Conflict Diamonds: Throwing It All Away

Joe talks about the Congo and Burma, and generally asks what we will do if we are going to be faced with the Robert Kaplanesque question of what to do with the failing states in The Coming Anarchy? (If you haven’t read his bleak book, you should.)

It seems that we’re left with recolonialization on one hand, and a nation-scale version of what a Richard Price character called the ‘self-cleaning oven’ (in which drugs, disease and violence depopulate the slums of New Jersey) on the other. Joe has pointed out how limited our resources are; the possible options are few and hardly bring confidence. UN troops? Somehow Srebrenica is the image I always have; that and the helpless ‘smurfs’ of the film ‘No Man’s Land’.

But it seems that there is one point of leverage that we in the West have. Cash. I’m not talking about giving it, either; I’m talking about taking it….The wars in these collapsing states are fought by would-be kleptocrats, who are essentially playing a brutal version of ‘capture the flag’ where once they have it, they control the sale of resources…diamonds, oil, tantalum, cocoa…into the international markets. Sales which take place for cash; dollars and euros to be stashed away by the ruling elites.

These brutal civil wars are worth fighting, not for power alone, but to appropriate the resources of the country and sell them. Take a look at this somewhat dry but exhaustive paper “Congo: The Prize of Predation” by Olssen and Congden (requires Acrobat viewer):

“They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing else, I suspect. They were conquerors and for that you want only brute force…They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at in blind – as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness.” (From Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, 1989, p 21)

Joseph Conrad’s description of king Leopold’s Congo Free State from 1899 applies as well to the predatory war that has been raging in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1998. This war alone, fought in remote jungles by a multitude of rebel and national armies from the Great Lakes region, is believed to have taken some 3 million lives and left 2.5 million internally displaced.1 A primary reason for the initiation and continuation of the fighting has been a desire to gain control of easily appropriable and highly valuable natural resources like gold, diamonds, and coltan that Congo is endowed with (Panel of Experts, 2001a, 2001b). Though shrouded in a veil of real and fabricated grievances, the true engine of the great war in Central Africa appears to be greed.

Our study uses Collier and Hoeffer’s (2001) empirically based distinction between greed and grievance as the two main motivations for civil wars. The grievance aspect is well known and is covered in numerous political science studies. What we refer to as grievances include inequality, lack of political rights, and ethnic or religious divisions. Economists – schooled in the tradition of rational, profit maximizing entrepreneurs – and a growing number of other social scientists, have lately come to analyze civil wars as a competition between warlords for the appropriation of valuable resources. In Collier and Hoeffler’s (2001) statistical investigation of civil wars from 1960 to 1999, they find that greed-related explanations have a greater explanatory power than grievance.”

Just as the engine for the gang wars in the inner city is fueled by the profits of the drug trade, the civil wars and ethnic and political friction in Africa and the less developed portions of Asia and South America provides the spark – but the desire to capture and sell the resources available is the real fuel.

We buy those resources; we could, if we chose, find ways to choke off the supply of fuel to these conflicts. Is it worth it to us?

‘Conflict diamonds’ are those smuggled out by warlords, and sold in the international markets at a discount. When I next buy TG a jewel, I’ll be helping finance one of the civil wars…or maybe, if I am prudent, not.

Think about it.

11 thoughts on “Conflict Diamonds: Throwing It All Away”

  1. There is no easy replacement for tantalum. It is a necessary metal for a modern industrial economy.

    Gold is too easily sold on the black market.

    Diamond prices are propped up by the diamond cartel. Saphires are rarer than diamonds but I believe their market price is 1/10th that of diamonds.

    Given the above how do you cut off the cash flow?

    We do know how to reduce American gang violence by 75 to 90%. Stop denying those in pain legal pain relief. (Heroin, cocaine, and marijuana are not recognized as legal relief for PTSD type problems. Yet that is their main purpose in chronic users.)

    There is no such easy solution for diamonds, gold, tantalum, etc. because they are already legal.

    ================================================

    The only reason drugs and violence go together in America is that we are unwilling to provide those in PTSD type pain a low cost legal source of relief. Instead we keep the low cost stuff illegal to prop up the profits of American pharmaceutical companies who take in some $40+ billion a year for anti-anxiety drugs. Replacing those drugs with home grown pot would destroy a significant source of drug company profits. Check out the major funding sources for the Partnership for a Drug Free America. Drug companies are at the top of the list.

    The drug war is not an effort to protect us from drugs. It is rent seeking. An attempt to protect drug company profits through government coercion. Drug prohibition is a disease vector, a violence vector, and the largest source of criminal finance. Yet here we are speaking as if prohibiting drugs was a positive accomplishment or talking as if it was the drugs causing the problems and not the prohibition.

    We will never solve this problem until the discourse rises above the level of DEA handouts.

  2. Have these huge conflicts in Africa been a constant feature over the last century? I had an idea that they only popped up with the end of colonialism. Did they happen before the white man showed up?

