Serious doubts have been cast on the ability of the year-old Kimberley process to rid the global market of conflict diamonds, which have prolonged the worst of the modern conflicts in Africa.
The members of the process — 45 producer, manufacturing and importing nations; the global industry and NGOs — agreed to voluntary peer review at their annual plenary in Sun City last week, instead of a system of mandatory checks.
Researchers estimate that one in five diamonds traded can be classified as conflict diamonds. The global industry is worth an annual $7-billion.
Ten member countries agreed to be peer-reviewed, including the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a crucial link in the blood diamond chain.
“Initially, the proposal was for a system that began voluntarily but became mandatory,” said Judith Sargentini of Fatal Transactions, a Netherlands-based NGO that monitors conflict gems. “Now it’s been watered down — only those countries that volunteer will be monitored. Those that don’t are the most interesting.”
As yet, there is no system of regular review.
Started three years ago in Kimberley — the city recognised as the bedrock of the global diamond industry — the process was spurred by revelations of the links between conflict and gems since the late 1990s by NGOs like Global Witness and Fatal Transactions.
Diamonds were revealed as the currency of war economies, as rebel movements in Angola, the DRC, Uganda, Liberia and Sierra Leone mined and traded the gems for guns.
Marketed by the four C’s — colour, carat, cut and clarity — the fifth C, conflict, was one a luxury industry highly sensitive to consumer whims could not risk. “Diamonds are poised to become the new fur,” wrote the London Independent three years ago.
Synthetic diamonds of growing quality also offered an alternative. Pushed to the table, the Kimberley system challenged an industry that had claimed tracking the source of diamonds was impossible. The process seeks to determine diamond DNA and certify that only these diamonds get into the major markets.
“Our mandate, as a collective, is to break the link between armed conflict and the illicit trade in rough diamonds,” the head of the South African Diamond Board, Abbey Chikane, said last week.
While the first three years of the Kimberley process was spent on setting up the system of sourcing and certifying, this year’s plenary faced one challenge: the implementation of an effective monitoring system to give the system credibility.
At its start, a coalition against monitoring at the Sun City meeting coalesced. India, Australia, China and Zimbabwe, among other states, lobbied against any monitoring, opting only for annual reporting.
In the other corner was South Africa, the United States (which imports 60% of the world’s diamonds), the European Union and Canada, the next big diamond frontier after recent finds. They came to the meeting with a proposal for peer review — a compromise position between mandatory monitoring and no monitoring at all ‚ and they won out.
Asked if a more muscular system was not necessary to ensure the credibility of the system, Kim Eling, the Kimberley process’s head of monitoring, said: “If we can implement it properly, it can work.” Voluntarism was important, he said, “to show the process is inclusive and not out to punish”. It pivoted not only on peer review, but also on peer pressure.
A statement in the final agreement is held up as an example of such pressure: “While these visits will take place on a voluntary basis, the plenary agreed that it would be desirable for the largest number of participants possible to volunteer to receive a review visit by 2006.” But no timetable of reviews was agreed on, and there is no system of regular monitoring.
Sargentini says there is also a resource problem. “The process is very difficult when everyone pays for themselves. There is only an interim secretariat, which does not have the stability of a permanent office with its own resources.”
It takes 23 steps to certify a diamond as sparkling clean. The process is expensive, and will require help from the industry and wealthier countries.
Much hinges on filling the holes in the Kimberley system. As the Mail & Guardian reported two weeks ago, the continent is more peaceful than it has been for a decade, and the clean diamond plan is one reason for this.
The Angolan peace is holding because Unita’s resource base was eroded when De Beers and other buyers turned the screws, while the fall of Charles Taylor is attributed in part to the drying up of diamond revenues. These are reasons to be more, rather than less vigilant, believes Sargentini.
“The peace is tenuous and it’s still very easy to smuggle diamonds,” she stresses.