De Beers stops all Angolan diamond purchases

The giant South African diamond house, De Beers, announced on Wednesday that it had placed a worldwide embargo on the purchase of diamonds from Angola in support of “the UN attempt to bring peace and stability” to the war-torn country. In a statement, the company said it was reviewing its buying operations in west and central Africa, notably the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Guinea. A company spokeswoman told IRIN the decision followed recent talks the chairman of the UN’s Angola sanctions committee, Robert Fowler, had held with Gary Ralfe, the managing director of De Beers, and Nicky Oppenheimer, chairman of its parent company, the South African mining conglomerate, Anglo-American. “This is to give our full and total support to the UN attempt to bring stability and peace to Angola,” she said. “We have been working closely with Ambassador Fowler on this.” De Beers, which handles the bulk of the global diamond trade, said it would keep the situation under review, and urge its diamond trading partners and clients around the world to adopt a similar policy. The company, which is building a new sky-scraper along the downtown waterfront of the Angolan capital, Luanda, said it had withdrawn its buyers from Angola over a year ago, but that it was, at the same time, “mindful of its responsibilities and its relations with the Angolan government”. It stressed it had never purchased diamonds from the UNITA rebel movement. “We deplore what is going on in Angola, and the implication that diamonds have funded that war,” the spokeswoman, Joan Braune, said. She also said the company purchasing agents at the diamond cutting and processing centre in Antwerp, Belgium, had also been instructed not to buy any more Angolan diamonds even if they were accompanied by Angolan government certificates of origin. The company declined to say what proportion of its income would be compromised by the decision. The De Beers statement said: “The company is equally concerned that, in addition to revenues from oil and other natural resources, some of the funds which had fuelled the war had been derived from the illegal sale of diamonds by the UNITA rebel movement.” But it was concerned that “legitimate business, particularly in developing nations”, should not be damaged by attempts to reduce income flowing into the coffers of rebel movements. Reacting to the decision, Alex Yearsley, a campaigner for Global Witness 2000, an NGO seeking to curb the financing of African wars through diamond sales, called it a step in the right direction: “This is a short-term solution to a long-term problem. We would like to know what concrete measures they intend to put in place.” In a statement this week, Global Witness 2000 launched a campaign to alert the public to a diamond trade funding wars in Africa which it estimated at US $42 billion.