It’s not often that diamonds dominate the headlines on the TV news and most of the daily newspapers, so we felt that we can’t really let the Naomi Campbell story pass without comment.
On Thursday Naomi Campbell was called to the Hague – apparently against her will – to testify in the war crimes trial of ex-Liberian President Charles Taylor.
Campbell and Taylor were guests at a dinner hosted by Nelson Mandela in South Africa in 1997, and it had been alleged that she was given a rough diamond (or diamonds) by Taylor.
Campbell had previously denied having received a diamond from Taylor (famously throwing a strop on ABC News when asked about it), but under oath at the Hague she finally produced her story, telling the court that two men came to her room after dinner and handed over a pouch containing rough diamonds, with the words, “A gift for you”.
But in a blow to the image of one of the world’s great luxury products, she described them as “small dirty looking stones” and “dirty pebbles”.
(Actually, she might be right about that: rough diamonds can look somewhat underwhelming when compared with the brilliant gems released once they’re cut & polished.)
Mr Taylor is accused of using funds from diamonds mined illegally in Sierra Leone to buy weapons supplied to the RUF rebels in that country’s 1991-2001 civil war.
The rebels in Sierra Leone were especially brutal – one of their trademark ‘punishments’ was to hack the limbs off civilians, including women and children, and there have also been accusations of rape, slavery, and ‘pillage’, much of it allegedly directed and funded by Charles Taylor.
It’s a little ironic that Mr Taylor and Liberia are at the centre of the West African ‘blood diamond’ trade of the 1990s because Liberia itself is not a major diamond producing nation. Instead, it became the smuggler’s route out for diamonds from the neighbouring countries of Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, and of course Sierra Leone.
Ms Campbell’s testimony is meant to support the case for the prosecution by demonstrating that Taylor had access to rough diamonds and was giving them away in the late 1990s.
But it seems to me (and I’m no lawyer…) that Campbell’s evidence, when viewed in isolation, is not terribly convincing.
Any half-decent lawyer would be able to cast some doubt on the fact that the gift came from Mr Taylor. Then there is doubt that the gift actually contained diamonds (although they have now apparently been tracked down to a charity worker in South Africa so presumably they can be examined — after a gap of 13 years, but, hey, a diamond is forever…).
But even if they are tracked down and traceable to Taylor, he could probably claim that the diamonds were acquired legitimately, or perhaps in South Africa where the dinner took place – a country which has no shortage of small, dirty-looking stones of its own.
It’s not a tremendous leap of the imagination to claim that Charles Taylor was somehow mixed up in diamond trafficking and arms supply to RUF rebels in the late 1990s, but I hope that the prosecution have some rather more convincing evidence than this loose link with a British supermodel who might or might not have taken delivery of three small dirty stones at the other end of the continent from a couple of nameless late night callers.
Much of the coverage has quoted Campbell’s assertion that she had never heard of blood diamonds or of Liberia. But so what? How many young models from Streatham, south London, would have heard of Liberia?
And as for the fact that Campbell hadn’t heard of blood diamonds, well some commentators would like to think that this must be wrong because surely everyone saw the DiCaprio movie, right?
Campbell was making the point that she hadn’t heard of blood diamonds in 1997, but neither had anyone because the term wasn’t coined until later when conflicts in Angola, Zaire, and Sierra Leone prompted a couple of NGOs to publish their reports into ‘conflict diamonds’ in 1998-2000, leading in turn to the establishment of the Kimberley Process which introduced regulation of rough diamond exports/imports from 2003.
The only good to come from Campbell's testimony is that as a result far more people are aware of the horrors of the Sierra Leone conflict and the alleged role of Charles Taylor (and, sad to say, of diamonds) in those horrors.
Perhaps that was the point: that this was a publicity stunt (and not by Campbell because she didn’t want to appear). But I’m not sure that the law and public prosecutions should be used for the purposes of generating publicity.
I wonder what they’ll do next… call Leonardo DiCaprio to the witness stand?
Update: Mia Farrow this morning testified that Taylor gave Campbell a "huge diamond". Is it mischievous to suggest that what Campbell describes as "small stones" and Farrow describes as "a huge diamond" might actually be the same thing? Perhaps they have different standards and expectations when it comes to diamonds...
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