Cinema: Viewpoint: So, Should You Buy a Diamond?

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Jewelers know the look, the shy mixture of hesitation and happiness, that crosses a man's face when he buys an engagement ring. He wants this piece of clear carbon to embody all the love he feels for his intended and to represent the new life they're embarking on. I felt it five years ago when I became one of the 1.7 million American men who buy a diamond ring each year. But after my engagement unraveled, I began to think again about that ring and about the diamond trade that produced it. I realized there were questions I should have been asking about that diamond beyond the carat size and the price. Primarily, should you even buy a diamond?

The answer depends on whom you ask. De Beers and the rest of the diamond trade would say yes. Watchdog groups like Global Witness would say no. Eight years ago, Global Witness produced damning evidence of jewel-related slaughter in several African nations. It caused an international scandal and gave rise to a policing mechanism called the Kimberley Process, which requires diamond-exporting nations to seal their stones in a tamperproof container, with a document stating they were not mined in a war zone. It also requires better data collection from customs agencies.

Has this worked? To research my book, The Heartless Stone, I traveled in 2004 and '05 to Africa, where diamonds are mined in conditions that range from the orderly to the horrific, and found virtually no oversight of the violence-prone alluvial-mining sites. Many stones have made their way out of the jungle and into suburban malls via somebody's lower intestinal tract. Even when the diamonds are not smuggled or traded for guns, the wages for the miners can be outrageously unfair. I met a team of diggers in the Central African Republic who were routinely paid $200 for large-carat diamonds that would easily retail for $40,000 in the U.S.

There is persuasive evidence that the supply chain is easily infiltrated. A September report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) said flatly, "U.S. control systems cannot help deter illicit rough diamonds from entering the legitimate trade." Another disturbing finding: the U.S. reported exporting more diamonds than it received in 2003-- a remarkable trade imbalance for a nation without a single working mine. The GAO said, with bureaucratic dryness, that such figures were "not plausible."

The Kimberley Process has two loopholes that can't be easily plugged. The first, as the GAO's findings indicate, is that it would be difficult to design a better tool for money laundering, arms dealing and cross-border smuggling than a diamond--all that liquidity in such a tiny space. Diamonds can be bought with dirty money, moved across African borders with relative ease, given false paperwork and then sent onward to the trading centers of Europe.

The second is that Kimberley concerns itself only with nations that are in a state of war as defined by the U.N. This essentially overlooks all kinds of miserable deeds in places like Angola, which is still recovering from a grinding 30-year war and where murder and robbery are facets of daily life in the diamond fields. I was told that miners have been eviscerated if they were suspected of having swallowed a stone.