Ashlander Mark Yaconelli with Petros Mufasa, one of the organizers for the Zimbabwe Workshop.

On the second day of the National Healing and Reconciliation Workshop, after a period of heartfelt prayers and singing, one pastor stood and read the following: "Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked."

"This is a day for victims," facilitator Mazvita Machinga announced.

It was a day when organizers hoped to create awareness among pastors and community leaders of the needs of victims of political violence within Zimbabwe. In the first exercise of the day, people were placed in small groups and asked to discuss the following questions: What types of victimization have people in your community experienced? What do these victims feel as a result of their suffering? What do these victims need for healing?

The responses to these questions were heart-breaking: A widow's car was torched simply because a mob from the ruling Zanu-PF party suspected she would vote for the opposition party; a pastor was beaten simply for receiving a visit from a white pastor; a woman's hand was chopped off for hesitating when a mob of so-called Zanu-PF "War Veterans" asked her to fake an illness so that the state could vote in her place.

Some victims feel anger and bitterness, others are lost in grief and depression, others are still shocked and confused.

The pastors agree that most victims feel great fear and uncertainty about further violence.

The group created a list of what these victims need: medical assistance, shelter, homes repaired, property returned, financial help, therapy, regular visits from pastors and community leaders, and most of all perpetrators confronted. The most common response was that victims wanted guarantees that they would be safe from future violence and reassured that perpetrators would face legal prosecution.

Frank Rogers then talked about the two most common responses to violence: fight or flight. Rogers explained that in the first instinctive response there is a great desire for revenge or "an eye for an eye." The problem, however, is that this only escalates the cycle of violence and makes the perpetrator want to fight back harder. Rogers counseled, "We end up mirroring the violence that was done to us and become what we hate."

In the second instinctive response, flight, we passively submit to the violence or simply pretend it never happened. The problem with this response, Rogers argued, "is that it does not bring healing to the victim who simmers in resentment and the perpetrator becomes victorious. The perpetrator is allowed to steal the victim's power, soul, and dignity."

Rogers spoke about a third option, forgiveness: "Forgiveness is abandoning your right to pay back a perpetrator with violence. It is no longer letting the violation of violence diminish our own humanity. It is learning to be free of resentment and vengefulness toward a perpetrator."

There were three clarifications to this definition of forgiveness. Forgiveness is excruciatingly difficult. It's difficult to transform honest reactions like anger, resentment, and vengefulness into the freedom of forgiveness. Secondly, forgiveness is the victim's journey, not the perpetrator's journey. Forgiveness is when the victim heals from the wounds of the violence enough that they can become free from its effects. Thirdly, forgiveness is a gift - it is a spiritual journey that comes from grace. A victim cannot force themself to feel forgiveness. It is the endpoint of a period of healing.

The last day was spent focused on reconciliation and what the facilitator called, "The perpetrator's journey." Presentations were made focusing on the two common responses to perpetrators of violence: retributive justice, punishing the perpetrators for wrong-doing, or national amnesty, allowing perpetrators back into the community without any punishment or acknowledgement of the offense. Both responses have their attractive benefits and yet each is inadequate in resolving the needs and suffering of both victim and perpetrator.

A third option, restorative justice, was then advocated by presenters, in which the community brings victims and perpetrators into dialogue for the purpose of mediating an accountable reconciliation between them. Restorative justice allows victims to share their story and be heard, gain information about the violence done to them, restore their personal power, and gain restitution. Restorative justice also ensures perpetrators understand the consequence of their actions, empathize with the victims, make amends to victims, own their need for healing, and are responsibly integrated back into the community.

At the end of the day the pastors and community leaders began to design practical plans for a national movement of healing and reconciliation. They drafted a letter of recommendations to be given to the national government asking that church and grassroots community leaders be placed in charge of national programs, they planned workshops within their communities that would teach the process of forgiveness, reconciliation, and restorative justice. Plans were made to begin documenting the names and experience of victims and the names and locations of perpetrators.

At the end of the day, five chairs were placed in the middle of the group. These chairs had been sitting at the front of the room, facing the group, for the final day of the workshop. Each chair had a piece of paper taped to its back reading "victim," "perpetrator," "government," "church," or "chiefs." The facilitator asked volunteers to sit in one of the labeled chairs. Five pastors came forward and sat in one of the chairs representing victims, perpetrators, government leaders, and the various spiritual and community leaders across Zimbabwe. They sat in a small circle and held hands.

The members of the conference then gathered around this symbolic group, prayed for them, sang over them, and then with great tears and smiles, exited the conference center to begin the real work of mending broken lives.

Mark Yaconelli is the co-director of Triptykos and the author of "Wonder, Fear, and Longing: A Book of Prayers." Read about his experience in Zimbabwe at www.triptykos.com.

ROUGH JUSTICE: Zimbabwean soldiers escorting a group of illegal gem panners after their October 2009 arrest in the Marange diamond fields. Prisoners are typically held for one to three days before release to an uncertain fate.

Zimbabwe's newfound diamond fields could have helped lift the country from its misery. Instead, they've fueled a cycle of government-sanctioned rape, murder, and thievery -- and pushed the place still closer to collapse.

Enlarge

SNARED: An MP watches over an illegal diamond panner at a detention center in Marange, October 2009.

Enlarge

SCARRED FOR LIFE: Elizabeth (not her real name) once sold blankets and other staples to miners in the Marange fields; during a government assault in late 2008, she says, she and other women were beaten and raped by soldiers.

Ali Moussa and his partner, Shahab Hamdan, are peripatetic veterans of the blood-diamond trade. For 15 years, they based themselves in Bo and Kenema, in Sierra Leone, near the rich diamond deposits that stoked a decade-long civil war between the ragtag government army and a brutal rebel force. As the enemies battled for control of the diamond fields, Moussa and Hamdan (the names are pseudonyms, at their request) bought gems from rebels and soldiers alike, then exported them to international dealers at a hefty profit. Then, in January 1999, the world was forced to watch as drug-fueled teenage rebels invaded Freetown, the capital, where they executed hundreds of civilians and hacked the limbs off hundreds more. Pro-government British troops defeated the rebels and oversaw the transition to a democratic government. Eventually, Moussa and Hamdan were obliged to look elsewhere to make their money.

