From the Wall Street Journal today on the comeback of Blood Diamonds:
The Kimberley Process says well over 99% of the world’s rough-diamond trade is now “conflict-free.”
But critics say there’s a big loophole in that definition: It doesn’t take into account human-rights abuses in diamond territory controlled by governments themselves.…In Angola … the Kimberley Process appears to have little appetite for human-rights issues. Last August, when a Kimberley Process peer-review team arrived to check the country’s compliance procedures, Angolan forces were just mopping up a major operation to expel some 30,000 illegal Congolese miners from Angolan territory near here. According to a U.S. State Department report citing local media and nongovernmental organizations, military and police “arbitrarily beat and raped detainees” and forced them to march to the border without food or water.…A confidential Kimberley Process report on the review visit makes no mention of alleged human-rights abuses… The group spent just two days in Lunda Norte, an area near the Congo border that has become a flashpoint for clashes between diggers and security forces. According to a draft of the internal report, the delegation intended to visit the site of a large illegal mining operation but was thwarted by “a last-minute decision to participate in a graduation ceremony for new border patrol security officers.”
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In order for Kimberley Process to get internationally-accepted, there was a compromise in its definition at its inception: that the term “conflict diamonds” would only apply to diamonds that were mined in areas controlled by rebel forces fighting legitimate governments. The idea was to outlaw RUF and Foday Sankoh, and, in the same vein, UNITA in Angola. The worst-kept secret was that it meant diamonds mined in government-owned mines would not face such a scrutiny – e.g. from the DRC, Angola, elsewhere. To their credit, the Canadians did act tough during their time as the KPCS’s secretariat, and now there’s some concern over Zimbabwe and, as this story shows, Angola. But if you reopen the definition, you run the risk of breaking the consensus that had been arrived at a decade ago, which was built on (a) a WTO waiver, (b) UN sanctions, and (c) collective will to do something to stop the amputation of arms by rebel forces. With such consensus now elusive, it won’t be easy to reopen the definition and extend the reach of the mechanism to deal with diamonds mined from territories that are under the control of a “legitimate government” – and it also means diamonds won’t be “conflict-free”.
Lameness even more shameful with Zimbabwe, where corruption diamonds are sustaining the ZANU machine
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