Diamonds Move From Blood to Sweat and Tears

By LYDIA POLGREEN

KOIDU, Sierra Leone — The tiny stone settled into the calloused grooves of Tambaki Kamanda’s palm, its dull yellow glint almost indiscernible even in the noontime glare.

It was the first stone he had found in days, and he expected to get little more than a dollar for it. It hardly seemed worth it, he said — after days spent up to his haunches in mud, digging, washing, searching the gravel for diamonds.

But farming had brought no money for clothes or schoolbooks for his two wives and five children. He could find no work as a mason.

“I don’t have choice,” Mr. Kamanda said, standing calf-deep in brown muddy water here at the Bondobush mine, where he works every day. “This is my only hope, really.”

Diamond mining in Sierra Leone is no longer the bloody affair made infamous by the nation’s decade-long civil war, in which diamonds played a starring role.

The conflict — begun by rebels who claimed to be ridding the mines of foreign control — killed 50,000 people, forced millions to flee their homes, destroyed the country’s economy and shocked the world with its images of amputated limbs and drug-addled boy soldiers.

An international regulatory system created after the war has prevented diamonds from fueling conflicts and financing terrorist networks. Even so, diamond mining in Sierra Leone remains a grim business that brings the government far too little revenue to right the devastated country, yet feeds off the desperation of some of the world’s poorest people. “The process is more to sanitize the industry from the market side rather than the supply side,” said John Kanu, a policy adviser to the Integrated Diamond Management Program, a United States-backed effort to improve the government’s handling of diamond money. “To make it so people could go to buy a diamond ring and to say, ‘Yes, because of this system, there are no longer any blood diamonds. So my love, and my conscience, can sleep easily.’

“But that doesn’t mean that there is justice,” he said. “That will take a lot, lot longer to change.”

In many cases, the vilified foreign mine owners have simply been replaced by local elites with a firm grip on the industry’s profits.

At the losing end are the miners here in Kono District, who work for little or no pay, hoping to strike it rich but caught in a net of semifeudal relationships that make it all but impossible that they ever will.

A vast majority of Sierra Leone’s diamonds are mined by hand from alluvial deposits near the earth’s surface, so anyone with a shovel, a bucket and a sieve can go into business; and in a country with few formal jobs, at least 150,000 people work as diggers, government officials said.

Most days, diggers like Charles Kabia, a 25-year-old grade-school dropout who has been digging since the rebels forced him to mine as a teenager, come up empty — he has not found a stone in two months. That last diamond, a half-carat stone, went for about $65, which he split with his three partners.

“From all my years of mining I don’t even have one bicycle,” said Mr. Kabia, his hands trembling. “I really get nothing out of it.”

The struggle to reform Sierra Leone’s troubled mining industry is emblematic of many of the difficulties faced by this small, impoverished nation as it tries to heal.

Sierra Leone is at peace, its economy is growing and in July it will hold a presidential election that will turn a fresh page in the country’s troubled history. But the recovery has been painfully slow. In the center of Koidu sits an enormous tank gun with a sign slung around its barrel — “War don don, we love peace,” a hopeful message in English and Sierra Leone’s lingua franca, Krio, placed there at the end of the war.

But five years later, the city still has no electricity. The crumbling streets were last paved in the mid-1970s. People live in roofless buildings left by the fighting, doing their best to scrub off the stinking mold and rig tarpaulin roofs.

Sierra Leone has struggled for much of its history to turn its diamonds into development and prosperity, but they have mainly been a source of pain.

“Diamonds, from the very beginning, corrupted Sierra Leone’s most basic sense of governance,” said Mr. Kanu, the diamond policy adviser.

Some countries, like Botswana, whose diamonds lie locked deep underground, have been able to make their deposits a source of wealth through careful management and control. But countries like Sierra Leone, Congo, Angola and Ivory Coast, where diamonds wash up in rivers and often sit just a few feet below the surface, have struggled to manage what may be the world’s worst resource curse.

The sprawling mining business here includes about 2,500 small operations. Unlike oil, iron ore and even gold, diamonds are so easy to transport that if regulations are too onerous and taxes too high, miners and exporters will simply turn to smuggling. In 2005, Sierra Leone officially exported $141 million worth of diamonds, government records show. That is a vast improvement over the $24 million officially exported in 2001, before stringent new rules known as the Kimberley Process required diamond deals to be certified by the authorities. Before that, most diamonds were smuggled out of the country through Liberia and Guinea and sold for weapons.

But even now, the government’s share of the revenue is modest, just 3 percent. In 2006, the government’s take was only $3.7 million. Licensing fees add to that total, but it is hardly enough to rebuild a nation of six million people, still broken by war.

Usman Boie Kamara, the deputy director of the government’s mining office, noted that new laws requiring permits for dealers, mine owners and exporters have forced out shadowy operators, smugglers and money launderers. Laws also set minimum standards for the pay and benefits of diggers — though they are scarcely enforced, miners and experts say.

“These issues are being addressed, but it takes time,” Mr. Kamara said.

At the Bondobush mine here, the grim routine of mining is on daily display — hundreds of diggers sifting through tons of gravel. The mine is divided into areas of 210 square yards, with each controlled by a license holder. By law that person must be Sierra Leonean, but in practice the licensees are often fronts for foreign backers or migrants from the Middle East or other West African countries.

Some are paid a small sum per day, usually about 75 cents, and given tools, food and shelter in exchange for about 30 percent of whatever their backers claim to be the value of the diamonds they find. And the financiers first deduct their expenses.

A few workers have no stake in their finds but are paid a wage, usually $2 a day. Still others work solely for a share of the gravel they extract from the vast, watery pits. In most arrangements, a great deal of the risk is shouldered by the laborer.

The industry has long been dominated by outsiders, feeding a nationalism that was exploited by Foday Sankoh, leader of the Revolutionary United Front, the brutal rebel force that claimed to be liberating the mines but instead enriched itself and terrorized the populace.

Yet even with the laws requiring local control, working conditions have not improved much. The mine where Mr. Kabia works is operated by a chief who functions as a kind of local government executive. The chief, Paul N. Saquee, 46, is a former truck driver who spent the past two decades in the United States, most recently around Atlanta. Mr. Saquee’s brother Prince is the chairman of the local diamond dealers association, the first Sierra Leonean to hold that position.

Paul Saquee employs two kinds of diggers. Some are paid about a dollar a day and 30 percent of the value of their stones, which they must hand over to Mr. Saquee’s representative, another of the chief’s brothers named Tamba. He watches with hawklike vigilance as the miners dig.

