# Ian Smillie One of the architects of the [[Kimberley Process Certification Scheme]], and the man whose resignation from it is the canonical citation for the proposition that certification schemes fail. Smillie taught school in Koidu, in Sierra Leone's diamond district, in the late 1960s, ran CUSO, and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2003. He served on the **UN Security Council Expert Panel on Sierra Leone in 2000**, co-authored Partnership Africa Canada's landmark report ***The Heart of the Matter*** the same year — the source of the Liberia smuggling arithmetic that anchors the whole blood-diamond literature — and helped design the certification scheme that followed. He was the **first witness at [[Charles Taylor]]'s trial in The Hague** in 2008. He resigned from Partnership Africa Canada and the Kimberley Process in **June 2009**, and what he said about it is the point: > [!quote] Ian Smillie, 2009 > He would no longer participate in **"a pretense that failure is success"** — and, on the institution he had helped build: **"when regulators fail to regulate, the systems they were designed to protect collapse."** To a trade publication he put it more plainly: "you can only do this for so long and convince yourself that you are having an impact. At some point you just admit to yourself that there are better things you could do with your time." The triggers he cited were the KP's paralysis over **Zimbabwe**, Venezuela, Côte d'Ivoire and Guinea. [[Global Witness]] resigned as an observer two years later over the same Zimbabwe decision — see [[Operation Hakudzokwi]]. Smillie had warned about exactly this in 2002, in a paper arguing the scheme needed proper independent monitoring, before it launched. His book ***Blood on the Stone: Greed, Corruption and War in the Global Diamond Trade*** (2010) is the standard account. ## See also [[Kimberley Process Certification Scheme]] · [[Blood Diamonds]] · [[Global Witness]] · [[Sierra Leone Civil War]] · [[Conflict Resources Atlas]]