Angola, UNITA and the Origins of the Conflict-Diamond Problem

The modern idea of a “conflict diamond” was worked out largely around Angola. In the 1990s the rebel movement UNITA paid for its war with diamonds dug in territory it held, and those stones reached the world’s cutting centers with little difficulty. A sequence of responses, from UN sanctions in 1998 to an expert panel’s report in 2000, led to the Kimberley Process certification scheme, which began operating on January 1, 2003.

How diamonds financed UNITA

UNITA (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) fought the MPLA government for most of the period after Portugal withdrew in 1975. Angola held national elections in October 1992; UNITA rejected the result and went back to war. The Lusaka Protocol of November 1994 was meant to end that round of fighting, but the peace did not hold. Through these years, the 2000 UN panel of experts later confirmed, diamonds were UNITA’s main source of wealth and funding.

Much of Angola’s output came from alluvial deposits in the northeast, in Lunda Norte and along the Cuango valley, where diggers can work the gravels by hand. Such deposits are hard to police and easy for an armed group to exploit.

The UN panel of experts that reported in 2000 described several ways UNITA obtained stones:

• mining by its own people, or by labor it requisitioned, in areas it controlled;
• a “tax,” usually paid in rough, on independent diggers working in its territory;
• commissions from diamond buyers it licensed to operate there.

The panel also found that caches of rough, rather than cash or bank deposits, were UNITA’s preferred way to store wealth. Diamonds are small, valuable, durable and easy to sell, and the panel reported that UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi was reluctant to keep funds in banks once financial sanctions were imposed in 1998.

Estimates of UNITA’s diamond income

Nobody counted the money, and every published figure is an estimate.

Source	Period covered	Estimate
Global Witness, A Rough Trade (December 1998)	1992–1998	At least US$3.72 billion from diamond sales
UN Monitoring Mechanism, final report S/2002/1119 (October 2002)	1993–1998	About $2 billion to $4 billion

Global Witness also estimated that UNITA had controlled 60 to 70 percent of Angola’s diamond production since 1992. The UN panel reported that, for arms deals, UNITA prepared parcels of rough allegedly worth US$4 million to $5 million each, with the value agreed by experts supplied by the arms broker and by UNITA.

Sanctions, step by step

The Security Council tightened its measures against UNITA over five years:

1. Resolution 864 (September 15, 1993) imposed an arms and petroleum embargo on UNITA.
2. Resolution 1127 (August 28, 1997) restricted travel by UNITA officials and required the closure of UNITA offices abroad.
3. Resolution 1173 (June 12, 1998) froze UNITA’s funds, banned the supply of mining equipment and services to areas outside government administration, and required all states to prohibit the direct or indirect import from Angola of any diamonds not controlled through the government’s Certificate of Origin regime.
4. Resolution 1176 (June 24, 1998) brought those measures into force at 00:01 Eastern Daylight Time on July 1, 1998.

Resolution 1173 was the Council’s first diamond sanction. It set the pattern later applied to Sierra Leone in 2000, Liberia in 2001 and Côte d’Ivoire in 2005. Its weak point was clear from the start: a ban that depends on certificates is only as strong as the controls behind them, and a rough diamond carries no visible mark of the mine it came from.

A Rough Trade (1998)

On December 1, 1998, the campaign group Global Witness published A Rough Trade: The Role of Companies and Governments in the Angolan Conflict. It argued that governments were flouting the UN embargo and that the diamond business operated with too little scrutiny for anyone to tell legitimate goods from UNITA goods. It put particular pressure on De Beers and its Central Selling Organisation, then the dominant buyer of the world’s rough.

Its recommendations included revoking the sightholder status of any trader found dealing in UNITA diamonds and penalizing such traders with confiscation and fines. The most far-reaching asked the Council to amend Resolution 1173 so that all diamonds in trade carried a certificate of origin subject to independent expert scrutiny. A documented trail for every parcel, rather than an embargo on one source, is close to the principle the Kimberley Process later adopted.

The Fowler Report (2000)

In Resolution 1237 (May 7, 1999), the Council set up a panel of experts to investigate how the sanctions were being broken. The panel was chaired by Swedish ambassador Anders Möllander. Its final report was sent to the Council on March 10, 2000, as document S/2000/203, by Robert Fowler, Canada’s UN ambassador and chairman of the Council’s Angola sanctions committee. It is widely known as the Fowler Report after him.

