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"Blood Diamond" Week Continues! Hooray!
December 7, 2006
Here are my thoughts about the two blood diamond-related events on Tuesday; I call it a “Tale of Two Press Conferences.”
The first was a news conference and lunch featuring Amnesty International and Global Witness. No one expected an industry love-in but I was struck by the harshness of the rhetoric – especially after the favorable NGO response to the recent Kimberley Process meeting. “We’re really concerned about how the diamond industry is putting out some misleading stuff,” led off Charmian Gooch of Global Witness. “The fact is, right now, you cannot buy diamonds that are guaranteed conflict free.” This last statement basically invalidates the entire Kimberley Process and System of Warranties, and if it’s true, Global Witness should rip up their treasured Nobel Prize nomination, because they haven’t accomplished squat.
Apart from the industry-bashing, the message was not particularly coherent -- at one point, Gooch said the Kimberley Process was “full of loopholes,” but later GW’s Alex Yearsley said “the Kimberley Process is basically working” -- and most of the non-trade reporters seemed to leave the press conference their heads spinning. While Amnesty International did put in the standard “we are not saying you shouldn’t buy diamonds” grace-note, that was an hour into the news conference after a lot of people left. And when you portray an industry as a bunch of evil liars, that is basically the same as saying people shouldn’t buy diamonds.
I’ve always been sympathetic to the NGOs, and I really would like to change this industry. But I also believe in being honest and fair -- especially towards an industry that has worked with you for six years -- and, after that press conference, it’s getting harder and harder for me to understand where Amnesty and Global Witness are coming from.
So let me skip ahead to the Diamond Information Center (meaning De Beers)-sponsored Russell Simmons press conference. After attending it, I realized why the NGOs felt the need to have their counter-event: This guy is a star. He has undeniable charm, draws a huge crowd, and his words have a lot of weight.
At times, the Simmons event was like a mirror event of the other. Speakers at both said the other side was being “misleading,” and proclaimed they were giving the true picture of diamonds in Africa.
In past posts I criticized the World Diamond Council’s campaign, and I might have upset some people over there. So I will note that the people at the World Diamond Council are decent and hard-working folks who deserve a lot of credit and thanks for the work they are doing. (They also did a great job with Oprah.)
But while watching the Simmons conference, I couldn’t help thinking that its rah-rah portrayal of the African diamond industry rang as false to me as the NGO’s non-stop negativity. The “true picture of diamonds in Africa” remains a mixed one: Some of it is great; other parts remain pretty bad. In the last five years, the needle has moved away from the bad considerably, and we should all be proud of that, but there is still a lot of work to do. We are in the middle of this process, not the end, and the industry might get a fairer hearing if it admits that.
Finally, now that I have probably ticked some people off, let me stress that this is an open forum, and comments are welcome. And as the whole “Blood Diamond” (uppercase) thing begins to hopefully fade away, I am in total agreement with end of this post, which asks the most important question.
Posted by Rob Bates on December 7, 2006 | Comments (2)
