In an age of supply-chain transparency, when a $4 latte can come with an explanation of where the coffee was grown and how, even luxury goods like diamonds are under pressure to prove that they can be sustainable. “If people stop buying our diamonds, we won’t be able to eat,” says Mwanza. But Congolese mining officials say diamonds are a vital source of income-if not the only source-for an estimated 1 million small-scale, or artisanal, miners in Congo who dig by hand for the crystals that will one day adorn the engagement ring of a bride- or groom-to-be. Given the ugly realities of the diamond business, it would be tempting to forgo buying a diamond altogether, or to choose, as Rodriguez eventually did, to purchase a synthetic alternative. Instead of blessings, our diamonds bring us nothing but misfortune.” I can understand why you Americans say you don’t want to buy our diamonds. “We have so much wealth, yet we stay so poor. “It’s a scandal,” says Zacharie Mamba, head of Tshikapa’s mining division.
And as Mwanza’s life demonstrates, diamond mining even outside a conflict area can be brutal work, performed by low-paid, sometimes school-age miners. But more than 10 years later, while the process did reduce the number of conflict diamonds on the market, it remains riddled with loopholes, unable to stop many diamonds mined in war zones or under other egregious circumstances from being sold in international markets. In 2003 the diamond industry established the Kimberley Process, an international certification system designed to reassure consumers that the diamonds they bought were conflict-free. It is an industry that was supposed to be cleaned up, after the turn-of-the-millennium notoriety surrounding so-called blood or conflict diamonds-precious stones mined in African war zones, often by forced labor, and used to fund armed rebel movements. Mwanza and Rodriguez are on opposite ends of an $81.4 billion-a-year industry that links the mines of Africa, home to 65% of the world’s diamonds, with the sparkling salesrooms of high-end jewelry retailers around the world. “We do this work so we can find something that will let us eat,” says Mwanza. Many parents choose to send their teenagers to the mines instead. Teachers at government schools demand payment from students to supplement their meager salaries. Hundreds of miners die every year in tunnel collapses that are seldom reported because they happen so often. None of the roads are paved, not even the airport runway. Yet the provincial capital, Tshikapa, betrays nothing of the wealth that lies beneath the ground.
Mwanza’s mine, a ruddy gash on the banks of a small stream whose waters will eventually reach the Congo River, is at the center of one of the world’s most important sources of gem-quality diamonds. He knows of at least a dozen other boys from his community who have been forced to work in the mines to survive. A large stone, maybe a carat, could earn him $100, he says, enough to let him dream about going back to school, after dropping out at 12 to go to the mines-the only work available in his small village.
It’s been three months since Mwanza last found a diamond, and his debts-for food, for medicine for his father-are piling up. His father is blind his mother abandoned them several years ago. Mining work is grueling, and he is plagued by backaches, but that is nothing compared with the pain of seeing his family go hungry. To Mbuyi Mwanza, a 15-year-old who spends his days shoveling and sifting gravel in small artisanal mines in southwest Democratic Republic of Congo, diamonds symbolize something much more immediate: the opportunity to eat.
0 kommentar(er)
