Bright shiny ironies of poverty

My big brother used to hip me to all sorts of social and political and economic and even religious issues back when I was a kid. Sounds fun, right? I must've been like 10 or 11 years old, old enough to comprehend and discuss with him. One issue I remember very well was the African diamond mining issue because it sounded frightening. I pictured people covered in soot and falling down shafts, going blind, getting real hurt. There was plenty there for my imagination to run away with. But I was still just a kid and I pretty much just stored that info away with all the other depressing stuff he'd tell me. But it's good to see this one getting some more attention these days. My brother is much older than me, and he was this serious anti-apartheid student activist at UCLA back then in the 1980s. At that time South Africa was still the world's number one diamond supplier. The African nations now that are affected the most by illegal diamonds are Angola, DR Congo, and notoriously, Sierra Leone.

Seems like the New Orleans disaster got folks confronting poverty issues, good. I think it connects us with the broader world poverty issue. I was just like a lot of folks watching the coverage of poor folks crying out "Help!" right here in the world's richest nation and couldn't help but notice that blaring irony. So I started looking up details and read that Sierra Leone is actually in a three-way tie to be the world's poorest nation, meanwhile it is the greatest supplier of diamonds! How's that for irony? This little factoid is actually a little hard to back because the millions of rough, uncut diamonds mined in war-torn Sierra Leone are smuggled out to neighboring countries and not officially sold to big buyers until they're recorded there (but read this about Sierra Leone, its neighbors, and leading buyer De Beers).

So now I'm reminded of those public awareness commercials we saw a lot of after Sept. 11, remember the commercials that said decent, well-meaning, middle class, white collar Americans who just wanna buy a few recreational drugs were indirectly, unwittingly supporting jihadist terrorist networks? Well how about piling on a little guilt on decent, well-meaning brides and grooms and rappers? Both Al-Qaida and Hezbollah support their ops with diamond dollars. Gotta mention Pat Robertson in the same breath.

I came across this photo essay "A Trail Of Diamonds" by Kadir van Lohuizen in Foreign Policy magazine last week and it's duplicated online.

In his remix of "Diamonds Are Forever" Kanye West says:
These ain't conflict diamonds, is they Jacob?
Don't lie to me mayne.
See, a part of me sayin', 'Keep shinin'.
How? when I know of the blood diamonds.
Though it's thousands of miles away
Sierra Leone connect to what we go through today.
Over here its a drug trade, we die from drugs.
Over there they die from what we buy from drugs:
The diamonds, the chains, the bracelets, the charmses.
I thought my Jesus piece was so harmless
'Til I seen a picture of a shorty armless.

Alright, kudos to Kanye for speaking his mind even way before his live TV Bush bash. He's apparently troubled deep down about wearing diamonds (part of his rapper uniform), so he demonstrates instead that he does 'care about black people' by at least starting this discussion. The 'conflict diamonds' he mentions are stones illegally traded for weapons from parties at war (or at civil war) due to this corrupt diamond profiteering. During Sierra Leone's civil war (1991-2002) the rebels, the Revolutionary United Front, grew infamous for forcing little kids to become soldiers, making them work in the diamond mines, and even chopping off their limbs (then packing the wounds with cocaine) if they didn't produce enough stones.

I also found this: Kanye's baby step earned him a little credit from the world's last 'conscious' rapper, Maxi Jazz from some British group called Faithless. He brings the diamond issues to light in his interview with the newspaper The Independent. But regarding the rest of us he says, "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that African-Americans on MTV, whose entire video budgets probably cost less than their wristwatches, also appear to be ignorant of just how many child-soldiers are bullying child-workers in blood-soaked diamond mines in Sierra Leone."

Yes, conflict diamonds are officially illegal and, due to U.N. sanctions, are now down to a small percent of all illicit diamonds (themselves just 20% of the global diamond market), but according to The Independent, almost half of all the world's conflict diamonds are sold here in the U.S. Bad. Another irony: Tony Blair wants to take on poverty in Africa like Bush is taking on terror in Iraq (wink), meanwhile 60% of the world's rough stones pass through London, the world capital of the diamond industry.