Zimbabwe auctioned 900,000 carats of rough gems Wednesday from a diamond

JOHANNESBURG Zimbabwe auctioned 900,000 carats of rough gems Wednesday from a diamond field where human rights groups say soldiers killed 200 people, raped women and enslaved children.It was the first public sale of diamonds from the notorious Marange field in eastern Zimbabwe since international regulators imposed a ban in November under rules designed to screen out conflict gems.The sale happened to coincide with the “blood diamonds” phase of the war crimes trial of Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president. Taylor’s case and the Zimbabwe sale are unrelated, but both point to the successes and difficulties facing the campaign to regulate the trade in diamonds that has helped finance wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, Congo and now Ivory Coast.

The auction in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, went ahead after the gems were certified as conflict-free by Abbey Chikane, a monitor for the Kimberley Process that oversees trade in the diamonds. Chikane had established that soldiers were gone from two fenced-off commercial mines producing the diamonds, and that the mines were operating according to “minimum international standards.”

In the rest of the field, where Zimbabwe’s military still holds sway and abuses reportedly continue, a ban on diamonds remains in place. But there is no guarantee its product won’t infiltrate into the legitimately mined stones.The arrangement so angered American gem trader Martin Rapaport that in February he quit as president of the World Diamond Council. “The tragedy of Zimbabwe is that the Kimberley Process has started legitimizing, legalizing, kosherizing blood diamonds,” he said in a telephone interview from Israel as the auction got under way.

He said it made Kimberley participants “liars who are telling the world that these diamonds are legitimate.”The Kimberley Process was set up in 2002. Its members are 75 diamond-producing and diamond-trading countries, along with industry agencies and civic and human rights bodies such as London-based Global Witness.

Stephane Chardon, chairman of the Kimberley monitoring group, said it deserved credit for the original ban on Marange diamonds and for ensuring that the two fenced-off mines were being properly run.He noted that the Kimberley rules apply only to blood diamonds mined and sold by rebel movements or their allies to finance armed conflicts aimed at toppling legitimate governments. It has no provision for punishing governments.Chardon said the system has helped. “In quite a few countries it has contributed to changing conflict diamonds into development diamonds, in the sense that the revenues are going to the government and are used for development purposes and not for conflict.”

The Marange field was discovered in 2006 and is believed to be the biggest found in the world since the 19th century. It triggered a chaotic diamond rush until police and then the army moved in.Human Rights Watch says the Zimbabwe government still has not kept its word to withdraw soldiers completely from the Marange fields, and that it found conditions there “quite appalling” as recently as May.

“We found that people were still being forced to mine, to dig for diamonds at gunpoint by the army, by soldiers,” said senior researcher Tiseke Kasambala of the area outside the two fenced off mines. “We found children as young as 11 still working in these mines.”Buyers from Belgium, Russia, India, Israel, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates flew into Harare on private aircraft to inspect the stones and present bids in sealed envelopes. They refused to speak to reporters.

“Buyers were extremely interested and the pricing was satisfactory,” said David Castle, director of Mbada Diamonds and chairman of the South African New Reclamation Group that offered the diamonds for sale.Global Witness campaigner Elly Harrowell said that instead of expelling Zimbabwe from the Kimberley process as recommended last year by Kimberley Process investigators who were sent to Marange, “What we have instead is a weak compromise.”

She said that unless Zimbabwe kept its promise to withdraw all troops and fulfill other promised improvements, the Kimberley Process should “act very, very quickly” to prevent Marange gems from being exported.The compromise was reached after a Zimbabwe court released human rights activist Farai Maguwu, who was jailed for more than a month after publicizing abuses at the diamond fields.

Human rights groups say the deal also helped avert a crisis in the international diamond market, since President Robert Mugabe was threatening to sell stones without certification.Zimbabwe’s mines minister, Obert Mpofu, said Wednesday the country has 4.5 million Marange diamonds in stock, valued at up to $1.9 billion – one third of the national debt of a country whose economy has been ruined by corruption, mismanagement and Mugabe’s campaign against the country’s white-minority farmers.(AP)

contractor attacks in Afghanistan

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan  The message, very often, is sent with bloodshed.There was the suicide bombing last week on a fortified Kandahar guesthouse shared by Western contracting companies, killing four Afghans and injuring several Americans. There was the Afghan engineer, shot dead in March as he helped inspect a school not far from the Pakistan border. Or the Afghan woman, an employee for a U.S.-based consulting firm, shot by motorbike-riding gunmen as she returned home from work in this southern city.

