Smillie - Diamonds

Resources Series

Gavin Bridge & Philippe Le Billon, Oil

Jennifer Clapp, Food

Peter Dauvergne & Jane Lister, Timber

Elizabeth R. DeSombre & J. Samuel Barkin, Fish

David Lewis Feldman, Water

Derek Hall, Land

Michael Nest, Coltan

I first encountered diamonds in 1967 when, fresh out of university, I went to Sierra Leone to teach at a small secondary school in the heart of the countrys remote diamond district. Koidu was a wild and lawless place not, perhaps, unlike Dawson City at the height of the Yukon gold rush. But without snow.

After my time in Koidu, I didnt give diamonds much thought, going on to work elsewhere in Africa and Asia as a development practitioner and later as an aid administrator, consultant and sometime writer. Then, during the late 1990s, as Sierra Leone descended into one of the worlds most horrific humanitarian crises, diamonds came into focus again when I joined an effort to understand how the war was being financed. My colleagues and I learned that diamonds were also fueling conflict in other countries. In 2000, as Sierra Leones war entered its ninth year, I was appointed to a UN Security Council Expert Panel to examine the connection between diamonds and weapons. I traveled extensively to the diamond capitals of the world: Antwerp, London, New York, Tel Aviv; and to Freetown, Monrovia, Conakry, and Johannesburg places where diamonds began their journey through a secretive underground network that ran from rebel armies to the fingers of brides in waiting.

I took part in the blood diamond campaign and I par-ticipated in negotiations that led to the creation in 2003 of the first-ever international certification system for rough diamonds. In 2008 I was the first witness at the war crimes trial in The Hague of former Liberian President and warlord, Charles Taylor, where I spoke about his role in the illicit diamond trade. I helped to start an organization called the Diamond Development Initiative that works on the problems of Africas many artisanal diamond diggers. And in 2010 I wrote a book about diamonds called Blood on the Stone: Greed, Corruption and War in the Global Diamond Trade.

I will explain below why the content of this book is different from that one, but first a note on style. Rather than write this book entirely in the third person, I have been encouraged by Polity Press to describe in the first person some of the events in which I played a direct role. I hope the approach will make the book readable and a little more genuine than if I were to feign distance and complete impartiality.

There are several compelling reasons for a new book about diamonds, one that brings together for the first time three aspects of the diamond industry: the diamond mystique, born of geology, history, and commercialization; blood diamonds; and the development potential in very poor countries of a mineral sold on the basis of love, prestige, and wealth.