Others, like Mr. Kabia, work for a percentage of the gravel they extract and own any stones they find. In theory, this means they should get a fair sale price, but dealers often exploit their ignorance.

Prince Saquee, the chief’s diamond-dealing brother, bankrolls several mines and scoffs at the notion of selling his stones to only one buyer.

“If you are working for an exporter, he will dictate the price,” he said. “To me that is indirect slavery.”

But he has no qualms about demanding precisely that arrangement from those below him on the diamond food chain. The mine owners and workers he bankrolls must sell only to him.

“For the miners, it is different,” he argued. A digger, “he depends on you. He doesn’t know the value so you as the dealer have to tell him.”

Paul Saquee, the chief, said that despite the low pay and hard working conditions, he was providing at least some form of employment to desperate people with no alternative.

“I wish that the miners would all go back to the farm, but they are here and need work,” he said.

Part of Mr. Saquee’s role is to administer a fund that sends a quarter of the government’s diamond revenues back to the community the stones came from. Kono, home to more than half of all mining license holders, received $377,900 in 2005 for a district of 475,000 people.

“I don’t believe that diamonds are the future of this country,” Mr. Saquee said. “We need to find something else to get ourselves moving.”

Indeed, the poverty rates are highest in the mining districts — Kono’s poverty rate is 20 percent higher than that in nearby Pujehun district, which is largely agricultural.

In the central bank building in Freetown, Mustapha B. Turay sorted gleaming stones into small mounds to determine their value for taxation. On a recent afternoon the country’s largest exporter, Hisham Mackie, a longtime Lebanese kingpin, brought in $2 million worth of stones bound for Antwerp, Belgium, that night.

Most had been dug by hand by workers in places like Koidu. But the paper trail does not reach all the way back to the miner, so there is no way to know how much a miner was paid. It is a gap, said Mr. Kanu, the diamond policy adviser, that can lead to the illusion that the problems brought to light by the civil war have been solved.

The journey of a diamond from Africa to a jewelry store.

Time Magazine Photo Essay

From The Economist print edition

An industry once dominated by a cartel is starting to look like any other
Panos
DIAMONDS are back on the big screen. The stones serenaded by Marilyn Monroe as a girl's best friend are now, however, portrayed by Hollywood as Africa's worst enemies. Leonardo DiCaprio may win an Academy Award for his performance in “Blood Diamond”, as a mercenary hunting for the precious rocks during the war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. But in reality, the shape of the industry—which produces an estimated $13 billion of rough stones and over $62 billion of diamond jewellery—has greatly changed since then.

Most of this transformation is due to the fact that De Beers, the company that once controlled much of the supply of rough diamonds, has loosened its grip, and a host of smaller producers are emerging. Regulators in Europe and America and governments in Africa have also promoted change, and “blood” diamonds have almost disappeared. As a result, the diamond trade is starting to look more like any other ordinary industry.

The shift, says Gareth Penny, De Beers' managing director, has been “from a supply-controlled business to a demand-driven one.” In the early 1990s the diamond giant was producing 45% of the world's rough diamonds, but selling about 80% of the total supply from its London marketing outfit, regulating the market through the careful management of a large stockpile. But sitting on a big inventory was not good for financial returns. At the same time regulators in America and Europe were calling for more competition and stories abounded about atrocities committed by diamond-financed rebels in Africa.

After new management arrived in the late 1990s, De Beers changed tack. Its main trading outfit stopped buying diamonds on the open market. The company delisted in 2001 and is now owned by Anglo American, the Oppenheimer family and the government of Botswana. It has settled its long-standing antitrust dispute with American regulators. And it has promised the European Union that it will stop buying diamonds from ALROSA, the state-owned Russian firm that extracts 20% or so of global production, by 2009 in order to promote competition. Today, De Beers sells about 45% of all rough diamonds, and its share of production is about 40%.

As the market becomes more dynamic, De Beers is investing heavily in exploration, developing four mines in Canada and South Africa and selling underperforming operations. The diamond giant has established a chain of jewellery shops in a joint venture with LVMH, a luxury-goods group. It now spends about $200m a year on marketing, which has helped to boost sales of diamonds, particularly in Asia. Marketing is also vital in persuading people to buy the real thing. Synthetic diamonds have captured 90% of the industrial market, but have made few inroads into jewellery, at least so far.

Smaller firms such as Kimberley Diamond Group, Trans Hex and Gem Diamonds are racing to fill the gap between large producers and exploration juniors. Petra Diamonds, another small firm, has just bought one of De Beers' South African mines. Petra is confident that it can make money from the loss-making mine, unburdened by De Beers' costs. It is also about to start producing in Sierra Leone, and is optimistic about its exploration in Angola, where it is working with BHP Billiton. The company expects to produce 500,000 carats by 2010, up from 175,000 carats last year. But this is still tiny next to the record 51m carats De Beers produced in 2006.

Meanwhile Lev Leviev, a secretive diamond tycoon, has been setting up cutting and polishing facilities in Africa, buying some rough stones direct from governments and moving into production, putting further pressure on De Beers. “Leviev has been a driving force behind the revolution at De Beers,” says Richard Chase of Ambrian Partners, an investment bank, though Mr Penny shrugs this off.

What is certain is that Africa, which produces 60% of the world's diamonds (see chart), wants to do more than just supply rough stones. “De Beers has failed to properly appraise the aspirations of African governments,” says Chaim Even-Zohar, a prominent diamond specialist. “Now it is payback time.” Gone will be the days when African diamonds were shipped to London to be sorted and aggregated in lots before being sold.

In January the firm agreed with Namibia's government that all diamonds produced by their joint venture would be sorted at home, and about $300m worth of gems, just under half the output, would also be sold locally. Last week De Beers, which has already sold 26% of its South African arm to a black-owned consortium, said it would merge its Namaqualand mine with a state-owned diamond firm to create a new independent local producer. And by 2009, all De Beers stones from around the world will be sent to a swanky glass building in Botswana's capital to be aggregated. All this shows that mineral resources need not always be a curse.

African producers are also keen to cut and polish their own diamonds, which adds 50% or so to the value of rough stones, and even move into the jewellery business. Although it remains a big trading hub, Antwerp is no longer the world's cutting and polishing centre, and Israel has suffered as well. Almost all diamonds are now cut and polished in India or China, but African producers hope to get a share of the business.