That's when they found out about Manica. "We came here [to Mozambique] a year ago when we heard about the boom" just across the nearby border, in Zimbabwe, Moussa tells me, grinning from behind a desk adorned with a digital scale and a pair of loupes -- the standard tools of the diamond buyer's trade. He's a bald, skinny Lebanese with an unplaceable accent, a mélange of French, Arabic, and the pidgin-English inflections of West Africa. "The quality's not as good as the diamonds in Sierra Leone," Moussa adds, "but the quantity is huge."

Just how huge becomes apparent during a swing through this once-sleepy frontier town at the base of the bush-covered Penha Longa Mountains. Long known primarily as a stop for a Laurentina beer or a tank of gas on the way to Beira, Mozambique's second-largest city, Manica has become a southern African boomtown: Deadwood in the bush. A Zimbabwean human-rights worker and a local teenager named João take me on a tour. We drive past furtive Lebanese traders sipping espressos in outdoor cafés or riding around town in new Toyota Land Cruisers; rows of pastel-painted ranch houses that could be in Orange County; a new mosque and halal supermarkets catering to the influx from the Levant. Bodyguards with rifles and German shepherds patrol outside walled-off compounds. Safari-jacketed Afrikaners from Johannesburg, who are vying with the Lebanese for a piece of the diamond trade, chain-smoke on the terrace of the thatched Manica Lodge. Shabbily dressed Zimbabwean diamond panners who've trekked across the mountainous border, their pockets bulging with rough gems (some are soldiers out of uniform, others civilian diggers employed by the troops), wander from house to house in search of a deal. Everywhere I turn, there is evidence of a vast unregulated enterprise, a libertarian's dream come to life.

Back on the front porch of Moussa's peach-colored bungalow, I ask him how much money he has made during the year he's been buying diamonds here. He smiles. "We are meeting all of our basic needs," he tells me. "We are getting by."

Moussa's coyness is understandable. He and Hamdan -- a sad-faced, gray-haired Lebanese in his late forties -- may be only bit players, but they and others like them are crucial actors in the illicit sale of untold millions of dollars' worth of gem-quality and industrial diamonds being smuggled out of Zimbabwe, ruled by the despotic president Robert Mugabe. And the transformation of Manica itself is only the latest manifestation of a corrupt and violent industry (smuggled stones may account for 10% of the $12-billion-a-year diamond trade) that, by fate or a stroke of divine injustice, happens to be centered on the world's most destitute and anarchic continent. Sierra Leone wasn't the only country in Africa where diamonds were used to underwrite rebellion at horrific human cost. In Angola, Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA guerrillas financed their gruesome 1990s war against the government by selling to De Beers -- if only indirectly -- an estimated $500 million to $800 million worth of illegal gems from UNITA-controlled mines. (In a statement, De Beers told Fast Company it "has never purchased diamonds from UNITA," but in a 1997 press conference, De Beers executive director Gary Ralfe conceded that "there is no doubt that we buy many of those diamonds that emanate from the UNITA-held areas in Angola secondhand on the markets of Antwerp and Tel Aviv.") And in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), an assortment of militias have vied for the country's rich alluvial diamond deposits, perpetuating a conflict that has claimed as many as 5 million lives since 1996.

For decades, it was relatively easy to ignore the links between the atrocities carried out around Africa's mines and the jewels around the necks of Tiffany customers. Then, about 10 years ago, the international human-rights movement embarked on an unprecedented effort to prick the world's conscience and persuade diamond-producing-and-importing nations, along with industry leaders, to clean up their act. In 2002, they created the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, a global watchdog group charged with getting blood diamonds -- narrowly defined as "rough diamonds used by rebel movements or their allies to finance conflict aimed at undermining legitimate governments" -- off the market. The Kimberley Process was endorsed by the United Nations Security Council and hailed as an important step toward bringing transparency to a murky and violent trade.

Today, not everyone is convinced that the process has been a success. The Kimberley Process mission, even former members say, has been so narrowly defined that the monitoring group has been unable to clean up the diamond business in any meaningful way. What's more, an institution that came into being to regulate the ultimate Darwinian industry has turned out to be just as morally compromised as the business it was supposed to purify, offering little more than what one critic calls a "feel-good PR exercise." Indeed, as the terrifying events in Zimbabwe over the past year attest, greed, criminality, and violence remain pervasive.

The Marange diamond fields lie about 50 miles west of Manica, in the foothills of Zimbabwe's Eastern Highlands, a lush, temperate zone dominated by three mountain ranges: the Nyanga, the Bvumba, and the Chimanimani. Marange is a dry, isolated patch of rolling hills covered in the vegetation typical of the southern African bush -- thorn trees and a savanna grass known as shrub veld. Less typical, of Zimbabwe at least, is what lies beneath: The igneous bedrock here is some of the world's oldest, the kind that often harbors diamonds, those clusters of carbon molecules, converted into crystals under high pressure and heat, that are found both in funnel-shaped volcanic formations called kimberlite pipes and in alluvial deposits scattered in shallow gravel beds or soil.

The highlands' trout-rich streams, golf courses, and forests of pine and eucalyptus have invited comparison to England's Lake District. But the terrain is better known as the stronghold of the rebel movement that fought against the white-minority regime of Ian Smith in what was then Rhodesia (named after Cecil Rhodes, the South African mining magnate who swindled local tribal chiefs out of mineral concessions in the 1880s and founded De Beers in 1888). In the 1970s, guerrilla forces led by a former teacher named Robert Mugabe launched attacks from the Eastern Highlands on isolated white homesteads and army patrols, one of the crucibles of a savage civil war that ended in 1979. A year later, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe and Mugabe its president.

