by Michelle Faud
Morning Star
Zimbabwe auctioned 900,000 carats of rough diamonds on Wednesday from a diamond field where human rights groups say that soldiers killed 200 people, raped women and enslaved children.
It was the first public sale of gems from the notorious Marange field in eastern Zimbabwe since international regulators imposed a ban in November under rules designed to screen out conflict gems.
The sale happened to coincide with the “blood diamonds” phase of the war crimes trial of Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president. Taylor’s case and the Zimbabwe sale are unrelated, but both point to the successes and difficulties facing the campaign to regulate the trade in diamonds that has helped finance wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, Congo and now Ivory Coast.
The auction in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, went ahead after the gems were certified as conflict-free by Abbey Chikane, a monitor for the Kimberley Process that oversees trade in the diamonds. Chikane claimed that soldiers were gone from two fenced-off commercial mines producing the diamonds, and that the mines were operating according to “minimum international standards.”
The arrangement so angered American gem trader Martin Rapaport that in February he quit as president of the World Diamond Council. “The tragedy of Zimbabwe is that the Kimberley Process has started legitimising, legalising, kosherising blood diamonds,” he said.
The Kimberley Process was set up in 2002. Its members are 75 diamond-producing and diamond-trading countries, along with industry agencies and civic and human rights bodies such as London-based Global Witness.
Stephane Chardon, chairman of the Kimberley monitoring group, said that the Kimberley rules apply only to blood diamonds mined and sold by rebel movements or their allies to finance armed conflicts aimed at toppling legitimate governments. It has no provision for punishing governments.
The Marange field was discovered in 2006 and is believed to be the biggest found in the world since the 19th century. It triggered a chaotic diamond rush until police and then the army moved in.
But Human Rights Watch says that the Zimbabwe government still has not kept its word to withdraw soldiers completely from the Marange fields, and that it found conditions there “quite appalling” as recently as May.
“We found children as young as 11 still working in these mines.” said senior researcher Tiseke Kasambala.
Buyers from Belgium, Russia, India, Israel, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates flew into Harare on private aircraft to inspect the stones and present bids in sealed envelopes. They refused to speak to reporters.
Zimbabwe’s mines minister, Obert Mpofu, said that the country has 4.5 million Marange diamonds in stock, valued at up to $1.9 billion – one third of the national debt.
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