Garrett Kennedy: Diamonds, drugs and al Quaeda's cash

Remember that TV ad, the one where they show kids talking and saying, "I just wanted to have a good time" interspersed with pictures of the World Trade Center crumbling and large shipments of weapons being moved? The ad that suggested -- no, stated -- that drug use leads to terrorism?

It was a powerful ad. And to a certain extent, it is truthful. Drug money may have been used in the Sept. 11 attacks, especially considering that Afghanistan is the world's leading producer of opium. But then again, considering that the Taliban banned the growing of opium in 2000, it may have been less of a factor then suggested by the ad.

Interestingly, the same TV stations that show this patriotic message have no qualms about airing commercials advertising diamonds.

Currently, and over the past decade, Sierra Leone, along with a number of other African countries, has been in a state of political and social strife as bloody civil wars have left thousands dead. Many can be seen walking the streets without hands; slicing them off is a tactic often used by rebel groups to deter people from voting in elections.

The fighting in Sierra Leone has destroyed countless families, as parents are slain and children taken and forced to fight in battle, some as young as eight years old, forcibly drugged to eliminate the pain and fear.

And at the center of this fighting is the diamond trade.

Diamonds can be seen operating in two ways here. On the one hand, they are the ultimate prize at the end of this civil war, a mighty valuable export that Western companies gobble up as part of a $7 billion dollar industry.

On the other hand, diamonds are also prolonging the war. It's through the sale of diamonds that rebel groups are able to keep themselves armed. These "blood" or "conflict" diamonds make up about four percent of the annual worldwide diamond trade, roughly $250 million dollars deposited directly into the hands of these fighters, who in turn use it to continue financing their wars.

Along the same lines of human rights violations, the diamond miners used by rebel groups are often prisoners of war used as slave labor. What's more, major diamond buyers, including companies like De Beers, knowingly participate in this trade that promotes such grievous behavior.

In 2000, the United Nations mandated that diamond traders obtain certificates stating that their diamonds are not conflict diamonds. The certificates were to be issued by the state, hypothetically ensuring their legitimacy.

However, when the West doesn't trust many of these corrupt governments to distribute humanitarian aid to their people, certificates from such nations is little more than an attempt at placation. Recent surveys suggest that up to 40 percent of the diamonds coming from these African countries may in fact be of blood diamonds.

So while in clear view our politicians and other moral leaders point to drugs as a source of financial backing for terrorism, they quickly and succinctly neglect to mention a more open, and legal, method of funding terrorism -- the diamond trade. And whereas the links between drug smuggling and terrorism are necessarily unclear, due to the underground nature of the drug world, the link between diamonds and terror is much more definitive.

With al Qaeda members acting as middlemen, the diamond business continues to flood money into terrorist coffers in addition to the unthinkable abuses of human rights the trade encourages.

In the end, the drug ad is not really about stopping terrorism, but rather about implicating drug users in an act to which they can be at best loosely tied. At the same time, there is no campaign decrying the sale of diamonds, only the "A Diamond is Forever" ads.

You would think that a country so primed to stop terror might take a slightly less hypocritical attitude, but hell, we can't break the age-old tradition of diamonds as the ultimate romantic token -- a tradition whose origins lie in a 1940's ad blitz by none other than De Beers. But maybe I find myself hoping for bit too much.

Garret Kennedy is a senior Anthropology major from Wayne, Pa.

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