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May PEACE Prevail in Sierra Leone!
May PEACE Prevail on Earth!

Using diamonds to ease Africa's pain
By James Carroll
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Boston Globe, published by the Boston Globe Newspaper Company.

You can get the news one article at a time, but for its meaning you might have to read two. Recently, a pair of headlines illuminated one another. ''AIDS in Africa seen cutting life span to 30,'' The Globe front page blared.

Reports from the 13th International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, provided such a bleak drumbeat - 40 million already dead or soon to die; unhealthy sexual behavior patterns too ingrained, governments too corrupt, drugs too expensive; the virus too resistant - that the difficulties could seem insurmountable.

Will America fall back now on the regretful detachment of a subtle neo-Darwinism, as if ''survival of the fittest'' applies to races as to species? Are the apparently less fit races of Africa doomed to fall before the plague of HIV/AIDS like less fit species of birds falling before a climate change?

Such detachment is based on the premise that the AIDS plight of Africa is rooted in a historically, if not innately inferior culture, with no real connections reaching north and west. The fate of Africa unfolds alone. But the second headline from another publication might call that premise into question. It ran on the front page of The New York Times business section; ''De Beers Halts Its Hoarding of Diamonds.''

De Beers Consolidated Mines originated in South Africa and has long dominated the world diamond trade. The Times reported that its shift away from hoarding as a means of price support resulted, in part, from ''public-relations fears that `conflict diamonds' from Africa are poisoning a carefully nurtured image that De Beers stones are symbols of `love, beauty, and purity.'''

Diamonds are, in fact, a point of intimate contact between privileged people in the North, including the United States, and the most desperate people in the South. And they are part of the explosive story of AIDS in Africa.

The vectors along which HIV has so efficiently moved on that continent include the wars in countries from Ethiopia and Eritrea to Sierra Leone to Angola, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, and Congo. Not only are violence-displaced populations more vulnerable to infection, health systems destroyed, resources wasted, and governments overtaken by warlords, but a key source of virus transmission are the marauding rebels, and the cross-border troops who take them on.

And the engine driving many of these conflicts has been diamonds, with rebels and officials alike stoked by greed. That is why the UN embargoed diamonds from Angola, and, recently, from Sierra Leone.

To prevent its tokens of ''love, beauty, and purity'' from being sullied by such associations, De Beers has just recently declared it will not trade in war-booty diamonds.

But war is not De Beer's only problem.To account for the explosive rates of HIV/AIDS transmission in Africa, experts have also targeted the tradition of migratory labor, a tradition not ''natural'' to Africa, but one dating to the colonial era, especially in South Africa. Migratory labor involves the movement of males away from their home communities and families, a related commercializing of sex, exploitation of sex-workers, and ultimate infection of home-bound wives and their babies.

This story begins, though, not in the traditions of a ''lesser race,'' as if the ideal of sexual fidelity is foreign to tribal Africa, but in economic structures imposed from outside and still in force. De Beers, for one, depends on such structures yet.

At another conference on HIV/AIDS in South Africa not long ago (as I read in the impressive new book ''Catholic Ethicists on HIV/AIDS Prevention,'' edited by James Keenan, S.J.), an African theologian named Teresa Okure made the point that what makes HIV so lethal in Africa are two other viruses, as she called them: a virus of the mind that makes women appear inferior to men, and a virus of an unjust social order that widens the gulf between possessors and the dispossessed.

Diamonds are a poignant, if tragic symbol of these very complexities, costing so much in the lives of those who mine them, while embodying the fondest wishes of those who give them as gifts and wear them. Cross-cultural facets of beauty and love are death and loss.

The grim fate of Africa is profoundly linked to an America that might think otherwise. Basic human compassion requires this country to support vastly increased programs of AIDS prevention, education, and treatment in Africa. But even more so, basic justice requires us to acknowledge ourselves as beneficiaries of this unjust social order, and to get serious about reversing it.

Here, oddly, De Beers could show the way. Its hoard of diamonds is worth about $4 billion, and the Times story suggests that the company intends to use its cashed-in stockpile to stimulate further diamond sales, ''to experience the sales growth of items like Gucci bags.'' But what if, instead, De Beers used even a portion of such profits to address the African AIDS crisis it helped to spark? What if De Beers became a major partner in prevention, funding massive AIDS education programs among its miners and truckers? What if De Beers used its enormous clout to motivate health ministries? Or began the transformation of its own inhuman industrial structures throughout Africa, and led other companies to do so as well?

If De Beers responded in such ways, diamonds could seem even more precious. The world could treasure them as symbols of a new investment in the ''love, beauty, and purity'' not of African stones, but of Africa's people.

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