Blood Diamond: Double Think & Deception, Part 1

To shore up lover’s hearts in the pre-Christmas 2006 diamond rush, the New York Times echoed the WDC’s statement, adding that diamond revenues today bring health care, education and development to African countries—those emerging nations. “This [diamond] is supposed to be a symbol of all things good,” a pullout in the NYT article reads—next to a seductive model with a glimmering smile and a glamorous gown. The article points buyers to diamonds from Canada: no blood spilled in Canada, right? In the same paper, on the same day, a full-page Tiffany advertisement featured soft aquamarine hues offsetting the sparkle of diamonds and the allure of the text: “My True Love Gave to Me.” 

Are blood diamonds merely polished by public relations? The Kimberly Process was launched under the narrow definition that “conflict diamonds” only originate from conflicts between “rebels” and “governments.” It refers to smuggling by militias antagonistic to “legitimate” member governments. But the examples of Angola and Zimbabwe illustrate how the new rules are used against immigrants, refugees, and poor citizen miners. This is the essence of diamondthink: truth and lie are inseparable, with deadly consequences. 

My True Love Took From Thee 

In Angola they are called artisanos or garimpeiros, and they are literally mining for their lives. While agriculture and commerce in the region require the direct authorization of the provincial governor, not one artisano has been granted a license for diamond exploration or subsistence agriculture. The “legitimate” government of Angola forces desperate people to resort to “illegal” activities to survive. 

Garimpeiros in Angola are forced into “illegal” mining because Angola’s mining security companies push people off their own land. Three private military companies (PMCs) have been targeting garimpeiros in Angola. The mercenary firms Alfa-5, Teleservices, and K&P Mineira defend Angola’s big name diamond firms like Sociedade de Desenvolvimento Mineiro (Sodiam), Sociedade Mineira de Cuango, and Sociedade Mineira Luminas. Human rights researcher Rafael Marques has documented case after case of PMCs arresting, beating, and torturing garimpeiros. They stop garimpeiros from fishing in their rivers, growing their own food, and living traditionally. The PMCs operate behind Angola’s public diamond company, Endiama, and have exclusive rights to Angola’s diamonds. Endiama owns 99 percent of shares in Sodiam, which has a joint venture with Lazare Kaplan International (LKI) of the Israeli-American Maurice Tempelsman family. 

Sodiam also works with the Russo-Israeli Lev Leviev Group. Endiama owns part of Alfa-5, the PMC that exploits and tortures garimpeiros. Alfa-5 and K&P Mineira provide security for ASCORP—the Angola Selling Corporation—another Angolan monopoly. One of ASCORP’s controlling investors, Lev Leviev, runs a global commercial empire that includes: Leviev Group of Companies; Lev Leviev Diamonds; Africa-Israel (commercial real estate in Prague and London); Gottex (swimwear); plus 1,700 Fina gas stations in the Southwest U.S.; 173, 7-Elevens in New Mexico and Texas; and a 33 percent stake in Cross Israel Highway (Israel’s first toll road); and more. Leviev partner Arcady Gay- damak, an arms dealer, also reportedly works with Danny Yatom, a former Mossad (Israeli secret service) chief and security advisor to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Leviev is connected to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and to Sandline International, a UK/South African mercenary firm. 

Angola remains a war-torn country. The União Nacional para a Indepen- dência Total de Angola (UNITA) rebels—backed by the CIA during the Cold War, then targeted by the Clinton administration, then partnered with the “rebels” in Congo’s wars—are known to sell $100 million worth of diamonds annually. While participants in the Kimberley Process complain of UNI- TA’s criminality, they gave the “legitimate” Dos Santos government a sparkling bill of health.  

The Angola example shows how “black markets” are created by predatory “white” economies, which perpetuate suffering and dispossession. Diamond companies do not “ignore atrocities” as the New York Times wrote in their December whitewash, they create and perpetuate them. 

Betrayal Is Forever 

Zimbabwe is the epitome of diamondthink. From December 2006 to January 2007, Zimbabwe’s police executed Operation Chikorokoza—end of illegal mining—against illegal gold panners and diamond miners countrywide. Police set up roadblocks and brutalized travelers. They arrested and terrorized at least 24,000 people and burned the houses of artisanal miners and others who were already displaced by the international destabilization of Zimbabwe. Police confiscated some 3.5 kilograms of gold worth over $57.3 million; 552,227 kilograms of gold ore; 92 emeralds; and 7,868 diamonds. Meanwhile, Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, and his cronies and their international benefactors have destabilized and depopulated the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) for decades—looting copper, cobalt, timber, uranium, and diamonds. 

Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party in recent years crashed the international media scene for evicting white farmers under “land reform,” but untouched were the largest landholders—i.e., multinational corporations. Mugabe seized power in 1981 on the empty promise of land reform. In the 1980s Mugabe and his “liberation” army terrorized the Ndebele people under the Gukurahundi—a bona fide genocide. After arming Mugabe’s gang, the international “community” closed its eyes to the slaughter. Attempts to break the story were squashed in Britain and the U.S. Equally invisible were Mugabe’s ties to international arms dealer John Bredenkamp, one of the 50 richest Britons, BAE Systems (British Aerospace); the U.S. State Department; and Billy Rautenbach, another Western mining cartel crony and white patron of Mugabe. 

The World Diamond Council “expressed concern” about Zimbabwe’s complicity in pillaging and smuggling rough diamonds from the DRC into neighboring South Africa for sale on the world market using fraudulent certificates of origin. But the threat of sanctions against Zimbabwe was not about diamonds. While international capital is isolating and punishing Robert Mugabe, other criminal diamond networks and racketeering of equal scale and nature are tolerated. 

Angola and Zimbabwe exemplify the process whereby an international certification scheme, enforced by the United Nations, rubber stamps boxes of rough stones according to their country of origin. Stamped Angola or Zimbabwe, the public is assured that these diamonds are now “conflict free” because these nations are members of the Kimberley certification. Coming from governments—and not rebels or militias—consumers can supposedly be at peace as they slip a diamond on their finger. 

Botswana is a classic example of a “peaceful” country engaged in diamond exploration. If any diamond in Africa is conflict free, one would think Botswana would be the place to find it. But the Botswana government has a long history of oppression against the San people—Bushmen of the Kalahari—and continues to force them off ancestral lands to make way for the world’s premier diamond cartel, De Beers/Anglo-American Corp. 

The diamondthink of De Beers knows no limits—they have even claimed that protecting tribal homelands leads to apartheid. Diamond finds in the Bushmen’s ancestral lands have inspired government evictions. “Money from diamonds has undoubtedly funded the evictions and the ‘relocation camps’ which the Bushmen call places of death,” wrote Survival International. “De Beers’ managing director in Botswana backed the removals. De Beers falsely claims there were no Bushmen originally in its concession. It has also stated that laws to protect tribal peoples should not be applied in Africa, as they ‘lead to apartheid.’” 

Botswana and Namibia have been fighting over water and the flow of refugees and dissidents brought Botswana into the crosshairs of the Pentagon in the late 1990s. A U.S. military build-up ensued—electronic intelligence listening posts, an expansive air base built in the Bushman’s desert, and weapons and training programs. Construction on the base began in 1994 and the U.S. “turned the base into a staging area for [special operations] forces involved in quelling civil wars and secessionist movements in Africa.” Botswana’s opposition complained: “Why should we put up such a sophisticated and costly facility when people are starving?” (See Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999 by Wayne Madsen.) 

After President Clinton’s glowing speech in Botswana in 1998, Professor Larry Swatuk at the University of Botswana complained: “The San people of the Central Kalahari have been relocated from within the Central Kalahari Game Reserve to make way for new tourism ventures and mineral prospecting by multinational corporations, including De Beers. About 3,000 San were moved to a bleak settlement called New Xade some 45 km beyond the reserve’s western border.... Unemployment, jobless economic growth, political in-fighting, conflicts over natural resources within and between states, and increasing mili- tarization in a region too familiar with the human and material costs of war: these are some of the realities that Bill Clinton should have seen.”  

By 2003 Australian BHP-Billiton was prospecting with leases over 78,000 square kilometers of Botswana, including some 27,000 square kilometers in the Kalahari Reserve. In a “landmark” court case decided in December 2006, the San won the “rights” to re-enter their ancestral lands in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, but the government stipulated that they cannot erect permanent structures, hunt or drill boreholes, and to expect no government services. Rapaport News called the court case “the longest and most expensive in Botswana’s history.” Diamonds are a $2 billion industry in Botswana, and the government is a 15 percent shareholder in De Beers. The Bushmen say: “We as First People of the Kalahari believe that conflict diamonds are whenever diamonds cause pain and suffering. That is why we call Botswana diamonds conflict diamonds.”      

Where Do Diamonds Come From? 