In the early years, Mugabe was revered as an independence hero. He promoted literacy and universal free education. He urged the country's 200,000 whites to stay on and help rebuild the country, and many did so. Zimbabwe built a thriving safari-tourism industry and its 4,000 white-owned commercial farms exported hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of tobacco and other cash crops a year; its minerals, including nickel, copper, and gold, brought in hundreds of millions more. By the end of the 1990s, though, Mugabe had followed the path of so many African leaders, morphing into a cruel and corrupt tyrant. (He has managed to retain a small following among his African contemporaries, who continue to view him as a liberator.) When a new opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), arose in 1999 and many of the country's white farmers supported it, Mugabe turned against them with a vengeance. He sent goons to seize thousands of white-owned commercial farms -- they stabbed, shot, and beat to death two dozen farmers -- and turned the land over to squatters, party loyalists, and military commanders. Nearly all of Zimbabwe's commercial farms stopped producing, and the country slid into economic collapse. Schools and hospitals closed, gas pumps ran dry, factories shut down. Unemployment hit 70%; life expectancy for women sank to 34, one of the lowest rates in the world; and hyperinflation turned the Zimbabwean dollar into near-worthless currency. Mugabe grew increasingly isolated and paranoid, unleashing his security forces to intimidate, torture, and murder opposition activists.

Despite the growing political violence and international ostracism, some companies continued to do business in Zimbabwe. Andrew Cranswick, a burly fourth-generation Zimbabwean, was one of the few who set up shop in those tempestuous days. Over lunch at a French bistro in Harare -- a green, once-prosperous capital that now features broken traffic lights and crumbling office towers looming over potholed roads -- Cranswick tells me that he and his partners founded African Consolidated Resources (ACR), a small mining company, in 2003, at the height of Zimbabwe's political and economic crisis. "We saw opportunity when everybody else said it was too risky politically," says Cranswick, cutting into a beefsteak in the late winter sun. Much bigger players were involved as well: In 2002, Kimberlitic Searches, a subsidiary of De Beers, had begun exploring a 1,000-square-kilometer area in and around Marange. But after running soil samples, De Beers deemed the site unpromising and allowed its licenses to lapse in March 2006. At that point, Cranswick pounced. "We purchased mining claims [to Marange]. We had one ex-De Beers geologist, and we followed up on a lot of the ground that De Beers had explored," Cranswick tells me. Several months later, the ACR team struck pay dirt: gem-quality diamonds in sandy soil a few feet below the surface.

Mere days later, Zimbabwe's mining commissioner claimed Cranswick's license was invalid, and the Zimbabwean police moved in. "They ordered all 70 of us off the property at gunpoint," Cranswick says bitterly. "They had no legal basis for it. It was just greed, individuals in the government who wanted to enrich themselves." As Cranswick and his partners watched from the sidelines and pursued a lawsuit in the unpromising forum of Zimbabwe's High Court, word of the find quickly spread across the country and the rest of Africa. Mugabe, faced with an implosion of political support, declared the area a free and open zone, and tens of thousands of migrants, from as far away as Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea, descended on the Marange fields. One international-aid worker drove through in mid-2006 and encountered clusters of men under trees, holding up their fingers in the shape of a diamond. "I was asking, 'What the heck is that? What's this signal?' " he says. "And then I realized, Oh, diamonds for sale."

The capital of Zimbabwe's Manicaland province, Mutare, is set in a bowl formed by steep and rugged mountains northeast of Marange; as the gem trade took off, it promptly became a frenetic commercial hub. Along with the panners came buyers from Lebanon, India, Pakistan, Belgium, and beyond, swindlers and hustlers and strivers who spread hard currency and drove up the price of food and rent threefold. "We moved our offices in Mutare, and the old office immediately became a brothel," one Westerner who worked in the town tells me. "And it was all because the area was flush with cash."

It was clear at the outset that the Zimbabwean government, and Mugabe's inner circle, would serve as the exclusive buyers of diamonds from the freelance panners. But the parastatal Minerals Marketing Corporation of Zimbabwe soon found itself overwhelmed by the scale of the unregulated panning and by competition from outside buyers with plenty of hard currency. Regime insiders such as Gideon Gono, the chief of Zimbabwe's national Reserve Bank, who sent emissaries to the fields with suitcases full of hyperinflated Zimbabwean dollars, were also becoming marginalized. Mugabe and his cronies watched as Zimbabwe's new diamond wealth slipped through their fingers and out of the country.

Blamed for plunging Zimbabwe into ruin, Mugabe's party was trounced in presidential and parliamentary elections in March 2008. Mugabe refused to concede and government militias and his security forces once again began a campaign of intimidation, torture, and murder of pro-MDC Zimbabweans. Amid the growing lawlessness and violence, Manicaland's governor, a Mugabe loyalist who had lost a run for Parliament, called for military action in the diamond fields. "He blamed the local population for not having supported him in the election," a Western diplomat in Harare tells me, "and he decided to teach them a lesson." Soon afterward, Gono announced that the government was losing $1.2 billion a year to illegal panners and that the army would be called in "to try to drive the illegal diggers out."

"Gono wanted greater market share of the diamonds for himself," says the diplomat. One military officer familiar with the planning of the offensive told Human Rights Watch that the top brass saw an army takeover of the fields as a way of appeasing an increasingly discontent rank and file: "Hundreds of soldiers were resigning, [or] deserting with their weapons [because they were being paid in Zimbabwean dollars] ... the final strategy was to give the military direct access and control over [natural] resources." In October, Constantine Chiwenga, the commander of Mugabe's armed forces, moved to a nearby Holiday Inn and set in motion Operation Hakudzokwi, which translates to "no return." He dispatched three battalions into Marange for what one military officer called a "swift, ruthless, and secret operation" to remove unlicensed miners from the diamond fields. "It was something made for Hollywood," says the diplomat. "It was a sequel to [the film] Blood Diamond."

Monday, October 27, 2008, dawned cold and clear at Marange. Around 7 o'clock, a panner looked up from his digging to see three helicopters sweeping in a few hundred feet above the ground. "I was not worried," he told Human Rights Watch early this year. "I just assumed it was a team of buyers who had come for business in helicopters, as they sometimes did." As the choppers approached, however, the panner saw military markings. Then the soldiers opened fire with automatic weapons. "We all stopped digging and began to run toward the hills to hide. I noticed that there were many uniformed soldiers on foot pursuing us. From my [group], 14 miners were shot and killed that morning."

