BY BRANDON CURRIE, GV CONTENT EDITOR

WATERLOO, ON – Since first going to Sierra Leone over 40 years ago as a CUSO volunteer, Ian Smilie has been one of Canada’s finest exports in international development. After leading – and largely winning – the fight to stop the global trade of conflict diamonds, he’s now trying to help Africa’s small-scale ‘diggers’ convert the stones from a “fuel for war into an engine for development.”

A successful consultant, author and editor of numerous books on aid and NGOs, Smilie worked with Partnership Africa Canada (PAC) to implement the Kimberley Process, a legally binding global certification system for the trading of rough diamonds. He now chairs the Diamond Development Initiative (DDI).

In May 2008, Smilie sat down with Governance Village to share insights, anecdotes and lessons learned during his lengthy career.

You recently delivered a lecture entitled: ‘War and Redemption in the Global Diamond Trade.' Is this to say you think the industry has redeemed itself?

I think it's working to; it's trying hard to,  though not exclusively for the right reasons. But that doesn't really matter.

Once we had the Kimberley Process up and running, we realized that there are more than one million artisanal alluvial diamond diggers in Africa who earn less than a dollar a day. And Kimberley is doing nothing about that - it's not a development or human rights organization. [The diamond industry] understood that this is the next issue. Diamonds are about wealth and love and loyalty and all of these good things; how does it look to have a million people earning less than a dollar a day, working under terrible conditions, digging these pieces of rock?

But the industry is very keen to address this issue - that's not the problem. We have to be careful that they don't swamp it. It's got to be about development, not scoring points for industry. We want to make sure there's enough balance and control in this thing so that it doesn't just become a PR vehicle... But I do think, through this, the industry is redeeming itself. Of course, they wouldn't put it that way because most don't think they did anything wrong in the first place.

They understand, however, that there is a real and continuing problem that does tarnish their image. And it's better to fix it - I mean, actually fix it - if they can. I think the whole Kimberley Process has given the diamond industry a new idea of what corporate social responsibility is. It's not funding orphanages in Africa - it is about their core business and how it relates to the community around it. DeBeers is not in Sierra Leone, but if there's a problem with diamonds in Sierra Leone, it's a problem for the entire industry, De Beers included.

Can the ‘diamond model' of corporate responsibility apply to other extractive industries?

Other extractives are also increasingly concerned about their image. They've been taking a beating from environmentalists, human rights and development NGOs. Oil companies come to mind but also other mining companies. There's been quite a campaign around gold mining, something called the "No Dirty Gold" campaign. And in the last couple years there's been a new initiative called the Madison Dialogue, which talks about everything going into jewelry: gold, silver, platinum, diamonds and coloured stones.

One of the things DDI is pushing is a clear definition of "development" diamonds. A label that means they conform to specific standards with third-party verification. It'll take three or four years to get to that... but we're working towards an ethical diamond. Some of the big companies could already produce this without blinking. What we're trying to do is get some of the junior and artisanal producers to produce ethical diamonds, because in Sierra Leone or the Congo or Angola there's no diamond you could label "ethical" or "development" at this stage. But we don't want to hurt small African producers. The objective of this is to create a movement that will help people working in the diamond business in countries like Sierra Leone.

How much influence did Partnership Africa-Canada have over the diamond regulation process?

The thing was that we had full-time dedicated staff working on nothing but diamonds. If you look at the average NGO campaign, it's usually a part-time thing for somebody. They might work full-time to produce a study, but they don't stick with it. I've seen a lot of NGO work over the years, and I think this is somewhat unique.

We were joined when this was really a sexy, hot issue by all the big [NGOs] - OXFAM, World Vision, Amnesty, ActionAid - we had a coalition of maybe 200 NGOs. But none of them, no matter how involved they were, had anyone working on [diamonds] full-time apart from us and a British NGO, Global Witness. And as it has become less sexy, many have dropped off.

It's really been Global Witness and PAC that have been keeping up with the research, going to meetings, embarrassing the Kimberley Process when it doesn't function... and now we're trying to expand to partner with African NGOs, which is long overdue. But I think we've been very influential. It wouldn't have happened without us and, if it did, it certainly wouldn't be half as tough as it is. People in the industry will tell you that we've been surprisingly effective for our size.

Is this a unique case of NGO participation in international affairs? Could it be template?

Well, they always hate it when we put our hands up at meetings.

A lot of NGOs that get into advocacy don't devote enough resources and don't see it as a long-term thing, maybe one or two years. What we've discovered is that this isn't over. And we've been at it for eight years. We've come a long way, but we've had to evolve, change and adapt.

