“The discovery of significant alluvial diamond deposits in the Marange area of eastern Zimbabwe [Manicaland Province] in June 2006 should have been a means of salvation for the virtually bankrupt country after ten years of chaos that saw world record inflation and the nation brought to its knees. Instead, it has led to greed, corruption and exploitation on a grand scale, the use of forced labour—both adults and children—horrifying human rights abuses, brutal killings, degradation of the environment and the massive enrichment of a select few.”*
Soon after diamonds were discovered, the ZANU-PF government declared the fields open to everyone, and so began the Great Marange Diamond Rush. Tens of thousands of teachers, nurses, bus drivers, goat herders, schoolchildren, and street kids converged on eastern Zimbabwe between 2007 and 2008 to dig for diamonds. Many of them hid in the bush during the day and burrowed under fences at night, and from dusk to dawn all of them sifted the dirt for the precious stone that might change their lives forever.
The news of the diamond rush spread around the world, and soon buyers from Belgium, Lebanon, Israel, Botswana, South Africa, and China descended on the town of Mutare. They hid in hotels and guesthouses, since, as foreigners, they were easily spotted by undercover intelligence agents. And once the country’s Reserve Bank governor admitted that Zimbabwe had lost, in only nine months’ time, four hundred million US dollars’ worth of diamonds smuggled out of Marange, the soldiers and secret policemen were sent in to make arrests. “We must protect the nation’s riches from crooks and scoundrels,” one minister said.
The government launched a nationwide police operation, End to Illegal Panning, aimed at stopping the illegal mining and trade in diamonds. During the operation, police deployed some six hundred police officers, arrested about nine thousand persons in Marange, and seized gems and minerals with an estimated total value of seventy million US dollars. For the next two years, police committed numerous human rights abuses, including killings, torture, beatings, and harassment.
At the peak of the scramble for diamonds in October 2008, more than thirty-five thousand people from Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Lebanon, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Belgium, and India were either miners in the fields or buyers in Marange.
With the government teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, Operation No Return was launched, using the Zimbabwe National Army, Air Force, and Central Intelligence Organisation, in an attempt to both restore a degree of order and allow key army units access to the Marange riches. The attack, in daylight, was carried out by the Joint Operational Command, the country’s top military commanders, using tanks, bulldozers, and helicopters to mow down the miners who ran for cover in the hills. Soldiers opened fire on defenseless miners, dogs were set loose to maul them, and some had their stomachs cut open by soldiers searching for stones. At the end of Operation No Return between two hundred and four hundred people had been killed, many of them teenagers.
Today, the diamond fields are run by the government of Robert Mugabe. In March 2013 it was reported that a 2.5-million-carat stockpile, valued at five hundred million dollars, had mysteriously disappeared before making it into the Zimbabwean treasury.