The business of Blood Diamonds: A historical perspective

A few years before 9/11, the world’s curiously selective conscience was shocked by images from the little West African country of Sierra Leone. There, an insurgent group fond of hacking off hands and feet with machetes funded its war by exploiting slave labor in diamond fields, smuggling gemstones via complicit dealers (Lebanese, naturally) to Liberia, then onto world markets.
Two horror stories from Sierra Leone and Liberia were soon added to those from Angola, where the government was locked in a protracted battle with the UNITA guerrilla movement, and from the Congo (AKA Zaire), on which neighbouring countries descended in a multisided scramble for spoils after the death of its western-sponsored president-for-life.
What to do about African “conflict diamonds” became one of the hottest topics discussed by the New York cognoscenti. Thus, conflict diamonds (later reincarnated as “blood diamonds,” when the original images started to lose their shock value) were already high on the international agenda before the conveniently timed discovery that behind the trade could be found the evil hand of al-Qaeda.
The “conflict diamonds” story actually began in Sierra Leone after World War II, when native soldiers who had been with British Special Forces returned home to find a country still under colonial rule and its leading industry still in the grip of a British monopoly. Most diamond mines produce a majority of industrial-grade stones, but in Sierra Leone an unusually high proportion were gem quality and in widely dispersed alluvial fields rather than concentrated in deep mines where security is easier, as in South Africa or Botswana.
Initially the main problem was in company-run areas where miners would steal stones to sell to local merchants who would then pass them on to smugglers. But by the early 1950s, more native diggers ventured into fresh territory. While the British regularly sent the police and Army to try to clear illegal diggings, the miners applied skills they had learned in irregular warfare to evade capture. For every informer kept by the company in the illegal mining camps, the miners seemed to have one in the local police.
Illegal production required a covert marketing channel. That was the role of Lebanese traders. The initial wave of Lebanese immigration into West Africa around the turn of the twentieth century had been mainly Christians fleeing economic crisis or Ottoman oppression. Their first destination was usually Marseilles, from where they hoped to move to the United States.
Some unable to get to a New World whose streets were reputedly paved with gold ended up in West Africa, where, a little later, they found alluvial fields genuinely seeded with diamonds. Initially prominent in retail commerce and real estate, with some smuggling as a sideline, during a post-World War II diamond boom, Lebanese traders advanced digging equipment and supplies, then arranged to move the diamonds to Liberia, which had low taxes and a US dollar-based financial system. The traffic threatened the tight control over the world rough-diamond market held by the British/South African Corporation De Beers Consolidated. Apart from feeding newspapers with claims that smuggling was sufficient to threaten the British balance of payments when the country had still not fully recovered from World War II, De Beers tried two other tricks.
The first was for “John Blaize,” a self-proclaimed undercover agent for the International Diamond Security Organization, the De Beers private policing affiliate, to approach a former Naval Intelligence officer. Ian Fleming had already published Diamonds Are Forever in which the dashingly decadent James Bond foils international smugglers working on behalf of Terror International.
The problem De Beers faced was that existing methods to control trafficking in West Africa were failing. Within its own mining concessions, it had traditionally relied on X-rays to stop miners from stealing stones. Another technique consisted of planting irradiated stones, then trying to pick them up with Geiger counters as miners passed the turnstiles or to trace them to buyers.
That, by definition, caught only the irradiated stones—of little use if large numbers of miners lifted large numbers of gems. Nor could the company irradiate en masse—stones had to be found before they could be so treated. And presumably there might be fears of a skin-cancer epidemic among the blushing brides who were its primary clientele. In the alluvial fields outside direct company control, the problem was worse. Here the company’s most important technique was to plant its own agents to outbid the illicit buyers. While that permitted the company to control the output, it drove up the price and encouraged more illegal production.
For a time the company combined that strategy with a buy-and-bust approach. But judges kept throwing out the cases—most of those entrapped were amateurs, with no previous history, who were lured into the traffic, then arrested in a blaze of publicity to try to scare away others.
According to the story, the Evil Empire (at that time Atheistic Communism rather than Islamic Terrorism) ran the traffic for two purposes. One was to obtain industrial diamonds (in the face of a NATO embargo) to aid the Soviet nuclear weapons program.
This was some accomplishment given that stones from Sierra Leone were so commonly gem quality, and that the USSR was already producing so many diamonds of its own that De Beers had entered a secret agreement to sneak them onto Western markets in violation of anti-Soviet sanctions then in force.
The second purpose, so the account went, was to use gemstones to finance Arab “terrorist” activity in Syria (recently free of France), Iraq (which was shaking off the British), and Algeria (where the first shots of an insurrection against French rule had been fired). Reports of the Soviet-WMD/Arab-Terrorist plot sent a shudder through the British spook agencies, who endorsed a covert program, jointly with De Beers, to use British secret intelligence funds to infiltrate Lebanese smuggling rings, snare traders, and, where necessary, assassinate ringleaders.
Therefore, apart from alerting the public to these early conflict diamonds, De Beers arranged for Sir Percy Sillitoe, former head of Britain’s MI-5, where he had made a reputation as a Commie-hunter, to be hauled from a pleasant retirement selling chocolates to spearhead the counterinsurgency.

(To be continued……)