And what of blood diamonds? Today, says Alex Yearsley of Global Witness, a pressure group, they make up a tiny fraction of world production. But Mr DiCaprio's on-screen antics have raised awareness of the issue. Although it is a big step forward, the Kimberley process—a certification scheme set up in 2002 to ensure that diamonds are not paying for weapons—is not perfect, and dodgy diamonds can still find their way onto the market. De Beers says the film's release in America, just before the crucial Christmas season, did not dent jewellery sales. But more customers now want to know where their diamonds come from and want a guarantee that they are clean.

This is good news for those producers that can demonstrate the provenance of their stones. Canada has developed a certification scheme for its diamonds, and since 2004 De Beers has been selling some stones in Asia with its Forevermark, a microscopic engraving that guarantees their origin. Small producers, such as Petra Diamonds, are following suit.

Even so, Global Witness says the industry is not much more transparent than it was a few years ago. Smuggling is rife, especially in countries like Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and illegal diamonds still find their way to rich countries. Some 1m informal miners pan the rivers of Africa for alluvial diamonds, often in appalling conditions. The Kimberley process was designed to stem the flow of conflict diamonds, says Willie Nagel, an international diamond trader who was instrumental in setting it up, but “conflict-free diamonds should not be confused with ethical diamonds.” Mining firms and voluntary groups are working to improve matters. Hollywood may not be looking to a Leonardo for its next portrayal of the industry—but it is by no means certain that it will be seeking a Marilyn either.

Lights! Decapitation! Action!

AP

White and black against global evilSUDDENLY, it seems, Hollywood cannot get enough of Africa. The past year or so has seen the release of a clutch of films set in Africa, all with big stars, big production values—and, unusually, big ideas.

First, in 2005, there was “Lord of War”, starring Nicholas Cage as an arms-dealer in Liberia. Then came “The Constant Gardener”, with its duplicitous drugs companies and deceitful diplomats. Recent films include “The Last King of Scotland”, about Uganda's psychopathic dictator, Idi Amin, and lastly “Blood Diamond”, a story of child soldiers and conflict diamonds (those that help fuel wars) set against the backdrop of Sierra Leone's civil war in the 1990s. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, it has made the biggest stir, and is in the running for several Oscars at this month's awards ceremony. And before all of these, in 2004, was “Hotel Rwanda”, about the Rwandan genocide of ten years before.

These films are not the feel-good productions that Americans and Britons tend to churn out. They are gritty thrillers immersing viewers in all the nastier aspects of life in today's Africa. Filmed in refugee camps, slums and hospitals rather than out on safari, they make the aristocratic, white world and luscious landscapes of Sydney Pollack's “Out of Africa” look quaint by comparison.

But that was a generation ago. Directors now go to Africa to find stories about arms-trading, genocide, famine and corporate wrongdoing that have filled the hearts and minds of a new generation of Westerners reared on Live Aid and anti-globalisation protests. Instead of old-style product-placement, the new films specialise in NGO-placement.

“Blood Diamond” hails Global Witness, a small British charity that first publicised the ill-effects of conflict diamonds, and the UN's World Food Programme (WFP), which also featured in “The Constant Gardener”. The WFP's spokesman says “it is wonderful publicity”—and even better since the stars now get involved in the issues themselves.

However, this happy new synergy between audience, issues and movie-makers only goes so far. The main protagonists in most of these films are white, so they are still principally about the white Westerner's experience of Africa—just as in “Out of Africa”. Edward Zwick, the director of “Blood Diamond”, argues that it would be “disingenuous” to pretend that he could have got the same financial backing and publicity if he had tried to make a film with a black storyline and a black star instead of one centring on a white mercenary and a (pretty) white female journalist. Hollywood's parameters have expanded a bit, but they are still there.

Jan 25th 2007 | ABIDJAN
From The Economist print edition

One of Africa's worst-run countries faces violent change

AFPA GENERAL strike has kept banks, schools and markets shut for more than two weeks; tens of thousands of people have been on the streets to demand the ailing president's departure; and more than 40 of their number have been shot dead by the security forces. Guinea's president, Lansana Conté, who has survived assassination attempts and coup plots, has never been closer to losing power.

The strike, the third in the past year, has become overtly political in tone: the trade union leaders' main demand now is for Mr Conté to step down. It was started on January 10th to protest against the freeing of two of his friends, who had been accused of corruption; it is widely believed that the president went to the prison in person to get them freed. But the roots of the unrest lie in the country's dismal economic state, which the unions and protesters blame on the president.

For despite vast reserves of bauxite and diamonds, Guinea is in a terrible mess, and life for ordinary people continues to worsen. A recent UN report concluded that 11% of the population struggle to eat even a meal a day. Civil servants often earn just $30 a month, while the price of basic necessities such as rice keeps rising. A recent survey by Transparency International, a Berlin-based anti-corruption watchdog, suggested that Guinea was the most corrupt country in Africa, and many of the president's detractors believe that the problem starts at the top. Mr Conté, who took power in a coup in 1984, has been sick for several years. He is rarely seen in public, preferring the comfort of his farm in the countryside. His hold on power and influence on events in his country have regressed at the same pace as his health.

Emboldened by their initial success at bringing the country to a standstill, disrupting even the bauxite industry, union leaders then called for Mr Conté to resign, and organised a rally in the capital, Conakry, for January 22nd. Chanting protesters marched on the presidential palace. The security forces fired on the demonstrators, killing at least 30 and injuring more than a hundred. Since then, however, there have been talks between union leaders and the government.

Gilles Yabi of the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think-tank, suggests that Mr Conté should appoint a prime minister, with wide powers, to form a unity government. Other countries, he says, should help out but “must not encourage, in the name of artificial stability, a flimsy compromise that will only hold for a few months”. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a regional group, wants the presidents of Nigeria and Senegal to mediate. As The Economist went to press, Mr Conté agreed to appoint a prime minister. But the strike was continuing.

POSTED: 5:30 p.m. EST, December 15, 2006
By Jeff Koinange
CNN

MBUJI-MAYI, Democratic Republic of the Congo (CNN) -- At a bend in a tributary of the mighty Congo River, dirt-poor villagers feverishly pan for the shiny stones that have proved as elusive as they are rare -- diamonds.

Hundreds stake their claims here hoping to strike it rich in this, the fourth-largest diamond-producing country in the world. Officials say that last year, diamond exports from the Congo grew to $2 billion, nearly one-fifth of the country's gross domestic product.

