Two South African diamond dealers accused of flouting sanctions against Unita by trading weapons and diamonds with the Angolan rebel group say their company sold its Unita diamonds to De Beers — at a time De Beers said it did not knowingly buy gems mined by the rebel movement.
The United Nations report into Unita sanctions busters, released this week, names Joe de Decker and his brother Ronnie as having run a diamonds-for-weapons trade with Unita. According to the report, which singles out other businessmen and countries, the brothers supplied arms from Eastern Europe, including mortar bombs, anti-tank weapons, anti-aircraft weapons, grenades, ammunition and small arms, and light weapons.
In a statement to the Mail & Guardian this week, Ronnie de Decker denied any involvement in arms smuggling and military activities. But both brothers said they had bought diamonds from Unita and had engaged in diamond mining operations with other partners. And he said any diamonds he had received from Unita had been bought by De Beers, the group that controls about two- thirds of the world’s diamond supplies.
“These activities took place at the same time as other international diamond buyers and mining groups were operating in the same areas as we were. Almost 99% of the diamonds handled by the group were sold to an associated company of De Beers in Europe and Israel,” De Decker said. De Decker’s naming of De Beers is the closest tie yet between the diamond giant and Unita’s informal diamond business that has kept the country at war for 30 years.
De Decker said that following the implementation of the UN Security Council sanctions, the group immediately ceased all operations and withdrew from Angola, leaving behind all equipment. “All purchases by the associated company of De Beers from the group also ceased,” De Decker’s statement said. On October 6 1999 De Beers announced it would no longer buy diamonds from Angola on the open market, having admitted earlier in the year for the first time that it could identify the origin of substantial diamond parcels.
De Decker sold large quantities of Unita diamond parcels to De Beers between 1993 and 1997, worth $4-million to $5- million each. As far as Unita diamonds are concerned, De Beers’s position since sanctions were imposed in 1998 has been clear – it has not bought them. Before then, the situation was murkier – the company said it did not knowingly buy Unita diamonds, with the qualifier that it could not identify where diamonds came from. However, De Beers said in 1998 that it had never bought diamonds from Unita.
Analysts said this week the scale of the De Deckers’ transactions with De Beers meant it was impossible that De Beers could not source the diamonds’ origin. In 1993 a diamond dealer based in Tshikapa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, told The Guardian that about one- third of all the diamonds they handled came from across the border in Angola and ended up in the hands of De Beers.
At the time, De Beers responded to the claim in The Guardian saying: “The buying offices are open to all comers and unless an offerer of diamonds openly shows his affiliation we wouldn’t be aware of it. We have no arrangement with Unita to buy diamonds illegally exported from Angola.” This week De Beers representative Tom Tweedy expressed “surprise” at the De Deckers’ inclusion in the UN report.
“De Deckers is known as a reputable company in South Africa; all my colleagues are absolutely shocked.” Tweedy said it was “very likely we bought diamonds from De Deckers as we were buying diamonds in the open market in Antwerp before the sanctions [were imposed]. It is impossible to establish where a diamond [came from] after it has been polished.”
Tweedy said that where the pre-sanctions period was concerned it was a “very difficult situation”. He said the company handled legitimate dealings, but there were instances when they turned down parcels of diamonds which they thought were from an illegal source but were actually from government mines.
“And there were diamonds from the Unita- controlled mines which came in through quite legal ways – you can’t tell from the parcels,” he said. Tweedy said this week that as a measure of the company’s commitment to enforce the UN resolution, the company will include a guarantee that its diamonds have not been purchased in breach of the UN resolution.
It took the UN $1-million, 10 men and six months’ work to try to uncover the secrets of Unita’s supply routes. Investigators criss-crossed Europe and Africa as they attempted to pull together the webs that connect the illicit traffic in oil, diamonds and arms, and Unita’s capacity to make war.
The De Deckers are not the only people named in the UN report to have dismissed its findings. Even as the Security Council began a debate on a report from the UN’s Angola sanctions committee, denials were ricocheting across the news wires, while leaked copies of the report made their way around the world. “No,” said Togo.
President Gnassingbe Eyadema didn’t trade arms for diamonds for Unita, as charged in the report. The UN’s two expert panels who handled the investigation said Togo had become the principal supplier of end-user certificates for arms for Unita from 1997, as it became obvious that the old Zaire regime would collapse.
The diamonds, said the report, were an earlier personal present from Unita leader Jonas Savimbi to Eyadema. “No,” said diamond dealer David Zollman, in an open letter to British Junior Minister for Africa Peter Hain. “We totally support your noble cause to stop people from profiting from African wars.”
Zollman is named by the investigation as a sanctions-breaker, together with his brother Maurice. “No,” said Rwanda, in a statement. “We gave proof of our non-involvement to the UN commission and we are surprised by the allegations levelled against Vice-President Major General Paul Kagame, and others.”
The report claims Rwanda received military aid from Unita in Congo and allowed Unita to operate more or less freely in Kigali, arranging diamond sales and meetings with weapons brokers, including some already working with the Rwandans, such as Russian entrepreneur Victor Bout. Bout controls two airlines, Air Cess and Air Pass, based in the United Arab Emirates.
The list of denials is long, but they all centre on the same criticism of the report: that much of the detailed evidence comes from a group of Unita defectors interviewed by the expert panels in Luanda in January. The implication is that their evidence was distorted.
It was only in January that the panels made a major breakthrough as the defectors related their experiences, backed up by genuine Unita documents captured by the army at Bailondo. The panellists are aware of the drawbacks of relying solely on the defectors. They say “the details provided by defectors and others … corroborate[d] information that panel members had independently uncovered or received from other sources”.
- Howard Barrell reports: Minister of Foreign Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said this week that, if South African authorities received sufficient evidence of South African-based companies or individuals illegally trading with Unita, they would be prosecuted. Responding to the UNreport, Dlamini-Zuma added that the South African government had at no stage sold arms to Unita. On the internationalisation of the conflicts in the region, Dlamini-Zuma added that South Africa would find it very difficult to provide cash-strapped Zimbabwe with aid in the form of loans or fuel supplies if there was any chance of these resources being used to buttress President Robert Mugabe’s expensive military campaign in Congo. Dlamini-Zuma told journalists in Cape Town on Thursday, shortly before leaving for Congo for talks with government leaders there, that any South African aid for Zimbabwe would be given in order to “make sure that Zimbabwe’s economy doesn’t get into deeper crisis”. South African policy on Congo did not allow it to supply the belligerents in Congo “directly or indirectly”. Dlamini-Zuma’s statement is significant in that it means South Africa is not a soft touch for Mugabe. In line with the position taken by the International Monetary Fund and other international financial institutions, South Africa is also, in effect, demanding that Mugabe end his Congo adventure before he can expect his appeals for economic assistance to bear fruit.