Bloody nonsense: when diamonds are a propagandist's best friend.

IN the halcyon, prelapsarian, pre-9/11 closing days of the last century, the attention of the sentient public was temporarily directed to a pair of particularly gruesome and loosely connected civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone in West Africa.

The atavistic nature of these conflicts was reflected in the preferred weapon used: the lowly machete, which resulted in horrifying yet visually compelling images of amputated innocents. These civil wars were eventually "sorted out" by the efficient neocolonialist intervention of 4,000 excellent, if exasperated and reluctant, British special troops in Sierra Leone, and by a somewhat tardier and sloppier U.S.-led and -financed U.N. "peace-brokering" operation in Liberia.

The fact that the chief villain in these jungle rumbles--Liberia's thug-president, Charles Taylor--had numbered some dealings with the area's Lebanese diamond merchants among his many other corruptions provided certain agenda-laden Western NGOs with the perfect pretext to launch a high-profile PR blitz against the diamond business, suddenly re-dubbed the "conflict" or "blood" diamond trade.

Seemingly overnight, the diamond-buying and -wearing public was subjected to a media barrage of deceptively plausible (yet empirically baseless) propaganda in which, via articles, TV specials, books, films, and even, ineluctably, rap lyrics, the notion was planted in Conventional Wisdom that diamonds were an integral part--the source of funding and even the casus belli--of these otherwise seemingly inexplicable African conflicts. Whereas the truth was, and remains: If there were not a single diamond produced on the African continent, there would not be one fewer war there, nor one fewer human victim thereof.

After 9/11, the non-issue of "blood diamonds" was brusquely eclipsed by force majeure and allowed to die down. But now, the release of a "major" and "controversial" new film, Blood Diamond, threatens to reignite the whole invidiously manufactured hysteria.

Now, Americans' knowledge of Africa in general is sketchy at best, and nonexistent at worst. Our ignorance concerning the "diamond business" is even greater. (Most Americans, for example, think of diamonds as chiefly an African product, when in fact more than half the world's diamonds are currently produced outside of Africa.) Indeed, this climate of incomprehension surrounding "blood diamonds in Africa" can take on tragicomic proportions: I invite those of masochistic tendency to examine the largely incoherent contribution of Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D., Ga.), who, in 2000, furiously and hilariously vented on the subject from her perch at the Trade Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee. (I appeared before this subcommittee, and listened--in stunned amusement--to her harangue.) When this pervasive geo-cluelessness is strained through the delirious prism of Hollywood's imagination--with history and reality reprocessed by such propagandists as Oliver Stone, George Clooney, and Michael Moore--the result can be genuinely demented.

And so it is, in this new movie. The eponymous conflict-funding "Blood Diamond" ends up in the hands of "white African mercenary" Danny Archer, played by ... Leonardo DiCaprio? Look, for all I know DiCaprio may be a sterling fellow. And certainly in Blood Diamond he has armed himself with a pretty convincing S'uth Ifriken Iccent. But for him to play a cynical, bloody-handed white African mercenary? His character's insipid youthfulness would cause him difficulty in getting served in any American bar, much less being taken seriously for a bloodthirsty profiteer. This kind of role had been the reserve in the past of the hard-bitten likes of Errol Flynn, Stewart Granger, Rod Taylor, and Richard Burton. DiCaprio might be more credible as, for example, a fresh-out-of-SAIS U.N. deputy special under-director for inter-regional human development. But a white African mercenary? I'm sorry, but ... no.

The unconvincing actor is, actually, quite appropriately cast for what is a monumentally unconvincing and ultimately, in its underlying premise, mendacious story. For the plain fact is: Diamonds don't cause or (in any meaningful sense) fund the wars of Africa, and never have. The only blood to be found on diamonds is the symbolic blood of the "blood, sweat, and tears" invested by the hard-working artisan diamond diggers who labor in the "independent" (which is to say, not owned by industry giant De Beers) diamond fields of Africa and elsewhere--in other words, precisely those souls who would suffer if the worldwide anti-"blood diamonds" campaign ever gained serious traction. It is significant that Sierra Leone, the country in which the film supposedly takes place, contains nothing like the sort of hellish King Leopold II-cum-Gulag "forced-labor diamond fields" depicted in it: In fact, virtually all diamond mining in Sierra Leone is done by self-employed diggers or small-scale local cooperative enterprises. And, while we're discussing ironic fabrications, the country it was partly filmed in--totally diamond-free Mozambique--suffered an even gorier civil war, if such is imaginable, than its diamond-producing sister, Angola.