Belgian-born Maurice Tempelsman has a long and bloody history in Africa. When Congo’s first premier, Patrice Lumumba, pledged to return diamond wealth to the newly independent Congo in the early 1960s, Tempels- man, who began with De Beers in the 1950s, helped engineer the coup that consolidated the dictatorship of 29-year-old Colonel Mobutu, as well as the coup against Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah. Diamonds were at stake in each of these coups. 

“I believe this was the beginning of what we now know of as conflict diamonds in the Congo,” says blood diamond expert Janine Roberts. “From then on diamonds would be extensively used to discreetly fund wars, coups, repression, and dictatorships in Africa.” According to Roberts, “Tempelsman’s role in the confluence of public policy and private profit as a middleperson for the De Beers diamond cartel may have shaped every major U.S. covert action in Africa since the early 1950s. Declassified memos and cables between former U.S. presidents and State Department officials over the last four decades directly linked Tempelsman to the destabilization of Zaire/Congo, Sierra Leone, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Rwanda and Ghana.” 

For over 35 years Maurice and his son Leon Tempelsman worked the diamond connection behind the repression of Mobutu Sese Seko and his Israeli-trained shock troops. Now, 47 years later, the Tempelsman empire remains rock solid behind three companies: Leon Tempelsman & Sons, De Beers, and LKI (which supplies Tiffany & Co. and Cartier). A client of Adlai Stevenson’s law firm during the first Congo crises (1960-1970), Tempelsman later hired Lawrence Devlin, a CIA station chief responsible for covert operations in Katanga, to maintain the Mobutu diamond/cobalt connections into the late 1980s. In 2002 Tempelsman offered Namibia’s President Sam Nujoma an $80 million interest free “loan” to bridge Namibia’s budgetary shortfall against future sales of Namibia’s gemstones. 

Tempelsman is the deep pockets of many U.S. politicians, donating to the campaigns of John Kerry (D); Ed Royce (R); Tom Daschle (D); Barack Obama (D); Maxine Waters (D); John Rockefeller (D); Richard Gephardt (D); Howard Wolpe (D); and Patrick (D) and Edward Kennedy (D). He also contributed to the 1988 win of George H. W. Bush. Tempelsman exploited ties with Anthony Lake, Clinton’s National Security adviser, who intervened at the U.S. Export-Import Bank on Tempelsman’s behalf. 

Tempelsman contributed some $500,000 to Clinton for president and he is currently backing Hillary. He traveled at Clinton’s side on the 1998 presidential Africa tour where his Botswana visit was not about an Okavango Delta wildlife reserve safari. Botswana’s President Mogae attended the 1999 Attracting Capital to Africa Summit in Houston, organized by the Corporate Council on Africa (CCA), the “who’s who” of multinational corporations. Tempelsman, as CCA chair, organized the summit, where 10 African heads of state met with half of Clinton’s cabinet and 200 corporate representatives. Tempelsman and the CCA organized the U.S.-Africa Business Summit in Africa in 2001, featuring DRC President Joseph Kabila, coordinated with an Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) meeting involving President G. W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell. 

Tempelsman is chair of the American Jewish Congress, a Zionist pressure group that claims it “works closely with the Israeli military” and he sits on the boards of nationalist American think tanks. As vice-chair of LKI, Tempelsman’s annual base pay is $458,833, with a bonus of $80,000. As principal director/shareholder in Leon Tempelsman and Sons he gets a comparable amount again. SEC filings show that LKI directors are high-rolling Zionist lawyers and investment bankers: one director belongs to the law firm that represented President Kennedy—another Tempelsman friend. LKI is also connected to the euphemistically named United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Selling to the U.S. Diamond Stockpile and elsewhere, Tempelsman companies have plundered tens of billions of diamond dollars from Congo/Zaire alone in the past five decades. 

Peace Is War, Ignorance Is Strength 

In 2001 the World Peace Foundation (WPF Program) on Intrastate Conflict at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government organized a conference on conflict diamonds that “involved stakeholders of diverse interests.” WPF program director Robert Rotberg chaired the meeting. Rotberg is also on the board of  the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center Science and International Affairs, whose directors are the core of the defense and intelligence establishment—people like John Deutch, former CIA director, and Richard Darmam, a partner in the Carlyle Group. The Harvard diamond conference actually normalized De Beers’s relations with the U.S. government. De Beers reps received a special government amnesty to attend the conference after years of exile from the U.S. due to anti-trust law violations. 

