even an open secret; there’s not a secret. There’s a lot of social pressure and extortionate pressure brought to bear: ‘You had better support our cause, or we’ll visit your people back home.’”

While undoubtedly some pressure is at work, other observers also see conviction: witness the anti-Israeli (and anti-American) rallies, replete with Hezbollah flags, which members of the Lebanese community have staged in recent weeks in a number of West African capitals.

In Sierra Leone, Lebanese traders control an overwhelming majority of the diamond buying shops. Although some of these enterprises are officially licensed by the Sierra Leonean government, most experts agree that their owners conduct most of their business off the books, smuggling last year somewhere between $170 million and $370 million worth of uncut gems out of the country each year according to Ambassador Daudi Mwakawago, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General in the West African country. A not-inconsiderable portion of these illegal profits eventually finds its way into Hezbollah’s coffers. For just one example of how lucrative this revenue stream is for the terrorist group, when Union des Transports Africains de Guinée (UTA) flight 141 en route to Beirut crashed off the coast of Benin on Christmas Day 2003, not only were 133 passengers lost, but so was a briefcase with $2 million in contributions being carried by a Hezbollah fundraiser.

In his book Blood from Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror, former Washington Post correspondent Douglas Farah described how al-Qaeda procured diamonds from the RUF and its Liberian patron, former President Charles Taylor. In contrast to Osama bin Laden who saw in the gemstones a means to hide his money, Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah’s sees in them a way to make money.

In fact, according to reliable sources in the region, Hezbollah is no longer content with collecting tribute from the Lebanese diaspora involved in the diamond trade and its operatives have slowly gone into the business directly, buying diamonds from both local miners and Lebanese traders in relatively well-known places like Kenema and Koidu in eastern Sierra Leone as well as more isolated production centers in Liberia, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. According to sources in the diamond business, Hezbollah then sends the highest quality gems to the industry’s center in Antwerp, Belgium, while lesser stones go the emerging diamond cutting centers in India—in either case earning the terrorists a handsome return on their initial investment.

If the United States and its allies are serious about fighting international terrorism, then they must do everything in their power to destroy Hezbollah—recall, Nasrallah has said that his group “needs only to survive to win.” This means that an effective counterterrorism strategy must confront the issue of the support that the terrorist group receives from not just Syria and Iran, but also from Africa.

With respect to curtailing the flow of resources to Hezbollah from its African network, the task will be both easier and harder than cutting off its supply lines from Damascus and Tehran. It will be easier, because we will not be acting against governments, but with them: most African governments would welcome assistance in building their own law enforcement capacity as well as in reasserting control over their own countries against the interlopers from the Middle East. However, the challenge will simultaneously be more difficult, because of the nature of the diaspora community within which Hezbollah operates: readily identifiable, but not easily penetrated.

In the Media

DAKAR, May 29 (Reuters) – Britain’s top retailers are not doing enough to prevent conflict diamonds from Africa reaching consumers, rights groups said on Tuesday, on the eve of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s farewell visit to the continent.

Global Witness and Amnesty International said a survey of 42 British retailers found more than three-quarters of them had no auditing procedures to curb the trade in illicit gems from conflict areas, known as “blood diamonds”.

The illegal gem trade fuelled wars in Sierra Leone, Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo and Liberia for more than a decade. More than 4 million people died in these conflicts, which have now ended, although gem smuggling continues.

Blair, who made combating poverty in Africa a hallmark of his 10 years in office, is due to visit Sierra Leone on Wednesday on the second stop of an African tour.

The British prime minister, due to step down on June 27, is widely regarded as a hero in Sierra Leone for Britain’s role in ending a 1991-2002 civil war, notorious for drug-crazed child soldiers who hacked the limbs off civilians.

“After all the promises the diamond industry has made it is very disappointing to find that retailers in the UK are still not taking the necessary steps to ensure the diamond supply chain is cleaned up from mine to shop counter,” Amnesty’s UK Business Campaigner Nick Dearden said.

Almost a third of retailers surveyed, including John Lewis [JLP.UL] and House of Fraser, failed to respond to repeated requests to provide information, the rights groups said.

The Kimberley Process Certification System was launched in 2002 to verify the origin of gems and exclude conflict diamonds from the market. Currently 46 countries belong to the system.

A report by Partnership Africa Canada (PAC), an observer in the Kimberley Process, said conflict diamonds represented as much as 15 percent of the world’s total in the mid-1990s but has fallen to less than 1 percent.

Campaigners, however, say the Kimberley Process is not tight enough to cope with a relapse into civil war in West Africa.

Although the region’s intertwined wars of the 1990s have subsided, Ivory Coast remains divided between a rebel north and a government south as a peace process creeps forward.

