Israeli Diamond Portal Reports: Blood Diamonds Continue to Flow from Zimbabwe

April 2, 2009 - PRLog -- The vaunted Kimberley Process in danger of becoming a toothless talk shop, writes Jim Jones, The Times.

The Kimberley Process is faltering, and badly. That is the unequivocal view of Partnership Africa Canada, a civil society participant in the process. In a public document published earlier this month, it said little or nothing was being done to halt the flow of blood diamonds from Zimbabwe, the report said.

At the Chiadzwa diamond fields near Marange village, southwest of the town of Mutare, forced or conscripted labourers are compelled to dig diamonds for Robert Mugabe’s family and military henchmen, who grabbed the property after killing or driving off the artisanal miners.

A diamond discovery in 2006 had led to a rush of would-be miners, but by 2007 the regime had partially succeeded in gaining control of the workings by bringing in the police. And it insisted that the diamonds be sold through the Zimbabwe Mining and Development Company only, ostensibly a state-owned operation but in reality yet another of the Mugabe clique’s devices for stripping the country and shifting the proceeds abroad.

At that point, Kimberley Process observers made a superficial examination of the area, flying over it and seeing very few people.

Though policemen had been brought in, many defected and took up mining, which offered far better returns than a constable’s salary. It couldn’t go on.

By mid-2008, Air Marshall Perence Shiri was there, putting troops on the ground and using helicopter gunships to kill or disperse hundreds of artisanal miners. Shiri, the head of the air force, is Mugabe’s cousin who, back in 1983 and 1984, headed the Fifth Brigade responsible for the mass murder of opposition voters in Matabeleland.

These days, locals are forced to work on the diggings, and the rough gems are spirited out of the country by dubious diamond buyers and put up for sale surreptitiously in cutting centres such as Mumbai. They do not figure in any official Zimbabwean export figures. And though their exploitation does not strictly fall within the Kimberley Process’s terms of reference - they do not fund a civil war, unless one believes that military attacks on unarmed civilians is a form of civil war -  the fact remains that the forced labourers are working as little better than slaves. Chiadzwa looks like an enormous prison camp or military garrison and offers no benefits to local people.

Should anyone care? Is this not an internal affair of a sovereign country? Does anyone care about another example of a rotten regime pillaging the country?

Partnership Africa Canada does, and its latest report on the bloody situation in Zimbabwe is causing more than a little upset in the Kimberley Process. But then, the partnership is one of its consciences. On the other hand, South Africa’s government is a process signatory, but its record and that of other African signatory governments on Zimbabwean human rights abuses offer little hope of much being done about the diamond operation.

The Zimbabwean situation might appear to fall outside the aim of halting the flow of diamonds noted in the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme’s (KPCS) core document as “...directly linked to the fuelling of armed conflict, the activities of rebel movements aimed at undermining or overthrowing legitimate governments, and the illicit traffic in, and proliferation of, armaments, especially small arms and light weapons.”

In May 2000, De Beers and some of its Southern African host countries wanted to rebut the bad press of blood diamonds. That led to the process’s establishment. Wars and civil wars across Africa were being funded by illicit diamond trading, which involved some respectable diamond companies. In an earlier cartel incarnation, De Beers’ agents would prowl the war zones to buy up illicit diamonds to support the market. Respectability needed to be restored, because De Beers executives were known across the continent as the most refined thugs in Africa.

Of course, it is not like that now, particularly with the introduction of the Kimberley Process, which counts companies, governments and NGOs among its adherents, thereby bringing an added respectability to the diamond mining industry. But when the Chiadzwa killings became known, the Kimberley Process dithered over whether to issue a statement. That was all it did.

As Partnership Africa Canada said: “This is not a matter of semantics and it is not a stretch of the Kimberley Process mandate, because the second item in the KPCS preamble clearly notes ‘the devastating impact of conflicts fuelled by the trade in conflict diamonds on the peace, safety and security of people in affected countries, and the systematic and gross human rights violations that have been perpetrated in such conflicts’.”

This article was published by The Times on March 21, 2009.



By: PolishedPrices

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