DURHAM - The movie "Blood Diamond," one of the holiday season's blockbusters, offers a window into many cultural cross-currents: Hollywood's efforts to cultivate a social conscience; a global industry proclaiming a commitment to corporate responsibility; and political activists flexing muscles in international politics. We laud these efforts, but we warn that their collective successes can perpetuate, not solve, the grievous ills that they all aim to address.

Set in Sierra Leone in 1999, the film exposes the underbelly of an image-conscious industry that promotes its product as a symbol of purity and everlasting love. Taking its title from diamonds mined, often by forced child labor, to fund brutal rebellions in African nations, the film promptly kicked the industry into damage control.

Far ahead of its release, diamond industry representatives publicized their ongoing efforts to stop the flow of blood diamonds through an international certification process. But however sincere and laudable the effort, the industry's response exposes deep limitations both to regulating the diamond trade and to delegating international responsibilities to private actors.

Blood diamonds, at some point said to represent 15 percent of a $60 billion industry, have too frequently found their way into the consumer markets and onto the unsuspecting fingers of would-be brides. In the process, they have contributed to horrific bloodshed in Sierra Leone, Angola, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and, most recently, the Ivory Coast.

Properly outraged, social activists in the late 1990s demanded that the industry do something to stop it.

The diamond industry was understandably petrified -- imagine if diamonds, marketed with stunning success as a symbol of romance, were associated with brutal warlords and abused child laborers.

In 2002, led by market leader DeBeers, industry officials cooperated with a number of Western non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to form the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme. The Kimberley Process is a vast international program designed to certify the origin of each diamond and to prohibit trade with countries that do not comply with its requirements. It instructs that each international shipment of rough diamonds be transported in a tamper-resistant container and accompanied by a government-verified certificate that indicates the origin of each stone. A working group, comprised of government, industry and NGO representatives, is assigned to monitor the implementation and effectiveness of the scheme.

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Has the process worked? DeBeers says the Kimberley Process has "virtually eliminated" the trade in conflict diamonds. Indeed, it is a poster child for swift and innovative international cooperation, and its involvement of industry and NGOs is unique and laudable. With 71 countries signed up and 99.8 percent of global production of diamonds covered, the process has overcome a major collective action problem. Even the World Trade Organization, where lately everything stalls, has formally approved trade sanctions to stop the trade in conflict diamonds.

At the same time, though, the voluntary nature of the process and its country inspections are bound to raise compliance questions. The industry has promised to impose self-regulation, but since up to 20 percent of the diamond trade is informal, it is hard to be sure that blood diamonds now represent less than 1 percent of the market. Diamonds are the currency of choice for smugglers, rebels and outlaws: they are portable, virtually untraceable and universally valuable. Those same attributes make policing diamond traffic extremely difficult.

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