A U.N. report concluded last year that Ivorian rebels were smuggling diamonds via Mali and Ghana to fund their operations, in violation of sanctions.

In Congo, fighting continues in the vast former Belgian colony’s lawless east in the wake of a 1998-2003 war, and diamond smuggling remains rife.

The United Nations recently lifted a ban on diamond exports from Liberia, but Global Witness said diamonds continued to be smuggled illegally from the country.

Link to Campaigners chide UK shops over Africa “blood” gems | Breaking City News | Reuters.co.uk

A NEWLY formed African Diamond Producers Association (Adpa) gathered in Luanda this week in what some of its members described as an attempt to establish a policy that should support beneficiation across Africa.

Having watched closely the implementation of so-called local beneficiation in southern Africa, other diamond-producing countries in Africa are calling on their counterparts to help achieve the same.

As many as 12 African diamond-producing countries have formed an association headquartered in Luanda to strengthen influence on the world diamond market.

Adpa includes Angola, Botswana, Ghana, Guinea, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Sierra- Leone, Tanzania, Togo, the Central African Republic and SA.

Adpa made headlines last week when the Congo’s Deputy Mines Minister, Victor Kasongo, was quoted as saying the organisation aimed to establish an Opec-style diamond cartel.

Kasongo has subsequently said his comments were taken out of context.

Speaking in a telephone interview from Kinshasa, Kasongo said: “It is nothing like an Opec-style organisation. It’s an African initiative trying to ensure that there is a value addition to our resources with the support from our members in southern Africa.

“We have to amend our laws to enable the governments to realise this. Beneficiation is the key priority,” he said.

South African government officials have also emphasised beneficiation as a common goal for Adpa. Recently, the governments of SA, Botswana and Namibia geared their policies towards beneficiation by insisting on local cutting and polishing as well as jewellery manufacturing to generate more employment in the diamond sector.

A government source in SA said Adpa would work only if the organisation’s members worked together on cutting and polishing, jewellery production and training of people.

In Botswana, the main focus appears to be on driving the Kimberley Process, aimed at curbing the trade of diamonds used to finance wars.

On Monday, Adpa issued a statement saying the organisation’s goal “is to introduce effective strategies and policies that are aimed at devolving sovereignty and recovering lost revenue for each of its member states”.

It also said it would work together with the Kimberley Process.

The Congo’s André Action Diakité Jackson has been made chairman of Adpa. Its interim executive secretariat is Edgar Diogo de Carvalho Santos, the former secretary-general of Angola’s ministry of geology and mines.

Link to Business Day – News Worth Knowing

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in conjunction with Warner Bros will Tuesday show on screen the movie “Blood Diamond.” This movie which, according to Josette Sheeran, the WFP Executive Director, “opened the world’s eyes to the tragic suffering endured by so many people across the country,” will be shown for free at the British Council on the 8th and 9th of May and on the 10th at the Family Kingdom.

WFP which is the world’s largest humanitarian agency is currently providing food assistance to over 300,000 people in Sierra Leone in its effort at reconstructing the country after a decade long civil war.

The movie “Blood Diamond” in its global distribution has helped to raise awareness of hunger and poverty, something which has wasted more than 850 million people globally.

The film includes scenes depicting realistic aid operations as undertaken by WFP in the 1990s while feeding the thousands who fled from and within Sierra Leone and neighboring countries.

Link to allAfrica.com: Sierra Leone: Blood Diamond for Public Screening Tomorrow (Page 1 of 1)

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), together with the United States film company Warner Bros. Pictures, will host the screening of the film “Blood Diamond” – which depicts the bloody civil war that engulfed Sierra Leone in the 1990s – for the first time ever in Freetown, the West African country’s capital.
The movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly and Djimon Hounsou, has never been publicly shown in Sierra Leone, and up to 600 people are expected to attend the two free showings of the film on 8 and 9 May.
“It is wonderful to have the chance to make this story available to the people of Sierra Leone,” said the film’s director Ed Zwick. “After all, it is a story that belongs to them.”
WFP’s distinctive white and blue logo appears prominently in several of the film’s scenes, and the agency continues to provide food assistance to more than 300,000 people to help the country rebuild after a devastating decade-long civil war.
“‘Blood Diamond’ opened the world’s eyes to the tragic suffering endured by so many people across the country, as well as WFP’s work to help them,” said the agency’s Executive Director, Josette Sheeran. “It also brought into focus the extreme cruelty and tragedy of child soldiers.”
The movie realistically depicts aid operations, such as those undertaken by WFP in the 1990s to feed thousands who fled their homes to areas within their home country or to neighboring nations. During the conflict in Sierra Leone, WFP staff reported witnessing the dire humanitarian situation as well as unspeakable acts of violence and cruelty similar to those illustrated by the film.
“Sierra Leoneans can take great pride in the immense achievements since the end of the war,” Ms. Sheeran said.
Ms. Connelly and Mr. Hounsou have added their voices to the call to end hunger by participating in a public service announcement for WFP which has been broadcast around the world.