More than 800 soldiers from three army units -- Mechanized Brigade and No. 1 Commando Regiment based in Harare, and the Fifth Brigade from the central Zimbabwean town of Kwekwe, along with five air-force attack helicopters and agents from the Central Intelligence Organisation -- descended on Marange that day and every day for the next three weeks. Ground troops followed the initial helicopter assault, advancing on pockets of miners scattered across the fields, firing their AK-47s indiscriminately. Miners stampeded in a panic through cramped tunnels, where dozens were crushed or suffocated. Witnesses observed soldiers searching the bodies of dead miners in the fields, pulling diamonds and other valuables from their pockets. "The soldiers pursued us into the hills," one observer told Human Rights Watch. "Unfortunately, we ran into a group of soldiers who stopped us. The soldiers marched us at gunpoint back to the fields and ordered us to collect the bodies of dead miners whom they had shot... . We gathered 37 bodies and piled them in an army truck." A local headman told the organization that in the three weeks of the military operation, the fields resembled "a war zone in which soldiers killed people like flies." While some local human-rights groups heard about the operation as it unfolded, it would take half a year for the slaughter to draw even a flicker of attention from the outside world.

On a morning last August, at the end of the Zimbabwe winter, the wind howled as I swerved my rented Nissan over a pitted tarmac road through Mutare, once the center of the illegal diamond trade here. The now-decrepit city of 180,000 people had fallen quiet again; Zimbabwean police had driven out the traders, and most had fled across the border for the relative charms of Manica. Farai Maguwu, a husky man in his late thirties who heads the Centre for Research and Development, a human-rights advocacy group, sat next to me, scouting for potholes, some large enough to finish off my vehicle. "In Zimbabwe," he tells me, "we say that if a man drives a straight line down a road, he must be drunk."

The conversation turned to Andrew Cranswick, the entrepreneur who had had his rights to Marange revoked by the Zimbabwean government. Maguwu theorizes that ACR had run afoul of Mugabe because the company had sold shares to the despot's political enemies. "You play with people who are on the wrong side of power, and you mess up," he says.

We follow a dirt track in the direction of Mozambique. At the Dangamvura Cemetery, Maguwu leads me to a mound of earth on the graveyard's outskirts, where, he claims, the corpses of 79 panners were dumped by the army on December 19, 2008. "Some were in an advanced state of decomposition, because they'd been killed and left to rot in diamond fields for several days," Maguwu says. "Soldiers and police brought them here in a secret operation, and even now they are denying that anything took place." I see no human remains and the place gives off no smell, but Maguwu tells me that he and his colleagues had entered the mortuary just before the bodies were removed and had seen evidence of bullet wounds. His team had examined hospital records showing that hundreds of people had been shot by police, severely beaten, and had dogs set upon them. "We were counting bodies," says Maguwu. "More than 500 people were murdered by the state in the diamond fields. It could be more."

Later that afternoon, a couple of miles from the cemetery in a dimly lit home with concrete walls covered with Christian homilies and pictures of Jesus, I am introduced to Elizabeth (not her real name), who had earned a living selling blankets, clothes, and shoes to the diamond panners at Marange. That same December, she says, she and dozens of other market women were arrested in a sweep through the fields by the military police. "We were caught, our money was stolen, and everything we had was collected and burned," says Elizabeth, a plump woman in her thirties. "Then they said, 'Line up, all you women, lie on your stomachs,' and they started beating us with branches and sticks. After that, they said, 'Sit down,' and began singling out the prettier women. They said, 'If you don't want to be beaten again, come with us.' " Elizabeth says she and five others were taken into an alley behind their makeshift market, where they were forced to lie down and remove their clothes. "Two soldiers made me sleep with them," she says. "Then, after forcing me to sleep with them, they sent me back to the others and they beat us some more."

Elizabeth introduces me to her nephew, a 16-year-old diamond panner who sits slumped on the couch, woolen ski cap pulled over his forehead. Before the army moved in, the nephew tells me, he dug for diamonds on his own or with friends. Now, soldiers ring Marange and almost all panners have joined "syndicates" -- groups of 20 to 30 men who work under tight military supervision. They turn most of their diamonds over to the troops while being allowed to carry a fraction of their booty to Manica. Maguwu says that diggers who fail to produce a sufficient quantity of diamonds are beaten, held in makeshift army prisons, tortured, and otherwise mistreated. "It's slave labor," he asserts. Elizabeth's nephew and his three friends had just made a clandestine trip to the fields, where they scavenged $1,200 worth of industrial gems, splitting the proceeds. But he had narrowly eluded army patrols and having been caught and beaten once before, he says, "I'm not going back. I'm afraid the next time they will kill me."

For most of the past century, De Beers controlled 90% of the world's rough diamonds and was known for its rapacious approach to business and a don't-ask-don't-tell attitude about the origins of its gems. With wholly owned mines in South Africa, and joint partnerships with the governments of Botswana, Namibia, and other big diamond producers, De Beers also worked with a tight network of some 150 cutters and polishers to control a vertically integrated diamond cartel. Yet over the past two decades, the business has become more diffuse, with major mine owners such as Australia's Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, Aber (which purchased all of U.S. diamond retailer Harry Winston in 2006), and Alrosa (which accounts for about 98% of Russian production) cutting into De Beers's market share. By its own estimate, De Beers now controls about 40% of the world's rough diamonds, with annual revenue of about $7 billion. The attitudes toward the business have changed as well.

No one did more to bring about that shift than Ian Smillie. A genial, gray-bearded Canadian who first lived in Africa in 1967 as a teacher in Koidu, near Sierra Leone's diamond operations, Smillie, now 64, went on to become the research director of Partnership Africa Canada, which focuses on sustainable development and protection of human rights. In January 2000, Smillie coauthored a report on the atrocities being committed in Sierra Leone, implicating De Beers and the Antwerp diamond-cutting industry, which together bought up nearly 100% of the country's stones. "The industry's standard line was, 'Guns kill people, not diamonds. We just buy diamonds, we don't have any involvement in this,' " says Smillie, speaking to me by phone from his home in Ottawa. Almost simultaneous with Smillie's report came a devastating exposé of De Beers's role in Angola by the watchdog group Global Witness. "By then, the state of denial was over," says Smillie, who became a key member of the Kimberley Process and helped organize the first international conference in May 2000 to discuss setting up a monitoring mechanism for diamonds. "Anybody who knew Africa knew things were in free fall. There was no regulation, rampant criminality. Diamonds were 'coming from' Gambia, Uganda, places with no diamonds -- it was one giant laundry."

