Word: diamond
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...buyer is a diamond dealer, registered with the Zambian government. He will drive back across the border where there is no border, just thick bush, scrubland and cattle trails. Even if he passes one of the rare police posts, he will just drive through and wave to the guards, perhaps give them a cigarette. He doesn't have to declare the diamonds. All he has to do is go to the Ministry of Mines in Zambia and get an export permit. He makes up a name and address of the "supplier" in Angola. The diamonds are now instantly legal...
...Diamonds may be forever, but for producers in Africa they can be a curse or a blessing. They have taken at least one country, Botswana, from rags to riches. In terms of value, half the world's diamonds come from South Africa, Botswana or Namibia. The control of the diamond fields in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo has always been at the heart of dark and bloody civil wars in those nations as well. But Angola is a case unto itself, a land where a hijacked diamond industry continues to feed the fires of misery even...
...combat that link, De Beers, which controls 70% of the world's diamond trade, has spent the fall implementing a new set of policies designed to help keep the hard-earned money of newly engaged couples from ending up in the hands of the rebels. This fall the company has reaffirmed its commitment to trying to stop the trade and even added a bit of a spin: a sense that the boycott was aimed directly at the National Union for the Total Liberation of Angola (UNITA), the rebel group led by Jonas Savimbi that has been a target of largely...
...easy to stop the trade. UNITA has already amassed a fortune from illicit diamond sales, enough to continue its hostilities virtually indefinitely. Diamond analysts calculate that UNITA made more than $2.5 billion from diamond sales between 1992 and 1997, and last year collected at least $225 million. U.N. researchers and human-rights lobbying groups put the figure far higher. By any estimation, Savimbi's 40,000-strong UNITA must be the richest rebel movement in the world...
...sanctions since mid-1998 against UNITA's diamond dealing have had little effect. Canada's U.N. ambassador, Robert Fowler, head of the Angolan sanctions committee, now has two panels of experts investigating UNITA's sanctions-busting operations and searching for a way to plug the embargo's holes. Fowler plans to put expert monitors in key trading centers to identify gems that could emanate from UNITA-held areas. He will also put U.N. customs officials at points in Africa where UNITA might move diamonds, money or weapons. At the same time, human-rights and environmental lobbyists have been pushing...