Link to Blood Diamond to be shown in Sierra Leone

This is a totally useless article. I suggest stop reading right now and come back to this column next week. Have a nice weekend. If you are still with me, this article deals with the question of whether it is possible that a diamond polishing plant operated by the Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and would-be-again diamond miner Alan Bond may be facing similar legal and reputational challenges in marketing their output.

That sounds like a weird question, and it is hard to give an explicit answer – unless one goes by the letter and the spirit of international anti-money laundering laws, which, increasingly, have become an inherent part of the diamond industry’s compliance environment.

Let’s first take a look at Alan Bond, the flamboyant entrepreneur who also has a well-established criminal record. Bond, the business tycoon (from owning media to almost everything else) who in the early 1980’s was a five percent owner of the Argyle mine project in Australia, is again looking for a future in diamonds.

Says the Financial Times this week: “Alan Bond, the disgraced Australian businessman and American Cup winner, is looking at ways to raise money in London for an African diamond mining project, including a reverse take-over of AIM-listed River diamonds.” The paper wrote this quite matter-of-factly on the front-page of its companies’ section. The project it is referring to is the Kao diamond project in the Kingdom of Lesotho. Alan Bond’s Lesotho Diamond Company controls 93 percent of the project, which – he claims – may produce a total of five million carats during the next 10 years.

The Kao project, reputedly discovered in 1972 by U.S. explorers, has attracted the interest of many companies over the years, only for the companies to be put off by political uncertainty and technical difficulties. The last public company to be associated with the project before it caught Bond’s fancy was the controversial Canadian miner Diamond Works, which farmed into the Kao pipe in early 1998.

The Financial Times tried to be “nice” to Mr. Bond (who celebrated his 69^th birthday this week) by merely calling him “disgraced.” It would be far more accurate to describe him as a convicted criminal who has admitted committing the largest corporate fraud in Australia’s history; this occurred many years before the world started to get used to Enron-type of swindles. Convicted to serve a seven-year jail term in 1997, the then ex-tycoon secured his release after only serving four years, when his lawyers caught a legal technicality that invalidated a judgment on appeal, which had handed out the sentence.

The fraud he committed “only” involved some A$1.2 billion – a colossal amount in the early 1990’s and, actually, still a gigantic sum in contemporary terms. You really must know what you are doing if you want to defraud the public of this kind of money.

The jail sentence was also related to an art swindle centering on the purchase of Vincent van Gogh’s “Irises” painting for $54 million — at the time a world record for a single painting. Bond had borrowed the money from Sotheby’s – but then simply reneged on his commitments and refused the payment, forcing Sotheby to sell the painting to a third party.

Some five years before going to jail, Bond himself went bankrupt. Poor guy. But don’t worry too much, as at some point, in 1995, his offshore family trust (that apparently remained untouchable and outside the bankruptcy) was willing to allocate $12 million to make a settlement with creditors who were owed $1.8 billion. The creditors ended up getting an extreme pittance, something like half-a-cent to the dollar, in a settlement that enabled Bond to get out of the bankruptcy.

Bond very much wants to take the Lesotho Diamond Company public and he is trying to achieve that through a reverse take-over through an existing listed company (River Diamonds, which has properties in Sierra Leone and Brazil). Some people – including some journalists – seem to have a very short memory.

Financial Markets Refused to Deal with Bond

It is exactly three years ago, around April 2004, that Alan Bond’s Lesotho Diamond Corporation unsuccessfully approached at least 10 London brokers in a bid to complete a £30 million float in the London market. The London Times then conjectured that Bond’s links to Lesotho Diamond Corp as a consultant and the size of his shareholding had dampened broker enthusiasm;a float on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) had subsequently been pushed back initially by six months – but that delay has lasted until this very day.

At the time Bond served formally “only” as a consultant to the company, though he also had intimated that the always present offshore Bond family trust controlled sufficient shares for it to remain 30 percent shareholder of the company after the then contemplated float. (His son Craig also sits on the board of the Gibraltar-registered Lesotho Diamond Corporation.) The Financial Times says that Bond today owns 40 percent of the company, with RAB capital (a hedge fund) holding an additional 10 percent.

It clearly seems that the present contemplated reverse take-over of River Diamonds is just another way to go public – after failing to find backing for his own straightforward bid. Mining consultants SRK value the Kao project at US$250 million, making it a quite a substantial property. Actually, the projected production figures have recently jumped.

