JCK editor-in-chief Victoria Gomelsky and news director Rob Bates talk with human rights activist and author Ian Smillie, one of the architects of the Kimberley Process. Ian’s unlikely career began when he volunteered to teach high school in Sierra Leone more than 50 years ago and has led him to become a leading advocate for ending the “blood diamond” trade. In this episode, Ian discusses his quest to improve life for artisanal miners, the threats they face from the rise of lab-grown stones, and his new memoir about a life dedicated to combatting global poverty.

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Episode Credits
Hosts: Rob Bates and Victoria Gomelsky
Producer and engineer: Natalie Chomet
Editor: Riley McCaskill
Plugs: @jckmagazine; tracr.com

Show Notes
01:10 Volunteer work triggers a lifelong calling
07:15 The dark side of diamonds
09:15 Dawn of the Kimberley Process
15:56 Room for improvement
19:26 A voice for artisanal miners
24:52 Unexpected risks from lab-growns
26:44 An eye-opening memoir

Show Recap
Volunteer work triggers a lifelong calling
Victoria and Rob welcome Ian Smillie, a Canadian human rights activist who was instrumental in the campaign against blood diamonds.

His industry-changing career happened almost by accident. After college, Ian joined Cuso International, the Canadian equivalent of the Peace Corps, and in 1967 was assigned to teach high school in Koidu, Sierra Leone—which was then, as now, the center of the country’s diamond industry. “It was really like the Klondike, the Wild West,” he remembers.

At that time, the Sierra Leone Selection Trust was the sole company legally allowed to mine for diamonds. But since the majority of the stones were alluvial, unlicensed digging was rampant. The Sierra Leone Selection Trust had its own police force and relentlessly chased illegal diggers. “Kids would be rounded up, put in trucks, driven 100 miles down the road, and dumped in the bush,” Ian says. His students were often among them, even if they weren’t actually digging for diamonds. They usually returned within a day or two, but daily life was chaotic.

After a military coup, the situation worsened. “The government turned out to be one of the most corrupt and predatory that country has ever seen,” says Ian. Soon, formal diamond mining vanished into the hands of crooks, thugs, and international mobsters. By the 1990s a civil war was raging, and it was being fueled by diamonds.

The dark side of diamonds
Ian left Sierra Leone after his teaching assignment ended, but the experience affected him profoundly. When he returned to Sierra Leone after becoming executive director of Cuso, he was alarmed to see how dire the situation had become.

“The rebel army was brutal, chopping hands off children and women and old people to terrorize them out of the areas they wanted,” Ian explains. He and several contacts who shared his concerns joined forces to explore why the violence had gotten so bad.

Sierra Leone’s civil war was atypical of African conflicts—”it didn’t have any Cold War antecedents…it wasn’t tribal,” Ian says. He and his colleagues came to realize that diamonds were playing a pivotal role in the violence: The rebel army wanted power, and diamonds proved a convenient way to pay for arms. The rebels usurped the diamond-rich lands—the same areas where Ian had once lived and worked as a teacher—and defended them viciously. Soldiers took diamonds across the border to Liberia, where the Liberian government, led by a warlord named Charles Taylor, gave them a safe haven, training, and weapons.

“That’s when we began to realize there was a problem with diamonds,” Ian recalls.

At the same time, research by the British NGO Global Witness revealed that diamonds were also fueling the civil war in Angola, along with conflicts in the Congo and countries surrounding it.

“We began to see there was a widespread problem where diamonds were concerned,” Ian says. “They weren’t the cause of the problem, but they were being used to pay for it.”

The dawn of the Kimberley Process
In 2000, Ian and his associates released a report summarizing their findings, but the idea of “conflict diamonds” was new. The industry at first resisted recognizing any link between itself and the bloody warfare in Africa. When the United Nations Security Council established its own expert panel to study the conflict in Angola, it released a report drawing similar conclusions, and the industry knew it was time to act.

