All Diamonds are Blood Diamonds Protest, February 5, 2007

PRESS STATEMENT

ALL DIAMONDS ARE BLOOD DIAMONDS PROTEST
FEBRUARY 5, 2007

All diamonds are blood diamonds!

This press conference was called by the African People’s Solidarity Committee, the organization of white people working under the leadership of African People’s Socialist Party that leads the Uhuru Movement, working for African liberation.

The Rapaport International Diamond Conference is being held here in New York today as part of a massive public relations campaign attempting to clean up the soiled image of the DeBeers diamond cartel and the world diamond industry whose hands have been dripping in the blood of African people for the past century.

As DeBeers and the diamond industry find themselves under the increasing scrutiny of world opinion, they are scrambling to save themselves, bolster their public image and maintain the massive profits that they have enjoyed for a century at the expense of the people of Africa.

In recent years we have heard much about blood and conflict diamonds in Sierra Leone and West Africa.

The concept of “blood diamonds” is based on the fact that diamonds were sold independently by renegade African forces who led murderous attacks on the people of West Africa during the 1990s. The renegade forces, acting in the interest of Western powers, sold diamonds outside of the “legitimate” process set up by DeBeers to maintain its worldwide hegemony over all diamonds, thereby artificially inflating their value.

The DeBeers’ led diamond industry tells us that the majority of diamonds are now “clean,” and that North Americans should feel good about buying the stones. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Diamond workers in the DeBeers-owned diamond mines of Africa are forced into slave-like conditions of back breaking labor for only pennies a day on their own land.

In Sierra Leone, billions of dollars worth of diamonds have been extracted since the 1930s, providing wealth for Europe, North America and Israel. Yet diamond diggers in Sierra Leone make about 30 cents a day and sometimes a cup of rice. There are no unions and no benefits.

Sierra Leone has no electrical infrastructure, no water purification systems, no roads, no education system, no health care. Throughout diamond-rich West Africa, in Congo, Liberia and Botswana, the conditions are the same or worse. At least half the people live on less than a dollar a day with the highest per capita AIDS rate in the world. The poverty is so great that 28 percent of the children of full-time diamonds workers die of starvation or curable disease before they are five years old.

In Guinea-Conakry the conditions are so serious that the people have waged a general strike for more than two weeks despite the fact that more than 60 people have been killed by the police of the neocolonial Conte government.

DeBeers and the diamond cartel are part of the legacy of the brutal colonial system in Africa. DeBeers was founded by the British colonial agent Cecil Rhodes who slaughtered tens of thousands of African people in Southern Africa, displaced them from their lands, set up the apartheid system, forced thousands into concentration camps, and used them as slave labor in the diamond mines where they were forced at gunpoint to crawl on their knees finding diamonds on the ground.

The conditions for diamond workers in Africa today are not much better. They are usually separated from their families in work camps surrounding the mines. In Botswana the entire diamond workforce was fired two years ago when they attempted to strike for a very small increase in wages.

Some claim that Canadian, Russian or other diamonds are “clean” diamonds. But in Canada and Siberia the Indigenous peoples are also fighting for control over their own land and struggling against the oppressive DeBeers cartel and the world diamond industry. More than that, no diamonds can be clean when the price of all diamonds worldwide is artificially inflated by the near slave labor of diamond workers in Africa.

This is why we say all diamonds are blood diamonds.

The diamond industry says that it is going to improve conditions for the workers and diggers. It claims that it might raise wages, build schools or provide drugs for AIDS victims. These are lies and spin to try to improve their tarnished image.

The fact is just conditions in the mines of are no interest to DeBeers. The diamond industry has had a hundred years to improve the lives of the workers, and it has not done it.

Most importantly, charity and crumbs from the vast profits of the diamond industry are not the answer.

The diamonds of Africa belong to African working people. They are part of the legacy of colonial plunder that began with slavery that has made America and Europe wealthy and powerful, and the majority of Africans impoverished and powerless.

The African People’s Solidarity Committee unites with the call led by the African Socialist International that Africa and all its resources belong to Africa people everywhere.

Every African child growing up in Sierra Leone or South Africa or Botswana should live in prosperity with a beautiful home, first rate health care, an excellent education and the best prospects for life.

African people are one people wherever they are, and Africa is theirs. If African people had power over their own land and resources in Africa, the police in New York would not be able to gun down Sean Bell in Queens.

The African People’s Solidarity Committee is calling on the white community, which takes for granted the promise that every engaged women will wear a diamond on her finger, to boycott ALL diamonds!

Give back your diamond as reparations to the African community. Returned diamonds help to fund the African People’s Development and Empowerment Projects building sustainable electrification and water purification programs throughout the African world.

Support the movement for One United Africa. The liberation of Africa and return of Africa’s resources into the hands of African working people is the only guarantee of a world of peace through justice and the coming together of all peoples for the benefit of all humanity!

For more information, see www.boycottdiamonds.net. Call 215-387-0919.