But what these villagers don't know -- or hardly care about -- is the fact these are some of the precious stones that have, according to experts, indirectly fueled some of Africa's dirtiest wars from Sierra Leone to Liberia and from Angola to Congo. They're known as conflict diamonds or, more bluntly, blood diamonds. And in this corner of the Congo, men and boys constantly mine, hoping to find a way out of poverty.

To get to Congo's diamond district, visitors fly to Mbuji-Mayi at the center of this vast nation, then drive for about 90 minutes on dirt roads until they arrive at Dipumba.

Once a village, the entire landscape is now pockmarked with holes the size of water wells, holes that a man can barely squeeze into.

But squeeze they do, and villagers like 40-year old Jean Pierre Mbenga and his five-man team arrive at daybreak. Their tools are simple -- an old pick, a simple rope, a torn sack. They don't have shoes, gloves, hard hats or flashlights.

Mbenga makes his way down into the tiny well. The mine shafts are deep, dark, cold and very dangerous. The walls are unsecured. Accidents are frequent and many miners have been buried alive in these pits.

Yet Mbenga knows he has to keep digging. He has a wife and eight hungry children at home, including a two-week-old son.

"It's terrible here," he says. "All we do is work from morning to evening and most of the time we come up empty. I can't think of a worse way to make a living."

But many here don't have a choice. Work is hard to come by and many are tired of fighting in the various militias that roam these badlands. These men and boys want to make an honest living.

But to them it just seems that the poor seem poorer than ever.

Mbenga, who's been digging for diamonds for more than two decades, says he once dug up a one-carat stone that he sold for $500.

He thought he had finally struck it rich, but by the time he divided the earnings among his team and paid the man who leased the land where he digs, he had less than $50 left.

"That's the life of a miner here," he says, "We work and work until our hands bleed and all we end up with is peanuts."

I ask Mbenga who buys his diamonds.

"Anyone," he says, "just as long as they have the money."

And that's exactly the problem.

Legitimate diamond sellers and activists have argued to change the system for the past decade. They want to curtail the illicit sale of diamonds to unscrupulous middlemen and, in some cases, militia warlords who use the diamonds in exchange for arms to fuel Africa's endemic civil wars.

It happened in Sierra Leone in the 1990s, where as many as 200,000 people were reportedly killed and many others had their limbs hacked off by rebels determined to take control of the country's rich diamond deposits.

Sierra Leone is the setting for the new movie "Blood Diamond." Leonardo DiCaprio plays a crooked Zimbabwean ex-mercenary who searches for a rare pink diamond. (The film was produced by Warner Bros. Pictures, which like CNN.com is owned by Time Warner.)

It's a movie that should stir controversy about just how careful the precious gem industry has been in making sure diamonds are bought and sold legally.

In the Congo, a country that has seen its fair share of civil wars and where corruption and mismanagement are rife, it's hardly conceivable that diamond sales can be fully monitored, when lawlessness and a frontier mentality are prevalent in cities like Mbuji-Mayi.

Most of Congo's diamonds are exported through a state-run company, but in a country that was overrun by one dictator after another for more than 40 years, experts say that getting diamonds out of the Congo illegally has been an-all-too-common occurrence.

That has fueled war, coups and more war, leaving many Congolese poor and desperate.

On this day, Mbenga finds nothing and on his way home he buys his family the only thing he can -- a tiny loaf of bread. He knows he has to go back down into the shaft first thing tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that.

He is determined to find wealth down there no matter the cost, human and otherwise, or how long it takes.

'Blood Diamond' tries to mix African politics and action.
By Peter Rainer | Film critic of The Christian Science Monitor

Hollywood has found Africa. On the heels of such films as "The Constant Gardener," "Hotel Rwanda," "The Last King of Scotland," and "Catch a Fire," we have "Blood Diamond," set in Sierra Leone in 1999 when rebels are waging war on the government.
Much more so than those earlier films, "Blood Diamond" freely combines political grandstanding with action-adventure heroics. The filmmakers demonstrate how the diamond trade in Africa perpetuates corruption and bloodshed, but they also want to deliver a rip-roaring saga.

It is not easy to make this sort of combination work; usually one or the other element falls down. In this case, the spectacular action sequences take precedence over the more didactic political material. Still, one understands the impulse on the part of director Edward Zwick and screenwriter Charles Leavitt to make something grander than a conventional political thriller.

The film begins with a rebel attack on a village. A local fisherman, Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), is enslaved and his family is forced to flee. Laboring in the mining camps, Solomon unearths an enormous diamond and, before escaping during a government raid, hides it.

Zimbabwean diamond smuggler and self-described soldier-of-fortune Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) learns of the diamond and attempts to coax the wary Solomon into retrieving it to save his family. An American journalist, Maddy Brown (Jennifer Connelly), gets wind of Danny's machinations and tries to enlist him in her investigation into the trafficking of "conflict stones" - diamonds mined in war zones and laundered by Western buyers.

To the filmmakers' credit, the relationship between Solomon and Danny never devolves into buddy-buddyism. Solomon is right not to trust Danny, whose charm is just one of many tools in his survival kit. (His stunning brutality is another tool.) The movie also doesn't overdo the romantic angle between Danny and Maddy, at least for most of the way. Maddy is so wised-up to Danny's ploys that, for her, yielding to him would be tantamount to defecting to the dark side.

The most powerful sequences in the movie are the raids that suddenly erupt out of nowhere. Rebels barge through the landscape in their trucks, with hip-hop music blaring like some infernal anthem. When Solomon's 12-year-old son Dia (Caruso Kuypers) is kidnapped by them and brainwashed into being a child soldier, the story's full horror comes through. This bright boy and good son changes into a zombie, and his transformation stands in for all the horrors that war wreaks.

Zwick in the past has often attempted to mix polemics and action and sometimes, as in "Glory," he has succeeded remarkably well. But too often in "Blood Diamond," Leavitt's script lets him down. Especially in the first half of the movie, the characters, particularly Maddy, are mouthpieces for the exposition. The dialogue is stiff. Granted, it's extremely difficult to score political points and still keep everything sharp and lifelike. But it can be done. Roger Spottiswoode's great "Under Fire," about journalists in Nicaragua in 1979, is the best proof.

As strong as "Blood Diamond" is in its best moments, I wish it had been even harder-edged. DiCaprio is remarkable - his work is almost on par with his performance this year in "The Departed" - but ultimately he is playing a swashbuckling good guy. He's in the cynical-on-the-outside soft-on-the-inside Bogart mold from "Casablanca."

