Diamond trade analyzed

The party, ZANU-PF, has used the money from diamonds - smuggled out of the country or illegally sold through the Reserve Bank - to reinforce its hold over the security forces, which seemed to be slipping last year as the value of soldiers’ pay collapsed with soaring inflation, Human Rights Watch researchers said.

Zimbabwe’s government yesterday roundly denied the charges leveled in the Human Rights Watch report, which cited visits by its researcher to the diamond fields in February and interviews with soldiers, miners, and other witnesses.

Information Minister Webster Shamu, of ZANU-PF, said in a telephone interview that the report’s aim was to tarnish the country’s image, block the sale of its diamonds internationally, and “in so doing, deny Zimbabwe much needed foreign currency.’’

“The whole report is just not true,’’ he said.

The Zimbabwe state media depicted the military blitz, code named “Operation No Return,’’ in Zimbabwe’s Marange district last year as a push to restore order in the midst of a lawless diamond rush in the district.

But the Human Rights Watch report charged that the military killed more than 200 miners and used the push to seize the Marange fields.

Many of the dead were taken to the mortuary at Mutare General Hospital, or buried in mass graves, the report says.

Army brigades are being rotated into the diamond fields of the Marange district, discovered in 2006, so more soldiers can profit from the illegal trade, it said.

Villagers from the area, some of them children, are being forced to work in mines controlled by military syndicates and have complained of being harassed, beaten, and arrested, the report says.

“It’s a big cash cow for the military and the police, especially since Zimbabwe is virtually bankrupt,’’ Dewa Mavhinga, the Zimbabwean lawyer who was the main researcher for the report, said in an interview.

Mugabe, who has ruled for 29 years, is now governing with his rival, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, who spent the past three weeks in Western capitals seeking assistance for Zimbabwe’s devastated economy.

President Obama and European heads of state generally declined to aid Zimbabwe’s government directly, in part because of concerns that it continues to flout the rule of law.

The Human Rights Watch report is the latest sign of growing international concern about charges of killings and human rights abuses in the diamond fields southwest of the city of Mutare.

“While Zimbabwe’s new power-sharing government, formed in February 2009, now lobbies the world for development aid, millions of dollars in potential government revenue are being siphoned off,’’ the report said.