DESMOND DAVIES, London | Tuesday 3.00pm
FOUR European organisations have launched a campaign to highlight how illegal sales of diamonds have been fuelling wars in Africa.
The diamond centres of London, Antwerp, New York and Milan are being specifically targeted by the organisations.
Diamonds from Angola, Sierra Leone and Liberia are being used by rebel groups in these countries to fund their purchase of weapons, according to the Fatal Transactions campaign.
“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,” Alex Yearsley of the United Kingdom-based Global Witness, one of the NGO’s involved in the campaign, said.
The campaigners said that despite the death and destruction caused by the conflicts in the three countries, the diamond trade has failed to put any controls in place to ensure that their diamonds are not funding the purchase of weapons for rebel armies.
According to statistics, Angola’s Unita rebels earned $3,7-billion from diamond sales between 1992 and 1997, while in Sierra Leone $200-million worth of diamonds were illegally exported annually between 1991 and 1999. The four NGOs are calling on the public and other interested organisations to ask the diamond trade to police the business.
But De Beers, the South African company that controls 70 percent of the sale of rough gem diamonds, said it did not buy stones from rebel sources. Company spokesman Andrew Lamont said in London that the sale of diamonds by rebel groups was minuscule compared with the $42-billion legal trade annually. The campaigners stressed that the exercise was not anti-diamond but anti-war. — Pana