Its diamond findings were blunt:

• Antwerp. The panel said Antwerp handled nearly 80 percent of the world’s rough trade, with rough turnover of about US$5 billion a year, and that its “extremely lax controls” made illegal trading easy. It described a grey market of an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 dealers, jewelers, manufacturers and brokers alongside about 3,500 registered traders. Once diamonds reached Antwerp, it said, they were virtually impossible to trace.
• Transit states. The panel concluded that authorities at the highest levels in Burkina Faso and Rwanda had violated the sanctions by arranging meetings between UNITA and Antwerp-based dealers and protecting the transactions.
• Inside Angola. Internal controls were so loose that almost anyone could legally possess, buy or sell diamonds, so UNITA stones could be passed through official channels and exported with valid certificates.
• De Beers. The panel noted that De Beers had decided in 1999 to stop buying Angolan diamonds, apart from one mine’s contracted output, and said this had made it harder and more costly for UNITA to sell.

The panel recommended forfeiture of rough whose legal origin could not be shown, an industry blacklist for traders caught breaking the sanctions, making dealing in undeclared rough a criminal offense in major trading centers, and a conference of experts to design controls that would follow diamonds from source to bourse.

From Angola to Kimberley

Belgium announced new enforcement steps on March 3, 2000. In Resolution 1295 of April 18, 2000, the Council welcomed them, along with measures taken by Antwerp’s Diamond High Council, and created a Monitoring Mechanism to continue the panel’s work. The same resolution welcomed a proposed meeting of experts to devise controls on diamonds from the point of origin to the bourses, and South Africa’s offer to host it.

That meeting took place in Kimberley, South Africa, in May 2000 and gave the process its name. Sierra Leone’s war, documented in Partnership Africa Canada’s January 2000 study The Heart of the Matter, added urgency; that story is told in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Conflict Diamonds. The milestones that followed:

• 2000: The World Diamond Council was founded to represent the industry in the process.
• December 1, 2000: UN General Assembly Resolution 55/56 supported an international certification scheme for rough diamonds, based primarily on national certification schemes.
• 2002: The World Diamond Council launched its System of Warranties, which carries conflict-free assurances from rough through to polished diamonds and jewelry.
• November 5, 2002: Ministers adopted the Interlaken Declaration in Switzerland. The Kimberley Process says 37 participants signed the scheme.
• January 1, 2003: The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme began operating. The Security Council gave it strong support in Resolution 1459 on January 28, 2003.

The Kimberley Process still defines conflict diamonds as rough diamonds used by rebel movements or their allies to finance conflict aimed at undermining legitimate governments. That wording reflects its origins in the UNITA case.

How the Angolan sanctions ended

Savimbi was killed in combat on February 22, 2002, according to the UN Secretary-General’s report on Angola of July 2002. The government and UNITA signed a Memorandum of Understanding on April 4, 2002, ending hostilities. On December 9, 2002, Resolution 1448 lifted the measures imposed under Resolutions 864, 1127 and 1173 and dissolved the sanctions committee.

Angola has been a Kimberley Process participant since 2003 and chaired the process in 2015. Kimberley Process statistics put its 2024 output at 14 million carats worth $1.41 billion. Its later rough-marketing arrangements are covered in Angola’s Diamond Trade and the Ascorp Era.

What the Angola case left unresolved

The certification scheme covers rough diamonds only; polished stones do not need a Kimberley Process certificate. The definition also concerns rebel movements, not abuses by governments or security forces. Global Witness left the Kimberley Process in December 2011, saying it had failed to deal with diamonds from Côte d’Ivoire, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. IMPACT, the successor to Partnership Africa Canada, left in December 2017, citing weak government controls and a lack of reform. How rough moves through the trade today is explained in The Diamond Pipeline.

Questions

Did Robert Fowler write the Fowler Report?

No. The report was written by the panel of experts chaired by Anders Möllander. Fowler, as chairman of the sanctions committee, transmitted it to the Security Council, and his name became attached to it.

Did the 1998 sanctions ban all Angolan diamonds?

No. Resolution 1173 banned imports of Angolan diamonds that were not controlled through the government’s Certificate of Origin regime. Government-certified exports remained legal, which is why the quality of Angola’s internal controls mattered so much.