As the United States presses ahead with an Afghan counterinsurgency strategy that depends on speeding up development of one of the world’s poorest countries, the U.S. contractors, construction companies and aid organizations needed to rebuild Afghanistan have faced a surge in attacks that puts the plan in jeopardy.

Overall figures for contractor attacks remain elusive, since the employees come from dozens of nations and work for hundreds of different organizations.But the death toll has jumped precipitously in the months since President Barack Obama launched a massive troop surge last December.

Of the 289 civilians working for U.S. contractors killed between the start of the Afghanistan war in late 2001 and the end of last year, 100 died in just the last six months of 2009, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service.To a degree, those killings have mirrored an increase in U.S. service member deaths, which roughly doubled in the first three months of 2010 compared to the same period in 2009.

Many of the recent attacks against civilian contractors have been around Kandahar, the one-time Taliban capital where the U.S. is poised to launch a major operation in the coming weeks, but the rash of violence has spiked across Afghanistan.”The insurgents are trying to say ‘You can’t do it,'” Gen. Stanley McChrystal said in a speech last week in Paris, shortly after two bombings shook Kandahar. “I think we’ll see that for months as they make an effort to stop progress. But I don’t think that they’ll be successful.”

In some ways, though, they already have been successful.Although contractors say they are not leaving the country, the attacks have forced them to retreat even further behind blast walls and heavily armed security perimeters. The security drives up costs, makes it more difficult to interact with regular Afghans and slows reconstruction projects.

The attacks have forced many contractors, aid groups and Afghan officials to retreat even further behind blast walls and heavily armed security perimeters. The security drives up costs, makes it more difficult to interact with regular Afghans and slows reconstruction projects.

“We have become the targets of the Taliban,” said Azizullah, the owner of a construction company that builds bridges and irrigation projects in the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand, strongholds of the militant Muslim fighters. “If we travel, they try to kidnap us and hold us for huge ransoms. If we don’t pay, they kill us,” said Azizullah, who like many Afghans has only one name.

His workers now travel in U.S. military convoys whenever possible, he said, to give them additional protection.That doesn’t surprise Gulali, a tribal elder from Kandahar province.”Of course the Taliban are against any of these people working for the Afghan government or the Americans or other foreigners,” said the elder, who also uses only one name.

He believes many of the recent attacks are by militants simply looking for softer targets. While nearly all foreign companies in Afghanistan now work out of guarded compounds, they do not have the massive fortifications and overwhelming firepower found at nearly any American military installation.The Taliban “want to use the easiest option,” he said.But the attacks are challenging a key part of America’s aims in Afghanistan.

Washington’s counterinsurgency plans call for aggressive development to build up everything from Afghanistan’s roads to its sewer systems to its irrigation networks. Much of the actual work is paid for by USAID, the government’s main international aid agency, then contracted through corporations that often subcontract the actual the work to smaller companies. On the ground, many employees are Afghans overseen by small groups of Western administrators.

The attacks “are not about armed confrontation. They are about subversion of the government,” said Terrence K. Kelly, a senior researcher at the Washington-based RAND Corporation who has studied how rebuilding efforts work in war zones. America’s strategy counts on development work to increase the legitimacy and reach of the Karzai government. With these attacks the Taliban can “turn off the delivery of services – which makes the government look bad,” he said.USAID insists it will not scale back its work in Afghanistan because of the attacks, according to Rebecca Black, the agency’s deputy mission director for Afghanistan.

Contractors insist they are also staying.The Louis Berger Group/Black & Veatch, a joint venture building major infrastructure projects across the country, was among the companies based in the Kandahar guest house attacked last week.In a statement, the joint venture said they were “currently conducting a comprehensive review of the recent events in Kandahar to assess what changes, if any, are required to continue our work.”(AP)