De Beers, with the most to lose from a global PR fiasco, was one of the first to fall in line, shutting down its buying offices in Angola and Guinea. Thanks in part to prodding by Smillie and others, the global diamond industry, including major mining companies and such retailing organizations as Jewelers of America, climbed aboard in July 2000, creating the World Diamond Council to represent it at the Kimberley Process. Kimberley, which was formally endorsed in Switzerland in November 2002 by 40 nations, plus the diamond industry and NGOs, obliged all of its members to establish a system of transparency and tight controls. The new rules required shipments of rough diamonds to be exported in tamper-proof containers accompanied by a certificate guaranteeing the origin and contents. Importing nations were to certify that the diamonds had not been tampered with and to reject shipments that didn't meet the requirements.

But as Smillie watched the Kimberley Process play out, he became convinced that it was falling far short. Its narrow definition of what it calls "conflict diamonds" failed to target those gems mined in countries overwhelmed by simple lawlessness or run by governments with appalling human-rights records. (Today, Kimberley considers only gems from Côte d'Ivoire, where a rebel army is in control of the northern part of the country, to be conflict diamonds.) Moreover, Kimberley proved almost totally unable to take the only punitive action in its arsenal -- suspension -- against countries trafficking in dirty stones. In 2004, under the chairmanship of Canada, the body suspended Congo Brazzaville, which was unable to account for hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of diamonds that it was exporting. (The country was serving as a conduit for gems from neighboring DRC.) But since then, Smillie says, "the Kimberley Process has been dragged kicking and screaming toward the idea that [any country] should be suspended." Kimberley's awkward consensus voting system means that "if a single country says no, including the intended expellee, you've got a real problem," he explains. There are also no independent monitoring systems to guarantee that nations comply and too many incentives to cheat or look the other way. "There is no effective way to track the stones from point of origin to point of sale," Amy O'Meara of Amnesty International said in 2006, after the release of Blood Diamond drew new attention to the issue. "There is so much money at stake and so many hands in the pot. It's easy for the system to be corrupted."

Last spring, after local NGOs and Human Rights Watch issued damning reports about the human-rights abuses and smuggling at Marange, Smillie grew still more frustrated by Kimberley's inaction. To his eye, Zimbabwe was in flagrant violation of the procedures that, as a member of Kimberley, it had agreed to follow. By the Zimbabwean finance minister's own account, the government receives "nothing" from the diamond fields, meaning that 100% of stones mined there are smuggled out of the country. But while money isn't flowing into government coffers, plenty is ending up in the pockets of both rank-and-file soldiers and Mugabe's inner circle. The latter allegedly have access to a fenced-off, 2-square-kilometer area in the center of the diamond fields, said to contain the richest lode of gem-quality diamonds. This section has become known as Mai Mujuru's Breast, a reference to the country's corpulent, feared vice president, Joyce Mujuru, the wife of the former commander of the armed forces -- and one of those who has reportedly profited most handsomely from the gems. "If you're a special person, you will go there and you will be allowed just 20 minutes. That's where you can get clear diamonds," one opposition lawmaker told the Los Angeles Times last year.

Smillie was initially encouraged when a 10-man investigative team from the Kimberley Process -- civil-society representatives, diplomats, and diamond-industry officials from half a dozen nations -- visited Marange in June at the invitation of the Zimbabwe government. Mining and foreign ministry officials gave them a stage-managed tour, then introduced them to various government functionaries who painted an innocuous picture of the events at Marange. "It was a dog-and-pony show," one member of the team told me. But four members broke away and traveled independently through the diamond fields, guided in part by a village leader who had witnessed Operation Hakudzokwi. "We talked to the community, the miners, and went out to the mining areas, and what we saw was in contradiction to what the [Zimbabwean] government was telling us," says one member of the breakaway group. In addition to evidence of rampant smuggling, "we saw victims of dog bites. We saw slave laborers digging diamonds. We saw soldiers guarding panners washing gravel in the water." The observer was horrified: "I was so emotional, so disturbed. I broke down." One member of the team who'd been on the official tour says he was "relieved" when the independents reunited with the others later that day and related the real story -- "and not the same garbage that the government was serving us."

The Kimberley team's preliminary report, which was leaked to the press, condemned the Zimbabwean army for carrying out "horrific violence" and said there was "direct involvement of the military in illegal mining." It recommended that Zimbabwe receive a six-month suspension from Kimberley, a move that would ban not only diamonds from Marange but also from Zimbabwe's two other production areas, River Ranch and Murowa, near the South African border. Members of the team called as well for a special rapporteur to investigate charges of mass killings and slave labor, and urged the Kimberley Process to address human-rights abuses at its next plenary meeting.

Weeks after the team returned from Zimbabwe, however, Bernhard Esau, the deputy minister of mines and energy from Namibia and this year's Kimberley chairman, met privately with Mugabe in Harare, then held a press conference: "Yes, there are members ... trying to convince other members to suspend Zimbabwe," he told the assembled reporters, "but we will not entertain such [calls]." Esau dismissed the human-rights abuses as outside of Kimberley's purview. And he downplayed the smuggling at Marange. Investigative team members looked on aghast. "Esau came to this place with very little knowledge or experience," says one African member of the team who believes Esau was influenced by Namibia's long-standing friendship with the Mugabe regime. "I think he is incompetent." By that point, Smillie had had enough. Shortly after Esau's visit, he resigned as a Kimberley representative, calling the organization "complacent and almost completely ineffectual." Smillie tells me, "Zimbabwe's diamonds have blood all over them."