    While recognizing the on-point humor of Ethnikistan, I don’t think that separations based on values and culture are necessarily a bad thing.
    The British tried to pretend the Sudan was a single nation, favoring the Arabized Muslims of the north over the Christians and animists of the south, and left the country in perpetual convulsion because it has no business being one country at all.
    The north wants to impose Sharia law and be part of the Arab world; the south wants to speak English and be part of modern Africa.

    Does it make sense for a nation to remain undivided just for the sake of nominal unity? It reminds me of those marriages that were a mistake to begin with and should be ended as quickly and painlessly as possible, being kept together for “appearances.”

  3. I’ll preface this with saying that I don’t have a strong background in African history or politics. This is just my gut talking, here.

    On reading Kaplan’s “The Coming Anarchy” I find myself with disturbing thoughts. It reads like a post-apocalyptic horror novel, and though I see his points, I don’t necessarily agree with his premise that Africa is a direct harbinger of doom for the United States. A destabilizing force, to be sure, one with international consequences, but I think that, on a more local level, it might not be so bad.

    This looks odd to me as I write this, since I’m known for pessimism, and in fact some of what I’m thinking is pessimistic, but I can’t get away from a sense of, not so much opportunity, but hope. Yes, Africa is going to hell in a handbasket, has been for centuries. It’s famed for it. Just ask Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz.

    But to my mind, I see a contrast that makes me think that, though Africa’s problems will run aground on our shores and already have to some extent, we can spare our nation a large chunk of the difficulties that Africa has and will continue to experience. Not to jump on the “Oh, it can’t happen here,” bandwagon, because it can. But I have hope that it won’t, because I think that the key to having it happen is apathy, something that is in far greater supply among a debilitated continent of third world nations than it is over here.

    A sense that nothing can be done about it will doom us. A sense of “Oh, hell we’re already screwed, why fight it,” will drive us screaming into the void. The West is different from Africa.

    Some of what Kaplan describes seems to me, at its core, to be something that already happened in the U.S. “It is worth noting, for example, that it is precisely the wealthiest and fastest-developing city in India, Bombay, that has seen the worst intercommunal violence between Hindus and Muslims.”

    Sounds like New York in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s to me. Jews and Italians, Hungarians and Irish all beating the crap out of each other because… well, because they could. But there’s a difference. I think it’s a sense of greater community. People came to the United States because it was a fresh start. They wanted to be part of a greater whole. They wanted to be American. Africa has no such analogy.

    In order to make a new start in America people had to give up their previous home, sail across an ocean for a month in steerage, burn away their old family ties to place. Africa’s all one big connected plot separated by loose borders and disease ridden terrain. People travel from place to place in a more migratory fashion, herded by circumstance and war, like geese being run to ground by wolves.

    But Africa has exposure to the West. It’s got Coca-Cola, and Marlboro. It’s got the images of the fruits of the West, but no real understanding among the people of how to get there. I think that the West, inadvertently created a half baked model for African politics to follow and then, when colonialism went out of fashion, pulled the plug and left them to fend for themselves. There’s no sense of communal alignment. Individual family units / tribes are vying for some kind of adolescent supremacy without taking into account the collective as a whole. Without this there can be no long term government institution that wields any real power. With an unstable government comes a lack of resource management. With no resource management the Tragedy of the Commons is exponentially compounded. Waste treatment is nonexistent. Disease is rampant. Foreign investment is almost nil. With the exception of South Africa, who in the region has the stability to have any real economy?

    So we end up with a situation where a series of larval societies, still stuck in an pre-feudalistic city state mentality, has been trying to shove a post-modern identities onto itself. It’s like watching children play at being adults and accidentally setting fire to the dog.

    Clearly something needs to be done. And this is where my thoughts start to bother me.

    I find myself, through acculturation and inclination, despising the colonial idea of The White Man’s Burden, but that’s what this sounds like to me when I say these thoughts out loud. Every fiber in my being screams “racial stereotype” and I don’t like it. This is not the time of Kipling. I’m Hawai’ian (among other things), and the whole idea is anathema to the way I was brought up.

    But something still needs to be done. But what? Aside from the fact that we have troops already committed everywhere else, the EU (okay, France) is already sending troops to the Congo. Whether it’s because they honestly want to deal with the issue, or it’s just a political “kiss off” to the U.S. to prove they can do it alone remains to be seen. From what I understand their only objective is to take the airport they’re heading into and open up the routes for humanitarian aid to flow into the country.

    But is it enough? Do parts of Africa need to be taken over by outside powers just to impose order and government? If not, will their destabilization leak over to the rest of the world? God, I hope not. I don’t think it can be done. It’s too goddamn big. Simply throwing money out there doesn’t seem right to me. Humanitarian aid is a great idea, when it gets to the right people. Who do we make the checks out to? Who do we give the food to? How do we make sure it isn’t stolen to feed rebel troops? Who are the rebels? These are countries known for rapidly shifting governments and corrupt politicians. Sending donations and avoiding the purchase of conflict diamonds has the feel of soccer moms holding a bake sale to free political prisoners. It just doesn’t seem enough.

    The problem won’t solve itself. So, I ask myself, what can I do about it? How can one person make a difference? And the easy answer, the one that far too many people give, the one that I fear the most, the only one that comes to mind, is nothing. And this disturbs me most of all.

