Blood diamonds making a come back

The KPCS three-day intersessional meeting began in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Monday. It was preceded by a damning Global Witness report – The Return of the Blood Diamond.

Abbey Chikane, Zimbabwe’s KPCS Monitor,said Zimbabwe had satisfied minimum requirements of the KPCS for the trade in rough diamonds.

Global Witness, a UK-based NGO that seeks to prevent the use of natural resources to fuel conflict, and a prime mover in setting up the KPCS, recommends in its report Zimbabwe’s suspension from the scheme for at least six months “or until such time as the diamond sector is brought into line with KP minimum requirements”.

The KPCS, established in 2002, brings together governments, the diamond industry and concerned NGOs to police the trade in conflict diamonds, also known as blood diamonds. The organization has 49 members representing 75 countries, and covers about 99.8 percent of the global production of rough diamonds.

Annie Dunnebacke, a Global Witness campaigner, told IRIN that “Zimbabwe has consistently been let off the hook and it will dominate proceedings at Tel Aviv. It is the biggest test the KP has faced yet… But how much longer can we civil society]sit at the same table,” she said.

Elly Harrowell, also of Global Witness, said in a statement accompanying the publication of the organisation’s report that, “Over the past three years, the national army has visited appalling abuses on civilians in Marange’s diamond fields. Nobody has been held to account for these crimes.”

In contrast, Chikane’s 25-page Zimbabwe Second Fact Finding Mission Report, scheduled to be presented on the first day of the Tel Aviv meeting, makes no reference to widely reported human rights abuses committed by members of Zimbabwe’s army and police.

An operation by Zimbabwe’s security forces to clear the estimate 66,000 hectare diamond fields of about 30,000 “illegal” miners allegedly resulted in hundreds of miners being killed, beaten and raped in November 2008, and was just one chapter in reported human rights abuses in the diamond fields, that among other things, may have seen children and adults used as forced labour.

Chikane’s report said of the November 2008 incident: “In response to the situation, the Zimbabwe Republic police invited the Zimbabwe National Army to support their attempts to secure the area. The Zimbabwe Republic Police and the army provided 1,500 officers to bring the situation under control.”

Partisan approaches

The report by Chikane has led to some blood diamond activists questioning the founding chairman of KPCS credentials as a neutral arbiter.

One civil society activist involved in the campaign to rid the world of conflict diamonds, who declined to be identified, told IRIN Chikane’s report “shows he is not carrying out his impartial duties as he should”.

The apparent sympathetic treatment of President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party, which was Zimbabwe’s ruling party for nearly 30 years until the formation of a government of national unity in 2009, is seen by analysts as a consequence of the ties forged by liberation movements during southern Africa’s struggles against colonialism.

Chikane spent years in exile as an ANC member during apartheid and his brother Frank was the director general of the presidency of former South African president Thabo Mbeki. Frank Chikane reportedly played a significant role in negotiating the formation of Zimbabwe’s unity government, which resulted in Mugabe retaining the presidency.

The Global Witness report also derides the “dangerously misplaced” 2009 arguments of Namibian Deputy Minister of Mines and former KPCS chairman Bernard Esau, a member of the ruling SWAPO government and outspoken ally of Mugabe’s ZANU-PF, who declared in 2009 “the Kimberley Process is not a human rights organization”.

“The prevention of violence and abuses fuelled by the trade in rough diamonds is the underlying rationale for the KP’s existence and cannot simply be cast aside when this becomes politically inconvenient,” the Global Witness report said.

Opaque investment companies

Chikane’s report notes that the demilitarization of the diamond fields should be a gradual process as private investors take control of the diamond fields that some are claiming to be one of the world’s most lucrative finds.

Harrowell said that “now it turns out that the joint venture companies nominally brought in to improve conditions are directly linked to the ZANU-PF and military elite. Thanks to the impunity and violence in Zimbabwe, blood diamonds are back on the international market.”

The Global Witness report said the joint venture investor structure that have been introduced were both opaque and lacked any transparency and that the natural resources were unlikely to benefit the country’s citizen if past practices were repeated.

Dominic Mubayiwa, CEO of the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation – which had exclusive rights to the Marange diamond fields from 2006 to 2009 before the introduction of joint ventures – told parliament in early 2010 that the mining parastatal had not paid a dividend to the state for more than 20 years.

The Global Witness report said it had access to notes of the closed meeting of a Parliamentary Portfolio Committee where Minister of Mines and Mining Development Obert Mpofu said he had “ignored the legal procedure in awarding the tenders” for the establishment of joint ventures in the Marange diamond fields.

The myriad of apparent contraventions of the KPCS has dire implications for Zimbabwe’s fragile democracy, Global Witness said.

“Through the Marange diamond fields, one party in the power sharing agreement, Zanu (PF), is securing exclusive access to a substantial source of off-budget financing. This gives it the means to finance another campaign of attacks on its opponents comparable to the one that it unleashed during the 2008 national elections.” IRIN