Film stirs up blood diamonds storm: a new Hollywood blockbuster, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is bringing renewed public attention to the issue of conflict diamonds. Stephen Williams reports.

The whole issue of conflict diamonds is again becoming a high-profile public concern thanks to a new film from Warner Brothers studios, made by Ed Zwick and starring the Hollywood heart-throb Leonardo DiCaprio.

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Set in the late 1990s, Blood Diamond was shot on several locations in Africa such as South Africa's Cape Town, Maputo and other parts of Mozambique.

The plot sees DiCaprio playing Danny Archer, a cynical white Rhodesian trying to smuggle diamonds out of Sierra Leone and into Liberia for Colonel Coetzee, a white South African mercenary leader played by Arnold Vosloo. It premiered in the US last December and will be released worldwide over the next few months.

Diamond mining in Africa is a multimillion dollar a year business with the continent supplying about 75% of the world's production. However, the recent civil war in Liberia--in which more than a quarter of a million people died, half of them civilians, and during which some 1.3m people were displaced--provides perhaps the starkest example of conflict driven by the wealth generated by this gemstone.

UN sanctions were imposed on Liberia's diamond industry in March 2001, but only nearly two years after the country became involved in funding the war in neighbouring Sierra Leone.

Since the 1990s, various international organisations and NGOs have campaigned to eradicate the trade in what have been termed 'conflict' or 'blood diamonds'. They played a key role in the creation of the Kimberley Process, introduced in 2003 as an international diamond certification scheme. According to one estimate, conflict diamonds amount to more than 4% of the world's total and generate annual trade revenues of around $7.5bn.

Botswana, Africa's biggest diamond producer and De Beers, the world's largest trader in the gemstones, enthusiastically endorsed the Kimberley Process. However, if the diamond industry thought that the introduction of the Kimberley Process had consigned such worries to history, they were badly mistaken.

The new film has aroused another storm of controversy, not least because in February 2006, Kago G Moshashane, the deputy secretary of Botswana's Ministry of Minerals, Energy and Water Resources, and Eli Izhakoff, chairman of the World Diamond Council, sent a joint letter to Zwick asking the filmmaker to show how mine owners have acted against Sierra Leone's conflict diamond trade. However, Zwick was reported to have declined to do so and is quoted as stating: "We're all aware of the Kimberley Process. The movie details the events of 1999 and our facts are in order. And we're not negotiating with anyone as to the content of our movie. We'll make the movie as we see fit."

De Beers chairman Nicky Oppenheimer says the industry has largely eliminated the problem of conflict diamonds (he puts the number of conflict diamonds now entering the legitimate market as less than 1% of all stones) but the UN has recently reported a disturbing new development. It says that a significant volume of illicit diamonds, from conflict-torn Cote d'Ivoire, are now entering the legitimate international diamond trade supply chain, while research and investigations by Global Witness, Amnesty International and other NGOs have shown that diamond control systems in many diamond rich areas are often poorly enforced.

Kimberly Process weaknesses

The conflict diamond problem is by no means confined to West Africa. In the DRC, fighting, particularly in the east, has centred on diamond mines, leading many to conclude that the clashes are being fuelled by the desire to exploit areas rich in natural resources.

Weaknesses in the Kimberley Process are being found throughout the diamond supply chain, not just in Africa but also in those countries with trading, cutting and polishing centres. A US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report shows that illicit diamonds may be entering the US because of major weaknesses in the implementation of the Clean Diamond Trade Act, the US legislation passed by Congress which implements the Kimberley Process.

Yet, as Peggy Jo Donahue, spokesperson for the Jewelers of America trade association says: "It is important to highlight how important a resource diamonds are for the poorest African countries. Diamonds are one of the few products they have."