Seven years after Kimberley went into effect, the organization hasn't made much of a dent in the underground trafficking of diamonds. Although, according to Kimberley's guidelines, eliminating smuggling is one of its primary mandates, the practice still comprises about a tenth of the global diamond business, according to Smillie and other experts. And according to the Kimberley Process's own review, Smillie says, half a dozen governments in Africa -- including the DRC, Angola, Sierra Leone, and Guinea -- "don't know where at least half their diamonds come from. Their internal controls are terrible." The big diamond buyers, including De Beers, have cleaned up their businesses, but smaller players have moved into the vacuum: Sylvain Goldberg and Ehud Laniado, of Omega Diamonds in Belgium, have allegedly made huge profits over the years trading in smuggled diamonds from Angola and Congo, passing the gems through Dubai, Tel Aviv, and Geneva, and then laundering the money through dozens of shell companies. (In October 2008, Belgian tax authorities barged into Omega's Antwerp office, seizing more than $125 million worth of illicit diamonds.)

Marange's gems, too, have found an easy path to the underground market. "They will go everywhere in the world," I'm told by one Harare diamond trader. "The low-quality stuff goes to India via Dubai, the medium quality to Lebanon and South Africa, and the highest quality to Israel and Belgium." Because the gems have been smuggled out of Zimbabwe, the trader says, export documents are often forged, listing their origin as South Africa or the DRC, but to experts the look of most of the rough diamonds is a dead giveaway. "They have a brownish coating, caused by soil working its way deeply into the facets, that is unique," he says. "Everybody knows they're from the fields of Zimbabwe."

Riven by internal bickering and political agendas, run by people with a vested interest in protecting their profits, Kimberley has demonstrated repeatedly that a multilateral body with small teeth is no match for simple greed. "The Kimberley Process is about assuring consumers that diamonds are clean," Smillie says, but "it has done fuck-all." Still, he adds, instead of writing off Kimberley, member nations should band together to reform the consensus voting system and to create an independent monitoring mechanism capable of imposing harsh penalties. "There is no alternative. To go back to the chaotic criminalized days pre-2000 would be a disaster for the industry and for African countries that depend on it."

In the months since the Kimberley Process team visited Zimbabwe, nothing much has changed in the fields of Marange. The soldiers continue to send their syndicates of laborers to dig for diamonds, the illegal flow spills across the border into Mozambique and around the world, and Zimbabwe's politicians remain divided about whether or not their country should face the stigma -- and possible further economic hardship -- of suspension. Even key opposition figures have rallied behind Mugabe, insisting that banning Zimbabwe's diamonds from the above-ground market will hamper the country's efforts to bounce back from ruin. In the competition between moral principles and potential diamond profits, the money always wins. Last spring, the deputy minister of mines, an opposition official, denied that any killings had taken place at Marange, earning the censure of his party. "He's been corrupted," I am told by one MDC insider. Likewise, Tendai Biti, once one of Mugabe's fiercest critics and now minister of finance in the unity government that Mugabe reluctantly formed last February, hedged on whether atrocities occurred at Marange. "There were acts of brutality," he concedes when I visit him in his office in Harare. "But I have not seen evidence of mass graves." (In October, the MDC announced it was "disengaging" from the unity government until details of the power-sharing arrangement were clarified.)

Biti too takes a strong stand against suspension, arguing that his government desperately needs $100 million to $150 million a year to function, and that Marange could generate much of those funds.

He says the government should be given time to sign contracts with "responsible" private partners, so that it can begin withdrawing the military and bring transparency to the process. "You need proper mining to start taking place, with the private sector responsible for security," he tells me. But Cranswick of African Consolidated Resources, who won his lawsuit in Zimbabwe's High Court (to no apparent effect, he says), claims that the Ministry of Mines has begun making ill-conceived deals with inexperienced private companies with "shady backgrounds." And members of the Kimberley team that met with Biti say that the finance minister is being naive if he expects the military to give up its cash cow. "What he says is bullshit," says one. "He's a good guy, and I respect him, but with Mugabe controlling everything, there is nothing he can do." Only the stigma of suspension, the investigator adds, will force Mugabe to pull out the military. "You have to tell the government, 'You cannot export your diamonds until you clean this up.' "

Back at Manica, one of the town's biggest diamond traders insists that slapping Zimbabwe with sanctions will only punish the little guy. "The diamond is not a drug. It is not a weapon. It is not dangerous," he says. "It is benefiting the soldiers, and it is also benefiting the people. The people there are already suffering. They are desperate. To sell their diamonds, some are ready to die." Hundreds, it seems, already have.

Joshua Hammer, an international correspondent specializing in conflict zones, is the author of three books as well as countless magazine articles.

Published on: 27th November, 2009

George Ayittey  

 

By Dr. George Ayittey and Denford Madenyika

While the Movement for Democratic Change has decided to concentrate all their efforts on the appointments of Gideon Gono as the Reserve Bank Governor and Johannes Tomana as the Attorney General, Mugabe is refusing to call for any by-election.

The Zimbabwean Constitution is clear on when a vacant Parliamentary seat must be filled. This failure by Mugabe to call for elections to fill the vacant seats makes all Members of Parliament lack legal mandates to execute their duties as legal Representatives of the Zimbabwean constituents.

How do you explain a system where more than 10 Constituents are not represented in Parliament yet laws that affect them are passed daily?

Well, as they say, the vampire state does not care about nor represent the people. It sucks the economic vitality out of the people.  Eventually, however, it metastasizes into a coconut republic and implodes.

The implosion nearly always begins with a dispute over the electoral process: A refusal to hold elections or the results of outrageously rigged elections. Blockage of the democratic process or the refusal to hold elections plunged Angola, Chad, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Somalia, and Sudan into civil war.

Hard-liner manipulation of the electoral process destroyed Rwanda (1993), Sierra Leone (1992) and Zaire (1990). Subversion of the electoral process in Liberia (1985) eventually set off a civil war in 1989.

The same type of subversion instigated civil strife in Cameroon (1991)  , Congo (1992), Kenya (1992), Togo (1992) and Lesotho (1998). In Congo (Brazzaville), a dispute over the 1997 electoral framework flared into mayhem and civil war.

Finally, the military's annulment of electoral results by the military started Algeria's civil war (1992) and plunged Nigeria into political turmoil (1993).

The political crisis starts when public furor, protests and violence erupt over election disputes. A gaggle of politicians and stake-holders scramble to resolve the crisis. They talk endlessly. The country is paralyzed. Frustrations mount. Several scenarios become possible.

