Diamond mining in Angola

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The history of diamond mining in Angola began on November 4th 1912 when geologists Johnston and Mac Vey from the Belgian company Forminière discovered "the seven famous rough diamonds of Musalala". Johnston and Mac Vey were confident that there were diamonds in Angola . Scouting work led them to the right bank of the Chiumbe River in the Lunda Norte province , where they found the precious stones in a right tributary of the Chiumbe, the Musalala. Knowledge of diamonds was already known earlier, from the first half of the sixteenth century, precisely in 1590 by the Portuguese, who claimed and explored the country for themselves from 1494. Since then, the valuable mineral has been successfully mined in the region. The main deposits are located in the northeast on the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in the center in the province of Huambo .

Importance of diamond mining for Angola

2001 false color satellite image of the Catoca mine . (The bright red stain is a fire.)

Before Angola's independence in 1975, the Portuguese colony in southwest Africa was the fourth largest diamond-producing area in the world. In October 1917, the Portuguese founded the Companhia de Diamantes de Angola (Diamang) company. In 1971 diamond production reached a record high, totaling 2,413,021 carats. With the establishment of the Empresa Nacional de Diamantes de Angola (Endiama) by the new Angolan government, this replaced the Diamang in 1988. The current production comes mostly from alluvial soils , mainly from the provinces of Lunda Norte and Lunda Sul , in the northeastern part of the country . About 90 percent of the land application has cameos quality. Angola also has at least six narrow eruption vents that geologists believe are rich in diamond deposits. The most important mine is the Catoca mine near Saurimo . Diamonds are one of Angola's most important government revenues. Mining and trading are controlled exclusively by the state-owned Endiama, the legal purchase of the diamonds is carried out by Sodiam , a 99 percent subsidiary of Endiama.

After the oil sector , mining is the second most important industry in Angola, and especially the diamond sector . In 2006, the sale of the diamonds brought in $ 165 million for the Angolan household. Several foreign companies see great investment opportunities here. Angola was the third largest producer of diamonds in Africa (2009) and has only explored 40 percent of the diamond areas within the country. Worldwide leading geologists estimate that the alluvial diamond reserves amount to up to 130 million carats. Endiama expects to increase production by 10 million carats per year.

In contrast to the oil sector, the diamond sector is labor-intensive, but there are many private diamond miners working here. The government sees this as illegal work and is dismantling this informal sector. In 2007, over 40,000 mostly Congolese Garimpeiros were driven from the diamond mines in the northeast of the country. Endiama has taken vast tracts of land through forcible relocation without compensation.

Angolan Civil War and blood diamonds

As the most profitable part of the Angolan economy, diamond mining helped finance and prolong the Angolan civil war that ravaged the country from 1975 to 2002. The diamonds of Angola were thus a trigger for the discussion about so-called blood diamonds and the establishment of the Kimberley Process , which pursues the goal of preventing the financing of civil wars through the diamond trade.

The Companhia de Diamantes de Angola Diamang , which was renamed the state-controlled and controlled Empresa de Diamantes de Angola (Endiama) in 1986, was responsible for diamond production . The majority of the diamonds mined in Angola, 70 to 80 percent of production, are of perfect gem quality, unlike industrial diamonds. Only five to ten percent of the world's diamond deposits are of sufficient quality for gemstones, so the high demand for Angolan gemstones on the international diamond market in Antwerp, Belgium can be traced. The diamond mining therefore proved to be a profitable economic sector, which the government, but also or above all, its opponent in the civil war, the Unita, knew how to exploit. The relative simplicity of diamond extraction led Unita to increasingly rely on the diamond trade as a source of income in the early 1990s. As a result, Unita intensified the fighting in the mineral-rich northeastern regions of Lunda Norte and Lunda Sul in order to establish dominance over the diamond deposits in the territory. This military effort has paid off for Unita from a purely financial and logistical perspective: Between 1992 and 1998, the rebel movement controlled 90 percent of Angolan diamond exports and earned around 3.7 billion US dollars from them. Above all, the Unita mined the diamonds from deposits in alluvial areas, where no mechanical effort or technical know-how was required. In order to do the mining, the Unita recruited Garimpeiros (miners) from its own ranks, small farmers from the region but also Congolese citizens who belong to the Bakongo ethnic group .