To come to grips with the blood diamond dilemma, the South African government called a meeting in 2000 in the town of Kimberley, where diamonds had been discovered in the 1860s. Attendees included representatives of NGOs and stakeholder governments from around the world, along with key industry players. Ian was among them.

The group agreed they needed a certification system to guarantee the provenance and legitimacy of diamonds. Three years and several dozen meetings later, they established the Kimberley Process (KP). “It seemed to us like a very long time, but…to get an international agreement on trade and regulation around anything, especially something as complicated as diamonds, that was almost lightning speed,” Ian says. “I realized now how fast it all happened, and that’s to everyone’s credit.”

The KP was formally established in 2003, and “shone a very bright light for the first time on the diamond industry,” Ian says. “People who had ignored rules and laws where diamonds were concerned really had to straighten up. Diamonds were being used for tax evasion, for money laundering, for gunrunning, for sanctions busting, and for conflict purposes. My guess is at least 25% of the rough diamond trade in 1999 was illicit in some way or another, maybe even more.”

Cutting off the money supply for weapons not only helped to end the wars in Sierra Leone and Angola, it also created a database for the international rough diamond trade with government statistics on the volume of diamonds being mined in, exported from, and imported to various countries.

Room for improvement
As diamond-fueled violence persisted in Brazil, Venezuela, and later Zimbabwe and the Central African Republic, it was clear the Kimberley Process didn’t have the teeth it needed to accomplish its goals, Ian says.

The framers of the process hoped to strengthen its original agreement, but that has proved impossible, largely because making any changes requires approval from every country. “Majority rule would have been much better,” Ian says.

Has the process outlived its usefulness, as KP veteran Brad Brooks-Rubin recently argued in JCK? Ian doesn’t think so. “It may not be possible to toughen it up,” he says. “But having an international body of governments that issues certificates and looks at where diamonds are coming from is important. Getting governments involved and taking some responsibility, and being held responsible by civil society and industry people is important.”

A voice for artisanal miners
While the Kimberley Process had a profound impact on the big picture for the diamond industry, it didn’t daily change life for hundreds of thousands of artisanal miners in Africa and South America.

“Artisanal diggers work under terrible conditions,” Ian says. “They’re standing knee-deep, waist-deep in mud all day long in the hot sun and they might or might not find a diamond. When they find one, they have no idea what it’s worth…and they have no way of getting a fair market price for it because the people who buy them are crooks.”

To support struggling miners, Ian helped found the Diamond Development Initiative (DDI), whose mission is to make working conditions safer and more environmentally sound, to help diggers earn market prices, and to legalize their work. “They are being chased away by their own governments and treated as criminals,” says Ian. In reality, “they are self-employed people working in the gig economy in a situation where there really isn’t any proper regulation.”

In 2020, DDI merged with Resolve, a larger Washington, D.C.–based NGO, which has continued the nonprofit’s mission and its projects.

Unexpected risks from lab-growns
Rob asks for Ian’s thoughts on lab-grown diamonds. He cites the emergence of lab-grown amethysts in the 1940s as a cautionary tale. “It knocked the bottom out of the natural [amethyst] business, and people who made a living mining amethysts are mostly gone,” Ian says. “I think that’s what could happen to diamonds. They could drag the whole business down to a point where it’s probably going to be difficult, especially at the bottom end, especially for some of those artisanal miners, to get a fair price.”

What about the idea of the natural and synthetic diamond markets cooperating rather than competing, as some in the industry have advocated? “That’s fine if you’re selling them in your store,” Ian says. “But that’s not the way it is for the [artisanal] miner. The miner is in competition…for his very livelihood.”

An eye-opening memoir
Ian says he wrote his new book, Under Development: A Journey Without Maps, to help his grandchildren understand “what Grandpa had been doing when he was getting on planes and going to all those places. As I was writing it, I realized I was trying to explain to myself what I was doing.”

Any views expressed in this podcast do not reflect the opinion of JCK, its management, or its advertisers.

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