Burch Lecturer Ian Smillie explains why the Kimberly Process has failed to staunch the flow of “blood diamonds.”
In 2002, Ian Smillie, chairman of the Diamond Development Initiative, was one of the chief architects of the Kimberly Process, a joint initiative through which governments, the diamond industry and non-governmental organizations coordinate to staunch the flow of conflict diamonds, better known as “blood diamonds.” In 2009, Smillie’s frustration over the fact that “the Kimberly Process has no way of enforcing compliance,” which had opened the door for blatant violations in Venezuela, Zimbabwe and other nations, led Smillie to resign from the initiative’s monitoring board.
Smillie, a world-renowned expert on conflict diamonds who has spent his career working to address the problem, recounted the history of the development of the Kimberly Process and its subsequent failure to eliminate the use of diamonds for money laundering, weapons acquisition and abusive mining practices in the 2013 Burch Lecture at Vanderbilt Law School Friday, February 8. Smillie’s Burch Lecture was the keystone address of the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law’s biennial symposium, “The Role of Non-State Actors in International Law.”
Diamonds work particularly well for purposes of money laundering, Smillie noted, because they are extremely easy to smuggle across borders. “Diamonds have a very high value to weight ratio,” he said. “I could have $5 million of diamonds in my shirt pocket. That makes them very attractive to thieves, smugglers, and people who want to evade taxes.” Smillie also noted that “conflict diamonds” were used to fund terrorist networks and acts of terrorism.
Mining of alluvial diamonds—diamonds scattered across wide areas at shallow depths—is particularly vulnerable to abusive mining practices, smuggling and tax evasion because it requires only “a shovel and a strong back,” Smillie said. Porous national borders, warlords for whom illegally mined diamonds present an easy way to finance weapon purchases, and “absolutely no regulation” that effectively governed or monitored diamond exports made “conflict diamonds” an intractable problem before the Kimberly Process was originally adopted by 49 nations in 2002.
The process involved a carefully negotiated agreement among numerous governments and non-state actors that established a clear monitoring and tracking system designed to allow nations, diamond mining companies and merchants, and non-government organizations to work together to ensure diamonds had been legally mined before they left a nation’s borders made their way through distribution and marketing channels. Smillie recalls watching with growing frustration as Venezuela, Zimbabwe and other nations openly violated the process but were not sanctioned.
“Guidelines where minerals are concerned are not worth a picture of warm spit,” Smillie wryly concluded. “To make some real progress in this area, there has to be regulation, and only governments can do that.”
Smillie began his career as a founder of Inter Pares, a Canadian non-governmental organization, in 1975, and then served as executive director of CUSO from 1979-83. As a development consultant he has worked for many Canadian, American and European organizations. His books include are The Charity of Nations: Humanitarian Action in a Calculating World (with Larry Minear, 2005), Freedom from Want: The Remarkable Story of BRAC (2009) and Blood on the Stone: Greed, Corruption and War in the Global Diamond Trade (2010).