OWN CORRESPONDENT, Luanda | Thursday
THE Angolan government has vehemently denied that the country’s official diamond trader has been buying gems from the rebel Unita movement, which is at war with the regime.
A Portuguese daily claimed that the Angola Selling Corporation (ASCORP) has been trafficking in diamonds bought from traders supporting the rebels.
“It is no longer possible for the rebels easily to mine and sell diamonds in Angola,” said Carlos Sumbula, Angola’s deputy minister of geology and mines.
Sumbula challenged Publico, the Portuguese newspaper which made the allegations, to say just where diamond trafficking by Unita, which has fought the government almost ceaselessly for 25 years, was still taking place.
“Unita does not control any diamond zone today,” the minister said. “We are now concerned with (halting) the illegal trafficking of diamonds and not with Unita’s blood diamonds,” Sumbula said.
The real traffickers, he added, are those trying to avoid selling their stones through ASCORP in order to get a higher price on the black market. Unita is already subject to a UN arms, travel and trade embargo.
In September, the Luanda authorities moved to make the informal sector legitimate and persuade scores of thousands of small miners to sell their output to the SODIAM state marketing firm.
Angola’s government has also tried to crack down on the black market for diamonds by allowing only ASCORP, a joint venture between SODIAM, Israel’s Wellox and Belgium’s Tais, to sell gems mined in the country.
Before ASCORP was created, the government was losing nearly $2m a day to diamond sales on the black market, mostly by Unita rebels, Sumbula said earlier this month.
Illegal diamond sales were now down to about $1m a day, he added.
The geology and mines ministry has predicted that diamond production in government-controlled regions of Angola will triple to $600m this year.
The United Nations has passed a resolution condemning trade in so-called conflict diamonds, which account for some four percent of the $6.8bn in diamonds produced each year.
Ministers from 20 countries met in Johannesburg in September with diamond industry representatives to take steps to set up an international certification scheme aimed at cutting the trade in conflict diamonds.
Apart from in Angola, diamonds have been the major source of funding for rebels waging savage wars in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo. – AFP