OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Wednesday 7.30pm.
DEPUTY Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad named nine people he said were flouting United Nations sanctions against the Angolan rebel group UNITA, primarily by smuggling illicit diamonds to Europe and South Africa to fund its war effort.
Pahad told parliament on Wednesday the nine people, all identified by a United Nations report releaed on Wednesday, included diamond company owners and dealers as well as air charter firms.
One dealer was shipping $4-million of diamonds a month to Europe’s main diamond centre, the Belgian port of Antwerp.
”This is very dangerous for the region’s diamond producers because governments and NGOs are preparing to launch an international consumer boycott through the Conflict Diamonds Campaign,” Pahad said.
He named former De Beers site holder and current diamond company owner Joe de Decker, air charter operator J. Pereira and diamond dealer Piet Hand, all South African.
He also named Russian national Victor Bout, owner of the Air Cess and Air Pass air charter companies, and military equipment supplier Ronnie Decker.
Pahad said British junior foreign minister Peter Hain had also given him the names of four more sanctions busters.
These were the brothers David and Maurice Zollman, who smuggled Unita gems to Antwerp and South Africa respectively; Hennie Steyn, a pilot for Maurice Zollman who also owned part of a Unita diamond concession and acted as a middleman between the group and European dealers; and Irishman Dennis Coghlan, who provided Unita with storage facilities in Botswana.
Pahad said South Africa would deal harshly with people it found breaking the sanctions and stressed that the UN report, officially published on Wednesday, cleared the country itself of any involvement in the trade.
Unita — formerly backed by the American CIA and South Africa’s apartheid-era security forces — has been fighting the Cuban-backed MPLA which now forms Angola’s elected government on and off for more than 30 years. — Reuters