RAPAPORT... This month, the movie “Blood Diamond” opens. The industry is scared, anticipating the worst…that people will go see the movie and stop buying diamonds. Most likely, this will not happen. People will go see the movie; most will see it as a fictional story and not relate it to real life. There are some people who are educated on the subject of conflict diamonds and who want to avoid buying them, but they probably got their information from traditional news sources and they felt this way before the movie came out. Most people going to the movie are going for entertainment purposes. They like the violent action that a movie of this sort provides. American culture and society is filled with so much violence — just turn on the television any night of the week for a range of crime shows — that many people have become desensitized to it and the movie’s violence won’t seep into their consciousness as real. Beyond that, “Blood Diamond” is being released at the same time as several other movies chronicling the violent history of Africa, making it one more in a genre that is becoming overcrowded.
It is not, however, the movie or even diamonds that are the problem. The real issue here is poverty in Africa. It is that poverty that allows the people to be exploited by greedy opportunists seeking to make fortunes at the expense of others. If people wake up in the morning and don’t know how their family will eat that day, they will do whatever it takes to make sure they can feed their family. That kind of abject poverty leaves people vulnerable to exploitation. That can change. The first step was taken when the Kimberley Process (KP) was created. While it is not perfect, it is also to be expected that when an initiative of this magnitude is implemented, there will be unforeseen events that will arise and that will need to be addressed. The KP needs to change as global circumstances shift and the diamond industry must be able to accommodate those changes to maintain credibility. Now the second step needs to be taken: The industry needs to come together on a more humanitarian level to help the people who are mining the diamonds to build a life that will give them the power to no longer be exploited by the parasites of humanity. It may be a slow start, one village at time, but one village will grow to the next and the next until the situation stabilizes. The goal is that, over time, all countries where diamonds are mined will have the same success stories as Botswana and Namibia.
Amber Michelle
Editor in Chief
Article from the Rapaport Magazine - December 2006. To subscribe click here.