In 2002 a WPF report “Diamonds in Peace and War: Severing the Conflict-Diamond Connection” lauded the Kennedy School’s efforts based on a rush of activity that followed the conference at the end of November 2001. The “rush of activity” included the U.S. government’s Clean Diamond Trade Act (HR 722), passed in April 2003. The Act gave the U.S. president the authority to institute “war on terror” sanctions against any country that deals in dirty diamonds. The U.S. General Accounting Office noted in 2006 that the law was weak and deeply flawed. 

The Kennedy School today peddles their report as a success. “Using diamonds to import arms and sponsor war is less likely now that the Kimberley Process has produced a near-final agreement,” the current abstract reads. “‘Diamonds in Peace and War’ is the place to learn all about this remarkably successful initiative of conflict prevention and conflict reduction.” 

When contacted, Robert Rotberg praised the Kimberley Process as a “remarkable achievement” and dismissed any conflict of interest between Tempelsman and the Kimberley initiatives. Asked about the U.S. government diamond stockpile, Robert Rotberg indicated that its existence “is news to me.” The U.S. Defense Logistics Agency controls some 3.1 million carats held at the Defense National Stockpile Centers. Pressed further about Tempelsman, Rotberg replied, “There is no contact between this side of the Charles River and that side. This is not a conspiracy. The real problem is not Maurice Tempelsman. The biggest problem is that the U.S. Treasury has been really slow to put [Kimberley] structures in place.” 

Maurice Tempelsman and Robert Rotberg are members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). No contact between them? From 1999 to 2002 the CFR sponsored a series of panels titled “Roundtable on Private Capital Flows to Sub-Saharan Africa.” The panel director was Mahesh Kotecha and the chair was Maurice Tempelsman. At the time, Tempelsman was funding the CFR’s Africa Program. Panelists included Walter Kansteiner, Robert Rotberg, Frank Wisner, and Botswana’s President Festus Mogae. 

“Tempelsman's role...as a middle person for the De Beers diamond cartel may have shaped every major U.S. covert action in Africa since the early 1950s.”

The Kotecha family runs illegal networks that pillage columbium-tantalite (coltan) from Congo. Walter Kansteiner—National Security Council African Affairs director under Clinton—is today director of Moto Gold, a company involved in Congo’s blood-drenched Ituri region, and the Kansteiner family of Chicago trades in coltan. Walter Kansteiner was the U.S. president’s “personal representative” to the G-8 Africa Process and he is a founding principal of the Scow- croft Group under Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Adviser to Bush I and Gerald Ford. Kansteiner also works for the Center for Strategic and International Studies Africa Policy Advisory Panel. Panelist Frank Wisner was also on the National Security Council under Clinton. Wisner’s father was CIA director of the Office of Policy Coordination. An early covert operations bureau, Operation Mockingbird, designed to infiltrate and control the U.S. media, was one of theirs. Frank Wisner —a USAID and state department official in Vietnam—was involved with the black-operations Phoenix assassinations program. Wisner’s co- directors of the American International Group include: 

• Marshall Cohen, a director of the Bush-connected Barrick Gold Corporation and a Canadian government official 
• Harvard Professor Martin Stuart Feldstein 
• Clinton cabinet members William Cohen and Richard Holbrooke 
• Carla Hills, NAFTA negotiator and director of Chevron-Texaco and the International Crisis Group, a flak organization active in all Africa’s hotspots 

(William) Cohen Group partners include former top Pentagon officers, White House officials, UK Lords, NATO chiefs, and directors of Lockheed Martin and Dyncorp. Note that Dyncorp director Mark Ronald was previously president/CEO of BAE Systems. Another Cohen Group director, Gen. (ret.) Paul Kern, participated in operations in Rwanda and Zaire. 

Tempelsman’s affiliation with Robert Rotberg at the CFR explains the absence of any mention of Tempelsman or his diamond interests in the Kimberley-related conferences, policies, and papers that came out of the Kennedy School. Seven Harvard professionals, including Michael Ignatief and Samantha Power, who won a Pulitzer for her whitewash of the U.S.-backed coup in Rwanda, took part in the 2001 Kennedy School conference that led to “Diamonds in Peace and War,” the report that buried Maurice Tempelsman’s involvement. 

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keith harmon snow’s work has appeared in publications in the U.S., UK, and Japan, including World War 4 Report, Black Commentator, Asahi Weekly, Yomiuri Shimbun, Toward Freedom, and Far East Economic Review. His work can be found at www.allthingspass.com. Rick Hines is an artist, freelance writer, and independent researcher for social justice. Part 2 of “Blood Diamond” covers more on the glitter and greed of capitalism.