The United Nations Security Council on Friday lifted its embargo on Liberia’s diamond exports, saying the West African nation has made progress in certifying the origin of its rough diamonds.
The 15-member Security Council unanimously approved a United States-drafted resolution that cancelled a 2003 resolution’s embargo on Liberian raw diamonds.
It was the council’s second vote of confidence in the new President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, following the lifting in June of an embargo on Liberian wood.
In Friday’s resolution, the council said it was ”applauding the government of Liberia’s continuing cooperation with the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme” and thus had decided ”to terminate the measures on diamonds imposed by paragraph six of Resolution 1 521” in 2003, which was an embargo on raw diamonds.
”Conditions have been established in Liberia which permitted today the lifting, and that’s a reflection of our confidence in that country, in its leadership and our wish that it should now progress quickly,” said the current Security Council president, British ambassador Emyr Jones Parry.
The UN-backed Kimberley Process, which groups 43 countries and international organisations, was set up in May 2000 to prevent illegally exported ”conflict diamonds” being used to buy arms.
Members of the group have agreed to a certificate system designed to identify the origin of diamonds and guarantee that they are legally exported.
Liberia’s ambassador to the UN, Nathaniel Barnes, welcomed the Security Council’s decision and said his country has been admitted to the Kimberley Process.
”I see it as a vote of confidence, as a support of our very strong political will to do the right thing for Liberia and Liberians,” Barnes said. ”I’ve just learned that the Kimberley committee is going to accept our application, as a result of this particular action, so now we are officially part of the Kimberley Process.”
The Security Council said it will review its action in 90 days, based on an evaluation it will receive from the Kimberley Process on Liberia’s performance.
So-called ”blood diamonds” and other precious stones were illegally exported to fund weapons purchases, a practice that fuelled civil wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Liberia was left in ruins after 14 years of civil war. Johnson-Sirleaf, the first woman to be elected president of an African country, has been in office since January 2006.
During the back-to-back civil wars in 1989-2003, rivals plundered the country’s wood and diamond resources to finance weapons buying.
Under the Kimberley Process, rough diamonds are sealed in tamper-resistant containers and required to have forgery-resistant, conflict-free certificates with unique serial numbers each time they cross an international border.
In December, the Security Council renewed sanctions against Liberia barring trade in diamonds and arms as well as targeting individual Liberians.
While the council then welcomed progress by the Liberian government since January last year to reconstruct the war-torn country and cooperate with the international effort to monitor the diamond trade, it said the situation still posed a threat to peace and security in the region.
Trafficking in illegal diamonds is considered one of the root causes of the civil wars in Liberia as well as of the 10-year brutal conflict in neighbouring Sierra Leone that ended in 2001. — Sapa-AFP