DeBeers diamonds website covers up the immense white wealth coming at expense of African oppression and poverty

Recently the World Diamond Council, led by the multi-billion dollar DeBeers diamond cartel, launched diamondfacts.org, a website in defense of the brutal diamond industry.

The website is diamond industry spin in the face of negative publicity generated by the struggle of African people against the genocidal reality of the bloody diamond trade.

“Blood” or “conflict” diamonds have gained notoriety in the past several years in the wake of imperialist-backed diamond proxy wars in Africa in the 1990s. Blood/conflict diamonds are those that are sold outside of the Kimberley process set up by DeBeers to maintain its worldwide control over the diamond trade.

The reality, however, is that all diamonds are blood and conflict diamonds! The diamond wars are just another chapter in the centuries-long history of Western colonial domination in Africa that kidnapped millions of African people for enslavement in the Americas, wiped out whole segments of the African population in Africa, stole African land and resources, and enslaved African people on their own soil for the benefit of the white world!

DeBeers diamond mines were founded by Cecil Rhodes, who colonized Southern Africa as a way of using stolen wealth and resources to create British prosperity for all sectors of society, including white workers.

The defensive posture of the diamond industry is a response to the growing movement of African working people throughout the continent and the world asserting that Africa and all its resources are the birthright of African people everywhere.

Diamondfacts.org lists outright lies that it calls “facts.” Here is the truth behind some of the DeBeers’ fabrications.

DeBeers lie: “An estimated 5 million people have access to appropriate to healthcare in southern Africa thanks to revenues from diamonds…Debswana, a mining company in Botswana, recently became the first mining company in the world to extend free anti-retroviral treatment (ART) to HIV positive employees, their life partners, their children, and former employees for life.”

Fact: Botswana, like all of Africa lives under the weight of 500 years of the slave trade and a brutal colonialism that built the wealth of the white world at the expense of African people.
Today, Botswana has the second largest per capita AIDS population on the planet, with nearly a quarter of the people infected. Botswana’s life expectancy at birth is only 36 years! Nearly a fourth of the population lives on less than a dollar a day! A third of the people of Botswana are undernourished. Yet Botswana is the largest supplier of uncut diamonds on the world.
Every man, woman and child in Botswana and all of Africa should live in prosperity, with houses, cars, the best education, the ability to travel the world and excellent health care.

Two years ago when diamond workers from four mines went on strike in Botswana—strikes are illegal there—the DeBeers-owned Debswana mine fired them, forcibly evicted the workers and their families from company-owned homes and had union organizers arrested.

Botswana’s diamonds make up nearly 70 percent of DeBeers’ total output. The diamond workers were asking for a mere 16 percent increase over their current pay, which the miners described as “peanuts.”

Debswana’s “free” antiretroviral drugs provided to its workers during their very short life spans are making millions for the parasitic Western pharmaceutical companies.

What African people are calling for is control over their own land and continent. They want to own and benefit from their own diamonds to feed their families and live a decent life that we take for granted here. They want power over their own destinies, resources, lives, housing and health care.

The demand in Africa is for national liberation from this parasitic system that has been stealing from Africa for 500 years in order to provide prosperity and democracy in the West.

DeBeers lie: An estimated 10 million people globally are directly or indirectly supported by the diamond industry.

Fact: White people in the U.S., Belgium, Israel and Britain are wealthy from the multi-billion dollar diamond industry. In Africa where most of the world’s best diamonds come from, people labor under hideous conditions, in near starvation because Africa’s wealth goes to white people in Europe and North America. In Sierra Leone and West Africa, diamond workers make about 30 cents a day. There is no electricity, no water purification and very little food.

DeBeers lie #8: Over one million people are employed by the diamond industry in India.

Fact: The former British colony of India may have a million diamond workers, but most are impoverished. Seventy percent of the world’s diamonds set in jewelry are cut and polished in India, a $3.3 billion industry.

Most of the diamond workforce in India is comprised of farm boys who earn tiny wages at small diamond-cutting sweatshops in the most impoverished sections of Mumbai, Surat and Ahmadabad. Almost 30 percent of this jewelry is imported to the U.S., which then turns them over for $11 billion annual profit.

DeBeers statement: Major world leaders—including Nelson Mandela—have cited the importance of diamonds to the lives of African people.

Fact: Nelson Mandela is a neocolonialist, a puppet leader from the colonized population who act in the interests of white power.

Today, 12 years after Mandela’s rise to power and the end of apartheid in South Africa, 40 percent of Africans in the cities are unemployed and 70 percent in rural areas. Sixty-one percent now live below the poverty level, while only about one percent of whites lives in poverty. Ninety-six percent of arable commercial land is still in the hands of white farmers.

Mandela recently came out with a public statement in support of DeBeers, stating that the diamond industry is “good for South Africa.”

The days of white control of other people’s resources are over. The only possibility for a future of peace on the planet is through national liberation, the right of oppressed peoples to self-determination, sovereignty and control of their own land and resources.

Demands:

1. Boycott ALL diamonds. All diamonds are blood diamonds
2. Donate your diamond to the Uhuru Movement, the African-led movement that is working with communities in West Africa to build an electrical infrastructure and water purification process there.
3. Reparations to African people and support for the struggle for national liberation, the right of African and all oppressed peoples to their land, government, wealth and resources.

Participate in African People’s Solidarity Day events with speakers from throughout the African world. Learn the truth about white America’s debt to Africa and African people.

Take a stand for the future of world peace and unity by supporting the right of oppressed peoples for national liberation. Break from our allegiance with this system that maintains itself through wars, violence and genocide against others so that we can benefit from their stolen labor and resources. Peace will never be possible until Africa and African people throughout the world are united and their land and destinies are in their own hands!

For more information on African People’s Solidarity Day, the National Day Against Diamonds and the truth about the diamond trade, see www.apscuhuru.org