Conflict diamonds targeted

A group of European non-governmental organisations (NGOs) has launched a public awareness campaign over the role the diamond trade can play in funding rebel armies across Africa.

Called 'Fatal Transactions', the campaign asks the public and other interested organisations to urge the diamond industry to implement effective controls to ensure that diamonds do not fund rebel armies, thereby fuelling conflict.

Global Witness, one of the four organisations leading the drive, said the campaign is not anti-diamond but rather it is anti-war. "Diamond revenue can bring enormous benefits to a country's economy if transparently controlled," Global Witness said. It gave as examples Botswana, Namibia and South Africa
where, it said, diamond revenue has funded economic growth and stability.

Said Global Witness: "Most people would be horrified to learn that their diamond jewellery had financed the purchase of landmines or guns in one of Africa's brutal conflicts." It said this has been happening throughout the 1990s with diamonds originating from the war-torn countries of Angola,
Sierra Leone and Liberia.

According to the NGOs, the global diamond trade in 1998 was worth US $42 billion, with diamond jewellery sales worth US $21 billion. De Beers, added the NGOs, controls 70 percent of rough stones and 50 percent of mined production.

The numbers of deaths resulting from conflict fuelled by diamonds is startling, said the NGOs. In Angola between 1992 and 1997, nearly 500,000 people died while the rebel UNITA movement earned US $3.7 billion in illegal diamond sales, through which it managed to buy arms and ammunition to sustain the 25-year-old war. Between 1991 and 1999, said the NGOs, 50,000
Sierra Leonans died in the war fuelled by the illegal exportation of diamonds worth US $200 million a year.

De Beers spokesman Andrew Lamont, however, told IRIN that wars caused by diamonds form a tiny part of the diamond-producing world. "We are concerned about conflicts caused by diamonds. We have put in place a paper trail to trace where the diamonds originate from."

Lamont added that De Beers, prior to the UN Security Council sanctions against UNITA-mined diamonds, used to buy diamonds from secondary markets to stabilise prices of the stones. "However, we now no longer buy diamonds without a certificate of origin as stipulated by the UN."

A Global Witness official told IRIN they hoped that De Beers recent guarantee that it did not deal in conflict diamonds would be effectively implemented. "De Beers should guarantee that they have stopped the practice of buying rough diamonds from dubious dealers and that the origins of their diamonds have not been sourced from conflict areas," said the official.