Three years after sanctions against ”conflict diamonds” helped end Angola’s civil war, the country’s diamond industry continues to thrive on violence and corruption, according to a report to be released next week by Angolan human-rights activists.
Entitled Angola’s Deadly Diamonds, the report details incidents of murder, beating, detention without trial, extortion and rape attributed to the Angolan police in the gem-rich north-eastern Lunda region throughout 2004.
It also details killing and beatings by security firms that are described as ”private armies”. Among them is Alfa 5, an offshoot of the South African mercenary outfit Executive Outcomes, which was contracted by the Angolan government to win back the diamond fields from Unita in the 1990s.
In many of these incidents, the victims were garimpeiros, the men who shovel gravel out of river beds in the hope of finding a diamond. The report highlights the plight of the garimpeiros, whose activities have been outlawed, but who live in a region where there are few other ways of making a living.
”This situation of illegality and unpredictability strips the workers completely of their rights, creating a situation tantamount to forced labour,” the report argues, citing cases where police have launched violent raids on digging areas, extorting diamonds and money from the miners.
Citing the testimony of victims and survivors, the report details a case in December 2004 where 12 people — most of them miners — died as the result of detention in a tiny unventilated police cell in the town of Muxinda.
It also records the deaths of 11 people in February 2004, after police opened fire to quell a riot in the town of Cafunfo. The riot was sparked by security guards arriving to remove electrical generators that had supplied the town.
The awarding of extensive concession areas to commercial mining companies — multinationals in partnership with the Angolan state enterprise, Endiama — has left people dispossessed of their homes and land, without the compensation required by law, the report claims.
Informal miners are obliged to sell their diamonds at prices fixed by the buyer. The authors argue that lack of transparency and accountability in this system facilitates the disappearance of revenue from Angolan state coffers, and provides a smokescreen for the lack of public investment in the Lunda region.
The use of diamond sales by rebel movements in Angola and Sierra Leone to fund their war efforts in the 1990s led first to the imposition of sanctions and latterly to the establishment of the Kimberley Process, an agreement between mining companies and states involved in diamond mining and marketing aimed at keeping ”conflict diamonds” off the international market.
The report argues that the Kimberley definition does not go far enough. It recommends that the international community ”reconsider the objectives of the Kimberley Process, so as to include within the category of ‘conflict diamonds’ all those gems that come from areas where mining is based on the systematic violation of human rights.”