LETTER: Kimberley Process a problem
Illegal diamond mining exposes flaws
Illegal diamond mining in the Northern Cape exposes the major flaw in, and the superficial narrowness of, the Kimberley Process for the international diamond trade. Initiated from Kimberley in the early 2000s, the process is still, disappointingly, a work-in-progress that has failed to evolve over the past 17 years.
The process was implemented by the international diamond industry in 2003 after more than a decade of brutal civil wars, chiefly in Sierra Leone, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where rebels used “blood diamonds” (mined by military force in rebel-controlled areas) to fund their insurgency against recognised governments. Hence the 2002 definition of “conflict diamonds” — rough diamonds that finance wars against legitimate governments...
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