Global Witness: Blood Diamonds Bloodier Than We Ever Imagined

Global Witness has had enough.

Earlier this week, the London-based organization that "campaigns against natural resource-related conflict and corruption and associated environmental and human rights abuses," finally pulled out of the Kimberley Process, an "international certification scheme established to stop the trade in blood diamonds."

"Nearly nine years after the Kimberley Process was launched, the sad truth is that most consumers still cannot be sure where their diamonds come from, nor whether they are financing armed violence or abusive regimes" Charmian Gooch, a founder of Global Witness, said in a statement. "The scheme has failed three tests: it failed to deal with the trade in conflict diamonds from Côte d'Ivoire, was unwilling to take serious action in the face of blatant breaches of the rules over a number of years by Venezuela and has proved unwilling to stop diamonds fuelling corruption and violence in Zimbabwe. It has become an accomplice to diamond laundering -- whereby dirty diamonds are mixed in with clean gems."

To be sure, Global Witness, which first exposed the problem of blood diamonds in 1998 and played an integral role in establishing the Kimberley Process -- by which major jewelry retailers including Tiffany (TIF) and Zales (ZLC) abide -- isn't giving up.

It's simply giving up on KP.

"There's nothing that will bring us back, this is really a permanent move," Annie Dunnebacke, senior campaigner for Global Witness, tells me. "We just don't see how the process can get better."

The "catalyst, the final test," Dunnebacke explains, "was Marange."

From Global Witness:

In a shocking move, the Kimberley Process recently authorised exports from two companies operating in the controversial Marange diamond fields in Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean army seized control of the area in 2008, killing around 200 miners. Mining concessions were then granted in legally questionable circumstances to several companies, some of them associated with senior figures in Robert Mugabe's Zanu PF party. Newspapers have reported that the Zimbabwean Central Intelligence Organisation, the state security service aligned with Mugabe whose members are accused of committing acts of violence against opposition supporters, directly benefits from off-budget diamond revenues.

From Charmian Gooch:

Over the last decade, elections in Zimbabwe have been associated with the brutal intimidation of voters. Orchestrating this kind of violence costs a lot of money. As the country approaches another election there is a very high risk of Zanu PF hardliners employing these tactics once more and using Marange diamonds to foot the bill. The Kimberley Process's refusal to confront this reality is an outrage."

From Alfred Brownell, President of Green Advocates, Liberia:

The Kimberley Process has effectively given up on Zimbabwe. KP member governments and the diamond industry seem ready to turn their back on the interests of Zimbabwe's citizens, the public good and the principles on which the Kimberley Process was founded."

The spectacular no-confidence vote by Global Witness brings into stark relief the abject collapse of KP.

In 2006, at the opening session of the Kimberley Process plenary meeting, World Diamond Council Chairman Eli Izhakoff insisted that "failure is not an option."

The cocksure Izhakoff asserted that any doubts regarding Kimberley were "absurd and unjust" and having less than full faith in the process "defies logic."

Logicians be damned, Annie Dunnebacke believes industry is the only entity able to make an impact.

"Governments have lacked the political will to hold one another to account," Dunnebacke says. "There needs to be a switch from an inter-governmental system to the companies themselves, with specific provisions for industry to take control of its supply chain."

However, past efforts by the diamond industry have not been particularly impressive.

"This problem was not discovered yesterday," Dunnebacke says. "The industry has had a huge amount of time to come to grips with this."

Indeed, in 2004 -- just one year after the Kimberley Process was established -- Amnesty International and Global Witness released a report [PDF] titled: Déjà Vu: Diamond Industry Still Failing to Deliver on Promises.

It was all downhill from there, with rape, murder, and unspeakable violence simply a part of doing business.

Thus, in 2009, Ian Smillie -- one of the key architects of KP -- broke ties with the organization, calling the Process "ineffective."

"I feel that I can no longer in good faith contribute to a pretense that failure is success, or to the kind of debates we have been reduced to," Smillie wrote in his resignation letter.