The bogus campaign against "blood diamonds" is waged by the gullible NGOs I mentioned earlier, egged on by an unholy alliance of cynical Western politicians and--for its own convoluted and paradoxical benefit--the De Beers diamond juggernaut itself. The principal NGO involved, Global Witness, is a small collection of wide-eyed London-based Pollyannas. The fact that De Beers is covertly supporting the anti-"blood diamond" project will no doubt be stoutly denied publicly, but was unofficially confirmed to me by a former senior De Beers sales executive. The campaign serves to suppress non-De Beers diamond production, while cloaking De Beers with a most welcome choirboy image.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

And the diamond-industry "leadership" emerges with scarcely more credit, with its own fawning and disingenuous collusion in the "blood diamond" charade. In a long open letter to the producer of Blood Diamond, the pooh-bahs of the World Diamond Council cravenly agree that "the story of conflict diamonds is an important one that needs to be told," that "conflict diamonds have in the past caused great pain and suffering in a number of countries in Africa," but that now bureaucratic institutions are in place to ensure "that revenues from diamonds should never again be used to finance armed conflict."

Oh, codswallop. This is pure cowardly balderdash. The industry is self-abasingly defending itself against charges that are totally false, and the sham edifice it has erected to "solve" this non-problem--the so-called Kimberley Process--is an open joke: Among other absurdities, it has prevented diamond exports from such conflict-free diamond-producing countries as Brazil, while at the same time "certifying" such risible anomalies as "Dubai-produced diamonds." (There are no diamonds produced in Dubai.)

Diamonds were no more used to finance armed conflicts than any other source of funds. Moreover, the vast majority of Africa's many civil conflicts occur and have occurred in countries and areas where diamonds are not found or produced. And, conversely, most diamond-producing countries are conflict-free. The diamond-producing Central African Republic, for example, has always been, despite its other undoubted peculiarities, civil war-free--while its neighbors to the north and east, the utterly diamondless Chad and Sudan, have endured virtually non-stop civil wars for the past 40 years. Equally, diamonds had absolutely nothing to do with the bloodiest of all African carnages, Rwanda; while Africa's largest diamond producer, Botswana, is as peaceful as Iowa. Another diamond-producing country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, does produce both civil conflict and diamonds, but the one is undertaken thousands of kilometers from the other, and by totally unconnected people.

And, in any case, the televised agonies of the limb-lopping horrors that gave rise to the whole "blood diamonds" non-story in the first place had no need for diamonds for their funding: The Red Chinese machetes used for the carnage cost, per dozen, literally pocket change. And AK-47s were on sale in the streets of Kinshasa in 2000 for $25. (With two loaded magazines, $35.) You don't need diamonds, "blood" or otherwise, to fund this arsenal, or, for that matter, to supply the locally grown ganga with which the "troops" are mostly paid.

Finally, many of the same Lebanese capos who control the diamonds of Sierra Leone, the Blood Diamond poster-country, also control the country's even richer natural resource, fishing--but are we inflicted with a global campaign against "blood fish"? Indeed, it makes about as much sense to blame the "funding" of African civil mayhem on the diamond trade as it does to blame the funding of international Islamist mayhem on the construction trade, since that is where bin Laden got the millions with which he set up al-Qaeda. (In fact, it makes a good deal less sense, since between bin Laden's terrorism and his family construction business, a money trail actually exists.)

To paraphrase the old Second Amendment truism: Diamonds don't kill Africans. Jumped-up barbarian maniacs with imported ideological agendas kill Africans.

Mr. Jolis is an American independent rough-diamond expert and consultant. He is based in Europe, and has considerable experience in Africa.