By contrast, Hounsou's Solomon, although his part is underwritten, has a gravity and force that makes most of the movie's romanticisms seem forced and inauthentic. His son is the real diamond to be retrieved and he never lets us forget it. Grade: B+

• Rated R for strong violence and language.

A new Hollywood movie is raising tough questions about Africa's bloody diamond trade. Fortune's Vivienne Walt reports from the pits.

By Vivienne Walt, Fortune
December 7 2006: 12:13 PM EST

(Fortune Magazine) -- Sahr Amara is stooped low, knee-deep in a muddy river, in the fifth hour of his workday. As he has each day for the past week, the 18-year-old will earn a stipend of only 7 cents, enough to buy himself a bowl of porridge to see him through the day.

Yet he returns every morning to dig in the wilting heat on the edge of Koidu, a town in eastern Sierra Leone, hunting for the one thing he says could transform his life: a diamond. Since he is the oldest of six children - three others have died of diseases - much of his family's future rests on his prospects.

The prize: A seller displays two raw diamonds on the streets of Koidu in Sierra Leone.

The pits: Hundreds of miners search for diamonds at Congo Creek outside Koidu in eastern Sierra Leone, part of an army of one million Africans who earn pennies a day in the $60 billion industry.

The diamond dealer: Abdollai Koroma runs his trading business from a chair under a shade tree in a back alley of Koidu.

CNN's Ali Velshi looks at the history of diamonds and it may have you thinking blood, not bling. (December 7)
Play video

"If I find a big diamond, I can afford to go to school, I can learn, and then I can help my family and even my village," he says. So far the plan has proved elusive; he has found no gems during his first week of work. "It's not easy," he says. "I think it depends on God."

Whether or not divine intervention leads Amara to a big find, his tale is anchored in a much more earthly economy: the $60-billion-a-year diamond industry, which has built its growth on dreams of love rather than of raw survival.

Koidu, whose diamonds have been mined since the 1930s, is thousands of miles away - and a galaxy removed - from the glittering displays in jewelry stores in New York, Tokyo and London. It is set in a country where the average man earns $220 a year and dies at 39. In the dwellings along Koidu's dirt tracks, residents eat dinner by candlelight not because it is romantic but because there is no electricity in town, just as there are no telephone lines and little indoor plumbing.

In short, it is hard to imagine a starker contrast between Amara's world and that of the people who might one day wear whatever diamond he finds, and they live in deep ignorance of each other. When asked what diamonds are used for, Amara draws a blank. "I only know they are valuable," he says.

Hollywood weighs in
But after 130 years of diamond mining in Africa, that ignorance is unraveling fast as the two worlds collide over the image of diamonds. The conflict, which has rocked the industry in recent years, may reach fever pitch this month with the release of the movie "Blood Diamond." Set in wartime Sierra Leone during the late 1990s, the film depicts a South African diamond smuggler, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, trying to recover a rare pink stone from a local fisherman whom rebels have forced to dig in the diamond pits.

The story line - a mixture of villainy and heroism - is classic Hollywood. But its roots are fact: In the 1990s rebels in Sierra Leone and Liberia financed their carnage from diamonds plucked out of the rivers and traded for arms. During a decade of war about 50,000 people were killed, and thousands had their hands hacked off by rebels.

Months before it opened, the movie had garnered media attention, aided by a marketing blitz by Warner Bros. (owned by Time Warner (Charts), parent of Fortune's publisher) and a $15 million counterattack by the World Diamond Council, an organization founded by more than 50 producers and dealers to end illegal diamond trading.

"We have been engaged in a massive educational campaign," says Eli Izakhoff, chairman and CEO of the council, which is heavily financed by De Beers, the company that sources about 40 percent of the world's diamonds, all of them from Africa. "This movie gives the industry a great story to tell." The council's message: More than 99 percent of diamonds are now from conflict-free sources, and millions of Africans have schooling and health care thanks to diamond revenues.

The movie is indeed a period piece: The civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia ended a few years ago. But the war over perceptions is just warming up. Many in the industry fear that as the end credits roll, moviegoers might glance down at their diamond rings and wonder under what circumstances the gems were dug. Unlike oil prospecting or coal mining - essentials for modern life - those questions could roil an industry whose lifeblood is ephemeral.

Controversy affects value
"Diamonds are essentially worth nothing," says Mordechai Rapaport, whose Rapaport Group price list is the industry standard. It's all about what they signify, he explains: In the case of a wedding ring, it's the guy, not the one-carat diamond. By that logic, he adds, "when a guy gives a woman a diamond and someone was killed for it, it is not worth anything."

Diamond producers and dealers did not need Hollywood to reach that conclusion. As war raged in the past decade, they realized that so-called blood diamonds carried a risk to their business that was far out of proportion to the tiny number of stones. Even during the bloodiest years no more than 15 percent of the world's diamonds were controlled by rebels in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The vast majority of diamonds, then and now, come from deep-level mines run by well-ordered international corporations, including Koidu Holdings, Sierra Leone's newest such operation, which opened in 2003 and exports $2.5 million in diamonds a month.

And although UN investigators recently found that rebels in the Ivory Coast had smuggled millions of dollars' worth of diamonds onto the world market through Ghana, blood diamonds account for only 0.2 percent of today's global supply.

But the industry's problem is far trickier than percentages. Consumers cannot be sure which diamonds are blood diamonds. And therein lies the potential for a boycott, especially since synthetic diamonds now look close to the real thing. "Diamonds are a luxury, so we depend completely on the consumer's faith," says Rory More O'Ferrall, director of external affairs for De Beers. "Anything that affects the integrity of that we need to address."

Tackling the problem took an unlikely alliance: Industry executives joined forces in 2003 with governments and the UN to end the trade of conflict diamonds. The resulting Kimberley Process Certification Scheme is a rare experiment by a major industry to monitor its own abuses. The 71 member countries agree to trade only among themselves. They inspect one another's facilities, then issue certificates declaring their diamonds conflict-free.

In theory, rigorous paperwork tries to trace all diamonds from mines to consumers. Transgressors are ousted: The Republic of Congo was banned in 2004, and Venezuela was threatened with suspension last month after reporting zero diamond exports for 2005.

But the system is hardly flawless, even in the U.S. In September the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that Customs and Treasury officials were only haphazardly enforcing the system, leaving companies to monitor themselves. Last year about 300,000 more carats were exported from than imported to the U.S. - which produces no commercial diamonds itself. Representatives from all 71 countries met last month in Botswana to try to tighten loopholes and squeeze out nonmembers. "There are fewer and fewer countries left that nonmembers can trade with," says Sue Saarnio, the U.S. State Department's representative to the November conference.