Swiss Governmental AML/CFT Progress Report

Before elaborating on the question put at the outset on the challenges facing both Bond and Hezbollah diamond manufacturers, a quick word about this week’s Swiss government annual Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Terrorist Financing (CFT) report – a progress report on that country’s adherence to the relevant compliance laws. The Swiss government reports an increase in the “quality” of the suspicious activities reports filed by mostly the large private banking institutions and by major foreign banks.

Banks understand much better that, under Swiss laws, tax evasion is not money laundering predicate offenses that need to be reported. They also understand that a questionable transaction is ONLY questionable if there is a reason to believe that the moneys involved are derived from criminal origins.

And reporting they are! According to the Swiss authorities – and this really applies universally to all money-laundering and terrorist-financing laws – the key in determining what money is crooked depends on the SOURCE of funds. Banks will tell you that it is very difficult to assume that an ex-convict, who has embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars in the past – is not using some of these funds to get a new start in business.

The AML/CFT laws applicable to the diamond industry specify to diamantaires to either refuse or report on an action involving diamonds, which may have been acquired by using questionable (read: criminal) funds.

Would an Alan Bond-owned and operated diamond mine fall in such category?

Diamond Cutting in southern Lebanon

Before answering that let’s see what Hezbollah has to do with this argument. An American investigative journalist, living in Beirut, has been investigating in the past few months diamond manufacturing in diamond factories owned and operated by Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. The journalist comes warmly recommended by the U.S. Department of State; the guy is serious and thorough. Much of his investigation focuses on how the rough diamonds reach the factories.

I don’t want to report details on what this reporter has found because it is his story – and when ready, the report will appear in the major U.S. publication that is employing the journalist. As Lebanon is (again) a member of the Kimberley Process, one must assume that the rough supplied to the Hezbollah factories are not conflict diamonds.

However, Hezbollah is listed by the U.S. government as a banned terrorist organization. One must assume that the funds used to purchase the rough diamonds for polishing come from an illegal (or criminal) source, something one also might assume when someone with questionable funds finances a diamond mine.

These diamonds are not conflict diamonds in the traditional sense. No, in my book, they are simply “dirty diamonds.”

Many diamond traders may shrug this off and argue that this isn’t a perfect world, and there is a limit to how much a trader can do due diligence – or is willing to do due diligence on the sources of the moneys used to secure the diamonds offered for sale. And that applies both to rough and polished.

Some time ago we reported on the Sierra Leone Diamond Company where the controlling shareholder disclosed in a stock market filing that he had been convicted in the past of narcotics dealing, and a range of violent offenses. In the legal community, all moneys used in business by someone with a narcotics dealing background is, almost by definition, “dirty money.” It didn’t prevent the company from going public, nor does it prevent it from selling its diamonds.

The point I am making is that somehow there are laws that are not being upheld. Most industry participants couldn’t care less – and any diamond that is not a “conflict diamond” is considered an o.k. diamond for all intent and purposes. The Hezbollah factories will do well, so will any Alan Bond owned diamond mine – if he finds the diamonds as suggested. But traders dealing with these kinds of situations may not be aware of the “risks” they are taking.

The “risks” come from the banks – which have become far more conscious of these issues and are reporting any transaction with a party they consider questionable to the authorities. Our product is a “sensitive” product – its value lies in the confidence and trust of the public in diamonds. This isn’t oil or uranium. This is diamonds.

The risks became very clear from this week’s Swiss government reports, as is it apparent from the behavior by other banks, including diamond-financing institutions. A trader may not mind purchasing these goods – by just doing lousy due diligence – but banks may think otherwise.

There are diamonds, which, legally, should be viewed as “dirty diamonds.” One may argue about the definition, the circumstances, the “seriousnessness” of the violation of laws, or the interpretations. Some may argue that Alan Bond may not be the best of example and say that he is o.k. now – and we hope that they can substantiate that position if ever asked to. Chances are that the issue will not come up and that one can buy his diamonds, or southern Lebanese polished, without worry.

The point we try to make here is that even if a diamond has a Kimberley Certificate, it doesn’t mean that the stone is o.k. It still can be a “dirty diamond,” and governments are increasingly going to greater length to investigate and prosecute. But who cares? Diamond Best Practice Principles have become largely irrelevant – they are hardly being enforced. Those fraudsters who bribed the GIA to secure fraudulent certificates to defraud the consumers are still among the industry’s most powerful and respected companies.

So who would care about ex-convicts, ex-narcotics traffickers, or Hezbollah diamonds? As long as the diamonds are “conflict-free” even the NGO’s don’t really care. So what’s the down-side? I told you at the outset, this is a totally useless article. If you nevertheless have come to these lines, I apologize for having wasted your time. I promise, I won’t do it again.

Have a nice weekend.

