The Kimberley Process Civil Society Coalition (KPCSC) has called on the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) to come to terms with the shortcomings of the certification scheme and to commit to serious reforms.
A KPCS plenary meeting will be held in Botswana from 1 to 4 November 2022, amid growing concern about the scheme’s ineptitude to address the ever-evolving forms of conflict in diamond-producing and trading nations.
“The KPCS has turned a blind eye to the environmental, socio-economic and security risks posed by mining activities to communities,” it said.
“This has resulted in perennial complaints from communities like Maluti in Lesotho, marginalised affected property owners of Koidu in Sierra Leone and communities living along Tshikapa and Kasai Rivers in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“The fate of the Jagersfontein community in South Africa, where burst tailings dams flooded and displaced communities, may be similar to what awaits many other diamond mining communities worldwide, particularly in Africa where most of the rough diamonds are produced.”
The KPCSC said KPCS intervenes only when rough diamonds are used by rebels to fight governments, ignoring the predicaments of communities affected by the actions or omissions of state and non-state actors that include displacements, environmental damage and violence, including the use of diamond revenues to maim women and children and annexing territories in other sovereign countries.
“This leaves diamonds tainted by other types of violence or conflict to flow onto the global market, certified ‘conflict-free’, as with diamonds from Russia,” it said.
“We call on the KP to be empathetic to the suffering masses of this world whose pain is funded by proceeds from diamonds, whether rough or polished. The KPCS has made it a habit to hop from one failed reform cycle to another and cannot even discuss problems that concern everyone, hiding behind a redundant scope of the definition.”
Mathew Nyaungwa, Editor in Chief of the African Bureau, Rough&Polished
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