Zimbabwe's Diamond Mines Lead to Rape, Murder, and Thievery

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SNARED: An MP watches over an illegal diamond panner at a detention center in Marange, October 2009.

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SCARRED FOR LIFE: Elizabeth (not her real name) once sold blankets and other staples to miners in the Marange fields; during a government assault in late 2008, she says, she and other women were beaten and raped by soldiers.

Ali Moussa and his partner, Shahab Hamdan, are peripatetic veterans of the blood-diamond trade. For 15 years, they based themselves in Bo and Kenema, in Sierra Leone, near the rich diamond deposits that stoked a decade-long civil war between the ragtag government army and a brutal rebel force. As the enemies battled for control of the diamond fields, Moussa and Hamdan (the names are pseudonyms, at their request) bought gems from rebels and soldiers alike, then exported them to international dealers at a hefty profit. Then, in January 1999, the world was forced to watch as drug-fueled teenage rebels invaded Freetown, the capital, where they executed hundreds of civilians and hacked the limbs off hundreds more. Pro-government British troops defeated the rebels and oversaw the transition to a democratic government. Eventually, Moussa and Hamdan were obliged to look elsewhere to make their money.

That's when they found out about Manica. "We came here [to Mozambique] a year ago when we heard about the boom" just across the nearby border, in Zimbabwe, Moussa tells me, grinning from behind a desk adorned with a digital scale and a pair of loupes -- the standard tools of the diamond buyer's trade. He's a bald, skinny Lebanese with an unplaceable accent, a mélange of French, Arabic, and the pidgin-English inflections of West Africa. "The quality's not as good as the diamonds in Sierra Leone," Moussa adds, "but the quantity is huge."

Just how huge becomes apparent during a swing through this once-sleepy frontier town at the base of the bush-covered Penha Longa Mountains. Long known primarily as a stop for a Laurentina beer or a tank of gas on the way to Beira, Mozambique's second-largest city, Manica has become a southern African boomtown: Deadwood in the bush. A Zimbabwean human-rights worker and a local teenager named João take me on a tour. We drive past furtive Lebanese traders sipping espressos in outdoor cafés or riding around town in new Toyota Land Cruisers; rows of pastel-painted ranch houses that could be in Orange County; a new mosque and halal supermarkets catering to the influx from the Levant. Bodyguards with rifles and German shepherds patrol outside walled-off compounds. Safari-jacketed Afrikaners from Johannesburg, who are vying with the Lebanese for a piece of the diamond trade, chain-smoke on the terrace of the thatched Manica Lodge. Shabbily dressed Zimbabwean diamond panners who've trekked across the mountainous border, their pockets bulging with rough gems (some are soldiers out of uniform, others civilian diggers employed by the troops), wander from house to house in search of a deal. Everywhere I turn, there is evidence of a vast unregulated enterprise, a libertarian's dream come to life.

Back on the front porch of Moussa's peach-colored bungalow, I ask him how much money he has made during the year he's been buying diamonds here. He smiles. "We are meeting all of our basic needs," he tells me. "We are getting by."

Moussa's coyness is understandable. He and Hamdan -- a sad-faced, gray-haired Lebanese in his late forties -- may be only bit players, but they and others like them are crucial actors in the illicit sale of untold millions of dollars' worth of gem-quality and industrial diamonds being smuggled out of Zimbabwe, ruled by the despotic president Robert Mugabe. And the transformation of Manica itself is only the latest manifestation of a corrupt and violent industry (smuggled stones may account for 10% of the $12-billion-a-year diamond trade) that, by fate or a stroke of divine injustice, happens to be centered on the world's most destitute and anarchic continent. Sierra Leone wasn't the only country in Africa where diamonds were used to underwrite rebellion at horrific human cost. In Angola, Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA guerrillas financed their gruesome 1990s war against the government by selling to De Beers -- if only indirectly -- an estimated $500 million to $800 million worth of illegal gems from UNITA-controlled mines. (In a statement, De Beers told Fast Company it "has never purchased diamonds from UNITA," but in a 1997 press conference, De Beers executive director Gary Ralfe conceded that "there is no doubt that we buy many of those diamonds that emanate from the UNITA-held areas in Angola secondhand on the markets of Antwerp and Tel Aviv.") And in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), an assortment of militias have vied for the country's rich alluvial diamond deposits, perpetuating a conflict that has claimed as many as 5 million lives since 1996.