Opposition leaders may be bought off and co-opted to join the errant regime. A "government of national unity" may be attempted. But even before the ink on the agreement is dry, squabbles erupt over the distribution of ministerial positions.

Neither side is satisfied with what they get nor do hostilities resume. The regime may resort to brutal repression of the opposition (Ethiopia, Eritrea, Zimbabwe) or even extermination with the macabre logic that if the opposition doesn't exist, then there would be no one to share power with (Burundi, Rwanda, Sudan).

But sooner or later, the people come to see through the political chicanery and posturing. The public loses faith in the electoral process and the ability of politicians to resolve the crisis. Some group then decides it is no use talking and the only way to remove the tyrant in power is by force.

The group then takes "to the bush" and that is how nearly all rebel insurgencies start in Africa. Charles Taylor of Liberia launched his rebel insurgency in 1989 after losing faith in the ability of the then president, General Samuel Doe, and opposition leaders, Gabriel Baccus Matthews and Amos Sawyer to resolve it.

Similarly, Laurent Kabila of Zaire (now DRC) took up arms in 1996. It only takes a small band of determined rebels to start an insurgency, wreak mayhem and utter destruction. Yoweri Museveni, now president of Uganda, started out with only 27 men, Charles Taylor of Liberia with less than 200 and Laurent Kabila with about 150.

The insurgency, always mounted by politically-marginalized or excluded groups, always starts from the countryside. Rebels don't set out to redraw artificial colonial boundaries. Nor does ethnicity have anything to do with the insurgency. Somalia is ethnically homogenous; yet it imploded.

The insurgency is about capturing POWER, so the rebels head straight towards the capital, where political power resides. Along the way, they pick up recruits and their ranks swell with unemployed youth (child soldiers). Government soldiers, sent to crush the rebels, often defect, bringing along their valuable weapons (Ethiopia, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Zaire).

Eventually the despot flees into exile (Generals Mobutu Sese Seko, General Siad Barre, General Joseph Momoh of Sierra Leone) or is killed (General Samuel Doe, General Juvenal Habryimana).

Since 1990, one African country after another has imploded with deafening staccato:

·   In 1990, Liberia was destroyed by the regime of General Samuel Doe,
·   In 1991, Mali by the regime of General Moussa Traore,
·   In 1993, the Central African Republic was destroyed by the military regime ofGeneral Andre Kolingba,
·   In 1993, Somalia was ruined by the regime of General Siad Barre,
·   In 1994, Rwanda by the regime of General Juvenal Habryimana,
·   In 1995, Burundi by the regime of General Pierre Buyoya,
·   In 1996, Zaire by regime of General Mobutu Sese Seko,
·   In 1997, Sierra Leone by regime of General Joseph Momoh,
·   In 1999, Niger by the regime of General Ibrahim Barre Mainassara,
·   In 2000, Ivory Coast by the regime of General Robert Guei.
·   In 2005, Togo by the regime of General Gnassingbe Eyadema.

Note the frequency of the title "General". Now, in Zimbabwe, the Joint Operation Command" (JOC) that is in charge comprise of these military generals: Chiwenga, Shiri, and Sibanda. It is déjà vu all over again.

Military generals have left a trail of plunder, wanton destruction and human debris across post colonial Africa. They did a number on Nigeria. Between 1970 and 2004, more than $450 billion in oil revenue flowed into Nigerian government coffers.

But, according to Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, former chief of Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Nigeria's military rulers stole $412 billion of the oil money.  Like their counterparts in Myammar (Burma), you can't reason with military generals.

They are not trained to compromise; a political necessity. They are programmed to destroy and they believe that every economic and social problem can be solved with the application of sufficient force, which has destroyed many economies and countries in Africa.

Said Chuba Okadigbo, former chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of Nigeria's dissolved Senate: "I believe the worst form of civilian government is better that the most benevolent military regime" (The New York Times, Dec 2, 1993; p.A3). Former Nigerian president, General Ibrahim Babangida would agree. He once said that all military regimes are a fraud. He should know that.

Zimbabwe is currently at this stage of the implosion process: Mass suffering, mass emigration (over 4 million Zimbabweans have fled the country), complete break-down of the electoral process, total lack of faith in the political leadership, both government and the opposition, seizure of power by military generals, and catastrophic failure of regional and continental leadership. The options available for peaceful resolution of Zimbabwe's crisis have rapidly evaporated and the window of opportunity has closed.

The first option is the "government of national unity or healing" (GNU), which was adopted by Kenya after its recent violent elections in Dec 2007. It is a flawed concept which has never worked in any African country in recent times.

It failed in Angola, Ivory Coast, Liberia, South Africa and Sudan. The basic reason is that, after protracted negotiations, neither side is satisfied with the government positions they get. Incessant squabbles erupt and the rebels may threaten to "return to the bush."

To appease them, new and meaningless cabinet positions may be created, leading to a massive swell of the state bureaucracy. Kenya now has at least 90 cabinet ministers and deputy ministers.

 In the case of Zimbabwe, it is unlikely the military generals, who vowed they will never accept an MDC electoral victory, would enter into "power-sharing" or "unity" talks with the opposition. Again, military generals do not compromise.

Furthermore, it is difficult to see how the opposition, after being brutalized and their ranks decimated, would join the Mugabe regime in a government of national unity. In fact, Morgan Tsvangirai has already rejected a junior position in such a government. The late Joshua Nkoma made such a mistake by joining the Mugabe regime in 1987 and was marginalized.

The second option is the "sovereign national conference" (SNC). It is premised on the realization that the crisis in Zimbabwe is beyond the capability of Mugabe and Tsvangirai to resolve by themselves and it must take all Zimbabweans to resolve. The vehicle for doing this is SNC. It is based on the African institution of "village meeting."  

When a crisis erupts in an African village, the chief will convene a village meeting, where the people debated the issue until they came to a consensus. Once reached, everybody in the village, including the chief, was required to abide by it, Hence, the term "sovereign."

