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Naomi Campbell is not just a pretty
woman. She has the kind of beauty that arrests attention, regardless of
race, gender or age: luminous and fascinating. So when I chanced on the
relay of her testimony to the Special Court for Sierra Leone on
television, I stopped to watch, expecting to appreciate her beauty.

What
I didn’t expect was to also appreciate her intelligence. But the way
she answered the questions, both from the prosecution and the defence,
showed a woman at the top of her game.

It explained why – in an era where
every workaday clothes horse is described as a ‘supermodel’ – she
remained at the top of a business where you need more than just good
looks to stay ahead for so long.

The
British media were also watching Campbell testify … with their knives
out. That’s another thing I didn’t quite expect. Campbell is certainly
notorious for her temper, but she isn’t the only international
celebrity guilty of public and private meltdowns. Yet ever since her
possible association with a diamond gift from former president of
Liberia Charles Taylor arose, Britain’s media have been in overdrive.

Subpoenas are as common as dust in
legal proceedings. But when one was served on Campbell, the story
became one of her being ‘forced’ to attend and testify, under threat of
imprisonment, as though a particularly harsh and unusual procedure had
to be deployed to drag a guilty and greedy accused person to court. An
ordinary subpoena!

From Campbell’s testimony and extracts
read by Taylor’s lawyer during cross-examination, it’s clear that only
her estranged former agent, Carol White, who apparently admitted two
men bearing the gift of uncut diamonds in the middle of the night, can
even link them to Taylor. Enough studies have been done to show how
different testimony about the same events can be, but despite the
brouhaha about how much contact Campbell had with Taylor, it’s worth
reminding ourselves that in 1997, when she was given the “dirty looking
stones”, the term ‘blood diamonds’ was hardly common currency.

The international NGO, Global Witness,
was among the first to highlight the link between diamonds and
conflict, but that was in 1998 when its report, “A Rough Trade” was
published. By July 2000, this had led the World Diamond Congress to
institute the ‘Kimberly Process’ under which all rough diamonds would
be given certificates of origin.

Again, although Sierra Leone’s civil
war raged from 1991 to 2002, it was not until the same July 2000 that
the UN Security Council held a public hearing on the conflict where the
direct link between the trade in diamonds and the purchase of arms by
the Revolutionary United Front (‘Foday Sankoh’) rebels was highlighted.
The role of Taylor’s Liberian government in supplying arms in exchange
for ‘conflict’ diamonds which it then passed off as originating in
Liberia, was exposed. As a result, the Security Council banned Liberia
from the diamond trade.

While a great deal of opprobrium has
been heaped on Campbell (the message conveyed by the media’s conversion
of her evidence about “dirty looking stones” to “dirty diamonds”
doesn’t even pretend to be subtle), we might also remember that from
her perspective, she was at dinner (not a ‘charity dinner’ as widely
reported) with ‘Saint’ Nelson Mandela, then President of South Africa,
and that Charles Taylor, whom she was meeting for the first time, was
Mandela’s guest.

One may wonder what he was doing there.
By September 1997, Taylor had been President of Liberia for just about
a month, and despite his history as a warlord in Liberia’s vicious
civil war, it had ended with elections that Taylor had won. However
widespread the feeling that his victory was due to the war-weary
Liberian people’s fear that anything other than giving him the
presidency would only mean the continuation of violence, he was now
Mandela’s brother-African President. Perhaps it was hoped that the
Madiba’s civilizing influence, which had worked its magic across South
Africa from Mangosuthu Buthelezi to fearful and suspicious Afrikaners,
might bring Taylor onside in the search for peace in Sierra Leone and
end his support for the rebels.

It’s
unrealistic to castigate Naomi Campbell for not knowing all this. Those
who want to ridicule her claim to have ‘never heard of’ Liberia might
pause to remember the number of times in their travels that they, on
identifying themselves as Nigerian, have been asked about their
interlocutor’s Ugandan friend. Or in what part of Accra is Nigeria?
(Yes!) How many island nations of the Caribbean can we name? Frankly,
the coverage given to Campbell’s testimony by the Western media in
comparison to that given to the trial, and indeed, the war for his role
in which Taylor is on trial (apart, of course, from the ‘fact’ that
Britain ended it) contains the alpha and the omega of why even educated
people who consume it know little or nothing about the rest of the
world.

Campbell may be no saint; but she’s hardly the blood-soaked villainess media hindsight would have us believe either.