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KP team visiting Zimbabwe under pressure

There have been reports of rampant diamond smuggling in the country although industry sources have said Central Bank governor Gideon Gono is inflating the figures.

The KP has been under pressure to stop diamond sales from Zimbabwe because of rampant smuggling and human rights abuses which saw scores of illegal diamond miners being killed last year during the clean up of the Chiadzwa fields in Marange.

The last KP review mission to Zimbabwe was in 2007 but its report has come under heavy criticism because it claimed there was no smuggling from mines like River Ranch when the figures did not seem to add up.

It also said there was no mining activity at Chiadzwa, now the centre spot of human rights violations.

The KP team also cleared the United Nations Development Programme office in Harare of any involvement in diamond smuggling yet a report by a special UNDP investigation says someone fraudulently registered vehicles that were used by River Ranch in the name of the UNDP.

The KP was dealt another heavy blow this week when Ian Smillie of Partnership Africa Canada, a non-governmental organisation that was heavily involved in creating the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme to curb the flow of conflict diamonds, resigned from his organisation saying he could no longer keep the pretence.

"I am leaving Partnership Africa-Canada (PAC) because I feel that I can no longer in good faith contribute to a pretence that failure is success, or to the kind of debates we have been reduced to," he reportedly said in a farewell letter to KP members.

"I thought in 2003 that we had created something significant. In fact we did, but we have let it slip away from us. The KP has been confronted by many challenges in the past five years, and it has failed to deal quickly or effectively with most of them: smuggling and fraud in Brazil, and issues of even greater importance in Côte d'Ivoire/Ghana, Guyana, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and now Guinea and Lebanon. In each case the issue has had to become a media debacle before the KP would deal with it (if at all), and in the case of Venezuela, we have effectively condoned diamond smuggling - the very thing we were established to prevent," Smillie says.

He added: "There is a basic truth: when regulators fail to regulate, the systems they were designed to protect collapse. In this case, the diamond industry, which means so much to so many, is being ill served by what has become a complacent and almost completely ineffectual Kimberley Process. Without a genuine wakeup call and the growth of some serious regulatory teeth, it leaves the industry exposed, vulnerable and perhaps, in the end, unworthy of protection."

The KP team is expected to meet the Minister of Mines and hold discussions with the Minerals Marketing Corporation of Zimbabwe, the KP agent in the country; the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation which is now supposed to be running Chiadzwa, Rio Tinto which operates Murowa and River Ranch which owns a diamond mine of the same name near Beitbridge.

The team which will be in the country for five days will also meet officials of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority, the Police and Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials.

The team is expected to visit Murowa to look at its mining operations and to assess the mine's stockpiles. It will also carry similar visits to River Ranch and Marange.

Zimbabwe is reported to have a stockpile of 1.33 million carats of diamonds valued at about US$150 million.

There has been rampant smuggling with some diamond dealers being arrested in India and others in Dubai.

Posted- 30 May 2009

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© Insider Publications 2009. This story is available for syndication. Contact the publisher at charlesrukuni@insiderzim.com