24 HOURS LEFT TO ACT: Ban Zimbabwe Blood Diamonds – AVAAZ Petition

Lobbying group AVAAZ are calling on people to sign a petition that they can deliver to diamond regulators meeting in Namiba this week. We have only 24 hours to gather as many signatures as possible. Please sign the petition and then use the AVAAZ tool on their website to send the petition link to as many of your friends and relatives as possible. The diamond regulators meeting in Namibia this week will decide whether to suspend Zimbabwe and stop Mugabe selling his blood diamonds on the world market.

Further information:

The Legal Monitor featured an article in this week’s edition about how the Zimbabwe military are using forced labour, including schoolchildren who are subject to abuse, to mine the diamonds (article provided at the end of this post).

HRW released a report in June detailing the terrible abuses going on in the diamond fields, available to download here.

A Special Assignment programme titled “Zimbabwe’s Blood Diamonds” was broadcast on Tuesday 27 October at 8.30 pm on SABC 3 (South Africa), also exposing the ongoing abuses in the fields. We posted a full transcript of the programme on our blog here.

Soldiers abuse schoolchildren – The Legal Monitor (link)

Human Rights Watch (HRW) latest investigations show military presence has increased in Chiadzwa, where brutal soldiers still use syndicates that include schoolchildren to illegally mine diamonds.

In a statement calling for the immediate suspension of Zimbabwe from the Kimberly Process (KP), HRW said Harare had failed to comply with any of the recommendations put forward in July by a review mission of the group.

“Zimbabwe has had more than enough time to put a halt to the human rights abuses and smuggling at Marange. Instead, it has sent more troops to the area, apparently trying to put a halt to independent access and scrutiny,” said Georgette Gagnon, the HRW Africa director.

The New York based organisation said a probe two weeks ago that included interviews with 23 people “directly linked” to Marange diamonds revealed that:

• The Zimbabwean army uses syndicates of local miners to extract diamonds, often using forced labour, including children.
• On September 17, a soldier shot and killed a 19-year-old member of one syndicate. The soldier stated, in the presence of witnesses, that he had shot the man for hiding a raw diamond instead of handing them over to him.
• Local miners provided information that soldiers have begun to recruit people from outside Marange to join army-run diamond mining syndicates.
• Smuggling of Marange diamonds has intensified. Scores of buyers and middlemen openly trade in Marange diamonds in the small Mozambique town of Vila de Manica, 20 miles from Mutare. The smugglers include people from Lebanon, Belgium, South Africa, and India, who circulate Marange’s diamonds onto the international market.

HRW last June produced a report that exposed brutal abuses by soldiers, including the killing of more than 200 people under an operation to flush out illegal miners code-named Operation Hakudzokwi. The report, ‘Diamonds in the Rough’, claimed that senior military and ZANU PF officials benefited from the illegal mining of Marange diamonds.

In its statement last week, HRW cited Zimbabwe’s failure to comply with a High Court order confirming ownership of tracts of Marange diamonds fields to UK firm, African Consolidated Revenues (ACR), as another reason the country should be banned from the KP.

This entry was posted by Sokwanele2 on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 1:59 pm. You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.