Another thing that NGOs think is that there's no money out there for this kind of work. Well, we have raised money. It hasn't been easy or fun - it never is. But we've had remarkably good support from foundations and bilateral donors. CIDA was supportive at the beginning, but they're not now. We can't even get them to answer the phone since we added the word "development" to "diamonds". But foreign affairs, IDRC, the Swedish government, the Brits, the Irish, the Belgians: it's amazing the collection of donors willing to support this kind of work.

Personally, what motivated you to take on the issue of conflict diamonds?

I was a CUSO volunteer in Sierra Leone in the 1960s, and by chance got posted to the diamond-producing area where I taught high school. Much later, during the mid-90s, I was part of a concerned group of Canadians that met to raise money mostly for relief.

At the time, nobody was interested in Sierra Leone. Not the UN. Not Canada. And it was getting worse and worse. Finally, someone in the group said: "Listen." This is about diamonds. And unless somebody does something about it, this thing will never be over." It was like a light bulb going on. I had seen diamonds in Sierra Leone and knew exactly how chaotic it was. It was fairly obvious the rebels had occupied the diamond fields. But nobody was putting two and two together. I thought to myself: "I'm a consultant and a writer, my time is my own. Why don't we get some money together and do a study on this?" So we asked 15 NGOs to give us $2,000 each, and all but one did. Then we asked [the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade] to match it through their Peacebuilding Fund.

How have diamonds changed Sierra Leone in the past 40 years?

40 years, really?! My God [laughs]! If you asked me quickly I would have said 30.

Nothing in mining them has really changed. The desperate nature of the physical and social conditions in the mining areas - not just in Sierra Leone but also in the Congo and Angola - are like they were 40 years ago. Nothing's changed. And that's the idea of the DDI, to try to do something more systematically. Not a bunch of nice little projects. The idea is to change the way diamonds are mined and how the community benefits from that.

Has pop culture's recent interest in conflict diamonds been useful?

The [Leonardo] Di Caprio movie (Blood Diamond) did come out at a useful moment because the Kimberley Process was wobbly and the industry was absolutely freaked about that movie. They were convinced it was the end of their world as they knew it. They got onside with everything we wanted at the time, so we got a lot of traction out of the film in that sense.

Has that translated into popular support from the public?

We haven't looked for popular support in that sense. It's very hard to get $10 donations for any of this stuff. To get people turned on to this issue that way, it would cost us a lot of money. People like to give money to starving children or emergencies. But if you tell them you want money to create an ethical diamond chain, it sounds okay after a 15-minute conversation. Coming at them straight out of the blue, if people can feed a starving baby or do development diamonds, what do you think would happen?

After starting out so focused on ending diamond-related conflicts, are you concerned about expanding into the social development side of the industry?

Well this is a much bigger problem. It's real change at a high level. It's okay to institute more laws and police them, which is what we've done with the Kimberley Process. But to actually do something developmentally sound - make a real difference - in places where development has never worked is a much bigger challenge. That's why we decided on an NGO that's focused just on this. You just couldn't get enough interest from the OXFAMs and CAREs. No one else is willing to do this except on an ad hoc, piecemeal basis. This thing's big and diverse, but is still only focused on one thing: diamonds.

When we were first talking about this and had no money, I would wake up in the middle of the night and think: "My God what are we doing here?" We've got so many people involved and talking about this, and we haven't got a dime. How are we going to turn this into something real?

Given what PAC has accomplished, what advice would you give other NGOs trying to make a difference in their field?

There are all kinds of ways to do it. If you want to do it yourself, the easiest way is to sponsor a child. Shorten the distance between the giver and receiver. The development might not be that profound, but you'll feel good. If you want to make a bigger difference, you really have to start working with others.

There are newish NGOs, like Global Witness, that are not quite human rights, not quite environment and not quite development. They're all of the above and a bit more. They're willing to campaign around a particular issue and stick with it for a long time. This is what made PAC effective where conflict diamonds were concerned, and we hope it will work with development diamonds and DDI.

People said with the diamond campaign, "Diamonds were sexy; it was easy." Well, diamonds were not sexy, and it was not easy. To get a global certification system for all rough diamonds, this seemed at first like a total pipe dream. One of our early recommendations was a UN embargo on diamonds from Liberia, and we were told by someone from [the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade] "That's not going to happen." But it certainly did happen, and that was just the beginning. In many ways the sky's the limit and you have to dream in technicolor. If you do a five-year plan and put it inside of a logical framework analysis, it won't work.