The Courier

Freddy Tsimba, Corps en mutation, 2006 202x106x54 cm, metal. Afrique Europe: 'rêves croisés'.

Credit European Comission and artist.

Paradoxically, the civil wars in Angola, Sierra Leone and Liberia ended before the Kimberley Process came into being in 2003. Including producer and consumer States, the diamond industry and NGOs, its mandate is to oversee a scheme for the certifying the origin of rough diamonds. Further, it is to ensure that diamond trafficking does not fill the coffers of warlords. Naturally, the end of these wars has brought a reduced proportion of conflict diamonds on the world market in relation to world production as a whole – down from 15% according to NGOs, or 4% according to the diamond industry prior to 2003, to just 0.2% now, to quote European Commission statistics.

The guard mustn’t be lowered

But this is not a reason to lower vigilance, argues the new Chair of the Process, Karel Kovanda, Deputy Director General for External Relations of the European Commission. The former diplomat, who until the beginning of 2005 represented the Czech Republic at NATO, fears that the slightest lessening of surveillance will have harmful consequences. Not all conflict diamonds have disappeared, he reminds.

“We have reason to think that Ivorian diamonds originating from the rebel areas in that country are being sold on the world market via Ghana and are fraudulently given certificates attesting that they are of Ghanaian origin”, explains Karel Kovanda. The Commission’s task will be to ensure full implementation of the action plan that Ghana committed to bring into effect at the plenary meeting of the Process in Gaborone (Botswana) last November. This action plan is meant to strengthen internal controls, thus preventing Ivorian rebel diamonds from being mixed with Ghanaian diamonds and ‘laundered’.

Ghana will be provided with expert gemmologists capable of determining from their colour and purity if diamonds from ‘packages’, certified by Ghana and accompanied by secure documents, originate from there. Another challenge will be to verify whether the rebels in the Central African Republic might have had access to alluvial deposits from the Lobaye River.

According to managers of the Diamond High Council in Antwerp (Belgium), the main trading hub of the international diamond trade, another benefit of the Kimberly Process is that it has meant an increase in export earnings for countries most affected by fraud such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (RDC) and Sierra Leone. This is because ‘capturing’ conflict diamonds prevents all illegal diamonds from being re-circulated through legal channels. Contraband gems and those which are used to finance armed groups or terrorists are considered as being part of one and the same category.

Strengthened by the success of the Process, Karel Kovanda would like to use it as a model to prevent the trade of other primary materials, such as other precious stones, from financing conflicts, too. At the same time, he is aware that the Kimberley recipe, as it stands, cannot be applied to other products due to the unique characteristics of diamonds (value-to-weight ratio, degree of market transparency, etc.). The moment is timely. Germany, which took over the G8 presidency in 2007, has included Africa, the leading global supplier of diamonds, and the question of the link between wars and natural resources, among its priorities.

The European Commission also intends to strengthen the transparency and accuracy of statistics on the trade of rough diamonds. Monitoring this relative data is crucial as in the past it has led to the detection of suspicious flows of goods. Besides this commitment to improve the traceability of diamonds, the Commission’s ambition is to increase the efficiency of the scheme by enlarging the club of 47 Process members representing 71 States. Karel Kovanda also wants to ensure that by the end of the year all member countries have undergone an evaluation by ‘peer review’, undertaken by representatives of other countries, NGOs and the diamond industry.

Integrate small-scale, informal miners

The Kimberley Process has not curtailed all violence connected with diamond mining. Even when there’s no fully-fledged violent conflict, confrontations between illegal miners and security officers from mining companies – or soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or in Angola in particular – sometimes prove to be bloody. Kovanda does not deny it, but considers that too much should not be expected of a system conceived to resolve the specific problem of wars financed by diamond smuggling. However, he says he is prepared to explore courses of action which might enable the Kimberley Process to play a part in resolving the problem of human rights violations caused by smuggling gems, other than those provoked by rebel movements.

Karel Kovanda is also considering whether to integrate associations of small-scale miners into the Process who, in Africa, constitute the overwhelming majority of workers operating in the alluvial diamond-mining sector. “The legalisation of the situation of alluvial miners is certainly one of the aspects we must take an interest in. It was no accident that during the last plenary meeting of the Process in Gaborone, the decision was taken to create a special working group on the mining of alluvial diamonds”, remarks the new chairman of the Process. “It may not happen this year, but sooner or later we will have to concentrate on the issue of living and working conditions of workers in the alluvial sector”, concludes Karel Kovanda.

* Co-author with Olivier Vallée, Gemmocraties : l’économie politique du diamant africain, Desclée de Brouwer, Paris 1997