U.S.: Far fewer conflict diamonds reach market
Source: Reuters
By Sue Pleming WASHINGTON, Dec 5 (Reuters) - Keen to curb any fallout following the release of a film this week about conflict diamonds, the U.S. State Department said on Tuesday the illegal trade of war zone gems had been sharply cut in recent years. The film "Blood Diamond," which stars Leonardo DiCaprio and debuts on Friday, tells the story of an ex-mercenary who smuggles diamonds out of war-torn Sierra Leone in the late 1990's. The profits from many of those gems were used to buy guns and fuel wars. "We feel the film provides a good historical snapshot of the diamond industry, particularly back in 1999, but we feel we have come a long way since the bloody atrocities depicted in that movie," senior State Department official Paul Simons told a briefing, called ahead of the movie's release. The United States buys about half of the world's diamonds. The diamond industry fears the film could make shoppers nervous that the diamonds they are buying may have come from conflict zones and depress consumer demand for the gem. The United States is part of the U.N.-organized Kimberly Process, which aims to stem the flow of conflict diamonds in a notoriously secretive industry by forcing participants to certify the origins of the diamonds being traded. In the late 1990s between 4 percent and 15 percent of the world's diamonds were estimated to have come from conflict zones, but this is now less than 1 percent, Simons said. "Kimberly has fundamentally reformed the rules of the game for trade of rough diamonds," Simons said. "The Kimberly Process covers the vast majority of the world's rough diamond trade today and we think it indicates a good success story for multilateral diplomacy." The Kimberly Process was implemented in 2003 to screen out illicit gems, but campaigners recently called for loopholes to be closed after uncovering a stream of black market diamonds flowing from Ivory Coast. Corinna Gilfillan, a campaigner with the group Global Witness, cited a recent U.S. report that showed poor U.S. enforcement in monitoring the trade of conflict diamonds. "We think there is still a long way to go to resolve this problem," she said. The report by the Government Accountability Office urged the U.S. government to do spot-checks, not just of rough diamond imports, but of companies trading in the gems. Diamond companies are not being properly policed, said Gilfillan, adding that the industry's system of self-regulation was "more of a public relations exercise than anything else." Even if a very small percentage of conflict diamonds reached the market, she said this was a substantial figure. "Diamonds can be used by a rebel group to provide arms and to kill and mutilate people. There is no acceptable level of blood diamonds." Simons said the United States was keeping a "vigilant eye" to curb the illicit diamond trade.
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