The underground diamond trade
A far grimmer assessment of the Kimberley Process can be found in the back alleys of Koidu. As the clammy heat eases off in the late afternoon, dozens of men converge on the neighborhood dubbed by the locals "Open Yei," Creole for "keep your eyes open," a reference to its thriving unlicensed diamond trading.

The action is the area's major entertainment, drawing a crowd of curious men and children. In a dirt clearing between the small wooden storefronts, Abdollai Koroma runs his business from a chair under a shade tree, clutching a yellow calculator and a jeweler's loupe in a weathered pouch. During just one hour eight men arrive with their wares wrapped in scraps of paper stuffed in their pockets. Koroma takes each stone and swirls it in his mouth before examining it briefly under the loupe. "This is 1.20 carats," he says after spitting out a glittering stone the size of a shirt button.

Koroma, who started trading diamonds at age 17, taps on his calculator, peels off a wad of banknotes, and makes his biggest purchase of the day: 200,000 leones, about $66. The previous day the neighborhood trade was equally brisk, as men gathered to sell diamonds to Komba Fillefaboa, a 47-year-old trader who began digging when he was 12. Fillefaboa says he buys dozens of stones on an average afternoon.

"We buy piece by piece and then gather them into a parcel to sell to dealers," he says. Once the parcel of diamonds is sold to a licensed dealer, illegally mined diamonds are easily mixed in.

Fillefaboa says he has no problem finding buyers, despite Sierra Leone's strict licensing laws, which ban illegal diamond dealing. Licenses are regarded as too costly and laws too cumbersome. "We are all illegal here," boasts the neighborhood's chief, Sahr Sam. "If the monitors come, we scatter."

Smuggling
In reality, government monitors rarely come to Open Yei. There are only 200 for the entire country, sharing ten motorcycles donated by the U.S. Agency for International Development. "At every level people say to us, 'If you harass us, we will just smuggle the diamonds,'" says Dan Joe Hadji, a senior monitoring officer in Koidu. "So we allow people to move around and hope and pray that they find religion" -by obeying the law.

Diamond producers and dealers frequently tout Sierra Leone as a Kimberley Process success story, since its official exports soared from near zero in 1999 to about $142 million last year, suggesting that smuggling has plummeted. Not necessarily so: The official statistics cannot be proved, says Jan Ketelaar, mine manager of Koidu Holdings and a former diamond advisor to Sierra Leone's President.

Worse, this year's exports are likely to drop about 10 percent, suggesting that bigger diamonds are being smuggled illegally, says a Western ambassador in Freetown who sits on a high-level diamond committee of diplomats and aid organizations but asked not to be identified. Director of Mines Alimany Wurie admits smuggling is widespread - perhaps as much as one-third of all Sierra Leone's diamonds.

Enforcement is nearly impossible. The frontier with Liberia, whose diamonds are banned from world trade, is just 30 miles from Koidu and riddled with old smuggling routes. Only three of the 36 border crossings into Guinea are guarded, says Hadji, and even those are left unmanned for a few days each month when border officials walk to town to collect their pay.

Yet the rampant smuggling, though illegal, does not kill. And with peace restored in West Africa, it is tempting to think of blood diamonds as little more than a dramatic movie plot. Those who have witnessed Africa's bloodletting up close say it's a mistake to relegate the issue to history, because history could repeat itself.

In any future conflict in the region, diamonds would be one of the surest ways with which to buy weapons. "Diamonds were very much the fuel for the war but not the root cause, and those root causes are still very much with us," says the Western ambassador. "Corruption, unemployment, poverty - I could well imagine another blood-diamond scenario here."

Fair trade
Faced with that stark possibility, diamond companies have begun trying to tackle the crippling poverty at the bottom of the industry, where, according to Global Witness, a British organization that has done extensive research on blood diamonds, about one million Africans earn pennies a day in the backbreaking and increasingly fruitless search for alluvial stones.

Flying low over Koidu in a twin-propeller plane shows how daunting that task is. Hundreds of men can be seen bent low in the rivers around Koidu. "They are working in absolutely horrific conditions in the hopes of striking it rich, but the majority never do," says Susie Sanders, a Global Witness researcher.

Little of the region's innate mineral wealth has filtered down to residents. "A billion dollars' worth of diamonds have come out of Sierra Leone in the last several years, and there is no electricity or water wells," says Rapaport, who toured the villages around Koidu last summer with his father, Martin, chairman of the Rapaport Group.

Shaken by the chasm between the diggers and the diamond buyers, the Rapaports are trying to start a Fair Trade association of producers along the lines of Starbucks (Charts), which buys coffee beans for a premium price from some growers, then sells them for more money to socially conscious coffee drinkers. Rapaport is predicting that the current controversy over diamonds will jolt consumers into asking retailers probing questions about the gems' origins.

If so, they are unlikely to find much information: Two years ago a survey of 40 major American retailers by Amnesty International and Global Witness found that almost none had policies in place against blood diamonds.

Rapaport believes consumers would happily pay a little extra to ensure they are buying African diamonds mined for decent wages under humane conditions. "Our idea," he says, "is that Tiffany (Charts) is going to wake up one morning and see that Cartier is selling fair-trade jewelry and say, 'Oh, my God, we need to do that.' They will change not from an ethical point of view but from greed."

In Koidu a U.S.-funded program trains diggers in how to grade and value the diamonds they find as a way of avoiding being fleeced by local traders. Last year De Beers and two activist organizations founded the Diamond Development Initiative, an international organization to train diggers in safety and economic issues, and ultimately to try to persuade many to grow crops instead. De Beers has begun a similar pilot training project in Tanzania, which it says it will replicate elsewhere in Africa if it is successful.

But for 18-year-old Sahr Amara all those projects seem abstract. His parents grow crops in a village about 20 miles from Koidu and cannot afford to buy his schoolbooks or pay his yearly tuition of 35,000 leones ($11.66). "I would like to find a diamond so I can go back to school," Amara says. "If I stay digging at this site for a long time and find nothing, maybe I will leave and try to find a job somewhere." That would leave Africa's 999,999 other diamond diggers still searching for a dream.

by Farai Chideya and Charlayne Hunter-Gault

News & Notes, December 6, 2006 · The latest news from Africa includes the release of new movie about Sierra Leone's diamond trade -- Blood Diamond -- and a milestone inaugural in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Nov 24th 2006
From Economist.com

A fairy-tale diamond returns to the market

JEWELLERY-auction catalogues, like small children, save the best for last. Among the final lots listed for Sotheby’s forthcoming three-part jewellery sale in New York is a gem the size of a postage stamp. Place your hand alongside the life-size photograph in the catalogue and you can see that the simple, platinum-mounted gem stretches well below the knuckle. Hard to imagine wearing it.

