The calling of witnesses to testify in a case that involves some top figures in Angola's military, security establishment and a mining firm accused of torture and murder in the country’s diamond fields has re-ignited debate over the effectiveness of the Kimberley Process (KP) to stop the trading of the so-called blood diamonds.
Making much noise over the issue is an Angolan human rights activist Rafael Marques de Morais, who had been investigating rights abuses connected with the diamond industry since 2004.
The north-eastern provinces of Lunda-Norte and Lunda-Sul were Angola's richest diamond-producing areas.
Diamonds from the Lunda region were an important source of revenue for the UNITA rebel movement during a civil war that ravaged the southern African nation.
Abuses
However, with the end of the war in 2002, the Angolan government granted mining concessions to companies owned by senior military figures and others with close links to the regime, Morais said.
Many of the generals that own diamond mining companies had also set up security companies to keep local people out of the concession areas.
These companies, he said, had enjoyed impunity from the law while carrying out acts of torture, abduction and, in some cases, murder against the people who live in the region.
Morais said the Angolan government and the mining companies regularly destroyed subsistence farming as a result of mining operations, without providing jobs in the region, which produces diamonds worth over $1 billion a year.
The Angolan Armed Forces (FAA) was also said to be responsible for many summary executions, and regularly uses torture.
He said the FAA buried 45 illegal miners alive some three years ago, while in February 2010, 22 illegal miners were executed by gunfire, in a mass extra-judicial killing.
A year after that, guards from the security company Teleservice forced 15 miners at gunpoint to jump off a speeding truck at intervals so as to scatter the evidence of their deaths in the bush in the middle of the night.
Morais said illegal miners and villagers alike were routinely stripped naked and beaten with the flat side of machetes.
Legal route
This was all happening under the nose of the Kimberley Process, which is seen in Angola as “worthless”.
"Under the Kimberley Process the state has the responsibility of certifying that diamonds mined in its national territory comply with ethical standards," Morais said.
"In Angola, the process is worthless, since senior state officials have been complicit in some of the worst human rights abuses associated with the diamond industry: the destruction of livelihoods as well as torture and murder."
Instead of campaigning for the suspension of Angola’s diamonds to KP, as what some groups had been doing in Zimbabwe, where the army also stand accused of the same crime, Morais decided to lodge a criminal complaint with the country’s attorney general.
Respondents in the case included General Manuel Hélder Vieira Dias "Kopelipa", Minister of State and head of the Military Bureau in the Angolan presidency, as well as a close confidante and business associate of President José Eduardo dos Santos.
Also named were three former commanders in chief of the Angolan Armed Forces: General António dos Santos França Ndalu, General João de Matos.
The mining consortium Sociedade Mineira do Cuango (SMC), private security company Teleservice and its representatives were also implicated.
Although Morais was excited about the move taken by the attorney general to hear the victims’ testimony it was less likely that the accused would be incarcerated given their high profile and politics of patronage, in Angola.
The Kimberley Process will also not do much to help the country deal with the problem, unless it emerges that the generals were trading their diamonds outside the official channels or some rebels were mining diamonds to finance their operations as was the case in the 1990s with UNITA.
Limbo
Zimbabwe was allowed to resume exports of diamonds from Marange despite similar accusations of human rights abuses and for one to think that KP would take drastic measures in Angola would be day-dreaming.
Dubbing gems mined under such circumstances “blood” diamonds was also contentious, hence KP’s hands were always tied much to the chagrin of civil rights groups.
KP, it seems, was more concerned with leakages of diamonds not who is being beaten by security officials guarding diamond fields, in Angola.
Although one cannot condone any beating, torture and even murder of informal miners, it is always a catch-22 situation for KP to punish firms or governments trying to stop the illegal mining of diamonds.
By doing so, it would appear as if KP was supporting illegal mining activities and if it does not take any action, human rights groups will be quick to call the organisation “worthless”.
With this sad reality, it would be logical to conclude that such situations require a strong judiciary system that can heavily punish perpetrators of gross human rights abuses rather than look up to big brother KP to wave a magic wand.
It remains to be seen if the legal path taken in Angola to end abuses in diamond fields will not be another damp-squib for civil rights groups.
Mathew Nyaungwa, Editor in Chief of the African Bureau, Rough&Polished
