Counting diamonds with clubs
I just came across this Y&R Cape Town advert on MarkLives.
Farai Muguwu, director of the Centre for Research and Development, has been remanded in custody again – he’ll be looking at a good 45 days in jail at least before he is released. His crime? Investigating human rights abuses and corrupt dealings in the diamond fields of Marange.
We’ve recently updated our special index on Zimbabwe’s diamond fields, with reports from Global Witness and Partnership Africa Canada.
The Y&R advert advises people to insist on certification to protect themselves from dealing in blood diamonds. But as the PAC report worryingly points out:
The story of Zimbabwe’s contested diamond fields is also a story of how the Kimberley Process – the international initiative created to ensure that the trade in diamonds does not fund violence and civil war – has lost its way.
Zimbabwe is not the only country failing to meet some or all of the basic requirements asked of diamond producing nations by the Kimberley Process. A lack of political will and weak internal controls in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, allows for a steady flow of illegal diamonds onto the international market.
But Zimbabwe sets itself apart from the others because of the government’s brazen defiance of universally agreed principles of humanity and good governance expected of adherents to the Kimberley Process. As such Zimbabwe poses a serious crisis of credibility for the KP, whose impotence in the face of thuggery and illegality in Zimbabwe underscores a worrisome inability or unwillingness to enforce either the letter, or the spirit, of its founding mandate.