SOLDIERS tasked with guarding diamonds in Marange are illegally mining the precious stones themselves

MARANGE - Soldiers sent to guard a newly found diamond field in eastern Zimbabwe from illegal miners are making a fortune, illicitly mining the precious stones by night for sale on a thriving black market for minerals, ZimOnline has discovered. 

The government - which diamond industry experts say could have lost nearly US$300 million to illegal miners, dealers and smugglers who had invaded the Marange diamond field - last month deployed soldiers to flush out illegal miners and secure the area in preparation for organised mining of the diamonds.     

But the soldiers will for sure never be able to thank their lucky stars enough, for many would by the end of their tour of duty here have become super rich from stealing the same diamonds they are here to safeguard as our two-man crew that spent a week undercover in Marange witnessed. 

Our contact, Thomas Nedziwe, who is a local villager, for the umpteenth time tries to reassure us that if we lay low, if we kept our cool, at some point it would be our turn to be hired on the teams of local villagers helping the soldiers extract the mainly industrial diamonds from the bowls of the earth.  

“You have to be patient, remember these are soldiers we are dealing with, you cannot be too upfront with them,” Nedziwe (not his real name) said, probably getting irritated by our incessant nagging about whether we would ever get a chance to be hired as helpers. 

There are about 100 soldiers and some police officers at Chiadzwa in Marange district, about 100 km south-west of the eastern border city of Mutare where the illegal diamond mining is taking place.  

The security men have organised themselves into groups that in turn recruit their own teams of local villagers to help in the extraction of the diamonds. The villagers are paid 10 percent of proceeds realized from the mining while the rest is shared among the soldiers and police. 

The villagers are carefully vetted before being hired, with their national identity cards inspected to make sure they come form Marange and are not undercover investigators sent by army or police superiors from Harare. 

Having spent two days last week roaming around at Chiadzwa without being hired we were getting anxious we might never be taken on the mining teams. 

But soon our turn came on the Friday, after managing to slip through the vetting process we were taken on one of the team of helpers to fill in for some of the villagers who had gone off for the weekend.  

"Varume hatingafe nenyota iwo makumbo ari mumvura," said an army captain in the vernacular Shona language as he welcomed us into the group. Loosely translated: guys we can’t die of thirst whilst standing in water - meaning the soldiers could not suffer Zimbabwe’s worsening poverty whilst they could escape poverty through selling diamonds. 

For the next four or five hours, it was gruelling work, with the captain – whose colleagues later identified only as Mashiri – leading the search for the precious stones.   

Using powerful army supplied searchlights and torches, we dug deep into the earth and shoveled out mounds of rock and soil – once we found the diamond stone, it was taken to another section for sorting by more experienced hands. 

It was an uneasy situation to be seen to be asking or answering questions. But on prodding an elderly villager we were working with in one of the long trenches, he explained: “Once there are enough diamonds, representatives of the soldiers are sent out to Mutare where there are ready buyers . . . they never sell to locals or the many dealers who come here trying to buy diamonds.” 

And true to the villager’s word, the next morning the soldiers and police were in a mean mood, protecting the nation’s riches and chasing away a host of precious stone dealers who regularly drop by, some driving cars with foreign registration numbers. 

Meanwhile, in Mutare city the prices of diamonds have shot up on the black-market because of rising demand and also because of the fact that most diamonds sold on the market are now almost exclusively from the mining activities of the security agents after illegal panners were chased away from Marange. 

Inferior quality stones that used to sell for Z$10 000 now sell at around Z$30 000, while the high quality gems that sold for between $100 000 and $150 000 now sell for not less than $350 000. 

When we confronted Mines Minister Amos Midzi with the information we obtained from our investigations in Marange, he professed ignorance of the illegal activities of the army but promised to take up the matter with the Ministries of Defence and Home Affairs in charge of the army and police respectively. 

Midzi said: "We put security agents there to protect the area because we want to do the proper thing. And my information is that the place is now calm. I will however take up the matter you have raised with the security ministries for investigation." 

But our friend Nedziwe probably summed it up well. “By the time the government people in Harare decide what to do with diamonds at Marange there won’t be much left and these guys from the army and police would probably have resigned their jobs to enjoy their loot in peace,” he said. - ZimOnline