‘It’s just business’ to launder conflict
Internal conflict and corruption in the Central African Republic fuel the blood diamond trade and survivors and displaced people bear the brunt
Market day in the riverside town of Gbitti in eastern Cameroon is a colourful affair. Farmers sit on the bare red earth, their wares spread out before them. Across the narrow stretch of the Kadéï River that separates Cameroon from the Central African Republic, merchants and shoppers haul wooden canoes by pulling on a steel rope stretched between the two banks. Children squeal and splash in the muddy waters where women beat their washing on stones.
On the sandy riverbank in February, a man dressed in jeans, a jacket and grey knit cap had a practiced air of nonchalance. But his eyes gave him away, darting back and forth, right and left, scanning for danger as he negotiated — perhaps for the following Monday — the delivery of rough diamonds.
Suddenly the deal was cut short. A teenager brandishing a spear shouted from across the river: “Stop talking to our brother!” Armed young men, members of the Christian militia rebel group known as the Anti-balaka, which emerged during the Central African Republic’s brutal civil war, were watching from the opposite banks and had spotted my camera.
“We have lost our families in the war. We do not want to be filmed,” one young man in a bright red bandana shouted.
“The diamond in two weeks,” the merchant muttered, and he moved swiftly away to quell the ruckus from his comrades across the river.
Money for rebels
The illegal trade in rough diamonds through border towns of Gbitti, Kentzou and Garoua-Boulai in eastern Cameroon provides a steady source of income for rebel groups on both sides of the Central African Republic’s bloody conflict.
According to the United Nations, the war has claimed more than 5 000 lives and displaced roughly one million since Muslim Seleka rebels seized power three years ago. Christian and animist groups known as the Anti-balaka turned upon Muslim people, pushing them south in reprisals that led to a de facto partitioning of the country.
Although elections brought a new government to power in February, the conflict has wreaked havoc on the economy, starvation has followed and hundreds of thousands of refugees have fled, many into UN camps in Cameroon. The government is too weak to assert full control over the mineral-rich country, and a lowintensity conflict has persisted.
The violence has robbed the Central African Republic’s government of an important source of income from the diamond trade, which had accounted for as much as 20% of its budget. But when war broke out, the small nation at the heart of Africa was suspended from the Kimberley Process (KP), a 2003 accord signed by 81 countries to certify the origin of diamonds and prevent them from funding rebel groups.
Without Kimberley Process certification, the Central African Republic was completely locked out of the international gemstone market but it won a partial reprieve last June.
As the doors to legal trade swung shut, neighboring Cameroon became an outlet for laundering Central African Republic diamonds into the global marketplace. Cameroon had only joined the Kimberley Process in 2012, and the government launched campaigns in the border towns to educate Kimberley Process officials about spotting conflict diamonds.
But a year-long investigation by 100Reporters has found serious cracks in Cameroon’s system: Rough diamonds from the Central African Republic are easy to purchase here, enforcement of the certification rules is lax and dealers speak openly of Kimberley Process officials, who will certify — for the right price — that gems from across the border are conflict free, whatever their origin.
Posing as a buyer, I found one Kimberley Process official willing to falsify certificates for rough diamonds and assist in evading export taxes.
Cameroon’s minister of mines, industry and technological development, Ernest Ngwaboubou, who is responsible for overseeing the rough diamond industry and enforcing Kimberley Process standards, declined requests to comment.
Guns and diamonds
In Gbitti, diamond traders from the Central African Republic use the money to buy light weapons that they ferry back across the river, selling arms to rebels on both sides of the conflict.
Security forces in Cameroon are hard-pressed to control the arms smuggling because buyers stagger their purchases, buying the weapons days apart to avoid suspicion.
“It is difficult to determine, even in times of conflict, whether a machete or spear is intended for lawful use,” said a major in the infantry battalion stationed in a field office in Eastern Cameroon, about 250km from the regional capital of Bertoua. He refused to reveal his name because he is not authorised to speak for the military.
The smuggling of diamonds and gold was rife in the region even before the Central African Republic civil war. The Kimberley Process secretariat has estimated that as much as 20% of rough diamonds from Central African Republic were illegally traded prior to 2013. The World Bank in 2010 put the estimate even higher, at 50%.
