25.03.2009

International Campaign Fatal Transactions

Conflicts and Natural Resources in Africa

Fatal Transactions is an international consumer campaign, calling on the public and other interested organisations to ask governments and companies involved in extractive industries to implement effective controls to ensure that the trade in natural resources does not finance or otherwise support conflict and economic injustice in Africa. The campaign wants to raise awareness and increase understanding of how western companies are involved in conflicts in Africa through buying natural resources from combatants.

10 years of Fatal Transactions

The Fatal Transactions campaign started in 1999 at exactly the right time.

a) For decades, the value of a diamond was exclusively determined by the four Cs—Cut, Color, Clarity, and Carat. Only when non-governmental organizations drew public and international attention to the issue with the Fatal Transactions campaign and other initiatives, was a fifth C added to the four others: Conflict. The goal of the Fatal Transactions campaign is to transform ‘fatal’ transactions into ‘fair’ transactions; transactions that contribute to sustainable peace and reconstruction in Africa.

b) The civil wars of the late 1990s in countries like Angola, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo were significantly financed by the trade in conflict diamonds. The diamond trade was not the cause, but the engine of the conflict. In 1999, another study by Global Witness was able to prove the connection between the Angolan rebel movement UNITA and the diamond company De Beers. This study constituted an important empirical basis for the campaign. Not without justification, the industry feared that the value of the diamonds, artificially created by multi-million dollar promotional efforts, could drop due to the connection with African civil wars.

c) At the end of the 1990s, the constitution of the diamond industry was very vulnerable, as it faced an excess supply of diamonds and did not market or sell stones to a value of several billion US Dollars to artificially stabilize the price.

Taken together, these factors generated such enormous political pressure that soon the diamond industry could be convinced to re-think its activities. Immediately after the campaign launch, De Beers for example, announced its withdrawal from Angola. Additionally, media attention strengthened the enforcement of the existing UN-sanctions. Fatal Transactions never advocated a general boycott of diamonds, because—as mentioned in our first manifesto—there can be positive effects of the diamond trade, such as in Botswana. In 2000, non-governmental organizations contributed to the initiation of the Kimberley Process to stop the trade in conflict diamonds. The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) of 2002 would not have become reality without the pressure of NGOs. In October 1999, one of the campaign’s first press releases reads: “Fatal Transactions calls for De Beers to work for the establishment of an independent examination board that certifies rough diamonds.”

The Kimberley Process certification scheme is both the biggest success and the greatest challenge thus far to the Fatal Transactions campaign.

Under the KPCS, which came about with contributions from several NGOs such as Global Witness, Partnership Africa Canada and Network Movement for Justice and Development from Sierra Leone, more than 70 states have since committed themselves to renounce the trade in conflict diamonds. This includes intra-state control and certification of all exports of rough diamonds. The KPCS is a result of constructive collaboration between governments, industry and civil society.

In the narrow legal sense, however, the KPCS is not a legally binding agreement. In principle, legally unsecured agreements carry the risk of being instrumentalized by industrial enterprises for image-improvement, without such agreements contributing to tangible and sustainable political changes. Therefore Fatal Transactions and other NGO representatives urge a revision regarding the liability and the practical implementation of the KPCS:

a) Diamonds from conflict regions such as Côte d’Ivoire still reach the international market. Just recently the resource-financed conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has erupted again.

b) The definition of conflict diamonds is insufficient as it is limited to diamonds traded by illegitimate actors such as rebel movements.

c) Even in officially pacified regions, grave human rights violations and working conditions akin to slavery accompany diamond mining. With the continuation of economic and social exclusion, the conditions are created for a renewed outbreak of armed struggle.

The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme has since become to be treated as a model for a general definition of conflict resources. Therefore, a greater legal liability of the certification system is of particular significance. The industry’s cooperation is commendable, especially in the case of the diamond industry. In this however, the different interests and objectives of NGOs, business and politics should not be blurred.

Challenges for the Fatal Transactions campaign

So far, Fatal Transactions has placed the focus of the campaign on the dialogue with the industry, lobbying and research activities, and less on the mobilization of the public—the force ‘from below’. It cannot be excluded that a more substantial convention against conflict diamonds would have been politically feasible had there been significant international pressure from civil society such as prior to the adoption of the Ottawa Convention against anti-personnel mines.

It is a basic truth that NGOs do not have influence on political decision-makers and the practice of industrial enterprises because power has been formally transferred to them, but because NGOs are themselves an expression of independent publics, are carried by them and share specific expertise and interests with them. To create critical publics and simultaneously to bring back politics to the center stage of claims should be a central task of campaigning.