Dirty diamonds and dirtier politics in Zimbabwe

Before I write anything about Zimbabwe, I should put my biases out there: as my colleagues at FP can attest, I think Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is pretty great. In fact, after interviewing and meeting him, I am convinced he could be Zimbabwe's "Mandela."

But from the beginning we've also known that Mugabe is no De Klerk. And two pieces of news coming out of Zimbabwe make this point both more clear and alarming than ever. The first has to do with Zimbabwe's diamond mines. Earlier this summer, the Kimberly Process -- a procedure established after the diamond-funded wars of the 1990s to prevent 'blood diamonds' from hitting the market -- recommended that Zimbabwe be suspended for failure to meet minimum standards.

What does "failure to comply" mean exactly? Well, as Global Witness, an NGO that monitors resource conflict, put it:

[C]ontrols over the diamond sector have been nonexistent and communities in and around the diamond fields have borne the brunt of a series of brutal measures to restore state control over the area. The authorities have failed to stop the military from carrying out abuses and profiting from the illicit trade in diamonds, effectively condoning - and perhaps even encouraging - the looting and attendant violence against civilians."

Sounds serious, right? Nope, the Kimberly Process decided today. Zimbabwe just needs some time to fix thing. Ahem, Mr. Mugabe, when might be convenient?

Maybe Mugabe will have time to work out how to control his soldiers after he works out another boiling conflict -- this one within his own government. After months of threatening to do so, Prime Minister Tsvangirai finally pulled out of the unity government three weeks ago, saying that unresolved issues and a failure to compromise on Mugabe's part had made his job impossible. Now, after Tsvangirai's tour of regional capitals and a summit of the negotiation-monitoring Southern African Development Community (SADC), the unity government is back. But Mugabe and Tsvangirai have only 15 days to work out how they are going to solve the world of differences between them. 

This is very bad news, not least because asking Mugabe to compromise in 15 days is like asking Kim Jong-Il to forfeit his nukes by next Thursday. Impossible. 

In my opinion, with bias acknowledged, the only ones more disgraced than Mugabe in all this are the internationals who forced the unity government coalition in the first place, but who have failed to follow through. SADC has been spineless, even under its newer, supposedly more firm moderator, South African President Jacob Zuma. They've hardly nudged Mugabe toward compromise, let alone given him the push he very badly needs. And the Kimberly Process just rendered itself rather uncredible by letting Zimbabwe go free.

Photo: JEKESAI NJIKIZANA/AFP/Getty Images