The trade in rough diamonds between the two countries was once quite lucrative. François Nganke, an artisanal miner from Gbitti, said he left a secure job with the humanitarian medical organisation Doctors Without Borders for the lure of gemstones, which he sold across the border in Central African Republic.
“The prices charged by Central African purchasing offices were interesting. We sold our stones to them,” he said.
But the Central African Republic trade collapsed when that country was suspended from the Kimberley Process in 2013, and its prices for rough diamonds plunged. Nganke now regrets his change of career. Mining is back-breaking work. In Gbitti men, women and children hack at the dry earth each day, usually with old pickaxes, hoes and shovels, sifting through the alluvial
deposits for buried treasure.
“It is painful. We need a pump to wash the gems free from the soil,” said one mother who has worked as a miner for five years.
Around her lay giant clods of earth and gaping holes, a testament to the sheer physical effort required to earn a living. “Sometimes we provide all this effort for nothing,” she said.
Today these small-scale miners in Cameroon face mounting competition from smugglers. “The majority of diamonds sold in Gbitti come from Central African Republic,” said Issa Bouba, a registered diamond dealer for the Cameroonian ministry of mines. He buys from the miners and sells the stones on international markets.
Gem trade feeds violence
The scale of the illegal trade and its impact on a country struggling to recover from war is difficult to measure. According to a UN panel of experts’ report, since the Central A f r i c a n R e p u b l i c ’ s K i mb e r l e y Process suspension, the smuggling of 140 000 carats of rough diamonds cost its government $24-million in lost revenues, representing 2.3% of its annual budget.
When the conflict broke out in
2013, the country was exporting $62.1-million a year in rough diamonds, which was its leading export.
The Central African Republic is the world’s 12th largest producer of rough diamonds measured by value. The stones are round and 12-sided with a greenish-brown tint. Despite these distinctive qualities, tracing their origin is particularly difficult. The vast majority of production is done by artisanal miners sifting the deposits by hand for gems, and are sold to intermediary merchants called collectors.
Moreover, 80% of the Central African Republic’s output comes from the southwestern region of the country bordering Cameroon, and the gems produced in the two countries are very similar in color and quality.
Kimberley Process officials in Cameroon who certify the origin of the diamonds find them difficult to tell apart. They rely upon the collectors to maintain a production book, recording where the miners say they extracted the stones.
“With 20 000 artisanal miners in Cameroon and limited ability to monitor those miners, it is impossible to be sure where each diamond recorded in that book has come from,” said Amnesty International in its report Chains of Abuse: The Global Diamond Supply Chain and the Case of the Central African Republic.
Human rights groups say the illegal trade in diamonds is closely interlinked with a vicious cycle of violence on both sides of the border. It has helped keep a low-intensity conflict alive in the Central African Republic, spawning horrific attacks that have
driven people from their homes.
Starving families have waded across the narrow Kadéï River to find refuge in Cameroon, the United Nations has reported. More than 200 000 Central African refugees have fled to Eastern Cameroon, and some have brought the illegal trade in diamonds with them.
Adam Abba, a Central African Republic merchant now living in Kentzou, sat legs crossed on a mat in his two-room house, provided by the refugee agency of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and brightly painted in its signature blue. Here in Kentzou, hundreds of Muslims like him collect and sell Central African diamonds from areas controlled by the Muslim militia Seleka.
A jovial man, Abba shared a breakfast of red tea and white rice as he explained how he laundered blood diamonds from the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo through Cameroon.
“In the Kimberley Process office, even when the diamond comes from the Central African Republic, it is not complicated. The officials will say it comes from Cameroon. For this, you’re going to pay [a bribe]. This is business, right?” Abba chortled.
“We are Africans. We understand each other,” he added.
Five hours drive to the north in Garoua-Boulaï, Aladji Samassa, another Central African Republic merchant tapped away on his new Samsung Galaxy tablet, scrolling through samples of diamonds he had recently sold in Dubai.
“You see the stone with a red back-