Are your diamonds pure? This question used to refer to matters of clarity, cut and color, but today there is another sense of purity that's being considered: the procedure in which the diamond was mined and the way it got to your neighborhood diamond dealer. Partnership Africa Canada Executive Director Bernard Taylor, for one, feels that tainted diamonds should be prevented from entering the clean diamond stream.
Taylor made this statement in relation to the recent recommendation made by the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme to suspend the import and export of rough diamonds in Zimbabwe for a period of six months, due to claims of foul-play.
It is no secret that the Marange Diamond Fields in Zimbabwe are controversial at best, but this recent recommendation by Kimberley Process puts an official seal on the demand for change. This is perhaps due to growing awareness what's going on in Zimbabwe, thanks to the human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Unicef and Not On Our Watch, an organization founded by international superstars such as George Clooney, Don Cheadle, Matt Damon and Brad Pitt.
No doubt that the 2006 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio about this topic also helped raise awareness among the public, as films sometimes manage to succeed where humanitarian movements don't.
The Zimbabwean government claims that a ban on its diamond industry would damage the nation's economy and its attempts to recover in the midst of the global financial crisis. Taylor, however, does not agree, and states that the export of diamonds from Zimbabwe amounted to a mere $33 million, clearly not a significant portion of the country's economy.
The rights to the Marange mining field were owned by Diamond Giant De Beers from the early 1980s till 2006, when its Exclusive Prospecting Order expired and the government of Zimbabwe took over the mines. In almost an instance, some 10,000 illegal miners arrived in Marange and started operating in small plots there, selling their diamonds to the government.
But this quickly changed as a black market developed for these diamonds, and the area has been subject to conflict ever since. To deal with illegal miners and diamond smugglers, the government sent its militia forces to deal with the problem and take control of the area.
This situation nonetheless is about to change, as one of Kimberley Process's recommendations was to remove the Zimbabwe militant presence from the area. This course of action, intended to tone down the violence in the area, might actually destabilize the area even more if diamond smugglers are allowed to roam free.
It is clear that a strong widespread international intervention and regulation is required here, in order to keep the diamond extraction process in Zimbabwe pure and violence-free. It is important for all of us to remember that the purity of life is just as important as the purity of a diamond.
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