18.10.04

Guardian

Bling, bling, you're dead

Diamonds may be a rapper's best friend, but the ones from strife-torn countries are causing untold misery


Maxi Jazz
Monday October 18, 2004
The Guardian

When I embraced hip-hop in the 1980s, rappers were concerned with ghetto youths' obsession with gold rope chains. Now we've moved on to ice-encrusted Rolexes and necklaces so studded with rocks that it's no wonder rappers work out.

What you hear today is not hip-hop, it's rap music. Hip-hop is a cultural movement born to draw together disaffected youth and give us somewhere not only to belong, but where we can excel. Hip-hop is not something you do or hear, it's something you are. Rap music is just rap music.

Part of the reason young people don't march as the conscience of a nation anymore is that most hip-hop is now merely rap. Our political leaders and media moguls, with their skillful use of language, make sure that people don't know that before one can usefully help the weak, one must first tackle the greed that works to keep them weak. And rappers, with their love of bling, reinforce this ignorance.

The truth we are not told is this: while we continue to display our childish lack of self-esteem by adorning our bodies with things that others can't afford - in particular, diamonds - then African children, mothers and fathers will continue to be slaughtered. With our love of bling, we in the west heedlessly fuel the unimaginable misery of millions of Africans.

Brutal civil wars in Angola, Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone are mostly fuelled and funded by "conflict diamonds", an illegal trade where armed militia control mines, and even entire diamond-producing regions, in order to trade the rough diamonds directly for guns. In the 70s there was an eerily similar trade in Jamaica: guns for ganja - a straight swap with American gangsters. The crucial difference is that the Jamaican gunmen moved into the local town to prosecute criminal activity; they didn't visit systematic rape and massacre upon the locals until they had all accepted the invitation to leave.

Three million people were murdered in Congo alone over the past five years as a result of this disgusting trade. So why not make conflict diamonds illegal, remove their value to the murderers and ethnic cleansers, and consequently the cause for the killing?

For the answer, I can only point you in the direction of the Kimberley Process, a diamond certification scheme signed up to by 60 countries, which was set up in the 90s after international condemnation of the trade. The said 60 countries agree to monitor their import/export of rough diamonds and weed out those gems covered in innocent blood.

As you might expect from a body of super-billionaires left to regulate themselves, the system doesn't work too well. Amnesty International says it's inadequate and open to abuse. The organisation has demanded independent and transparent monitoring of all stages of the trade and called for consumers to be more aware and to refuse to buy conflict diamonds.

The participating governments of the Kimberley Process should not leave it as a matter for the conscience of their citizens or the compa nies that make fortunes from the diamond trade.

In November 2003, the US General Accounting Office stated that al-Qaida used diamonds to "earn money, move money and store money". And yet the world still allows the über-rich of the diamond industry to police themselves. You'd be forgiven for thinking that, with evidence of this nature, the US would be keen to regulate the flow of these deadly stones. But 50% of all conflict diamonds are sold in the US. The diamond industry generates $6.8bn every year. Bling rules, greed is good and, as the (increasingly) down-trodden of that country often remark, "Ain't a damn thing changed".

Well, here's where a difference might be made. London is the capital of the world's diamond industry, with 60% of the world's rough diamonds passing through the capital. The British government needs to show some leadership and make independent monitoring mandatory. If it actively encourages the other Kimberley Process partners to do the same, it would have a big impact on this evil trade and may even help bring security, if not peace, to these ravaged regions.

Johann Hari, a columnist for the Independent, wrote last year: "The central myth of Blair's premiership has been the belief that you can improve the lot of the poorest without challenging the powerful". Well that, dear reader, is the plain and simple truth - ask anyone who's actually made a difference to ordinary people's lives, ask Gandhi, ask Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela.

Given that the Kimberley Process utterly ignores this principle - and the plight of millions of Africans - I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that African-Americans on MTV, whose entire video budget probably costs less than their wristwatch, also appear to be ignorant of just how many child soldiers are bullying child workers in blood-soaked diamond mines in Sierra Leone.

· Maxi Jazz is a rapper with the band Faithless. For more information on conflict diamonds see www.amnesty.org

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