Yet even more impressive than the size is the colour, a cool delicate pink, Sugar Plum Fairy rather than Barbie doll.

Unusually for a large gem, this jewel would suit a girl just as well as it would a woman. Which Sotheby’s hopes will add to its appeal.

In the past few years young women in Hong Kong and China have been avid buyers of pink diamonds, gradually pushing up the prices. The bigger the stones, the more they are coveted. A one-carat gem sells for $30,000-40,000, a ten-carat for $150,000-175,000 per carat. A pink diamond this size―28.03 carats―is expected to fetch $250,000 a carat.

Natural pink diamonds are unusual. High-pressure heat treatment can give a very faint pink, though the result is more often a yellow or a green. This stone is a rare freak of nature, the largest fancy intense purple-pink diamond to be graded by the Gemmological Institute of America. It was probably found in Brazil, or, very possibly, Angola. It was faceted in New York, its rectangular cut determined to maximise the beauty of the stone and minimise waste. The finished gem has been graded VS2: not flawless, but good enough for imperfections to be visible only to a trained eye, through a 10x loupe.

If you need to ask the price ...Sotheby’s is keen for prospective owners to know that this diamond can hold its head high among other pinks in history. Some of the most famous are the “Agra”, which weighs 32.24 carats; the “Darya-i-Nur” (Sea of Light), part of the crown jewels of Iran, which is estimated to weigh between 175 and 195 carats; and the “Williamson Pink”, a brilliant-cut stone of 23.60 carats, which was given to the Queen of England, then Princess Elizabeth, on her wedding in 1947.

The impressive narrative in which Sotheby’s cloaks the gem echoes the firm's handling of its most important pictures. It has already been presented to select clients in Hong Kong, Geneva, California and Florida. For six days before the sale it will be exhibited in New York. The current owner wishes to remain anonymous, and it is being made clear that the next owner will have to be very rich indeed. The catalogue entry concludes with the unforgettable words: “Estimate on request”.

What Sotheby’s does not say is that this stone has already failed to sell once. Two years ago it was brought into Sotheby’s Geneva office, where most of the auctioneer’s biggest, and certainly its most anonymous, jewellery sales take place. The gem was taken to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, where HSBC Private Bank helped Sotheby’s arrange a discreet showing to a number of potential buyers. On May 18th 2005 it was put up for auction as an unmounted gemstone, of interest probably to few outside the trade. The bidding failed to reach the reserve of $7m.

Eighteen months on, Sotheby’s has changed its pitch. The reserve has dropped $500,000. The stone has been mounted as a ring. Private buyers have been trying it on. The marketing has reached out to Palm Springs and Palm Beach. As the market bubbles up and buyers swarm towards prime assets, this makes perfect sense. Much money has already been made this year, and Wall Street bonuses are still to be paid out. If all goes well, listen out for the rumble of other sellers, rushing for the bandwagon.

The fancy intense purple-pink diamond, lot 393, will be sold in Sotheby’s “Magnificent Jewels” auction in New York on December 6th, estimate $6.5m-7m

POSTSCRIPT: The pink diamond failed to reach its reserve. Bidding stopped at $5.7m.

Nov 9th 2006 | KONO, MONROVIA AND SEGUELA
From The Economist print edition

The trade in conflict diamonds

AT A huge open-pit diamond mine near the rebel-occupied town of Seguela in northern Côte d'Ivoire, labourers toil under a fierce sun as a rebel soldier circles the perimeter of the pit. “We have taken over the mine to provide security,” says another rebel official, as a gang of miners looks on, bemused. Whatever the rebels' explanation for their presence at the lucrative Bobi mine, UN experts say that, in fact, mines like this one near Seguela are producing diamonds worth up to $23m that are being smuggled to Mali and Ghana, violating UN sanctions and helping to fund the rebels' war effort.

Rebel use of the mines is another setback for attempts to control the flow of “conflict” or “blood” diamonds that have helped to fund some of the bloodiest wars in Africa, and particularly in countries such as Sierra Leone and Liberia. On September 29th the World Diamond Council, an influential industry group, suggested that all Ghanaian rough-diamond exports, worth $34m last year, be suspended to ensure that Ivorian diamonds were not being illegally exported too.

Global Witness, a pressure-group, has said that the Kimberley Process, the certification procedure agreed in 2003 by 70-odd governments in partnership with the industry and some NGOs and without which countries cannot legally import or export diamonds, now risks becoming “little more than a paper-pushing exercise”. And if all this were not bad enough for the diamond industry, it is bracing itself for yet more bad publicity: the release of the film “Blood Diamond”, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a diamond-smuggling mercenary in Sierra Leone's 1991-2002 civil war, when rebels hacked off the limbs of their victims in bloody battles to control the country's diamond-producing areas.

The self-regulating Kimberley Process has failed to interrupt the myriad diamond-trading networks that operate across the loose borders of west Africa. In Sierra Leone, for instance, official exports last year stood at about $140m, up from a paltry $1.2m in 1999. The Kimberley Process may have encouraged many diamond miners to sell to authorised dealers, but experts believe that between $30m and $160m-worth of diamonds are still smuggled out of the country each year. Meanwhile, an unknown quantity of diamonds is smuggled into Sierra Leone from neighbouring countries, for certification by the Kimberley Process.

Nor is Sierra Leone's diamond industry benefiting its people as it should. In a country where corruption was widely blamed for the onset of war, the arrest of the son of the mineral-resources minister on suspicion of diamond-trafficking is a worrying sign. The government has resisted use of a digital-mapping system that could improve its poorly administered concession-licensing. Over 2,000 small licences, some of them fronts for government officials, go virtually unmonitored; the system seems incapable of picking out illegal dealers and agents. Meanwhile, the government collects only an estimated $7m from licences, royalties and taxes on diamonds.

While Sierra Leone struggles to control its diamond sector, neighbouring Liberia, also recovering from civil war, complains that it is being unfairly punished for its slow implementation of Kimberley Process recommendations. “This country is desperately in need of revenue and illicit mining will continue, you cannot control it completely,” says Eugene Shannon, Liberia's new minister of mines. Exploration companies claim there are significant deposits to exploit (thereby helping to replenish the government's coffers), but they must instead wait for the lifting of UN sanctions, which the Security Council has just extended. The minister's attitude annoys campaigners wanting more effective curbs on conflict diamonds. Liberia's government needs all the money it can get.