Link to Tacy Ltd

  KOIDU, Sierra Leone — The tiny stone settled into the calloused grooves of Tambaki Kamanda’s palm, its dull yellow glint almost indiscernible even in the noontime glare.

An industrial grade gem, above, can bring $1 or so for days of work.

It was the first stone he had found in days, and he expected to get little more than a dollar for it. It hardly seemed worth it, he said — after days spent up to his haunches in mud, digging, washing, searching the gravel for diamonds.

But farming had brought no money for clothes or schoolbooks for his two wives and five children. He could find no work as a mason.

“I don’t have choice,” Mr. Kamanda said, standing calf-deep in brown muddy water here at the Bondobush mine, where he works every day. “This is my only hope, really.”

An industrial grade gem, above, can bring $1 or so for days of work.

Diamond mining in Sierra Leone is no longer the bloody affair made infamous by the nation’s decade-long civil war, in which diamonds played a starring role.

The conflict — begun by rebels who claimed to be ridding the mines of foreign control — killed 50,000 people, forced millions to flee their homes, destroyed the country’s economy and shocked the world with its images of amputated limbs and drug-addled boy soldiers.

An international regulatory system created after the war has prevented diamonds from fueling conflicts and financing terrorist networks. Even so, diamond mining in Sierra Leone remains a grim business that brings the government far too little revenue to right the devastated country, yet feeds off the desperation of some of the world’s poorest people. “The process is more to sanitize the industry from the market side rather than the supply side,” said John Kanu, a policy adviser to the Integrated Diamond Management Program, a United States-backed effort to improve the government’s handling of diamond money. “To make it so people could go to buy a diamond ring and to say, ‘Yes, because of this system, there are no longer any blood diamonds. So my love, and my conscience, can sleep easily.’

“But that doesn’t mean that there is justice,” he said. “That will take a lot, lot longer to change.”

In many cases, the vilified foreign mine owners have simply been replaced by local elites with a firm grip on the industry’s profits.

At the losing end are the miners here in Kono District, who work for little or no pay, hoping to strike it rich but caught in a net of semifeudal relationships that make it all but impossible that they ever will.

A vast majority of Sierra Leone’s diamonds are mined by hand from alluvial deposits near the earth’s surface, so anyone with a shovel, a bucket and a sieve can go into business; and in a country with few formal jobs, at least 150,000 people work as diggers, government officials said.

Most days, diggers like Charles Kabia, a 25-year-old grade-school dropout who has been digging since the rebels forced him to mine as a teenager, come up empty — he has not found a stone in two months. That last diamond, a half-carat stone, went for about $65, which he split with his three partners.

“From all my years of mining I don’t even have one bicycle,” said Mr. Kabia, his hands trembling. “I really get nothing out of it.”

The struggle to reform Sierra Leone’s troubled mining industry is emblematic of many of the difficulties faced by this small, impoverished nation as it tries to heal.

Sierra Leone is at peace, its economy is growing and in July it will hold a presidential election that will turn a fresh page in the country’s troubled history. But the recovery has been painfully slow. In the center of Koidu sits an enormous tank gun with a sign slung around its barrel — “War don don, we love peace,” a hopeful message in English and Sierra Leone’s lingua franca, Krio, placed there at the end of the war.

But five years later, the city still has no electricity. The crumbling streets were last paved in the mid-1970s. People live in roofless buildings left by the fighting, doing their best to scrub off the stinking mold and rig tarpaulin roofs.

Sierra Leone has struggled for much of its history to turn its diamonds into development and prosperity, but they have mainly been a source of pain.

“Diamonds, from the very beginning, corrupted Sierra Leone’s most basic sense of governance,” said Mr. Kanu, the diamond policy adviser.

Some countries, like Botswana, whose diamonds lie locked deep underground, have been able to make their deposits a source of wealth through careful management and control. But countries like Sierra Leone, Congo, Angola and Ivory Coast, where diamonds wash up in rivers and often sit just a few feet below the surface, have struggled to manage what may be the world’s worst resource curse.

The sprawling mining business here includes about 2,500 small operations. Unlike oil, iron ore and even gold, diamonds are so easy to transport that if regulations are too onerous and taxes too high, miners and exporters will simply turn to smuggling. In 2005, Sierra Leone officially exported $141 million worth of diamonds, government records show. That is a vast improvement over the $24 million officially exported in 2001, before stringent new rules known as the Kimberley Process required diamond deals to be certified by the authorities. Before that, most diamonds were smuggled out of the country through Liberia and Guinea and sold for weapons.

But even now, the government’s share of the revenue is modest, just 3 percent. In 2006, the government’s take was only $3.7 million. Licensing fees add to that total, but it is hardly enough to rebuild a nation of six million people, still broken by war.

