Blood Diamonds?

"Blood Diamond" shows two aspects of the diamond industry: Dazzlingly brilliant necklaces, bracelets, earrings and pendants are on the one side, and inhumane working conditions in mines as well as financing brutal civil wars on the other. At least that's the story that the movie with actor Leonardo DiCaprio tells about Sierra Leone in the late 1990s.

The film has revived the public debate about blood, or conflict, diamonds, as the gems that finance civil wars are dubbed. And predictably, dealers in Antwerp, the world's biggest commercial center for diamonds, are annoyed. They've been trying to shake off their bad reputation for years.

Conflict diamonds are a problem of the past, according to Freddy Hanard, managing director of the Diamond High Council (HDR), Antwerp's diamond dealer association.

"Blood diamonds were a problem of the late 1990s, and it was also limited to Africa," Hanard said. "In those days, 4 percent of the diamonds sold worldwide were conflict diamonds. Today it's less than 1 percent. That means the system is working."

Tracking diamonds' origins

The system he referred to is the Kimberley Process. It's a mechanism developed and enforced by governments, the diamond industry and non-governmental organizations to control the trade. The Kimberley Process is meant to ensure that diamonds sold legally come with a certificate that describes their origin and guarantees that they are not conflict diamonds.

"Every diamond shipment that comes to Antwerp is examined," Hanard said. And not just to determine its origin, but also whether the price is appropriate. Every diamond that leaves Antwerp again is examined once more. Transparency is an absolute necessity."

Hanard added that Antwerp's strict control of diamonds was singular, and that it ensured that a gem that passed through the Belgian city was clean, "an ethically correct diamond."

According to official statistics, the proportion of conflict diamonds on the market these days is very low. Most African countries that mine diamonds are not engaged in civil war, and the gems have become a commodity like any other. Only in Ivory Coast is a war being financed by the sale of diamonds.

NGOs skeptical

However, numerous non-profit organizations are skeptical of dealers' rosy statements when it comes to conflict diamonds. Herrlinde Gerrits of Fatal Transactions, a Dutch group that campaigns for an effective system of monitoring the raw materials trade from conflict areas, identified problems she saw.

"First, the certificate says little about whether the diamonds truly come from the where they were declared to be from," Gerrits said. "Secondly, I doubt that all dealers here keep their hands clean when someone arrives with a backpack full of Congolese diamonds and offers a good price. Not everyone would say: 'We won't buy them because there's no certificate.'"

Antwerp's dealers reject such allegations. They say their gems are indeed clean. It's rare that NGOs are able to prove that that's not the case.

DiCaprio invited to Antwerp

In their zeal to protect their field, and to deflect any damage the "Blood Diamond" movie might do, the diamond industry started a public relations campaign at the end of last year, before the film was released. The Diamond High Council even invited Leonardo DiCaprio to Antwerp to show him the trade there, though he has not responded as yet.

The industry's efforts may have already borne fruit, or perhaps the film had little influence on consumers. In any case, diamond sellers in the United States, where the movie was released in early December, had nothing to complain about when they added up their Christmas sales. And Hollywood's stars and starlets let it shine in diamond jewelry worth many hundreds of thousands of euros at the Golden Globe Awards a few weeks ago.