Do You Know Where Your Diamond's From?

We went to see “Blood Diamond” last night, a typical Hollywood convention of action and violence set around the conflict diamond industry that has its roots in Africa. I hope most of you reading this have seen the movie already (even if you were motivated only by Leo DiCaprio), so that I don’t have to urge you to see it. It wasn’t one of the industry’s best movies, but it did touch on important, and even unexpected, issues that seldom get attention outside of documentary films. For one, part of the movie portrays the psychological process used to dehumanize child soldiers, a terribly disturbing and pervasive issue in Africa that is too often ignored. There are currently an estimated 250,000 children that have been recruited or are being used by armed forces in Africa in 2007 alone. Last week an international conference was held in Paris where 58 nations signed a non-binding accord to stop the illegal and unacceptable use of children in armed conflict. In addition, a month ago the NY Times Magazine published an article adapted from a new book by Ishmael Beah (“A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Child Soldier”). Beah is a former child soldier in Sierra Leone who now lives in Brooklyn with his adopted family.

The use of children in armed conflicts (as soldiers, porters, cooks, sex slaves or spies) is primarily the result of the global demand for natural resources such as gold, diamonds, oil, timber, or other minerals like columbite-tantalite (coltan) that is in each of our cell phones. The diamond trade is an excellent example of this relationship, as global demand for diamonds, along with a calculated control of their supply on the international market, funds many of the ongoing wars here. (The same is true of other non-African resource-rich countries with ongoing internal strife, e.g. Burma.) Whether or not your diamond is “clean” (a very difficult thing to know for sure, despite the existence of voluntary industry certification measures such as the much-criticized Kimberley Process) and whether or not it will make you feel guilty about contributing to the demand for diamonds that fuels this flawed industry, “Blood Diamond” is worth two hours of your time.