Global Policy Forum

By Paul Knox

United Nations-- Fresh from having his appendix removed, Robert Fowler is a little lighter and trying hard not to sneeze. Nevertheless, Canada's ambassador to the United Nations ignores the escalator and shuffles up the stairs to the second floor of the conference building at the UN headquarters, where he has presided over Security Council meetings almost daily since returning to work last week.

Mr. Fowler's staff members say the 54-year-old envoy was "climbing the walls" -- beside himself about having fallen ill. He was taken to hospital just two days before Canada stepped into the spotlight as president of the council for a month. Now he is back at work, appearing before the television cameras after council meetings to inform the world of its decisions.

But his illness has delayed one of the earliest initiatives of Canada's council term -- tackling the illegal trade in guns, diamonds and oil that is nourishing a resurging civil war in Angola. As head of the council committee overseeing sanctions imposed against an Angolan rebel group, Canada has volunteered to point the finger at those who make it possible for the rebels to keep fighting.

"Sanctions busters need to be identified and held accountable," Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy said last month. He described Angola as being "awash with weapons."

The effort could end up pitting Canada against one of the world's best-known companies -- the Anglo-South African giant De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd., which controls 70 per cent of the global diamond trade. De Beers says it respects UN sanctions. But a British research and lobby group, Global Witness, said in December that the company had failed to prove that it was not buying diamonds from rebel-held areas of Angola.

Another question is whether Canada has seized control of the barn door well after the horses have bolted. Some Angola watchers say the rebels have already armed themselves so heavily, using the proceeds of illegal diamond sales, that the moment for tough enforcement of sanctions has passed.

It now looks as if it will be April before Mr. Fowler is able to travel to Angola, its southern African neighbours and the diamond bazaars of Europe to search for answers.

Angola, a former Portuguese colony of 12 million, is rich in land and minerals, but has an annual per-capita income of less than $400. Nearly 30 per cent of children die before reaching the age of 5, according to the UN Children's Fund.

Fighting flared in December after a four-year ceasefire between government forces and rebels known as UNITA -- the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola. UNITA's leader, Jonas Savimbi, was backed by the United States and South Africa as a rival to the Marxist rebels who led the struggle for independence from Portugal. He lost his outside support with the end of the Cold War and the demise of South Africa's apartheid regime.

But diamonds have kept him going -- rough but high-quality stones pulled from mines and alluvial deposits deep in the Angolan interior. After South Africa and Russia, Angola is considered the third-most-important source of diamonds in the world. With global price fluctuations, the total value of Angolan stones has ranged between $250-million (U.S.) and $700-million a year for the past decade.

De Beers mines half the world's diamonds and controls at least an additional one-fifth of the global trade. It has long been accused of buying diamonds produced in UNITA-held areas. After the UN's arms embargo against UNITA was extended to include diamonds last June, De Beers said it would not buy unofficial Angolan stones.

"We won't purchase diamonds without a government certificate of origin," said Tom Beardmore-Gray, executive vice-president of De Beers Canada Corp., the company's Vancouver-based subsidiary.

But Charmian Gooch, who produced the Global Witness report and briefed Canadian officials at the UN last month, notes that De Beers is famous for its efforts to control the global gem-quality diamond trade. It "mops up" the stones it does not mine -- buying them, even at depressed prices, and releasing them slowly onto the market.

That "leads us to believe that it would be very difficult for De Beers to have fully implemented the embargo," Ms. Gooch said. "We want them to clarify how they have done it." She said UNITA made at least $200-million (U.S.) and possibly $350-million last year from diamond sales. "That buys a hell of a lot of weapons."

In theory, the government of President Jose Eduardo dos Santos has a monopoly on sales of Angolan diamonds. In practice, many slip out of the country illegally. Borders with the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia are sparsely populated and barely policed. Ms. Gooch's advice to the Canadians, in looking for sanctions choke points, is to focus on Europe.

All stones sold by De Beers arrive in London for disposal through its Central Selling Organisation. Many of the rest arrive in Antwerp, Belgium, centre of the diamond-cutting trade.

Ms. Gooch said experienced diamond appraisers can spot an Angolan stone in the rough, and Belgian customs officials could reject them if they took the UN sanctions more seriously.

Mr. Beardmore-Gray said it's not that simple. "You could say some mines produce stones of a particular type or a particular look, but I don't think it's possible to say a certain stone came from a certain region."

Wherever they come from, diamonds are fetching less now than a few years ago. New mines in Australia and Canada's Northwest Territories have come on stream. Economic turmoil has tamed what once were white-hot markets in Asia.

Alex Vines, a London-based Angola specialist for the activist group Human Rights Watch, said that, in the long run, low diamond prices may hurt Mr. Savimbi more than UN sanctions.

He said UNITA took advantage of the ceasefire to re-equip itself with rocket launchers, ground-to-air missiles, vehicles and spare parts -- even though an arms embargo has supposedly been in effect for several years. "There was good evidence in 1995 of sanctions busting," Mr. Vines said. "[The UN] should have clamped down then and made it really difficult." He said the UN should still try as hard as it can to enforce anti-UNITA sanctions, adding that cutting off the flow of petroleum products might be most effective. "It's going to be a terribly difficult job to do this properly," he said.

UN and Canadian officials are scheduled to issue a report today on planned strategies for enforcing the anti-UNITA sanctions.

The Angola conflict is one of several in Africa where Canada's temporary Security Council membership is forcing it to play a wider role. In all likelihood, when Canada's council performance is assessed in two years, it will be on the basis of successes or failures on the continent. "The implementation of sanctions and the degree to which they become effective . . . requires an incredible amount of international support, both from a government perspective and from a business perspective," a UN-based diplomat said.

Consumers have an interest too, Ms. Gooch said. "The whole premise of a diamond is that it's a gift of love. If consumers start to question whether diamonds are funding war, . . . there could be serious consequences in terms of sales."

THE SANCTIONS

The latest package of UN sanctions against the UNITA rebel force in Angola came into effect on June 25, 1998. They include the following:

A freeze on funds belonging to UNITA, its senior members and their immediate families;

A ban on official contacts with rebel leaders in areas under their control;

A ban on "the direct or indirect import from Angola . . . of all diamonds that are not controlled through the certificate of origin regime" of the Angolan government;

A ban on the sale of mining equipment, motorized vehicles, boats or spare parts to anyone in a rebel-held area.

The sanctions order authorizes exemptions for humanitarian reasons, to be decided case by case. Earlier sanctions, still in effect, include an arms embargo.