Britain has called for a ban on sales of diamonds from Sierra Leone that, as in Angola, have fuelled the country’s civil war
Ewen MacAskill in Antwerp and David Pallister
In a small room above the Diamond Bourse in Antwerp, a dealer expressed regret over the mutilations and deaths in the African civil wars in Sierra Leone and Angola. But business is business. “Human beings are greedy. I am among them. If you have 100, you want to make it 200,” said the dealer.
His assessment was widely shared in Antwerp. In the shadow of the archaic but magnificent central station, dealers, polishers and jewellers are crammed into five streets. Here dealers spill on to their desks diamonds worth not 100 or 200 but millions of pounds.
This is the centre of the world trade in diamonds: it is a crossroads for the gems dug up, often at terrible human cost, in Africa and for the onward journey to the jewellers’ shops in the world’s biggest cities.
The diamond merchants were dismissive this week of the proposal by British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to extend sanctions already imposed on diamonds from rebel-held fields in Angola to those held by the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone.
Cook called for an United Nations resolution banning the trade in diamonds from Sierre Leone “except where they are certified as legitimate by the government”. Of an estimated $70-million worth of diamonds exported from Sierra Leone last year, just $1,5-million were “legitimate”, according to industry sources.
Cook conceded that an embargo on smuggled diamonds would be difficult to police and require the co-operation of bankers, brokers and buyers. It will also require the co-operation of Charles Taylor, the President of Liberia, who has been supplying arms to Sierra Leone’s rebel RUF in return for diamonds.
Despite the dealers’ brash expressions of confidence, there is a growing sense of unease within the diamond square mile of Antwerp. Pressure groups have sought to introduce an ethical dimension, and the fear among dealers is that campaigners could undermine consumer demand: dealers react with horror at labels such as “blood diamonds”.
Diamonds and arms present a tangled story. The journey to Antwerp begins in the rebel areas in war-torn African countries, such as Sierra Leone and Angola, and often from there passes through a third country. Unita leader Jonas Savimbi used Burkina Faso as a staging post and the Burkina Faso government smoothed the way.
Karrica, the nom de guerre of his roving ambassador, Marcelo Moises Dachala, would be met at the airport, cleared through customs and provided with special armed protection for his valuable luggage. A scheduled Sabena flight from Brussels would deliver the Antwerp dealers.
Last year in meetings like this, Unita earned an estimated $150-million to buy arms, medicines, fuel, mining machinery and other commodities.
Investigators working for the UN sanctions committee on Angola have identified an international network of smuggling, with rebel stones being shifted through half-a-dozen West and Southern African countries. Parcels of diamonds were often traded directly for weapons with diamond dealers and arms brokers travelling to Unita areas or friendly capitals.
Overwhelmingly, the arms come from Eastern Europe either directly into Unita territory or via third countries such as Togo and Burkina Faso, whose leaders provide false end-user certificates in exchange for diamonds, according to Unita’s former procurement chief General Jacinto Bandua.
The pattern in Angola is repeated in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The air cargo companies that fly the weapons into the war zones can be both deliberate sanction busters or mainstream operators taken in by apparently legitimate paperwork.
The number of rough diamonds going to Antwerp from the conflict zones are a matter of dispute. The Diamond High Council insisted it was considerably less than campaigners claimed. It also said its import regulations were much tougher than those elsewhere in Europe.
Campaigners are pressing for some way of unravelling the tortuous journeys made by those trading in diamonds. Proposals include tests to determine the origin of the diamonds as well as marking them as proof they did not come from war zones.
Meanwhile, De Beers this week supported the call to boycott diamonds from Sierra Leone. Earlier this year a probe into illicit diamond trading with Unita named one of De Beers’s top dealers. This suggested the diamond giant had itself helped fuel war in Angola in order to profit from diamonds.
De Beers insists that it has not bought diamonds from Unita since the boycott was imposed in 1998 and is now prepared to guarantee that its stones are not sourced from the rebel movement. In October 1999 De Beers said it would no longer buy diamonds from Angola on the open market.