ELLIS MNYANDU, Cape Town | Thursday 6.45pm.
SOUTH Africa added its voice on Thursday to a chorus of criticism of a UN report accusing African states of flouting sanctions against Angola’s Unita rebels.
Foreign Affairs Minister Nkosazana Zuma said the independent report was limited by its restriction to one-sided sources, but maintained that South Africa would not hesitate to prosecute any South African offenders.
”Part of the problem with the Fowler report… is that their informants seem to be just a few people who have crossed over from Unita to the government side,” Zuma told reporters.
”So it means the information that they have would be limited and it would depend on what access they had to people busting the sanctions,” she added.
The report released on Tuesday spells out how Unita has circumvented the sanctions by buying fuel or weapons from eastern Europe, shipping cargo to African nations for transit to Angola and paying for goods with illicit diamonds.
Zuma’s deputy Aziz Pahad named nine people suspected of flouting UN sanctions in parliament on Wednesday, including a dealer who was allegedly shipping $4-million of diamonds a month to the Belgian port Antwerp, Europe’s main diamond centre.
Among those named were former De Beers sight holder and current diamond company owner Joe de Decker, air charter operator J. Pereira and diamond dealer Piet Hand, all South African citizens. Decker has denied the allegations.
Zuma said the government would take action when it had hard evidence from the report’s panel, which was headed by Canada’s UN ambassador Robert Fowler.
”In terms of the South Africans who are supposed to be involved, we’ve asked the Fowler panel to give us enough evidence to be able charge some of the people,” Zuma said.
UN ambassadors from Burkina Faso, Togo and Rwanda have all attacked the report, describing it as ”botched”.
Unita was also said to have violated the sanctions through agents or smuggling ventures in Gabon, South Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Congo Republic, the Ivory Coast, Zambia and Namibia. — Reuters
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