International consumers have this week been urged to boycott any diamonds from Zimbabwe’s controversial Chiadzwa diamond fields, until human rights abuses there have stopped.

By Alex Bell, SW Radio Africa

Last week a meeting of the diamond trade’s international watchdog, the Kimberley Process (KP), ended in stalemate on Zimbabwe’s trade future, with concerns still high over the situation at Chiadzwa. But despite ongoing reports of rampant smuggling, incidents of violence and human rights abuses, the KP chairman last week announced that Zimbabwe could resume exports.

The unilateral decision by the DRC’s Mathieu Yamba, said to be a known ally of the Robert Mugabe regime, has prompted calls for a boycott of Zimbabwe’s stones. Last week both Canada and America insisted that the decision was against KP protocol because there was no consensus from all KP members. At the same time the US based Rapaport trading group re-issued its trade alert on Chiadzwa stones, urging diamond dealers not to accept any diamonds sourced from Zimbabwe’s alluvial fields.

Last week Israel also distanced itself from Yamba’s decision, announcing that it would stop and search any diamond shipments that come from countries known to be dealing with Zimbabwe, namely China and India.

Atrocious decision
Leading rights organisation, Human Rights Watch, has this week also called for consumers not to buy Chiadzwa diamonds and has also urged the KP governments to suspend diamond sales until the Zim dispute is resolved. Senior Human Rights Watch researcher Tiseke Kasambala told SW Radio Africa on Thursday that the decision by the KP’s Yamba is “atrocious,” in the light of the situation at Chiadzwa.
“We have credible reports of beatings, shootings, dogs being set on villagers, and other abuses at the hands of the military,” Kasambala said.

She added, “This (decision by the KP chair) is a terrible tragedy for the KP because it erases all the good work it has done in the past. The fact that it now refuses to deal with broader issues of human rights is a really sad indictment of the institution.”

Requirements not met
Diamond exports from Chiadzwa have been suspended since June 2009 because of police and military abuses in the minefields. These include killings, beatings, forced labor and rampant smuggling of diamonds, all in contravention of KP standards. In November 2009 the Zim government and the KP agreed to a joint work plan, in which Zimbabwe promised to carry out a phased withdrawal of the armed forces from the diamond fields and to allow a monitor to examine all diamond exports to certify that they met KP standards.

None of these requirements have been met and the KP has been deadlocked for almost a year over what to do. Human Rights Watch said in statement that this dispute has “highlighted the failure of the consensus-based decision-making process to address government noncompliance.”

Major loophole
“The members have not been able to reach consensus to revise the KP rules to explicitly prohibit the sale of diamonds by governments that committed abuses to obtain them. Under the rules, a conflict diamond is narrowly defined as one sold by a rebel group to wage war against a government. That definition has left a major loophole since it does not prevent a government like Zimbabwe's from committing abuses when it mines or sells diamonds,” Human Rights Watch said.