Angolan rebels evade diamond sanctions

PRETORIA, South Africa (Reuters) -- Angola's UNITA rebels last year mined alluvial diamonds worth around $300 million and have perfected ways to evade U.N. sanctions, a respected regional think-tank said on Thursday.

"Without diamonds, UNITA will not be able to prosecute its war at the level it does, but of literally all the commodities in the world, diamonds are the most difficult to control," said Jakkie Cilliers, executive director at the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies (ISS).

"(UNITA leader Jonas) Savimbi's income from diamonds was $300 million in 1999," he added.

Cilliers was speaking at the launch of a new ISS book entitled "Angola's War Economy: The Role of Oil and Diamonds."

The country has been in the throes of a savage civil war since independence from Portugal in 1975 between UNITA and the formerly Marxist government in which around one million people have died and millions more have been displaced.

UNITA, according to one of the book's editors, Christian Dietrich, controlled nearly 10 percent of global diamond production between 1993 and 1997 and "the rebels mine more diamonds at present than has generally been presumed."

A U.N. embargo on UNITA has been given impetus with moves to tighten up the trade in "conflict diamonds" which have also fuelled wars in Sierre Leone and Democratic Republic of Congo.

But Dietrich says the campaign's effectiveness has been blunted for a number of reasons.

"States have yet to enact legislation prohibiting business between their citizens and UNITA, while those individuals named by a U.N. panel of experts are expendable, leaving the real players unnamed," he writes in the book.

"UNITA has been mining and exporting diamonds for longer than most rebel groups have been in existence. Savimbi fully understands the methods of circumventing sanctions and using regional allies to achieve his goals," Dietrich said.

Many countries that are not diamond producers, such as Rwanda and Uganda, supply rough diamonds to Belgium -- an easy route for UNITA diamonds, the ISS says.

Even if these routes were cut off, the ISS contends that UNITA could still easily mask its gems behind legitimate production in Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa and even Angola itself.

The ISS is also highly critical of the Angolan government and the role that multi-national oil companies have played in propping up the Luanda regime.

"Any attempt to argue that the exploitation of oil (or diamonds, for that matter) by large corporations in Angola is ...somehow neutral, or apolitical, does not stand up to scrutiny," Cilliers said.

"Doing business within the oil and diamond industry in Angola makes multinationals part of the war economy and as such they should play their part in seeking to establish peace."

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