  4. Stephen, this is very, very good. Care to make it a formal Guest Blog piece here with its own posting, or would you rather put it up on your own blog?

  5. Thanks.

    Joe, I’d love to have it posted here at Winds of Change. Tried sending you a mail about that, but my system’s choking for some reason. Thanks, again.

  6. M. Simon –

    I understand that tantalum (and oil, and gold, and cocoa etc. etc.) are at least useful and often necessary to the West’s industrial economy.

    a) That would suggest that stable sources of supply are in our interest, no? Do you believe that the current policies encourage medium- or long- term stability?

    b) It doesn’t excuse us for happily trading with the kleptocrats who work to ramp up production (see the cited article) to generate cash.

    PG –

    Post-colonial Africa certainly has been a violent and unstable place, but the levels of violence in the last decade have ratcheted upward dramatically. To a large extent, I wonder if the Soviet/U.S. tensions kept some measure of stability going in the Third World, as each power attempted to ensure the stability of it’s client states.

    Stephen –

    I certainly don’t think that the U.S. (or even, to contradict Trent, much of the West) is directly at risk for the kind of political and cultural collapse discussed by Kaplan. But we are indirectly at risk, in two specific areas – first, economically, as nations with resources on which we depend can no longer be looked on as reliable suppliers; and as the human cost mounts, the ‘failed states’ become places where medical and political pandemics are liable to breed.

    While I firmly buy into the argument that poverty is not itself the cause of terrorism, I do believe that an increasing population of people living in Hobbes’ world is something that can only have negative consequences for us. They will be desparate and pissed off. And poor – did I mention poor? So the economic growth necessary to keep feeding the Western economies will come from…where, exactly?

    I tried to personalize the point in talking about buying ‘conflict diamonds’. Please don’t assume tat’s where I believe this should end; I certainly don’t think that a ‘buy from De Beers or don’t buy’ campaign is a serious matter. I do think that we (both personally and through our Western governments) need to think carefully about who we want to do business with, and how we can raise the cost of doing business with the kinds of evil kleptocrats we see in the Congo. I don’t see embargo as anyting but a blunt tool, and I’d love to see us deveop better ones – but sometimes blunt tools work.

    A.L.

  7. Much of Africa and the Middle East’s trouble comes from the fact that decolonization occured at a time that many in Europe, and even in the universities of the US, thought that socialism and central planning were good ideas. Those are the ideas their elites held at independence, and as a result they wasted most of their initial capital and many decades trying to make the impossible work.

    Some nations in Africa are starting to make major immprovements by embracing some market-oriented reforms. In an environment where even some semblance of property and oportunity exist, some people will finnd better things to do with their time than kill each other over existing wealth – like create wealth instead.

    What can the US do?

    (1) First, do no harm. Stop any policy that helps shore up kleptocrats or, worse, socialists, in the name of stability.
    (2) Use diplomatic pressure to encourage free market reforms.
    (3) FREE TRADE!
    (4) Reeducation of local elites – and not by our universities, who are part the problem.

    1 & 2 “merely” require an attitude adjustment at State (just one of many needed.)
    3 will be politically painful (SC textile interests, etc.)
    4 I’m not even sure who could do it. US companies? Chambers of Commerce? The Heritage Foundation? Doingit right will be a political minefield.

    Of course, most of this will work best in semi-stable countries like Uganda. But even in the Congo we can pick the least-bad warlords and reward them with trade agreements for respecting property and business in the areas they control, and educate them about the long-term benefits to them of such policies.

  8. No criticism meant, A.L. My apologies if it came across that way. I agree with your points, and didn’t think you were implying that that’s where you thought it should end. I was merely giving voice to my own frustrations at not knowing what to do. When it comes down to it, my post was really more a comment on Kaplan’s essay, which I have to thank you for linking to. Fascinating reading.

  9. There are many things that can be done depending on what you want to accomplish.

    Feeding starving people? You can do that, but why are they starving? Are they dependent on you for food or can’t they farm or what?

    Health care? You can do that but why are they in need? Is the local UN/NGO the defacto health dept or do superstitions prevent or what?

    Ideally something like US/Western democratic government & lifestyle. Which means that people in any African country have representative govenment, can have a job, can get an education, are not subject to roving bands of thieves, bandits, rebels, etc.

    However, current Western debate stalls at how best to implement, filter and apply. The UN, EU, Environmental orgs and NGOs all have their say. In the meantime central African’s lives suck.

    Stephen’s comment that US imigrants had lose their place has relevence, but most Africans have to do this in their place. They have to drop the tribal idea and traditions. For instance applying Hutu and Tutsi logic to the US is like having locals in Colorado kill Californians because they build vacation homes increasing taxes and skewing the zoning.

    Remember that idea of human progress? You know eliminating diseases, feeding everyone, being able to “live to eat” instead of “eating to live”? Many in the West seem to have forgotten this.

    How can you help? Support economic force against the despots and if that doesn’t work supporting regime change. Will good, innocent people die? You bet. But they do die now and have been. The hope is that this will stop and they can get lives.

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