The Dark Core of a Diamond

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De Beers' fear tactics failed. The Australians had managed to fashion a new branding identity for their brownish stones. Attractive phrases were coined to describe unappealing goods: "champagne diamonds," "cognac diamonds." This was an ironic rehash of an unsuccessful De Beers campaign in the 1940s to unload brown diamonds on the U.S. market. A globalization drama played out on a grand scale as millions of Australian gems were pressed into rings in Indian factories and shipped to America, Japan and elsewhere.

By the end of 2004, the legendary "single channel" instituted by the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes had sprung so many leaks that De Beers controlled slightly less than half the world's supply of rough diamonds, down from 80% just a few years before. Now it was seeking to reinvent itself again as a branding tool. It still had half a billion rough in the vaults, plus a brilliant advertising team and the power to bend its remaining sightholders to its will.

Angola
Jonas Savimbi died in a way that might almost have pleased him. It took 17 bullets to bring him down. The Maoist-trained guerrilla leader who had bankrolled his army with millions of illicit diamonds was dead. The government of Angola signed a peace treaty with Savimbi's rebel army less than two months later. The news was greeted with quiet celebration in the diamond quarters of Antwerp and New York. Angola had virtually invented "blood diamonds"—the stones used to finance civil wars in Africa. Savimbi and his movement had been responsible for up to half a million carats a year, bartered for AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. Savimbi's death in the spring of 2002 paved the way for Angola's entry into the plan for gem certification known as the Kimberley Process, which the diamond industry had been forced to create the year before under pressure from the U.N.

"We didn't want to become another fur," a diamond executive told me. Any nation that exports diamonds is required to seal the stones inside a tamperproof container with a document certifying that they were not mined in the midst of a war. Angola was brought into the system 11 months after Savimbi's assassination. But Savimbi's death brought no peace to the diamond fields. In some ways, it made things worse. Poorly paid government troops, as well as defeated rebel veterans, were suddenly left without an enemy to fight, though they had their weapons.

Just before I arrived in Angola, the bodies of four men were pulled out of the Cuango River. All had been eviscerated. The assumption was that the killers had been searching for missing stones in the dead men's digestive tracts. "Of course, these are 'blood diamonds,'" said Rafael Marques, a researcher with the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa who is trying to document the human-rights abuses. "In some senses, it is even more bloody than a war diamond. It used to be one enemy attacking another. Now you have private security firms and government soldiers literally slaughtering people."

India
What India offers is sweat. It was at least 90° at midday inside the Sanghavi Diamond Co. plant in the northern India city of Surat, where hundreds of men were grinding stones on spinning metal wheels. Four men were assigned to each wheel, hunched around it like poker players around a pot. I watched a young man named Manesh Amvalin putting facets into a tiny stone. His hands were covered with perspiration. He had already done 25 diamonds that day, and he would be paid the equivalent of a dime each. "If you have patience, this is easy," Amvalin told me.