Fragments from the History of Loss by Louise Green

Author:Louise Green [Green, Louise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: NAT011000 Nature / Environmental Conservation & Protection, NAT038000 Nature / Natural Resources, LIT025020 Literary Criticism / Subjects & Themes / Nature
Publisher: The Pennsylvania State University Press

Debris

In 1998, the U.K.-based nonprofit organization (NGO) Global Witness released a report of their investigation into the role of diamonds in conflicts across Africa. The report, “The Rough Trade,” indicted the diamond industry for its complicity in the trade in “conflict diamonds.” In 1999, this was followed up with the Fatal Transaction Campaign. The emphasis was on the way in which diamonds, particularly from informal alluvial diggings, became both the cause and the means of sustaining violent conflict in Africa and elsewhere.

Although initially denying any responsibility for the origins of the diamonds they acquired, in 2000, De Beers responded to the campaign by declaring a change in their policy. Matthew Hart, author of Diamonds: The History of a Cold-Blooded Love Affair, notes that “in March 2000, De Beers began inserting into sight boxes notices guaranteeing that none of the goods had been purchased in contravention of the UN resolution against the war trade. It was a seminal event, serving notice that the leading diamond house was setting itself against the bloodied goods and aligning itself, in effect, with some of the harshest critics of the trade” (2002, 199).

In 2005, De Beers, Global Witness, Partnership Africa Canada, Rapaport, and the World Bank founded the Diamond Development Initiative, seeking to “optimize the beneficial development impact of artisanal diamond mining to miners, their communities and their governments” (quoted in Le Billon 2006, 787). Yet what this emphasis on “blood diamonds” or “conflict diamonds” has done is to conceal the long history of violence associated with diamond extraction. Although currently in a position to present itself as the moral form of capitalism, De Beers has been implicated in diamond wars in the 1950s and 1960s in both Sierra Leone and Angola. As Philippe Le Billon notes, “Ironically, the lasting effects of linking diamonds with violence may not be ethical consumption, but rather a stronger dystopian vision of Africa and legitimated position for large ‘reputable’ (western) companies over smaller local and regional operators” (2006, 794).

This dystopian view of Africa once again confirms the instrumental logic of De Beers, whose careful management of the industry preserves the diamonds’ value. A particular sleight of hand makes any interference with the ownership of the industry self-defeating because of the precarious nature of the product’s value. If the particular social life of diamonds is unique, it also has many things in common with the extraction of other raw materials. All involve enclaved spaces with high security, the violent seizure of natural commons, and a set of invented traditions and shadowy transactions between local and global elites that serve to define the proper ownership of these raw materials. All gain value as they move away from their point of origin into the global marketplace. In the long history of climate change, colonial expansion not only provided the raw materials that fueled the manufactories of the Industrial Revolution and enabled a technique of life based on the consumption of fossil fuels—Timothy Mitchell’s “carbon democracies” of the metropolitan centers. It also provided

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