The same year, Georgette Gagnon, Africa director at Human Rights Watch, declared, "This diamond monitoring body has utterly lost credibility."

And, in February 2010, Martin Rapaport -- another principal behind the Kimberley Process -- resigned from the board of the World Diamond Council, saying, "Instead of eliminating blood diamonds, the KP has become a process for the systematic legalization and legitimization of blood diamonds."

Sadly, the Kimberley Process is far from the only initiative to fail the people it was intended to protect.

Back in April, Minyanville's Lila MacLellan explored the chocolate industry and the "child and slave-like labor used to harvest cocoa in the nations where most of the world's supply is grown."

"In 2001," she wrote, "major chocolate-making companies, including Hershey (HSY), Mars, and Nestle, signed something called the Harkin-Engel Protocol, which called on governments, exporters, and major stakeholders to eradicate the worst forms of child labor in the industry," in addition to coca exporters like Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Cargill.

But, like the Kimberley Process, Harkin-Engel, introduced by Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), "did not see its goals met by its initial 2005 deadline, nor could it claim success by its extended deadline of 2008, according to a study by researchers at Tulane University in New Orleans."

Though Hershey spokesman Kirk Saville told CNN that "The protocol's value is seen in measurable progress on the ground," the US State Department counts more than 109,000 children in Cote d'Ivoire's cocoa industry still toiling for little to no pay and estimates 10,000 of those to be "victims of human trafficking or enslavement."

The International Labor Organization's 2005 "Minors out of Mining" initiative also fell short of cleaning up abuses in West Africa's gold belt, which includes Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal, as has the Malian government's National Action Plan for the Elimination of Child Labor.

A report released yesterday by Human Rights Watch called "A Poisonous Mix: Child Labor, Mercury, and Artisanal Gold Mining in Mali," found that children as young as six continue to "carry loads heavier than their own weight, climb into unstable shafts, and touch and inhale mercury, one of the most toxic substances on earth." For this privilege, some of them are "sexually abused or engage in sex work to survive."

"These children literally risk life and limb," says Juliane Kippenberg, senior children's rights researcher at Human Rights Watch.

Closer to home, even Coca-Cola (KO) has been called out in the past by human rights groups for labor violations.

Coke relies on a global network of independent bottlers, who buy syrup from Coke's Atlanta headquarters, add carbonated water, then package and distribute the finished product -- not entirely unlike the way McDonald's (MCD) sells burgers to franchisees who warm and package them for sale to the public.

In Colombia, a decades-long civil war resulted in thousands of assassinations, kidnappings, and cases of torture at the hands of right-wing paramilitary groups -- including the killings of eight people who worked for Coca-Cola bottlers after they attempted to organize.

And, in the 1980s, Coke dealt with a similar situation in Guatemala. Terry Collingsworth, a lawyer with the Washington-based International Labor Rights Fund pointed out that after Coke removed bottling plant owner John Trotter, who had been accused of collaborating with death squads to rid the operation of union leaders, and installed new management, the violence ended.

(In an interview with Minyanville, Angela Harrell, Media Relations Director at the Coca-Cola Company, said, "All allegations related to the Coca-Cola Company have been proven to be false. The lawsuit against the Colombian bottler -- an independent bottler -- was dismissed in 2006, appealed twice, and thrown out in 2009. The company and the bottlers both support the right to freely organize.")

If industry cooperation is truly the way to stop abusive labor practices, what to make of consumers taking action?

An online petition from Delly Mawazo Sesete of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, explains that he "want[s] an iPhone for the holidays this year -- and I do like the iPhone 4S -- but having monitored mining sites in eastern Congo for several years documenting human rights abuses, I have seen firsthand the rape, violence, and devastation being fueled by the trade in minerals found in Apple's (AAPL) products."

However, Delly continues, "I cannot in good conscience purchase an iPhone because the gold, tin, tungsten, and tantalum that power it on are destroying my home."

Will it work?

Probably not. Though, it can't possibly be any less effective than the Kimberley Process.

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