Botswana is alive to reports that Zimbabwe is selling diamonds without following the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme.
That, however, has not tempted the Minister of Minerals, Energy and Resources, Ponatshego Kedikilwe, to jump the gun and make an immediate pronouncement.
Unlike his Foreign Affairs counterpart, Phandu Skelemani, who has a penchant to shoot from the hip over bilateral relations, Kedikilwe is treading carefully. The Minister says he wants to establish the veracity of the reports with his counterpart, Zimbabwe’s Minister of Mines and Development, Obert Mpofu.
Quizzed by the Telegraph this week, Kedikilwe said: “I will speak to Minister Mpofu to verify the facts; I don’t want to speak out of turn.”
Pundits have warned that the Kimberley Process could collapse after the group meant to prevent diamonds from financing conflicts decided to allow Zimbabwe to sell diamonds tainted by army killings in Marange. Diamonds were discovered in Marange in 2006, drawing in thousands of small-time miners hoping to get rich quick.
Once the extent of the find became clear, the army cleared the area in late 2008, when Human Rights Watch says more than 200 people were killed, some by helicopter gunships.
The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (Kimberley Process or KP) is an international governmental certification scheme that was set up to prevent the trade in diamonds that fund conflict. Launched in January 2003, the scheme requires governments to certify that shipments of rough diamonds are conflict-free.
The Since 2003, KP has gathered governments, industry and activists into a global regulator that makes decisions by consensus.
AFP reports that at the Kimberley meeting in Kinshasa on June 23, rights groups simply walked out after the chairman, Mathieu Yamba of the Democratic Republic of Congo, gave the green light to two companies to sell gems from Zimbabwe’s Marange fields.
“It weakens the process,” the AFP quoted Tony Hawkins, an economist at the University of Zimbabwe, as having said. “Less and less regard will be paid to KP. In the long term, it could wither away and die.”
KP’s own investigators documented “unacceptable and horrific violence against civilians by authorities” prompting a ban on exports of the gems in June 2009.
Since then, two firms operating in a series of incarnations as South African firms and Zimbabwe parastatal entities have kept on mining, with Harare stockpiling gems now estimated to be worth up to $5 billion, according to the AFP.
Zimbabwe’s gross domestic product last year was $7.5 billion, according to the International Monetary Fund.
The mines ministry, which, like the security forces are controlled by long-ruling President Robert Mugabe under Zimbabwe’s shaky unity government, is desperate to sell the gems.
The country’s finance minister, Tendai Biti, has been reported as saying he cannot account for any of the $30 million in Marange diamonds sold in the months before the ban.
Nonetheless, African countries, China and India supported the Kimberley decision, which was opposed by Western nations, rights groups and the industry ÔÇö which is keen to avoid the bad publicity which “blood diamonds” bring.
Additional reporting by AFP
