# The Heart of the Matter > [!note] 📄 Non-governmental report > Published by Partnership Africa Canada, an independent research and advocacy coalition. Partnership Africa Canada, *The Heart of the Matter: Sierra Leone, Diamonds and Human Security*, by **[[Ian Smillie]]**, Lansana Gberie and Ralph Hazleton, **January 2000**. The report that produced the single most-quoted piece of arithmetic in the conflict-minerals field. ## The Liberia arithmetic > [!quote] The Heart of the Matter, January 2000 > "annual Liberian diamond mining capacity is between 100,000 and 150,000 carats, but the HRD records Liberian imports into Belgium of **over 31 million carats between 1994 and 1998**" Roughly six million carats a year against a domestic capacity of a tenth of that — **a discrepancy of forty to sixty times.** The companion figures are as stark: Sierra Leone's official government exports in 1998 were **8,500 carats**, while Antwerp recorded Belgian imports from Sierra Leone of about **770,000 carats**. This is the export-versus-geology method that runs through the whole cluster — the [[Fowler Report]] catching Uganda exporting diamonds from a country with no diamond deposits, [[Global Witness]] catching Rwanda exporting more coltan than it can mine. See [[Rwanda]]. ## The weakness worth knowing The arithmetic rests entirely on statistics from the **Diamond High Council**, the Antwerp industry body — **which the report simultaneously indicts** as conflicted, since HRD was both the statistical authority and the trade's own representative. That is the report's most important methodological feature and its most important vulnerability. Two further caveats: "declared country of provenance" in Antwerp records is not country of origin, so the Liberian figure also absorbs Guinean, Ivorian, Congolese and non-African goods being laundered for tax or provenance reasons — the report attributes the gap to Sierra Leonean conflict diamonds more confidently than the data supports. And the 100,000–150,000 carat "domestic capacity" is itself an estimate whose derivation is not shown. ## The recommendations, and what became of them The report's central proposal was a **permanent International Diamond Standards Commission under UN auspices**, with independent standing. **It was not created.** What emerged instead was the [[Kimberley Process Certification Scheme]] — voluntary, consensus-based, state-run, with no independent standards body and no enforcement arm. Smillie helped design it, and resigned from it in 2009 saying he would no longer participate in "a pretense that failure is success." Of the eight recommendation clusters, the ones achieved were the UN embargoes on Liberian and Ivorian diamonds and the consumer-awareness campaign that culminated in the *Blood Diamond* film era. The one that would have mattered structurally — taking Belgian oversight away from the HRD — **did not happen; the HRD retained its role.** ## See also [[Ian Smillie]] · [[Blood Diamonds]] · [[Sierra Leone Civil War]] · [[Kimberley Process Certification Scheme]] · [[A Rough Trade]] · [[Charles Taylor]]