Thanks to Naomi Campbell's clueless testimony before the U.N. Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague, the manufactured non-scandal of "blood diamonds" is once again being trundled before the collected gullibility of the world.
The parallel occurrences of diamonds and internecine mayhem in Africa are in no way causative—certainly no more than by any other commercial commodity found in the continent. When was the last time we heard of "blood manganese," or "blood copper," or, for that matter, "blood bananas" or "blood cut flowers"?
The fact is that most African diamonds are produced in places that are reasonably-to-perfectly peaceful, (such as Botswana, Namibia and South Africa), whereas there are murderous African conflicts that rage elsewhere without the slightest "assistance" from diamonds (such as Rwanda, Uganda, and the Sudan).
Alas, this simple truth is no match for the combined forces of liberal guilt and the commercial interests of a few players in the diamond industry. So the "blood diamond" charade has trundled on unimpeded, passing through Congress (where I testified about the absurdity of the whole notion 10 years ago), through Hollywood in the hands of Leonardo Di Caprio, and most recently last week with supermodel Ms. Campbell's testimony in The Hague about her "dirty pebbles." In this faux-morality play, everyone has his assigned role: