GEMS VALUED at €56 million from the controversial Marange diamond fields in Zimbabwe were put up for auction yesterday, the first legal sale since international regulators partially unbanned trading in the precious stones two months ago.
Buyers from the United States, Israel, Russia, Lebanon and India were said to be at the heavily guarded auction in Harare’s international airport where 900,000 carats mined since the end of last May went under the hammer.
Some buyers had their own planes waiting so they could immediately take their purchases out of the southern African country.
Opening the auction, Zimbabwean prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai said the occasion should be seen as a “historic” one, given the government had managed to satisfy the requirements of watchdog body the Kimberley Process (KP). The KP is an international organisation charged with preventing trade in “blood diamonds”, which it defines as gems mined by rebel groups whose proceeds go to fund war or conflict.
“We have put in place measures to ensure that we abide by the Kimberley Process principles and sell our diamonds in a transparent manner,” said the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader, who is in a transitional government with President Robert Mugabe.
The KP ruled in June that human rights abuses by the military, which stands accused of killing over 200 illegal miners during operations to secure the Marange fields in 2008, were no longer taking place following visits to the area by its monitoring team.
The KP had blocked the sale of diamonds mined from Marange – in the east of the country in Chiadzwa – in November last year, and gave the government until June to clean up its operations.
The decision to sanction the diamond sale should provide a much-needed windfall for the transitional government, which has struggled to secure billions of euro in donor funding needed to rebuild the shattered economy.
According to the government, it has 4.5 million carats of diamonds in its stocks, which it values at €1.3 billion – a sum over half this year’s national budget.
However, most of these stones were not mined under KP supervision, so they still need to be audited before they can be released for export, said KP monitor Abbey Chikane. The South African added that the gems on sale yesterday were of a high quality and were likely to fetch up to $80 (€62) a carat.
Despite the KP assurances regarding current mining practices at Marange, the sale of precious stones from the area remains controversial. Human rights organisations continue to report rights abuses are regularly carried out by the military personnel tasked with protecting the known deposits.
Critics also claim that Mr Mugabe and his military allies are misappropriating diamond profits to prepare his Zanu-PF party to face the MDC in the next general election. This accusation was given credence recently by Zimbabwean finance minister Tendai Biti, who told parliament that €23 million in Marange sales made before the ban last year never reached the treasury.