Smuggling path from Angola to Antwerp

The export of the diamonds mainly worked through countries in which the Unita had a perfectly developed infrastructure . Burkina Faso , Togo and Zaire in particular maintained close contact with Unita in the 1990s. They made their state territory available to the rebel movement for diamond transfers and as a stopover for secret arms deliveries from Eastern Europe. The leader of the rebel troops, Jonas Savimbi , expressed his gratitude to the political leaders of the friendly African states by giving the president Blaise Compaoré (of Burkina Faso), Gnassingbé Eyadéma (from Togo) or Mobutu Sese Seko (from Zaire) diamonds worth millions sent. In other cases, Angolan diamonds were smuggled into Antwerp via South Africa , Namibia and Zambia without the knowledge of the governments concerned .

Mining rights as a reward for government loyalty

On the other hand, the MPLA government tried to secure control over diamond production by means of the Endiama by selling the official mining rights or by participating in the production through joint ventures . The civilian population living in the diamond-rich regions of the country should - at least formally - benefit from the granting of prospecting licenses. However, these provisions contradicted the realpolitical situation by far. The government controlled only about 30 percent of Angolan territory in 1994 and was unable to implement administrative regulations. In addition, the mining rights were usually awarded to senior Angolan officers of the FAA (Forças Armadas Angolanas) . Thus, their loyalty to the Angolan state should be guaranteed. In order to compensate for the financial or technical deficits, the officers could confidently fall back on willing foreign companies, which enriched themselves with a generous share of the profits.

De Beers and their monopoly

The diamond trade - the most important source of income for Unita - worked in cooperation with the British-South African diamond trading monopoly De Beers . The Central Selling Organization CSO , De Beers' distribution center, acquired as much as possible of the Angolan diamond production, marked it as official De Beers diamonds and took it into custody. The CSO regulates the number of gemstones that are periodically sold to "sight holders" (licensed dealers) in order to subsequently be offered on the main diamond markets of Antwerp , Tel-Aviv and London . The transnational diamond group controls around 70 percent of the global diamond trade.

Because of their economic importance, the northeastern regions of Lunda Norte and Lunda Sul have been the most fiercely contested areas. The acts of war in the Lunda region between the outside armed forces, the Mbundu based in the capital and the Ovimbundu based in the central highlands have moved the Chokwe , based in the two Lundas, to an anti-government and an anti-Unita stance and thus a new ethnic dimension -regional nationalism .

Deportations due to illegal mining

In 2007, diamond production in Angola hit the headlines again in negative form when the first mass deportations of "illegal" miners occurred with serious human rights violations. According to UN figures, almost 115,000 people were deported from Angola to the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo in the next two years, 2008 and 2009, under very dubious circumstances . The Congo responded with mass deportations of thousands of Angolans who had been refugees in the Congo for years as civil war refugees. Mutual deportations of hundreds of thousands of their nationals have characterized the tensions between the two large neighbors Angola and Congo for months. Behind this are disagreements about oil, diamonds and the hoped-for electricity from the Inga dams on the Congo River in Congo. Between 100,000 and 200,000 people were deported in both directions by the end of 2009.

The Angolan government must "respect human dignity" when it comes to deportations, according to a UN report . Accordingly, most of the deportees come from the northern neighboring country. In July 2009 Endiama admitted that the practice of deporting illegal miners from the diamond-rich northeast of the country will be changed in the future. Often people were picked up at night and their belongings were robbed. At the border, the deported had to undergo intimate physical checks to prevent them from secretly smuggling diamonds out of the country. Human rights organizations also report months of deportation detention and rape of women and girls at the borders.

The United Nations is closely monitoring the situation and is holding talks with the Angolan government about current practice. The government in Luanda makes no secret of the mass expulsions and describes them as necessary to protect the diamond areas from illegal mining of the gemstones .

The Unita had financed with the diamond smuggling their civil war, and still the standards are Kimberley certification scheme implemented inadequately to stop the trade in conflict diamonds.

Web links

further reading

  • Carlos Freire de Andrade: Subsídios para o conhecimento da geologia da Lunda: Diamond deposits in Lunda . (Part 1: A geological survey made in 1945-46; Part 2: A study made in 1945-48 of the diamondiferous gravels and concentrates.). Companhia de Diamantes de Angola (Publicações culturais, 7), Lisboa 1953

Individual evidence

  1. The story of the Endiama ( Memento of the original from June 12, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Portuguese)  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / canais.sapo.pt
  2. Map on diamang.com, taken on January 4, 2011
  3. Map of the areas with the highest diamond concentration in Angola ( Memento of the original from June 12, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 163 kB) Page 3 (English)  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.iss.co.za
  4. VoA: ONU: Continuam violações sexuais sistemáticas ao longo da fronteira Angola-Congo February 21, 2011 (Portuguese)