Are diamonds a bad thing? According to Hollywood, they just may be. The upcoming film Blood Diamond, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, explores the seedier side of the history of the African diamond trade, and it’s been generating a lot of attention. In the movie, DiCaprio portray a South Africa mercenary hunting for a pink diamond in war-torn Sierra Leone, where diamond-smuggling helped finance fighting that killed more than 75,000 people in the 1990s.

In many cases, the diamond trade has served as a force of good in some parts of Africa — a good example is Botswana, where diamond mining has contributed to a 120-fold increase in per-capita income in just forty years. The good, however, is counterbalanced by evil: at the end of the 20th century, the world became aware that diamonds were being used to finance some of the bloodiest civil wars in the history of the world, in places like Sierra Leone and Liberia. According to a group of Bushmen associated with DiCaprio (the most recent “conflict diamond” poster boy), even in Botswana diamonds have caused problems: the Bushman claimed that they were evicted from their land when diamonds were discovered there.

Whether we like it or not, Hollywood films have a great deal of influence on public opinion in America and around the world. At the same time, however, Hollywood’s treatment of any subject can’t help but be facile and incomplete; their format is limited to two hours or so. It’s difficult to cover all sides of an issue in such a limited time frame, and naturally the film has its critics. Representatives of the international gemstone market accuse Blood Diamond of trivializing events that are long past. According to industry spokesmen, such occurrences have long since been remedied; and in fact, most African diamond-producing nations are now members of the Kimberly Process, a regulatory partnership dedicated to ensuring that African diamonds are clean, and produced in ways that do not take advantage of those who actually mine them. The process basically requires governments to track the diamonds from mine to jeweler.

Among those who are fighting against the image of the African diamond industry as a mill for “blood diamonds” is Nelson Mandela, who points out that diamonds are essential to the good health of the South African economy. De Beer Group, the South African conglomerate that controls some 60% of the diamond market, is a significant part of that country’s economic health. As such, they’ve dedicated about $14 million to an advertising campaign extolling the virtues of diamonds, scheduled to begin before the December 2006 release of the DiCaprio movie.

Let’s face it — when you get right down to it, diamonds are rocks. They’re useful in a wide variety of industrial processes, and they shine real pretty when you cut them and polish them up — but they’re just rocks, and as such they’re not inherently good or evil. It’s the value that we humans place upon diamonds, and the things we use them for and do to acquire them, that can be good or evil. If the people controlling them are shortsighted, corrupt, greedy, or just plain evil, this can result in everything from bad decisions to death squads. There’s no doubt that this has happened in the past, but it has happened with more than just diamonds: the gold and fur trades have sparked similar conflicts, and petroleum still reigns unchallenged in this regard in the modern ere. Scarce natural resources will always spark conflicts among those unwilling to see the Big Picture.

On the other hand, when people work together, as has happened with the Kimberly Process, entire nations can benefit. While there still may be kinks to work out in the diamond trade, at least the people involved are willing to work them out — so let’s keep movies like Blood Diamond in historical perspective, shall we?