Usman Boie Kamara, the deputy director of the government’s mining office, noted that new laws requiring permits for dealers, mine owners and exporters have forced out shadowy operators, smugglers and money launderers. Laws also set minimum standards for the pay and benefits of diggers — though they are scarcely enforced, miners and experts say.

“These issues are being addressed, but it takes time,” Mr. Kamara said.

At the Bondobush mine here, the grim routine of mining is on daily display — hundreds of diggers sifting through tons of gravel. The mine is divided into areas of 210 square yards, with each controlled by a license holder. By law that person must be Sierra Leonean, but in practice the licensees are often fronts for foreign backers or migrants from the Middle East or other West African countries.

Some are paid a small sum per day, usually about 75 cents, and given tools, food and shelter in exchange for about 30 percent of whatever their backers claim to be the value of the diamonds they find. And the financiers first deduct their expenses.

A few workers have no stake in their finds but are paid a wage, usually $2 a day. Still others work solely for a share of the gravel they extract from the vast, watery pits. In most arrangements, a great deal of the risk is shouldered by the laborer.

The industry has long been dominated by outsiders, feeding a nationalism that was exploited by Foday Sankoh, leader of the Revolutionary United Front, the brutal rebel force that claimed to be liberating the mines but instead enriched itself and terrorized the populace.

Yet even with the laws requiring local control, working conditions have not improved much. The mine where Mr. Kabia works is operated by a chief who functions as a kind of local government executive. The chief, Paul N. Saquee, 46, is a former truck driver who spent the past two decades in the United States, most recently around Atlanta. Mr. Saquee’s brother Prince is the chairman of the local diamond dealers association, the first Sierra Leonean to hold that position.

Paul Saquee employs two kinds of diggers. Some are paid about a dollar a day and 30 percent of the value of their stones, which they must hand over to Mr. Saquee’s representative, another of the chief’s brothers named Tamba. He watches with hawklike vigilance as the miners dig.

Others, like Mr. Kabia, work for a percentage of the gravel they extract and own any stones they find. In theory, this means they should get a fair sale price, but dealers often exploit their ignorance.

Prince Saquee, the chief’s diamond-dealing brother, bankrolls several mines and scoffs at the notion of selling his stones to only one buyer.

“If you are working for an exporter, he will dictate the price,” he said. “To me that is indirect slavery.”

But he has no qualms about demanding precisely that arrangement from those below him on the diamond food chain. The mine owners and workers he bankrolls must sell only to him.

“For the miners, it is different,” he argued. A digger, “he depends on you. He doesn’t know the value so you as the dealer have to tell him.”

Paul Saquee, the chief, said that despite the low pay and hard working conditions, he was providing at least some form of employment to desperate people with no alternative.

“I wish that the miners would all go back to the farm, but they are here and need work,” he said.

Part of Mr. Saquee’s role is to administer a fund that sends a quarter of the government’s diamond revenues back to the community the stones came from. Kono, home to more than half of all mining license holders, received $377,900 in 2005 for a district of 475,000 people.

“I don’t believe that diamonds are the future of this country,” Mr. Saquee said. “We need to find something else to get ourselves moving.”

Indeed, the poverty rates are highest in the mining districts — Kono’s poverty rate is 20 percent higher than that in nearby Pujehun district, which is largely agricultural.

In the central bank building in Freetown, Mustapha B. Turay sorted gleaming stones into small mounds to determine their value for taxation. On a recent afternoon the country’s largest exporter, Hisham Mackie, a longtime Lebanese kingpin, brought in $2 million worth of stones bound for Antwerp, Belgium, that night.

Most had been dug by hand by workers in places like Koidu. But the paper trail does not reach all the way back to the miner, so there is no way to know how much a miner was paid. It is a gap, said Mr. Kanu, the diamond policy adviser, that can lead to the illusion that the problems brought to light by the civil war have been solved.

Link to Diamonds Move From Blood to Sweat and Tears – New York Times

David Harewood on his poisonous role in Blood Diamond

If y ou choose to watch the movie Blood Diamond next time you pop down to the multiplex (and you could certainly make worse choices), you will see popular British actor, David Harewood, drug children, train them as child soldiers and slaughter and kidnap virtually defenceless villagers.

Needless to say, it won’t actually be David effortlessly performing these dastardly deeds.

The Oscar-nominated movie sees Harewood portray Captain Poison, the ruthless leader of a band of never-do-wells who call themselves the Revolutionary United Front (RUF.) Despite the fancy name, they are little more than rebels who force people to mine diamonds which are subsequently used to fuel a bloody civil war with the government’s military in 1990s Sierra Leone.

So please don’t get it twisted. In reality, Harewood is quick to show that he’s a nice guy.

In the calm surroundings of Century on Shaftesbury Avenue in central London, he is a world away from the hot plains of Africa where Blood Diamond was filmed.

