An international body charged with stopping the illicit trade in diamonds that fuels conflict will not suspend Zimbabwe, officials said on Friday, though its investigators concluded Zimbabwe’s military had organized smuggling syndicates with the government’s permission and used “extreme violence” against illegal miners.
Instead, the countries who are part of the UN-endorsed Kimberley Process said they would send a monitor to decide whether future exports of rough diamonds from the troubled Marange fields in eastern Zimbabwe can be certified as conflict-free.
Human rights groups denounced the decision, saying the body had showed it was incapable of stopping gross abuses and the flouting of international standards.
Bernhard Esau, the Namibian deputy mining minister who heads the Kimberley Process, said in an interview on Friday that the nations who belong to the body had listened to what Zimbabwe “told us as a Kimberley family” and decided to give the government a chance to come into compliance with international standards under a monitor’s supervision by agreed timelines.
“If that time comes, we’ll have to see if those things have been met or not,” he said. “I am hopeful, but I don’t want to be let down. I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt.”
The plan agreed to on Thursday calls for private security companies, Zimbabwe’s police force and its mining ministry to secure the fields, while the military withdraws in phases.
Zimbabwe’s mining ministry, as well as the police and military forces, are under the control of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party.
Zimbabwe’s mining minister, Obert Mpofu, told the Kimberley gathering, held this week in Swakopmund, Namibia, that the situation in the Marange fields was improving. Zimbabwe’s state-run newspaper, The Herald, this week described the effort to stop the trade in Zimbabwe’s diamonds as being led by Western nations and based on “a glut of unsubstantiated claims of human rights abuses.”
Critics said the decision demonstrated the ineffectiveness of the process set up to police the international diamond trade.
“This failure to act has sent a bad message,” said Annie Dunnebacke of Global Witness, an organization that advocates strict controls on diamond production. “It says if you don’t follow the rules there will be no serious consequences.”
Advocates pointed out that the body’s decisions must be made by consensus, which means a single country or small group of countries can block tough action. A suspension of Zimbabwe from the group would have curtailed its diamond sales, depriving Mugabe of a source of patronage for the military, analysts have said.
Critics said that under the plan approved for Zimbabwe, its mining ministry has been put in charge of “education of villagers on the dangers of illegal mining.”
“The government already did that by killing more than 200 villagers and by beating and setting dogs on hundreds more,” said Ian Smillie, a researcher and advocate who was an architect of the Kimberley Process.
Kimberley investigators who visited the country in July found evidence that Zimbabwean security forces had raped, assaulted and set dogs on illegal miners who flocked to the Marange fields.
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