(Continued...)

Now, with Blood Diamond coming out so close to Christmas, the industry is bracing for the chilly effect the film might have on holiday sales.

"This movie is going to jar people," says Bonnie Abaunza, who runs Amnesty International's celebrity outreach program. (Amnesty is an adviser for the film.) "I don't know how you can watch it and not stay up all night thinking about child soldiers and conflict diamonds."

That people in the multibillion dollar diamond game tend to avoid commenting on their concern publicly comes as no surprise, but the industry's recent behavior speaks volumes. While the movie was in the early stages of production, the World Diamond Council, an organization set up by diamond companies in 2000 following pressure from human rights groups, sent a three-page letter to Ed Zwick, the film's director, that took great pains to point out the strides the diamond industry has made to remove conflict diamonds from the market.

The movie's story "would be incomplete without the message of hope contained in the unprecedented international effort to eliminate conflict diamonds," the letter stated. "There is a real risk of associating diamonds with African conflicts permanently and undermining consumer confidence in the product unintentionally."

In September the council created a website, which attempts to outline how diamonds benefit the economies and people of Africa. It explains that nearly all of the world's diamonds are conflict-free thanks to the Kimberley Process, a certification system set up to track diamonds all the way from the pit mine to a woman's ring finger. The process, says the council, "has virtually eliminated the trade in conflict diamonds."

"After the movie comes out, do you think people will want diamonds from Sierra Leone? The jewelers won't want to touch them. I don't give a crap about the development groups or the diamond industry. I care about the African diggers getting their asses kicked in"The World Diamond Council maintains that the Kimberley Process has reduced conflict diamonds to one percent of the world market. But according to Global Witness, a human rights group that works to combat the proliferation of conflict diamonds, the system is gravely flawed. The organization maintains that in war-divided Ivory Coast, for example, about 300,000 carats of diamonds are mined per year, mostly in the rebel-held north. In September the United Nations reported that diamonds mined in Ivory Coast were providing the rebellion with up to $23 million per year. Ivorian rebels smuggle the diamonds through Mali and Ghana, the report said, where they get a Kimberley Process stamp of approval.

"It's a broken process," says Corinna Gilfillan, the head of the U.S. office of Global Witness. "If De Beers and the others are really concerned about this, they should do more to make sure governments are making their countries adhere to the process."

The industry's public relations campaign has made the human rights community suspicious. "All this publicity begs the question: Why is the World Diamond Council spending all this money?" Abaunza says. "What are they scared of? Pharmaceutical companies didn't launch a campaign before The Constant Gardener came out."

A member of the council's publicity group, who asked not to be named, acknowledged the pre-release impact of the film: "The industry has never made any bones about the fact that it's the movie that got them going on the website and the education campaign. The diamond industry owes Warner Bros. and the filmmakers a debt of gratitude for getting them engaged."

A nonprofit group called the Diamonds for Africa Fund recently launched a parody of the Diamond Council's website that focuses on the unseemly side of the business. The site is critical of the effectiveness of the Kimberley Process, pointing to the smuggling in Ivory Coast as evidence that loopholes in the system still exist. The website also highlights the use of child labor in African diamond mines and the poverty that prevails in Africa even where the diamond market is said to be clean.

The site also offers a solution: buy diamonds from Canada. It's a notion that infuriates Martin Rapaport, a member of the World Diamond Council and publisher one of the industry's most important newsletters. In 2000 Rapaport tried, unsuccessfully, to establish a system in Sierra Leone that would vastly increase the pay that local diggers got for their finds, cutting out the middle men and discouraging smuggling along the way. Now he sees the release of Blood Diamond and the advocacy that surrounds it as reckless and potentially harmful to the very people the human rights groups are trying to help.

"How dare these people effectively create a boycott of Sierra Leone diamonds?" Rapaport says. "After the movie comes out, do you think people will want diamonds from Sierra Leone? The jewelers won't want to touch them. I don't give a crap about the development groups or the diamond industry. I care about the African diggers getting their asses kicked in."

Abaunza at Amnesty International doesn't see it that way.

"We don't want a boycott of diamonds. We want people to ask their jeweler if their diamonds are conflict-free," Abaunza says. "I believe in the power of education. I think people need to understand this. The economies in Africa need to be strengthened—the public will say 'I don't want people starving. I want to know what's going on.'"