With the testimony of Naomi Campbell at the International Criminal Court about her gift of blood diamonds, the issue has come back into the public's consciousness.
First, there was an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal ($) - a piece of pro-diamond garbage. The piece was so disingenuous it almost made me sick. Hopefully most people realized the author was far from objective considering he is a diamond consultant. And even if some people gave him the benefit of the doubt, hopefully they realized his arguments were complete sophistry.
(He says that diamonds do not contribute to conflict - at least no more than many other minerals. If his point is that we should be concerned about how other resources also provide money to warlords and allows them to continue horrible acts of violence, then I would agree. Instead, I gather his point is that we shouldn't think at all about how our consumption feeds violence in parts of Africa, Asia and South America.)
One thing he says that people concerned about blood diamonds would agree with is that the Kimberly process is largely ineffective. This article in Foreign Policy sums it up. Unfortunately, the WSJ opinion author concludes that because the Kimberly process does not work, we should give up and just buy diamonds as before oblivious to the death and destruction. The FP article fortunately looks for ways to improve the process so that people can continue to buy grossly overvalued diamonds (thanks to what is actually very clever advertising going back decades) with less impact on conflict. Let's hope people actually heed the call for change.
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