Posted on May 26, 2011
It is a sad fact that many association press releases kind of come and go without a trace. But the WFDB’s release today on Zimbabwe and the Kimberley Process seems to have set off a bit of a furor.
I have enormous respect for WFDB president Avi Paz and the hard-working people who donate their time and expertise to the group. But I—and many others I spoke to today—can’t see the point in today’s WFDB statement.
The statement quotes Paz as saying, “The KP members and experts need to come and face reality and resolve the Zim issue once and for all."
What the statement seems to not be aware of is, in April, members of the KP’s Working Group of Monitoring (WGM) met in Dubai to resolve the Zimbabwe impasse. However, Zim, for reasons known only to itself, boycotted the meeting. Those talks in Dubai came months after Zimbabwe allies rejected an earlier WGM agreement forged at a meeting in Brussels—which Zim also boycotted.
These agreements all still call for monitoring and for the government to meet certain criteria. But the WFDB release seems to want Zimbabwe to be allowed to export indefinitely, with no strings attached. (I should note that the WFDB is a different entity than the World Diamond Council, which represents the industry in front of the KP. People there could not have been happy about this statement.)
It is worth noting that the anti-Zimbabwe faction made significant concessions in Dubai. One NGO told me the agreement was "awful." Its final outline resembles pretty closely what KP chairman Matthieu Yamba called for in his famous (or infamous) unilateral “administrative decision” in March.
So, it is safe to say, the members of the WGM have made considerable efforts to resolve this impasse. This release seems like something that should have been sent out two months ago. At this point, any lecture should be directed at the Zimbabwe faction. The ball is in that country's court.
Since Dubai, there has been little word from Zimbabwe on whether they accept this agreement. And sources say the KP chair feels his decision should supersede the one negotiated in Dubai, even though there is little difference between them. (Yes, things are that petty.) The KP Plenary is meeting in Congo later this year to hash all this out; but as of now, there is still no consensus agreement on Zimbabwe.
The talk about this release will come and go, but I do believe it raises larger issues. Even those incensed by the statement today were gratified that the WFDB included this strong statement from Paz: “All members of the WFDB [should] continue to follow the KP's and the WFDB's clear directives not to trade in rough diamonds without the proper KP certification.”
That is important. There are now rumors that an African country and Zimbabwe ally is taking in exports from Marange. The country’s officials will no doubt argue they have “the right” to accept these stones; after all, the KP chairman has given his okay.
But the rest of the Process hasn’t agreed to that. And the industry should not be trading Marange diamonds until all this is 100 percent settled. De Beers has all but said that it will not look favorably on any sightholder found doing so. If these stories about exports are true, it reinforces the feeling that some African countries don't have much interest in continuing the Kimberley Process, and that this important enterprise is slowly unraveling.
So in a way, the WFDB's intentions were good. They were right: The KP needs to get beyond Zimbabwe. But their release also makes the industry appear divided and not fully behind the WGM’s efforts to forge a compromise. And for that reason, it may have made things worse.
LEN736 · 0 sec ago