The movie focuses on two Africans from different backgrounds who fate unites to find a rare pink diamond in war-torn Sierra Leone. Both men, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Danny Archer an ex-mercenary from Zimbabwe (for which he received a best actor nomination), and Djimon Hounsou’s Solomon Vandy, a happily married Mende fisherman (a performance which netted him a best supporting actor nomination), naturally want the diamond for very different reasons.

Archer sees the diamond as his ticket out of Africa while Vandy sees the diamond as a way to save his wife and daughters from a life as refugees. Even more pressing, is his desire to save his son, Dia, who has been kidnapped by Captain Poison, from life as a child soldier.

Looking at Harewood, it is hard to believe this father of two young children could ever be a ruthless killing machine, who laughs as he orders rebels to slaughter villagers, who shoots dead any miner who dares to keep a coveted diamond and chops the hands off men, women and children he sees as useless.

EXPLOITED

Funnily enough, Harewood said he really wanted to play a villain. “On stage, I have had the opportunity to play darker roles – but this gave me the opportunity to play a role I have never played before,” he says.

Harewood is known for more than 30 theatre and television acting roles which range from Macbeth on the Estate (an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth) to Babyfather and Separate Lies.

“I also loved the issue,” he continues. “I think it was one that needed to be exposed, we don’t hear enough of societies that are exploited.”

Playing Captain Poison required a huge change in his mindset, so the naturally calm and collected Harewood spent time reading up on and watching documentaries on the real atrocities, which took place during the civil war in Sierra Leone.

But this wasn’t enough.

Although Harewood relished the role, even he was taken aback when he saw the full-length film for himself.

“I was really kind of shocked.

The first half hour of the movie is really shocking,” he says.

“There was a woman who sat down next to me and I was telling her what I was playing and she said I really can’t believe you could ever be that nasty. When I went, I could see her kind of double taking, looking at me as the film was going on.”

Despite even these extreme reactions, Harewood is able to locate the greyer areas of his character’s personality.

“He (Captain Poison) is an absolute devil… but I couldn’t simply say he’s bad. We think it’s easy to demonise people but everything has to start somewhere.

My character rose to the top through cruelty but he had to do that to survive.

“One message (from this movie) is that if we allow our darker side to come out, we can destroy ourselves and destroy all communities. Family is also a strong theme running through the movie. The emphasis Solomon Vandy places on family is very important.”

Harewood said his preparation for this role has led him to a deeper understanding and sympathy for Africa. A crucial part of this is that it has made him become more aware of the issue of conflict diamonds – harvested by warlords to fund weapons for bloody conflicts – and their devastating consequences for people caught in the conflict.

He has also started reading more on Africa, asking himself deeper questions on the role of Europe in Africa and the inclination by many in the West to ‘demonise’ youth and others without making much effort to understand root causes of what is described as bad behaviour.

“For me this has been a journey. While I was in Africa, it continually struck me how beautiful Africa was but how poor it was. It struck me that a land so rich in resources can be so poor,” he says passionately. It will certainly be interesting to see if Blood Diamond causes any sort of shift in attitudes towards Africa. After all, there are many people who still cling to the belief that colonialism was somehow good for the continent (instead of seeing it as the legalised looting and killing spree that it really was).

Similarly, the general public just don’t seem aware of the extent to which the meddling of multinationals in post-colonial Africa has in some cases been even worse than the system that preceded it.

“I think a lot of people will have their eyes opened,” Harewood says.

“Hopefully the film will make people more aware so they think twice before they buy and display diamonds.”

Link to The Voice UK

THE film, Blood Diamond, depicting the savagery behind the gem trade, has sent shivers through the industry.

Now desperate dealers are bribing celebrities to make a statement by wearing them.

A village burns on Sierra Leone’s civil war-stricken diamond fields. Bodies litter the bush and shocked survivors are lined up by a rebel commander whose forces have just razed their homes and butchered defenceless family members and neighbours.

He is not satisfied with the extent of the bloodshed. With a bark and a gesture he summons forward two youths from among his followers.

Though barely more than children, they are clearly high on drugs. And both are swinging machetes for the blood sacrifice they are about to demand.

Seizing the right arms of their chosen victims, the young pair bring their blades crashing down, severing hands as a warning to the whole village not to challenge their authority.

Such horrifying scenes were common in Sierra Leone’s 11-year civil war.

“Chopping off right hands or even whole limbs was a strategy used by the rebels to promote their power and spread fear,” says Peter Komora, who witnessed the carnage in his native Sierra Leone, West Africa.

“Often it was their child soldiers, as young as seven, delegated to carry out the amputations. Can you imagine what that did to them?”

That conflict was mostly financed by diamond smuggling and its legacy is a nation that still bears the emotional and physical scars of the West’s lust for the glittering gems.