Custom artistry at Green Lake Jewelry Works has a growing clientele

By DEBERA CARLTON HARRELL
P-I REPORTER

Jim Tuttle has had to move his business four times in 10 years, but that's a good thing.

Green Lake Jewelry Works has relocated to a 7,200-square-foot former restaurant in Northgate that showcases artists at work as well as the latest computer technology and a gleaming inventory.

Tuttle founded his first Seattle shop at the north end of Green Lake as a one-man, 500-square-foot operation. After outgrowing two other Green Lake sites, he now runs the business with his wife, two daughters and 35 trained artisans.

"It's crazy," said Tuttle of the 20 percent to 30 percent growth his shop has experienced each year since he moved the family from Atlanta.

There are reasons for the success.

Tuttle, a jeweler who spent years "on the bench" creating jewelry sold by large mall stores or chains, decided to step away from his bench and the wholesale model of selling jewelry. Noting that many sales clerks did not have the training to determine whether some pieces could be created or repaired, he decided to make a go of an artist-run, handcrafted business selling reasonably priced items.

He listened to customers -- who wanted everything from heirloom repairs to "conflictfree" diamonds -- and decided jewelers should be the sales clerks. His business took off beyond anything he anticipated.

A visit to Green Lake Jewelry Works yields some clues to his success. Open and airy, Tuttle and his artists designed and transformed the former Copper Sky restaurant into a store that looks as unique as its custom-made rings, bands, brooches, earrings and pendants. Warm wood paneling and high windows surround a flat stone fireplace, where idea-gathering customers settle on comfy sofas to flip through books and magazines. Visitors walk across a newly painted floor with rust-, gold- and blue-scrolled patterns to check out items already in stock.

Artists or gemologists step away from their own benches to work with customers, discussing and refining ideas, then sketching designs or creating 3-D computer models of pieces.

Ellie Lee, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design now working as a jeweler and computer-aided design modeler, showed a visitor various views of an elegant one-carat diamond ring framed by platinum curves and baguettes, or channel-set diamonds. The design earned instant oohs and aahs from onlookers.

Other artists work with microscopes, setting stones, engraving silver bands by hand, casting wax models or creating intricate filigree by curling, twisting and bending tiny threads of wire.

"I think we kept growing because there's really not another store like this," said Krista Tuttle, 26, the store's production manager who is also, like her younger sister Melissa, a trained artist.

"I think my father's philosophy is pretty unique," Krista said. "We'll try pretty much anything. It isn't very often that we'll tell a customer we can't do something."

Although conflict-free diamonds, for example, are not the store's main source of revenue, they have been popular. "Conflict-free" refers to diamonds, usually mined in Canada, that are tracked and certified -- and usually large enough to be laser-engraved with serial numbers -- showing that they have not been trafficked and sold for cash to finance terrorism, civil wars or other illegal activities.

"There is a growing trend for people wanting to know the source of their diamonds," said Robert Cosentino, founder of the Conflict-Free Diamond Council in Washington, D.C.

"It has been about 10 years since news broke about what was going on in Africa, and people are becoming more and more aware about the exploitation of natural resources to convert into cash, then cash into arms. We're particularly concerned about diamonds, because they're easy to carry and conceal."

He said he expects awareness to grow with an upcoming Leonardo DiCaprio movie, "The Blood Diamond," set amid a civil war in Sierra Leone. "Blood diamond" is another name for diamonds mined and sold in war zones.

"The council realizes the only way to keep blood or conflict diamonds off the market is if consumers themselves start demanding that their diamonds are certified," Cosentino said. "I'm not familiar with the (Green Lake Jewelry Works) store. But I'm not surprised it's doing well in Seattle because the city has very socially conscious consumers who think about the impacts of their purchasing decisions."

In the entryway of the new store is one of two high-tech mills that use tapered steel needles to cut wax models into designed forms, guided by specialized software produced by Robert McNeel & Associates in Seattle. While other industries have long used software to model products, Tuttle is among the few using computer-aided design for jewelry, although its use is growing.

Tuttle says CAD has greatly enhanced his business, a boon to a man who says he "knows what good jewelry should look like but wasn't trained to sketch."

"We would not have grown so rapidly, doing such specialized work, without the CAD," Tuttle said. "But I also think it comes down to basic business. I knew I'd be happy if I could just make good jewelry at good prices, to do what I knew, and still support my family."

IF YOU GO
Green Lake Jewelry Works
550 N.E. Northgate Way
Hours: Monday, Friday-Saturday,
10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Tuesday-Thursday,
10 a.m.-8 p.m.; Sunday 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
206-527-1108
www.greenlakejewelry.com

P-I reporter Debera Carlton Harrell can be reached at 206-448-8326 or deberaharrell@seattlepi.com.

Six illegal miners have been shot dead in the Democratic Republic of Congo's main diamond mine, Miba, near the central town of Mbuji-Mayi.
The diamond workers' union blamed the deaths last week on armed guards who work at the mine, known as "suicidals".

A BBC correspondent in DR Congo says illegal miners are often killed when pits fall in on them.

The Miba mine produces diamonds worth $6m-8m every month and attracts up to 10,000 illegal miners a day.

Deadly

Sources in Mbuji-Mayi told the BBC's Arnaud Zajtman that the shoot-out happened at night between two groups of "suicidals" who were fighting over a diamond-rich deposit.

But union official Jean Marie Kabuya Mulamba said those killed were unarmed miners.

Every week an average of four or five miners are killed.
But the miners' union said this latest incident is the most deadly in recent months.

Miba manager Gustave Luabeya said that 300 armed policemen and 1,000 unarmed private guards are not enough to prevent the clandestine miners from accessing the mine.

But he insisted that none of the guards had been involved in the incident.

Clandestine miners live on less than $1 a day.

Local inhabitants say the mine does not bring any profit to the local area.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/africa/5254006.stm

Published: 2006/08/07 16:42:55 GMT

© BBC MMVII

The following are a selection of important articles that relate to the topic of conflict diamonds. Additional Newsbriefs and Articles are available in the News section under the topic 'Conflict'. If you are aware of an article that should be listed here please email news@diamonds.net. You are also encouraged to share your views in the DiamondTrade Forum.

http://www.diamonds.net/selectednews.asp?list=1

http://www.amnestyusa.org/diamonds/d4.html