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| by Ed Zwick (Producer of 'Blood Diamond'), |
Mar 17, 2008 |
What we ended up doing was little enough... insignificant, in fact, relative to the immensity of the need. But a film company has certain resources. And so we repaired roads, dug wells, improved sewage drains, built classrooms. More important, we injected forty million dollars of cash – in the form of jobs -- directly into local economies, where the money stays and is turned over, again and again. The truck driver gives his pay to his wife, who pays the butcher, whose wife buys clothes for her children, and so.
We were there for less than a year.
But the diamond industry has been in West Africa for almost a hundred years. And, as best I can tell, relative to the bounty it has taken, it has done next to nothing at all. I’m not talking about Botswana – which has become the poster child of all the good your industry can do. And, with all due respect, it’s beside the point to the contributions to education or AIDS prevention in South Africa. Because the nations of West Africa that still languish at the very bottom of the HDI have been abused, abandoned, and forgotten. To suggest that we no longer buy their stones because of the inherent corruption is to go deeper into the same denial that created the situation in the first place. Forget about Charles Taylor, or whether it was this company or that one who maintained a buying office or knowingly bought conflict stones, forget whether it was top management, middle management, or middle men who truly knew what was going on while thousands were killed, millions displaced, and whole countries laid waste. Forget whether you worked in sorting, cutting or polishing, and forget even whether your role in retail, wholesale, distribution or advertising created a plausible deniability between your profit and the suffering of so many others. The fact is, every single member of the diamond industry, consciously or not, benefited from the very stones that ruined Sierra Leone.
And now, after all the hue and cry in the media, after all the images of severed limbs, the fears, real or imagined, of the NGOS threatening a boycott, after all the negotiations with governments, it turns out that the Kimberly Process has been good for business. Retail sales have risen every year since 1999. By declaring you no longer trade in dirty West African stones, you hope to wipe clean the slate of an unsavory past and replace it with an altruistic face. To say, ‘that nasty business in West Africa is ancient history, the Kimberly Process has solved everything,’ or ‘We’ve changed. We’re an “ethical” industry now. None of us even knew it was even happening’ – is to miss the point. Complicity is not just a phrase of art.
Many of us in this room are Jews. How many of us would accept the argument that those in Nazi Germany who stood idly by and watched the slaughter of six million are free of blame because they now claim not to have known what was happening.
At the end of World War II, as Japan lay in absolute ruin, brilliant minds led us to understand the moral as well as the political obligation of restitution. We realized there was an intrinsic value to building up a society we had destroyed, in the creation of alliances and trading partners out of a former enemy. Amid the hopelessness and apparent passivity of millions of people, there is an incalculable energy that has yet to be felt by the rest of the world. The question is, will we harness it as a force for productivity and good, or we will continue to allow it to turn inward, often violently on itself – until the day comes that its rage is manipulated toward we who have been instrumental in its suffering. How many times has it been proven in other parts of the world that a violent ideology finds its most fertile expression among the dispossessed. It is at our peril that we assume Africa is not ripe for the same kind of exploitation.
I am encouraged this morning to have heard so many capable people focus their considerable intellect and experience on the welfare of a place whose need has been ignored for too long, and also to sense the willingness of each of you to listen to the other. But the diamond industry needs to do more than listen. I don’t mean coming up with some clever marketing scheme that confuses responsibility with publicity by making a corporate line-item out of helping people…like offering to make a $10,000 charitable contribution in order to convince some clueless actress to wear bling at the Oscars. I’m talking about a paradigm shift, about re-imagining an entire industry as a force for good, not waiting for a development partner, but becoming a major development partner yourself; not to be defensive but rather to lead. What would happen if the industry decided to dedicate a portion of every single African diamond sale – to the rebuilding of infrastructure and the creation of sustainable development? The Red Campaign is doing it with Gap t-shirts and jeans, American Express is using credit cards, what’s to stop the branding of West African diamonds.
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