Bloodless Diamonds?
“It’s not diamonds that are the problem,” says Ali, a Lebanese diamond dealer in eastern Sierra Leone. “Diamonds are just stones. It’s people that are the problem.”
Sierra Leone has some of the highest quality diamonds in the world. Like a lottery winner who wastes his fortune and sinks into misery, however, the country has been unable to cope with its windfall. “Blood diamonds” have been blamed for causing its horrific civil war, which saw rebel militias, Liberian thugs, mercenaries, Sierra Leone’s army, and UN and Nigerian “peacekeepers” killing and maiming in a desperate struggle to gain control of the gem trade.
Since the war finished in 2002, Sierra Leone has languished among the world’s poorest countries, with nothing to show for its rich treasure trove of minerals. Economists see it as a classic example of the resource curse, which plagues many poor nations endowed with valuable natural commodities: mineral wealth allows governments to neglect the rest of the economy, enrich themselves, and ignore those outside their circles, forcing the excluded to resort to violence to obtain a share of the loot.
But the failure of resource-rich nations is not inevitable. Botswana has thrived on the back of its diamond mines. South Africa, brimming with gold and diamonds, is Africa’s largest economy. Australia, another diamond producer, doesn’t do too badly.
Earlier this week we spent the day at a diamond mine near Kenema. Johnny, a Sierra Leonean who has spent most of his life in England, has come back with his wife Suzy to dig for diamonds. Using borrowed money, they have leased an acre of land deep in the jungle and hired fifty men from surrounding villages to dig a forty-foot-deep pit and sift through the mud and gravel it throws up.
It is easy to see the allure. When we arrive, Johnny shows me yesterday’s haul of eight small stones. The first looks like an undistinguished lump of glass, but the second, flawless, looks like a diamond and, although rough (it will be cut in India or Antwerp), its different facets glitter as I turn it around in the sun. It is worth about £1,000. On the neighbouring plot last year, a Lebanese found a thirty-carat diamond worth £4 million. From one moment to the next, Johnny could get rich.
Or die trying. Another nearby plot was mined for two years by some Americans. They didn’t find a single gem. Prices fell by 80% in the recession, prompting many miners and dealers to switch to gold, which provides a steadier, less risky income. Ali’s business partner almost bankrupted him by giving him a fake cheque for £100,000-worth of diamonds. “We say the profit from diamonds reaches from your toes to your knees, but the losses reach up to your throat,” he says, making a strangling gesture. He is currently pursuing the man through Interpol.