In recent years, this indigenous African tradition was revived by pro-democracy forces in the form of "national conferences" to chart a new political future in Benin, Cape Verde Islands, Congo, Malawi, Mali, South Africa and Zambia. Benin's nine-day "national conference" began on Feb 19, 1990, with 488 delegates, representing various political, religious, trade union, and other groups encompassing the broad spectrum of Beninois society.

The conference, whose chairman was Father Isidore de Souza, held "sovereign power" and its decisions were binding on all, including the government. It stripped President Matthieu Kerekou of power, scheduled multiparty elections that ended 17 years of autocratic Marxist rule.

In South Africa, the vehicle used to make that difficult but peaceful transition to a multiracial democratic society was the Convention for a Democratic South Africa. It began deliberations in July 1991, with 228 delegates drawn from about 25 political parties and various anti-apartheid groups. The de Klerk government made no effort to "control" the composition of CODESA. P

olitical parties were not excluded; not even ultra right-wing political groups, although they chose to boycott its deliberations. CODESA strove to reach a "working consensus" on an interim constitution and set a date for the March 1994 elections.

It established the composition of an interim or transitional government that would rule until the elections were held. More important, CODESA was "sovereign." Its decisions were binding on the de Klerk government. De Klerk could not abrogate any decision made by CODESA - just as the African chief could not disregard any decision arrived at the village meeting.

Now, imagine a Convention for a Democratic Zimbabwe (CODEZI). In this case, leaders of all political parties in Zimbabwe, all churches, trade unions, teachers, professional bodies, student groups, etc. will be assembled to hammer out a new political future for the country -Zimbabweans solving their own problems.

If this process worked in Benin and South Africa, there is no reason why it shouldn't work in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Zimbabwe and elsewhere in Africa.  Evidently, there is an African solution for the crisis in Zimbabwe but the leadership in southern Africa and Africa generally don't see it.

Only a few, notably leaders in Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Zambia, have made feeble attempts to condemn the barbaric brutalities of the Mugabe regime. It is noteworthy that the strongest condemnation came from Liberia and Sierra Leone - countries that have been ravaged by civil wars of the same issue of power sharing.  

Even South Africa, whose president, Thabo Mbeki, was appointed by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to mediate the Zimbabwe crisis, failed miserably. After the March 29 elections, Mbeki claimed there was "no crisis" in Zimbabwe.

The rest of the African leadership is just not credible to condemn Mugabe when, as Africans would say, "they are doing the same thing in their own countries." Who is President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda to urge Mugabe to step down? Back in 1986, the same President Museveni declared that "No African heads of state should be in power for more than 10 years." He has been in power for 20 years and still counting.

It was worse than a farce when the grand daddy of all organizations - the African Union (AU) - met on Monday, June 30, in Egypt to find a solution to Zimbabwe's crisis. Egypt happens to be a country, whose president, Hosni Mubarak, has been in power for more than 27 years.

Mugabe was invited to attend the Summit and, as was to be expected, he was greeted with hugs and hailed as a hero. The same thing happened in 1994. When Rwanda was about to implode the defunct Organization of African Unity (OAU) was on vacation, chomping on caviar and doing the watutsi in Addis Ababa.

Six years later, the OAU launched an inquiry into the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which blamed Western powers for failing to intervene to stop the mass slaughter. Naturally. And what did these leaders do to stop the slaughter occurring right under their own very noses? Nothing.

The paucity of good leadership has left a garish stain on the continent. More distressing, the caliber of leadership has deteriorated over the decades to execrable depths. The likes of Charles Taylor of Liberia and Sani Abacha of Nigeria even make Mobutu Sese Seko of formerly Zaire look like a saint. The slate of post colonial African leaders has been a disgusting assortment of military coconut-heads, quack revolutionaries, crocodile liberators, "Swiss bank" socialists, brief-case bandits, semi-illiterate brutes and vampire elites. Faithful only to their private bank accounts, kamikaze kleptocrats raid and plunder the treasury with little thought of the ramifications on national development

The U.N. or the international community is fecklessly impotent in doing anything about Zimbabwe. The U.S. is pushing the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions but Russia and China may veto or block it. Besides, the sanctions would only be symbolic and totally ineffective. The international community will watch haplessly until Zimbabwe implodes and then rush in relief supplies and peacekeepers - until another African country blows and the whole macabre ritual is repeated: DR Congo, Darfur, Somalia, etc.

It is most ironic that Robert Mugabe who fought against the illegal racist regime of Ian Smith of Rhodesia should end up himself presiding over an illegal regime in Zimbabwe.  Back in the 1970s, the most effective sanctions against the Smith regime were in telecommunications which cut the regime's access to the rest of the world. In Zimbabwe's case, African sanctions would prove more effective as it is a land-locked country. 

South Africa could cut electricity supplies to Zimbabwe with a flick of a switch and neighboring African states could seal their borders. But none of these is likely to happen. Nor would the Zimbabwe's military generals bend to African sanctions.

Zimbabwe is finished, gone but that is not the end of the tragic saga. First, there are other African countries that are also standing in line:

 Angola: President Jose Eduardo has been in power since 1979;

• Burkina Faso: President Blaise Compaore since 1987;
• Cameroon: President Paul Biya since 1982
• Chad: President Idriss Derby since 1994;
• Egypt: President Hosni Mubarak since 1981;
• Equatorial Guinea: Teodoro Obiang since 1979;
• Gabon: Omar Bongo since 1967;
• Guinea: President Lansana Conte since 1984;
• Libya, Moammar Ghaddafi since 1969;

Second, Africa's post-colonial story also shows that rebel leaders who seize power are often no better. They are themselves "crocodile liberators," exhibiting the same dictatorial tendencies they loudly condemned in the despots they removed: Charles Taylor versus General Samuel Doe and Laurent Kabila versus Mobutu Sese Seko. As Africans often say: "We struggle very hard to remove one cockroach from power and the next rat comes to do the same thing." Was Charles Taylor Better than Samuel Doe, and Laurent Kabila better than Mobutu Sese Seko?

If you think Robert Mugabe is bad wait till Emmerson Mnagagwa or Constantine Chiwenga takes over. 

The writer, a native of Ghana, is president of the Free Africa Foundation in Washington, D.C.He is the author of Africa Unchained (Palgrave/MacMillan).