The New Blood Diamonds

Diamonds from African countries have been funding guerrilla wars for decades. But they're not the only precious gems with blood on their hands. Here are four more prized resources that are fraught with conflict.

BY JORDANA TIMERMAN | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010

RUBIES

Location: Burma

Product: Burmese rubies are famous for their distinctive dark "pigeon's blood" color. Both the United States and the European Union ban Burmese gems, but outside groups estimate the junta still reaped almost $300 million from rubies in the 2006 fiscal year.

Casualties: The brutal Burmese junta, which earns much of its hard currency from the sale of gems, holds direct stakes in many of the mines and conducts official auctions to augment the profits made from illegal smuggling. At the mines themselves, child labor and diseases such as HIV/AIDS are common.

COLTAN

Location: Democratic Republic of the Congo

Product: Coltan, short for columbite-tantalite, a metallic ore that contains elements used in cell phones, is mined in the DRC's war-ravaged Kivu region. The U.N. estimates the DRC made $750 million worth of profits from coltan between 2000 and 2004.

Casualties: The 13-year-old civil conflict, which has so far claimed 5 million lives and pulled in armies from Rwanda and Uganda, is essentially a resource war over the DRC's minerals: vast reserves of diamonds, gold, tungsten, tin, and coltan. There have also been 200,000 recorded cases of sexual violence against women and girls, not to mention the destruction of one of the world's most endangered rain forests.

BAUXITE

Location: Guinea

Product: The West African republic of Guinea is the world's primary supplier of bauxite ore, used to make the aluminum that goes in everything from soda cans to airplanes. Twenty percent of Guinea's GDP, or $857 million a year, comes from its bauxite-dominated mining industry. A Chinese firm recently agreed to invest $7 billion in Guinean infrastructure in return for mining rights.

Casualties: The bauxite bounty has not trickled down to the 70 percent of Guineans living in poverty, though mining companies are technically supposed to pay development taxes to their local communities. Meanwhile, bauxite revenues have enabled the military junta to consolidate power and ignore international sanctions.

EMERALDS

Location: Colombia

Product: Colombia is the world's leading exporter of emeralds, accounting for half of the $280 million a year global trade.

Casualties: Emerald mafias fought a bloody "green war" in the 1980s to keep drug cartels out of the business. Violence from the rural Boyacá area extended to Bogotá, killing more than 3,500 people. Victor Carranza, the country's shady emerald czar, is accused of funding paramilitary groups, and he served jail time between 1998 and 2002 for organizing death squads. As for the mines, they rely on the children and wives of men killed in the region's ongoing violence.

 SUBJECTS:
 

Jordana Timerman is a researcher at Foreign Policy.

MARTHABLACK

9:32 AM ET

January 7, 2010

DRC

This article is a bit too succinct. Are you really sure that bauxite qualifies as a conflict resource. There's of course a whole lot of political instability in Guinea but the attribution of "blood diamond" to Bauxite is a bit harsh. It's very difficult for countries to develop wealth from their resources and sometimes the state structure, lack of transparency and accountability is what is to blame. It would be simplistic to attribute lags in economic development solely to companies.

Sometimes countries that want to attract FDI, are almost doing a fire sale of their resources by offering tax holidays and such to make sure that resource are extracted. When resource prices go up and that governments and populations are not getting wealth from their resources while companies' earnings shoot up, governments implement tax hikes. So the pendulum goes back and forth between high taxes and no tax. Mongolia is a good example of that. http://justdigging.wordpress.com/2009/10/14/mongolia/

As for DRC, there's no doubt for the labelling of conflict resources. Should anybody be interested into reading more about how some companies have benefitted from the conflict click on this link http://justdigging.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/doing-well-out-of-war-companies%E2%80%99-experiences-in-conflict-zones/

 

RALF.LEITERITZ

8:24 AM ET

January 8, 2010

Emeralds in Colombia

The text on emeralds in Colombia contains several mistakes, apart from being dated. First of all, the last of the "green wars" included several prominent Medellin drug cartel members, for example Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha ("The Mexican"), as active participants. Rather than a war against drug cartels it was a war between two aliiances of emerald mine owners and drug traffickers.

In the event, the war ended in 1990 with a peace accord between the rival alliances. The mine owners prevailed over their drug-trafficking allies in terms of political, economic and social control in the emerald region. This control was implicitly recognized by state authorities who have prefered to delegate efective authority in the region to the mine owners in exchange for keeping the peace between them. As a result, violence levels have dramatically come down during the last 15 years. If emeralds were the "new blood diamonds" as the title of the article suggests, we should see more, not less violence in the emerald region, no?

This points to a general problem with the piece: its backward-looking perspective on the causes of violence in Boyaca. Armed conflict over emeralds has always been a local affair, involving mine-owning families and their occasional allies from outside the business. Hence, the peace accord between them offered a sustainable solution in order to contain violence in the long run. The families and their private militias have been able to prevent the intrusion of illegal armed actors active on the national level in Colombia such as paramilitary and guerilla forces into the emerald region. Victor Carranza undoubtedly had links with paramilitary forces - mostly as a financier - but in other parts of the country.

Emeralds as such do not provoke violence. Rather, it is the local institutional context that makes them more or less prone to armed conflict and violence. Given the relative stability of the current setup, fears that emeralds will turn into the "new blood diamonds" are vastly exagerated.

Ralf Leiteritz
Department of Political Science
Universidad de los Andes
Bogota

 

RALF.LEITERITZ

8:36 AM ET

January 8, 2010

P.S.

For years now, the Colombian emerald industry has suffered from lack of profitability. Production figures have dropped dramatically since the heydays of the mid-1990s. The resulting prices increases have not been able to off-set this trend. As a result, the labor force in the industry has dwindled precipitously. There is by now an out-migration from the region as jobs and income are scarce. Barely a fertile soil for any wars over emeralds....