Last week the 2025 chair of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, Ahmed Bin Sulayem, had an article published extolling the benefits of the scheme. He must have had his tongue firmly planted in his cheek when he sent the article for publication.

Despite the bullish headline, integrity was missing from the outset.

If, as the article claimed, the Kimberley Process (KP) is “arguably the most successful attempt to govern the entire commodity supply chain” then that “success” should be measured against the death toll in Gaza where Kimberley Process certified diamonds have funded a genocide that has killed at least 70,000, and could be 126,000 or higher, defenceless, besieged and deliberately starved Palestinian, men, women and children.  For the people of Gaza, the KP has been a weapon of mass annihilation.

Ahmed Bin Sulayem, who worked quietly behind the scenes for years before the signing of the Abrahams accords to develop diamond trade links with the genocidal, fascist and apartheid regime in Israel, was never likely to say anything that might endanger the booming trade in Israeli blood diamonds which are laundered through the Diamond Exchange in the Dubai Multi Commodities Centre.

To claim that the KP attempts to govern the entire diamond supply chain is grossly misleading, intentionally so in my opinion. That claim forms the basis of the scam which legitimises the trade in blood diamonds that fall outside the remit of the KP which only bans rough diamonds that fund rebel violence.

While the KP was created to solve a very particular problem – rough diamond-funded rebel violence – the World Diamond Council (WDC) latched on to this to claim that it solved problems across the entire supply chain from mine to market. The WDC introduced the bogus System of Warranties to claim polished diamonds, that aren’t regulated by the KP, are conflict free even when they generate revenue used to fund genocide as is the case with diamonds processed in Israel.

There is no argument about the objective of the original, very limited, mandate of the KP. But what is at issue is the fact that rather than ending the trade in diamonds linked to grave human rights violations KP certification is being used to legitimise blood diamonds that fund human rights violations by groups other than rebel factions........

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