AN APPALLING tale of mass murder, extreme cruelty and rapacious greed by Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe's government and his security forces has been revealed, after human rights researchers documented the slaughter of hundreds of peasant miners and villagers at a diamond field and the enslavement of children forced to work for no pay.
Mr Mugabe's elite are smuggling diamonds worth an estimated £125 million a month out of the country from the Marange diamond field, in a remote area of eastern Zimbabwe, while the new power-sharing government, formed in February this year, lobbies t
he world for development aid.
The prime minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, of the Movement for Democratic Change, has spent the past fortnight trying to convince foreign leaders that reforms in Zimbabwe now merit international financial support.
The new administration has said it needs $10 billion to rebuild a shattered economy and win the confidence of millions of Zimbabweans who have faced years of bare hospitals, potholed roads and staggering unemployment.
But its case has been undermined by a 62-page Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, Diamonds in the Rough, released yesterday. It said the Zimbabwe army was continuing to torture and assault Marange villagers, following massacres in which hundreds of people had been killed, as police and troops seized the mining and trading operations.
Police took over the mines in August 2008 and killed an unknown number of peasant workers. The officer commanding the operation, Superintendent OC Govo, ordered his men to "shoot on sight" any villagers found in the diamond fields.
One police officer told HRW: "At the end of August 2008, Superintendent Govo addressed us and said we were all too lenient with local miners. He then said he was going to show us how to deal decisively with local miners.
"Around ten that night, he led us to a well-known camp of local miners in the hills. First, he pointed a searchlight into the air and then he began to shoot randomly at the sleeping miners. I saw him shoot and kill three miners. Many others ran into the night. He told us to leave the bodies, saying the other miners who had run away would return to bury their dead."
The public disorder resulting from the police action then gave Mr Mugabe an excuse to send in the army to "restore order".
The army established "order" by committing numerous and serious human rights violations, including extrajudicial killings, beatings, torture, forced labour and child labour in Marange, according to HRW.
It said: "The first three weeks of the operation were particularly brutal – over the period 27 October to 16 November, 2008, the army killed at least 214 miners. The army has also been engaged fully and openly in the smuggling of diamonds, thereby perpetuating the very crime it was deployed to prevent."
In a bitter irony, the Marange military operation was commanded by Air Marshal Perence Shiri, chief of Zimbabwe's air force, who, in the early 1980s, as a young army officer known to his men as "Black Jesus", supervised the massacre of 25,000 Ndebele villagers in western Zimbabwe by Mr Mugabe's elite North Korean-trained 5th Brigade. A 5th Brigade commando unit has been deployed by Air Marshal Shiri to Marange.
"Military helicopters would fire tear gas and live ammunition from the air to support soldiers shooting at miners on the ground," said the report.
A local headman told HRW that in the three week period from the end of October, the area around his village resembled "a war zone in which soldiers killed people like flies".
Another villager told HRW: "I ran to the hills (when the soldiers attacked]. Unfortunately, we ran into a group of soldiers who 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 and took them to the edge of Nyazika village. There, we found two more army trucks offloading 35 bodies. The soldiers then ordered us to dig a grave and bury the bodies. We buried 72 bodies in that grave."
A military officer familiar with the planning of the operation told HRW that an additional motivation for deploying the army was a plan by military intelligence to reward and appease an increasingly discontented army rank and file, who were poorly paid during the country's severe political, social and economic crisis.
The list of killings and assaults recorded by HRW is long and relentless. The diamond field, confiscated by the Mugabe government from a British-registered company, African Consolidated Resources, in February 2007 after the discovery of stones near to the surface, continues to be controlled by the military, who use hundreds of unpaid children as slave labourers.
The diamonds, unregistered under the so-called Kimberley Process, which is designed to curb the entry into legal markets of "blood diamonds" or "conflict diamonds," are smuggled out to powerful syndicates in South Africa's Johannesburg and Maputo, the Mozambique capital, and moved onwards to processing centres in India, Lebanon, Israel and Belgium.
Under the Kimberley Process certification scheme, set up in 2002, participants are forced to certify the origins of diamonds being traded. This assures consumers that, by purchasing diamonds, they are not financing war or human rights abuses.
Kenneth Roth, executive director of HRW, said the group was calling for the definition of blood diamonds to be broadened to include gems mined through "repression and violent abuses" by governments.
One of HRW's Zimbabwe researchers, Dewa Mavhinga, told reporters in Johannesburg yesterday that the organisation wanted the South African and Mozambique governments to cut off the flow of Marange diamonds into their countries.
He said the evidence gathered by HRW was just a small part of the story – mass graves litter the area. He added: "There are hundreds of victims of human rights abuses who are unwilling to come forward for fear of the military."
Last night, Zimbabwe's deputy mining minister, Murisi Zwizwai, denied the HRW allegations and said the presence of the military at the diamond field was to secure the area.
Speaking on the sidelines of a Kimberley Process meeting in neighbouring Namibia, he said there had been no deaths caused by the military but that there had been "skirmishes" among the illegal diggers, which had resulted in three reported deaths and eight arrests.
"The special operation by security forces has been successful, as evidenced by (the] order and sanity which now prevails in the Marange area," he said.
• The full Human Rights Watch report can be accessed at : http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/06/26/diamonds-rough.
CAUGHT UP IN ZIMBABWE'S DIAMOND FRENZY"I HEAR the mangoda (diamonds] are back," whispers the woman in front of me at a vegetable shop in the Zimbabwean city of Mutare.
"Yes, but so are the soldiers," says the cashier. "If they catch you, they will hit you, like a snake you find in your house."
Diamond dealers come into town on Friday afternoons. Brand-new Pajeros, twin cabs and Toyota Hiluxes speed up the normally sleepy palm tree-lined main Herbert Chitepo street, radios blaring.
Later, the gwejas (diamond dealers) will flock to the Pavilion and other drinking spots, where they splash US dollar bills. One bartender got a £6 tip just for wiping up a gweja's spilt beer last week, the local paper reported. That gets people talking in a town where a good salary is £60.
Welcome to Diamond City, a pocket of Zimbabwe where some are still making their fortune, despite a brutal security clampdown in the nearby diamond fields of Chiadzwa, as documented in the Human Rights Watch report.
After a five-month lull, the trade is back in full swing. Fifty-five diggers have been arrested and soldiers have once again set up bases in Chiadzwa, reports say.
But there are suspicions the security forces are involved in the diamond syndicates: four soldiers were killed in separate shoot-outs last month in what looked to be arguments over the proceeds of deals.
These days, the diamonds are being smuggled out across the border to Mozambique: foreign dealers are more cautious about coming into Zimbabwe. Two weeks ago, my father-in-law was flagged down by a man in his 30s on the road to Forbes Border Post, five miles from the city centre.
The man admitted he used to be a civil engineer but was now taking "stones" across the border. "He just puts them in his pocket and walks across. He said he'd done it before."
Nearly every resident has a tale to tell of the diamond frenzy.
There's the pre-school teacher who watched as a deal between two gweja fathers went sour late last year: "They pulled out guns on each other in the school car-park." Or the nurse who treated a man with severe dog bites from the diamond fields: "He asked us not to write it on his sick record."
Residents joke that if your gardener appears in a Pajero, you know there are diamonds in the backyard.
The full article contains 1525 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
