BULAWAYO – Zimbabwe will sell diamonds outside the Kimberley Process (KP) should the world diamond trade watchdog rule that Harare’s efforts to comply with its standards are inadequate, Mines Minister Obert Mpofu said at the weekend.

“If the KP is unsatisfied with our efforts and wants to be difficult saying that we have failed to comply with their requirements . . . we will not lose sleep but rather we will just pull out and not lose anything,” Mpofu said, while addressing the Bulawayo Press Club last Friday evening.

“The KP does not own the diamond trade markets. Zimbabwe will pull out of the KP and sell its diamonds to those markets,” he said.

Mpofu’s comments echo threats by President Robert Mugabe about two weeks ago to withdraw from the KP process, suggesting growing frustration in Harare over demands by the diamond body that Zimbabwe cleans up mining of diamonds at its controversial Marange field or face a ban that would damage the southern African country’s diamond industry.

The KP is a grouping of diamond trading countries and civic society groups set up to prevent trade in conflict or blood diamonds.

The group has since last year been under pressure to impose an international ban on Zimbabwe diamonds after a team of investigators it dispatched to Marange unearthed rights abuses and other irregularities at the notorious diamond field that is also known as Chiadzwa.

Zimbabwe however escaped a KP ban last November but the global body gave Harare a June 2010 deadline to make reforms to comply with its regulations.

Under a set of measures meant to bring Zimbabwe’s controversial diamond industry in line with KP standards, the watchdog must monitor production and sales of diamonds from Marange.

But Harare and the KP are yet to name a monitor for Marange, while human rights groups allege that state security agents continue to commit human rights violations and other crimes at the diamond field. – ZimOnline