What every war crimes trial needs - supermodel Naomi Campbell

Opinion

What did they know about how to stage a decent war crimes trial back then?

So, this Mlle Carole White, mon ami, what did you make of 'er testimony? Was zere not one thing that seemed to you a leetle, shall we say, peculiar?"

"Can't say that there was, Poirot. I mustn't have been listening."

"Ah, Hastings, here is la difference between us. You leesten to everyzing, and yet you do not 'ear. But Poirot, he hears evryzing, n'est-ce pas? And what I 'eard was Miss White's suggestion that La Belle Campbell and Monsieur Charles Taylor's men were, 'ow you say it?, text messaging one another regarding ze delivery of ze stone ..."

How we have reached this pass is one for cultural historians to unravel, and the best of luck to them with that. But, somehow, the war crimes trial of a suspected genocidal tyrant has been transformed, by the catalyst of celebrity, into Agatha Christie's The Mystery of the Blood Diamond.

This tale is so suffused with Agatha touches (jewels, women bitch-slapping each other, even its very own Blue Train) that the slaughter of untold numbers of West Africans and the butchering of their babies struggle to make it as side issues.

Even BBC Radio could summon the strength to lead bulletins with the trial only once Naomi Campbell had made her peevish and petulant way to The Hague.

The carnage allegedly perpetrated on his own people and those of Sierra Leone by Charles Taylor ... well, it's desperately sad and all that and he does seem a bad egg. But that staff-assaulting harridan Campbell, she's the 24-carat monster, what with her reluctance to testify and her proud ignorance of a dictator whose long-running trial the rest of us had seen fit to ignore until she descended to give it life. Yet the allegations about Taylor's conscription of boy soldiers and his use of rape and enslavement to stoke Sierra Leone's civil war and enable him to get his hands on the diamond mines make a gratifyingly lurid undercard to the main event.

The real story is that of the supermodel, her embittered former agent, the earth-mother Hollywood actress, those "dirty-looking stones", and a night in September 1997 when all the above coalesced in Pretoria, like Christie characters congregating for a murder, for dinner chez Nelson Mandela.

Was White driven by hatred of her former employer, whom she is suing for compensation, to spray false accusations at the legendarily ill-tempered catwalk diva? Did Mia Farrow hear Campbell say over breakfast the following morning that Taylor had given her the gem? Or is Woody's ex that classic Agatha archetype - the ageing actress motivated by envy? And was it possible to send text messages at all in the South Africa of 13 years ago?

Until now, cliché held that the age of celebrity reached its apogee a few weeks before that dinner in Pretoria, when the hysteria provoked by Princess Diana's death had threatened the monarchy. Four Septembers later, when 9/11 apparently changed the world, it was declared that as well as those in the twin towers and aboard the various airliners, al-Qaeda had killed the obsession with famous people.

Nine years on, it's impossible to imagine how the imperium of celebrity could rise above this latest zenith. From Campbell's dominance of a trial concerned with crimes against humanity, the only way is down. Or so you might wish to believe.

Looking down from here, the war crimes trial you feel sorry for is Nuremberg. No doubt it thought it made a splash, with the convictions of 19 of the 22 Nazi defendants. With the benefit of hindsight, however, its flaws become apparent.

Marlene Dietrich may have appeared in that timelessly magnificent 1961 film Judgment At Nuremberg, but neither she nor any major female celeb gave evidence at the trial.

How Hartley Shawcross forgot to call Oswald Mosley's missus is beyond me, but the oversight cruelly denied Alvar Lidell the chance to intone: "This is the home service of the BBC, and here is the news. In Nuremberg today, Diana Mitford told the court that she assumed the large diamond Herr Hitler gave her, during a visit to Berchtesgarten in 1936, was zirconium. She further insisted the pearl earrings she received from Hermann Goering during that same visit "looked like the most frightful tat that might have fallen out of a Christmas cracker, so I gave them to Frau Boormann".

"Mrs Mitford's evidence was later contradicted by Betty Grable. Having remonstrated with the court for delaying completion of her new musical motion picture, Mother Wore Tights, Miss Grable claimed she overheard Mrs Mitford telling Eva Braun the earrings were 'perfectly exquisite', and she planned to wear them to His Majesty the King's dinner dance, Adolf's Other Ball, to be held in the Royal Albert Hall. In other news ..."

What did they know about how to stage a decent war crimes trial back then? We shouldn't be too harsh on Shawcross and his colleagues if they naively assumed public attention could be held by nothing more captivating than the intimate details of industrialised genocide. Who knows, in the banal world of 1945, perhaps it was. In these enlightened times, no horror that unfolds beyond our borders has profound meaning or the power to affect until sprinkled with the magic dust of fame.

Naomi Campbell's reluctant demotion of Charles Taylor to the bit-part bad guy at his own war crimes trial may mark an historic apex, but the syndrome has been with us for the quarter century since Band Aid at the very least.

So the real mystery of the blood diamond isn't what La Campbell knew or when she knew it, cher Hastings or even what Mamma Mia claims she said about the gemstone. It is that we retain the capacity to be staggered when a news bulletin, of the sort that had studiously relegated this trial down the running order for the better part of three years, begins with the words: "The supermodel Naomi Campbell ..."

- Independent