During September and October, I shot a documentary on the diamond business in Africa. It is a report presented by Sorious Samura who worked as a consultant on Warner Brother’s latest feature film ‘Blood Diamonds, which shows how diamond sales fuelled Sierra Leone’s horrendous civil war in the 1990s. That war ended in 1999 but the country is still in trouble. Too many people are driven by the ‘get rich quick’ mentality, which is a curse for the country.

 

Despite diamond exports worth billions of dollars, Africa’s main mining centres in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo are still lacking the most basic infrastructure: no running water, no proper roads, hardly any medical facilities, not enough schools etc. This is a most obvious case of corruption. Local people are angry and desperate; deaths and killings happen every day. If their misery continued, more wars are unavoidable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Corrupt political systems are, without doubt, an important cause of wars. They create injustice and prevent the development of healthy economies and functioning societies. On a local level, the traditional response to high level corruption - if any - is either a coup or a revolution, usually creating even more misery and millions of refugees. Yet, how do we respond to corruption on an international level?

 

One clearly needs a strategy to fight corrupt regimes around the world and anybody dealing with them. Could we create ‘Geneva Conventions for Business’ with a tribunal similar to the International Criminal Court? In a world where corporations are building up more power than states it would be a wise insurance policy to create a moral code of conduct for businesses. Any individual, company or government involved in corrupt business practices would run the risk to be internationally named, shamed and boycotted. This should in the long run, lead to a better protection of human rights and civil liberties. It could also prevent bloody conflicts - more effectively than the talk in the UN and the work of aid agencies around the world.  

 

‘Geneva Conventions for Business’? Is this just a silly dream of a naive do-gooder? May be, but if you think about all the money, the time and the lives wasted in wars, it would make economic sense to pursue this dream actively. Efforts not wasted in wars, could be invested in building healthier societies.