Diamond Color And Clarity

Diamonds' Fake Provenance--Another Disaster for Zimbabwe

Smugglers of illegal goods succeed by avoiding physical detection of their products. Hence cocaine traders hide their wares inside ping pong balls or even humans. But for legal products, such as cigarettes or alcohol which are smuggled to evade tax, the key to success is openly hiding smuggled goods, with fake paperwork.

A well-faked provenance is especially essential for certain high value products, where buyers may already be alert to concerns about legitimacy, such as wine, antiques, art and also diamonds. Unlike the former products, diamonds are impossible to fake to a moderately trained eye. But it is much harder to detect where a diamond is from, even with scientific analysis, than whether a colorless stone is a diamond. And because diamonds are often found in places run by dictators and despots, there is a business in faking a "blood" diamond's provenance to pretend it was mined elsewhere.

The Kimberley Process is named after the famous diamond mining areas of South Africa where negotiations first took place designed to approve locations which follow good practices. The 75 nations signatory to the Kimberley Process endeavor to outlaw blood or conflict diamonds, and ensure they don't make it to lucrative markets. But while the Process is a valuable exercise, many blood diamonds slip through. In India's main Heera diamond market, local sources tell me that blood diamonds sell for at least 30% less than those with Kimberley Process certification. So given the millions of carats of diamonds that pass through this market every week, faking certificates is a high value business.

Some of those receiving fake certification come from mines controlled by the despotic leadership of Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe. Although Mugabe's ZANU PF party is in an uneasy coalition with the far more democratic MDC party run by Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC has no control over the military and it is the military that control the diamonds.

When I visited the Marange diamond field in Zimbabwe in 2007, I was one of a rare group of white visitors. Most of the others were invited – a couple of specially-selected and friendly journalists and some Israeli diamond traders – but I wasn't, which made it dangerous for me to stay long and dangerous for any black Zimbabwean to talk to me.

The field was controlled by Zimbabwe's military, which according to many local sources used violence and intimidation to prevent workers talking to any unauthorized foreign writers. These scared workers had to dig out the diamonds and were paid a pittance for doing so. Some locals said workers trying to escape were even shot by gunmen in helicopters. From the little I was able to actually see, their living conditions were very poor.

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