Conflict Diamonds
 

What is a Conflict Diamond?

A serious issue facing the jewelry industry is "conflict diamonds," which are diamonds being sold by rebel movements to fund military campaigns and terrorist activities.

A workable system for the certification of the source of uncut diamonds known as the Kimberley Process, was formally adopted in November 2002 and came into operation on January 1, 2003.

Our Guarantee to You

CanadaJewels takes the issue of Conflict Diamonds very seriously.  Canadian Diamonds that we offer are mined and cut in Canada.

CanadaJewels/JK Schmidt Jewellers is a member of the Government of Canada's  'Canadian Code of Diamond Conduct'

For non-Canadian diamonds we deal only with suppliers who warrant that the diamonds they provide have been purchased from legitimate sources not involved in funding conflict and are in compliance with United Nations Resolutions.

All our suppliers guarantee that their diamonds are conflict free, based on personal knowledge and/or written guarantees provided by the providers of these diamonds.

You give diamonds as a gift of love to those dear to you and you wear them with pride and joy.  The diamonds you purchase from CanadaJewels will not be tainted in blood!

Thank you for your support in helping rid the world of conflict "blood diamonds."

History of Conflict Diamonds

Blood diamonds got their start in 1992 in the bush war of Angola, where UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi, seeking new ways to finance his army, looked to the country's vast diamond fields to extend the smuggling business that his rebel movement had pioneered in the 1970s and 1980s.

By 1993, Savimbi had in place the world's largest diamond smuggling network, netting hundreds of million dollars a year with which he bought arms.

This pattern of using blood diamonds were used as war currency was replicated in other African conflicts, particularly in Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

It was not until 1998, when the United Nations began investigating conflict diamonds, that the issue grabbed the attention of the jewelry industry, diamond buyers and the public worldwide.

Canada's ambassador to the world body, Robert Fowler, oversaw the in-depth investigations of conflict diamonds.

The United Nations ultimately created a monitoring agency to investigate conflict diamond peddling in Angola, and the Security Council imposed sanctions on diamond dealing with UNITA in 1998.  Later this ban was expanded to Liberia and the rebel-held areas of Sierra Leone.

Only a handful of countries enacted laws to implement the sanctions, and the only known prosecution for trading in blood diamonds took place in Belgium.

The events in Sierra Leone were most horrific.  Rebels there carried out one of the most brutal military campaigns in recent history, to enrich themselves as well as the heads of the diamond industry living far removed from the killing fields.

The rebels' signature tactic was amputation of civilians.  Over the course of the ten year long war, the rebels in Sierra Leone have mutilated some 20,000 people, hacking off their arms, legs, lips, and ears with machetes and axes.  Another 50,000 to 75,000 thousand deaths have been related to the blood diamonds in Sierra Leone.

While the rebels terrorized and looted the countryside, thousands of prisoner-labourers, many of them children worked to exhaustion, digging up the blood diamonds from muddy open-pit mines.   Many ended up in shallow graves, executed for suspected theft, for lack of production, or simply for sport.

The blood diamond issue took on greater significance after the September 11th, terrorist attacks in 2001 on the United States.  Media reports cited evidence that diamonds were used by terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda, as a means of transferring their wealth globally.

Kimberly Process

Responding to the heightened attention on blood diamonds and seeking to protect their industry, southern African officials launched the Kimberley Process.

The Kimberley process provides for an international framework in which to identify and record the origin of the world's diamonds under the auspices of the diamond industry's World Diamond Council, which includes senior De Beers' executives.

References

For further information on this subject we recommend two excellent books.
Blood Diamonds by Jon Land and;
Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World's Most Precious Stones by Greg Campbell