Among the wounded are tens of thousands of amputees whose limbs were severed and who thus endure a life of hardship in that benighted nation.

One can only hope they never hear the new battle cry from the diamond industry, as it faces an assault on its credibility and profits.

FEARING a consumer backlash in the wake of the controversial film that exposes the dark past of the gem trade, Blood Diamond, the industry has financed a multi-million dollar promotional PR campaign to limit the damage.

The industry’s foot soldiers are an army of celebrities who are being offered inducements to wear their diamonds in public. And the campaign slogan? “Raise Your Right Hand” (the better to display your sparkling jewellery).

Unwitting it may be. But it is hard to think of a more crassly offensive tagline to those men and women in Sierra Leone who have no right hand to raise, but who have paid a far higher price for diamonds than the celebrities ever will.

So what is a “blood diamond” and why the fuss about the Raise Your Right Hand campaign? Also known as a “conflict diamond”, the blood diamond is a rock that has been mined in one of the world’s war zones, usually in Africa.

The continent supplies 65 per cent of the annual international supply of the gemstone. And a “blood diamond” is one sold by parties acting for one of the warring factions, to fund the continuation of their military operations.

A story circulating in Sierra Leone’s major diamond mining region illustrates who benefits most from the country’s most precious natural resource.

It tells of a local peasant woman who, while digging in her potato patch, found a stone she believed was a diamond. She asked her pastor’s opinion.

Satisfied as to what he was holding, he gave her the equivalent of $35 for it and sent her on her way; the pastor sold the rock to a diamond dealer for $130,000; the dealer had the stone weighed and classified by the government mining department in Freetown, which determined it was 156 carats of diamond, valued at $1,273,000; the stone was sold at auction to a Saudi Arabian diamond merchant for $254,000 more than that valuation — about 40,000 times more than its finder was paid.

Similar stories quickly spread and threatened the industry with a consumer backlash.

Then came Blood Diamond to add to their woes. And the Hollywood film has also, inadvertently, shed light on the current conditions in Africa’s diamond fields — even those no longer affected by conflict.

So the $15 billion-a-year industry has retaliated, using the only weapon it knew might counter the negatives: star power.

Stars have been offered almost $33,000 — to be paid to an African charity of their choice — to wear big diamond rings on their right hands at public events.

The pre-publicity for the Raise Your Right Hand For Africa campaign stated: “Hollywood’s leading female nominees and presenters are invited to proudly wear a Diamond Right-Hand Ring on this year’s red carpet at one of the upcoming 2007 awards shows: Golden Globes, 49th Annual Grammy Awards or Academy Awards.

“The diamond industry hopes Hollywood’s leading ladies will help generate up to $130,000 for key projects in southern Africa.”

On the red carpet at the Golden Globes awards in California last month, Beyonce Knowles presented her bauble to the paparazzi, like a boxer bares his fists to a challenger.

Jennifer Lopez was another recipient of the Raise Your Right Hand largesse, though a spokesman for the star denied she took part.

The World Diamond Council, which is behind the campaign, has set up a website to spread the message that the diamond trade is not only ethical, but a vital source of income for Third World nations.

Link to Diamonds’ dull lustre | Sunday Herald Sun

HOW DICAPRIO’S BLOOD DIAMOND MOVIE GAVE AMPUTEE KIDS HOPE

The film Blood Diamond tells how diamonds have been the cause of widespread death, destruction and misery in Sierra Leone.

The soil of the small West African country has some of the richest diamond deposits in the world, and the stones can be excavated by hand.

Blood diamonds are jewels that are mined in a war zone and sold illegally to finance rebel groups. People who buy these gems are financing brutal and bloody civil wars. The Sierra Leone conflict was characterised by mass amputations and forced conscription of children.

Blood Diamond is set during the civil war that ravaged the country in the 1990s, claiming 75,000 lives.

It was this easily smuggled commodity that brought the Revolutionary United Front to diamond-rich Kono in 1991. Rebels forced thousands of civilians into work gangs harvesting the stones, which they handed to Charles Taylor, neighbouring Liberia’s infamous warlord, in return for arms.

They earned an estimated £60m a year. The illicit trade is also believed to have helped al-Qaeda fund the September 11 attacks. During Sierra Leone’s 10-year civil war, children were used as labourers in diamond mines. It is only in recent years, after an international outcry, that industry and governments came up with a certification scheme to prevent such stones entering the supply chain.

In 1999 De Beers, the world’s largest diamond company, with massive control of both mining and distribution, introduced a zerotolerance policy. But the certification scheme is still far from watertight.

Amnesty International has branded it “open to abuse”. The charity urges shoppers to ask jewellers where their diamonds come from and whether they are conflict-free.

Link to SundayMirror.co.uk