Crucial week for Zimbabwe’s diamonds

Zimbabwe will know this week whether it can sell its diamonds from Marange legally or not as members of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme which gives the clean bill are meeting in Kinshasa to discuss the Zimbabwe issue among other things.

The intersessional meeting is supposed to have started yesterday but there has been dead silence about it save for stories published in the United States and Australia which say Zimbabwe will be given the go-ahead despite its appalling human rights record.

Zimbabwe’s diamonds have been on the KP agenda since 2009 when the country started commercial production by approving two operations one by Mbada and the other by Canadile, both joint ventures with the state-owned Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation. The government has since approved more mining operations in the area.

Western countries and non-governmental organisations have opposed the export of Zimbabwe’s diamonds from Marange because of alleged human rights violations following the deployment of the army to the fields. They have also claimed that the diamonds are benefitting President Robert Mugabe and his cronies and not the country.

Zimbabwe has argued that it has the right to sell its diamonds because it has been given a clean bill by a monitor appointed by the KP as well as review teams that were sent to the country to assess the situation for themselves.

Key industry representatives, the World Diamond Council and the World Federation of Diamond Bourses, have both said the KP should allow Zimbabwe to sell its diamonds openly because it is going to sell them anyway.

The World Federation of Diamond Bourses Avi Paz said members of the Kimberley Process should take the “essential and courageous decision” to allow Zimbabwe to export its rough diamonds because the KP’s indecision is about to cause irreparable damage to the industry.

“The Kimberley Process, due to the deadlock in its decision-making process and its experts’ ensuing indecision to allow rough diamond exports from Zimbabwe to resume, is about to cause irreparable damage throughout the entire to supply pipeline of our industry and trade, and threatens the livelihood of literally millions of people throughout the international diamond and jewellery sector,” Paz said.

World Diamond Council boss Eli Izhakoff shared the same sentiments. “Anytime you have illegal diamonds flow out, it means they flow out at a lesser price. That is unfair to the people who deal legally in diamonds. This will actually be a weak link in the chain of the Kimberly Process and the chain is as strong as its weaker link.

“So we must have all the chains just as a strong and therefore the faster we resolve the issue (the better). And it’s not a question about loving Zimbabwe or wanting Zimbabwe to come in because it is Zimbabwe. The question is there is a producing country out there that produces a significant amount of rough and for them to be in the system is much better than they are out of the system.”

If Zimbabwe does not get the go-ahead this week, it may have to wait until November when the KP holds in plenary after which the Democratic Republic of Congo will hand over the chair.

This normally goes to the country that is deputy chair but at the moment there is no deputy after Zimbabwe and Southern African Development Community countries barred the United States from becoming deputy chair.

But diamond expert Chaim Even-Zohar says the meeting in Kinshasa is merely technical because whether the KP members agree or not, this will not affect Zimbabwe.

“….hordes of Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) bureaucrats will descend on Kinshasa, DRC, for their traditional intercessional meeting. They will, totally in vain, try to find a Zimbabwe solution while ignoring that, from a Zimbabwe perspective, there is no longer any problem since the KP chair already gave its stamp of approval on unmonitored Marange exports,” he says.

KP chair Mathieu Yamba gave Zimbabwe the go ahead to sell its diamonds in March and has the support of African diamond producers.

(18 VIEWS)