Use diamond wealth to help people: HRW
By Never Kadungure
Kenneth Roth from Human Rights Watch has urged the Zimbabwe government to use the estimated US$200 million a month from diamond mining in the country to help serve ordinary people.
‘Rather than use the Marange mines to pay off the military, to pad the Swiss bank accounts of Zanu PF officials, why don’t you use that US$200 million a month to begin to serve the people of Zimbabwe,’ Roth said during a press conference.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch on Friday called for a ban on Zimbabwean diamonds. Roth who is the watchdog’s Executive Director called for a ban on any sale or purchase of Marange diamonds … until … the mining is not based on the violent abuse of residents in that region.
More than 100 witnesses – miners, police officers, soldiers and children – interviewed for the report entitled “Diamonds in the Rough”, say that Zimbabwean armed forces are trying to access control of the precious gems.
The report catalogs a series of atrocities in the Chiadzwa diamond field in the rural Marange district, 50 miles west of Zimbabwe’s third city Mutare since 2006, as Mugabe’s military wrests control of the 25-acre field from villagers and informal diamond panners.
More than 50,000 desperately poor Zimbabweans have converged on the area to dig for gem stones since the discovery of alluvial diamonds in the area in September 2006.
The human rights group said that last year, investigators had gathered evidence of mass graves and accounts of an incident when military helicopters fired at miners, while armed soldiers on the ground chased off villagers from the area.
Dewa Mavhinga, the Zimbabwean lawyer who was the main researcher for the report, said that hundreds of victims of human rights abuses are unwilling to come forward for fear of military assault.
