Diamond Advertising, Blood Diamonds, and Civil War in Sierra Leone

Introduction: Diamonds, Advertising, and Conflict

Diamonds may be a girl's best friend, according to a concept popular in the 1950s. Alternatively, diamonds might also be forever — a concept popularized through decades of advertising. Diamonds are a symbol of love, but they have hardly been the source of much loving interaction between various human populations. In fact, diamonds have been at the root of intense and deadly strife in Sierra Leone for most of the past two to three decades. The fact that advertising for diamonds is so memorable suggests that advertising messages bear some causal responsibility for the devastating civil wars in Sierra Leone and the human suffering that resulted.

In 2000, the World Bank released a report noting that "greed for diamonds and other 'lootable' commodities fuels civil wars." The report did not mention advertising as a direct contributor. Conceivably, however, that conclusion could be extrapolated, because the World Bank research suggested that "civil wars are more often fuelled by rebel groups competing with national governments for control of diamonds, coffee, and other valuable primary commodities, rather than by political, ethnic, or religious differences." There is little doubt that consumer demand for such commodities as coffee and diamonds — neither of which is necessary to support life as are water and food — is influenced by advertising and other forms of promotion. It might easily be argued that the fact that advertising for diamonds is so monolithic — it would be difficult to find any adult in America who does not know the tagline "A diamond is forever" — is one reason demand is so high.

Demand was in fact significantly ramped up during the 1930s. Until then, the engagement ring — an enormously popular use for diamonds today — was often an opal, ruby, sapphire, or turquoise ring, according to Twenty Ads that Shook the World by James B. Twitchell. Twitchell contends that the De Beers diamond company changed the world diamond market beginning with the "A diamond is forever" ad campaign that began in 1947. In 2000, Advertising Age magazine named the campaign's slogan the slogan of the twentieth century.

When De Beers flooded the Japanese market with the same concept in the 1960s, it increased diamonds' popularity there as well.

Although De Beers had one major aim — convincing consumers that diamonds were the very best gemstone to own — the company diversified its advertising to encourage consumers to hold onto their family's already-owned diamonds as heirlooms. That may seem, at first glance, to be a counterproductive advertising strategy, but it worked. It eliminated the aftermarket in diamonds — the gems that once might have appeared at auction — so that most people who wanted a diamond would be compelled to buy a new one. Without people selling their diamonds back to jewelers or to other buyers, the demand for new diamonds increased.

Research Problem and Methodology

De Beers has been very successful in advertising its diamonds, arguably increasing demand and sales while keeping prices high. There have also been well-documented and extremely bloody civil wars fought over diamonds. Does diamond advertising lead to civil strife that damages international relations and causes vast amounts of human suffering?

The answer to this research question was thought to reside in the literature concerning advertising and the literature concerning diamonds and civil wars, so a literature review was undertaken to determine what factors had already been discovered regarding the research problem. Additionally, an Internet search was conducted to determine how the diamond industry operates. The two categories of information developed through those means were then assessed to develop the findings presented below.

Literature Review: Diamonds and Civil War in Sierra Leone

A meeting of the Partnership Africa Canada (PAC) group produced a report — summarized by Smillie et al. in Social Justice — noting that diamonds were central to the conflict in the small West African nation of Sierra Leone, and that no peace would be sustainable there until problems related to mining and selling diamonds had been addressed, both within that nation and in diamond-buying nations worldwide.

As has been widely reported, and as the article notes, diamonds "have been the cause of widespread death, destruction, and misery for almost a decade in Sierra Leone" (Smillie et al. 24). Worse still, the point of the war was not to win it, but rather to engage in profitable criminal activity disguised as warfare — what the article calls "disorganized crime" (Smillie et al. 24).

As noted in the introduction, De Beers conducted advertising campaigns both to decrease the number of diamonds available for resale from family treasures and to increase worldwide demand. Smillie et al. contend that De Beers, which had been directly involved in Sierra Leone until the 1980s, did much more to control the prices paid for diamonds, which in turn controlled the lengths to which people would go to obtain them. After the beginning of the Sierra Leone civil wars, "in its attempts to mop up supplies everywhere in the world, De Beers not only sustained the artificially high price of diamonds, it also undoubtedly bought diamonds from war zones" (Smillie et al. 24). Not long after the Sierra Leone devastation began in 1991, other war zones — including Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo — emerged as well. The Sierra Leone strife was masterminded by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) (Smillie et al. 24).

The RUF initially claimed that it sought free elections, as well as social and economic justice; Sierra Leone was then at the bottom of the United Nations Human Development Index (Smillie et al. 24). The RUF did not, however, wage war on the government — it waged war on the people. To finance their rebellion, they had to wrest control of the diamond fields from the corrupt government (Smillie et al. 24). When an elected government returned in 1996, the war did not stop but actually intensified (Smillie et al. 24).

Sierra Leone was joined in diamond-related criminal activity by Liberia, whose president, Charles Taylor, acted as banker, trainer, and mentor to the RUF and made Liberia a major center for diamond-related criminal activity. The article points out that it would be wrong to assume Sierra Leone and Liberia, Angola, and the Republic of Congo were alone in their criminal involvement (Smillie et al. 24). In fact, there were Lebanese diamond traders, and in the early 1990s, a number of Israeli investors operated in Sierra Leone's diamond sector — "many of them as dubious and as corrupt as their predecessors" (Smillie et al. 24).

The article does not directly address any harm the diamond wars may have done to international relations, but it does call upon the international community to put a stop to the carnage. The PAC report recommended specific steps to prevent further social disintegration in Sierra Leone, including:

A United Nations peacekeeping force to facilitate disarmament and demobilization of insurgents, and deployment of UN security forces on a long-term basis in all diamond-producing areas; external assistance in dealing with government corruption; development of a system for fair prices to small diamond mining operations, supported by adequate and timely banking financing; and encouragement for the government to raise its standards for foreign investment in large-scale mining operations, with international assistance sought (Smillie et al. 24).

All this interest in Sierra Leone was reignited in May 2000, after the RUF attacked and captured more than 500 UN peacekeeping troops, killing several. That event, and the civil disturbance that followed, put Sierra Leone and the diamond problem back in the headlines. The article concludes that diamonds did not cause the conflict but are, rather, its currency, providing the RUF and its patrons with strong economic motivation and opportunity.

Conclusion

It can be concluded that even though diamonds reach the consumer via a number of criminal, corrupt, or terrorist individuals and organizations, at base, De Beers advertising is at the root of the civil wars, international ill will, and the maiming and murdering of civilians that occur in the countries that produce blood diamonds — if not virtually all the world's diamonds. At the very least, the advertising contributes to the conditions that drive prices upward, making diamonds ever more valuable for the clandestine transactions of the world's criminals and terrorists.

The evidence does not support the conclusion that advertising caused the wars directly. Rather, advertising created and sustained a global consumer culture around diamonds that kept prices artificially high, which in turn made diamond fields worth fighting — and dying — over. The responsibility is therefore distributed across De Beers' marketing apparatus, the mine owners who extracted profit from volatile regions, and the international community that failed to act decisively until the carnage had already claimed enormous human costs.