Global Policy Forum

Since the outbreak of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo four years ago, the vast central African country has lost some $800m a year to fraudsters who illegally export diamonds, the deputy minister for mining and oil has said.

"Our country, the world's leading producer of industrial diamonds, has lost$800m a year since the start of the war of aggression" in 1998, Ambroise Mbaka said late on Monday, citing statistics published by the High Diamond Council, based in the northern Belgian city of Antwerp.

The government of the DRC hopes that the application in November of the so-called Kimberley Process - which establishes standards for national certification schemes for trade in rough diamonds - will curb the fraudulent export of diamonds from DRC.

"Export certification, as provided by the Kimberley process, will allow us to reduce fraud practised by neighbouring countries which do not produce one single carat," Mabaka said, naming the Republic of Congo as a chief culprit in the alleged illegal diamond sales.

Kimberley process

The HRD has proposed a moratorium on diamond exports from the Republic of Congo, the DRC's smaller, western neighbour. In April, when the DRC joined the Kimberley Process, Mines and Hydrocarbons Minister Simon Tumawaku said fraud in the diamond industry was draining $400m a year from DRC, or about two-thirds of the country's potential revenue from the precious gemstone.

The aim of joining the Kimberley Process was to counter the looting of diamond resources in the east of the country by DRC rebel factions and their allies from Rwanda and Uganda, Tumawaku said.

Since 1998, the DRC has been carved up a war that has been dubbed Africa's most complex and which has killed an estimated 2.5 million people. A series of peace accords have been signed this year between different parties to the conflict, which drew in Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe and, briefly, Chad on the side of the government, and Rwanda and Uganda on the side of two key rebel groups.

Many of the foreign belligerents have withdrawn or begun to withdraw their troops from the DRC, with Rwanda completing its pull-out from the east of the country on October 5.

Criminal cartels

But an expert panel said on Monday in a report to the UN Security Council that African states that have withdrawn their armies from DRC have set up criminal cartels in their place to continue plundering the country's natural wealth.

"The looting that was previously conducted by the armies themselves has been replaced by organised systems of embezzlement, tax fraud, extortion, the use of stock option as kickbacks and diversion of state funds," the report said.

"The elite networks maintain the facade of rebel administrations in the occupied areas" to generate and then steal public revenues, it said. In rebel-held eastern DRC, Rwandan battalions that specialised in mining had stayed on after the army's withdrawal, but no longer wore uniforms and would continue "in a commercial guise" the report said.

Sales of diamonds, the principal source of export revenue in the DRC, are supposed to pass through officially approved traders. The precious gem is mined by small-scale producers throughout the country, and on an industrial level in central Kasai Oriental province by two companies, Minií¨re du Bakwanga (Miba) and Sengamines. The state has stakes in both.

In areas under DRC government control, officials including National Security Minister Mwenze Kongolo have colluded with Zimbabwean figures to transfer at least $5bn worth of assets from DRC state mining companies to private firms over the past three years, the UN report said.

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