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Diamonds and clubs: The militarized control of diamonds and power in Zimbabwe
Partnership Africa Canada (PAC)
June 2010

http://www.pacweb.org/index-e.php

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Zimbabwe and the Kimberley Process

The story of Zimbabwe's contested diamond fields is about many things: smuggling and frontier hucksterism; a scramble fuelled by raw economic desperation and unfathomable greed; and, of course, heart-wrenching cases of government-sponsored repression and human rights violations.

It is also about political intrigue, ambition and a complete disregard for decency or the rule of law.

But it is not just another black eye for a once great nation alone.

It is also a story of how the Kimberley Process - the international initiative created to ensure that the trade in diamonds does not fund violence and civil war - has lost its way.

Zimbabwe is not the only country failing to meet some or all of the basic requirements asked of diamond producing nations by the Kimberley Process. A lack of political will and weak internal controls in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, allows for a steady flow of illegal diamonds onto the international market.

But Zimbabwe sets itself apart from the others because of the government's brazen defiance of universally agreed principles of humanity and good governance expected of adherents to the Kimberley Process. As such Zimbabwe poses a serious crisis of credibility for the KP, whose impotence in the face of thuggery and illegality in Zimbabwe underscores a worrisome inability or unwillingness to enforce either the letter, or the spirit, of its founding mandate.

This report makes several other contentions. The first is that what is occurring in the two contested diamond areas - Marange in the eastern province of Manicaland and River Ranch in the south - cannot be seen in isolation. They are inextricably linked to the same pursuit of political power, and the same defiance of KP protocols.

Another is that Zimbabwe's diamonds are "blood diamonds". This is a charge that Zimbabwe not surprisingly refutes, citing the KP's own definition that the term applies only to "rough diamonds used by rebel movements to finance wars against legitimate governments". But that interpretation fails to recognize the current political realities of Zimbabwe, or consider how, and to what ends, political elites within ZANU-PF are using diamonds to both jockey for power in a post-Mugabe era and destabilize the Government of National Unity, created in February 2009 with the inclusion of the Movement of Democratic Change (MDC). These political elites are intimately tied to Zimbabwe's military establishment, the Joint Operation Command, and as such constitute a "rebel movement" opposed to the democratic governance of Zimbabwe.

The obsessive control of the country's diamond resources by this small renegade group threatens the viability of the Government of National Unity (GNU) in other significant ways. Almost four years after the military took control of Marange not one cent has entered the national treasury. This has three consequences: it starves the national treasury of any benefit that could steer Zimbabwe back from economic ruin, it thwarts efforts to re-legitimize public institutions and it leads to an overall lack of confidence in the Government of National Unity in which millions of Zimbabweans have put their trust to tangibly improve their lives.

By not explicitly acknowledging these threats to Zimbabwe's political stability, the ability of the KP and key foreign actors to appropriately respond to this crisis is severely compromised. Worse still, the collective failure to heed recent historical precedents of other similarly contested diamond deposits in Africa - particularly alluvial ones - threatens to escalate events into exactly the outcome Andrew Cranswick presages above: another civil war to blight Africa's battered reputation, sully the legitimate diamond trade and once again taint a universal symbol of love and devotion.

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