by Project Underground
Angola has been engulfed in civil war since 1975, when it gained independence from Portugal. Over the last ten years, Angola's civil war has killed an estimated 500,000 people and forced two million Angolans from their homes. Angolan government forces, once backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba, are now funded by oil revenues. The rebel National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), formerly supported by the US Central Intelligence Agency, pays for its weapons with money derived from diamond exports.
Angola currently produces nearly $10 million worth of oil each day - a figure that is expected to triple within the next decade. Meanwhile, multinational oil firms are offering hundreds of millions of dollars to explore virgin areas of Angola's coastal seabed. Increased attacks by UNITA have caused the government to sell more drilling licenses in order to pay for the ongoing civil war.
"In spite of a civil war, companies are still falling over each other trying to get a piece of the action in Angola," said Kase Lawal, chairman and chief executive officer of Camac Holdings, a Houston-based energy company with offices in several African cities.
According to Patrick Smith, editor of the London-based newsletter Africa Confidential, military hardware suppliers have equity stakes in all of the recent oil bloc purchases.
The Angolan government announced that the site holders for three main offshore oil concessions are BP/Amoco, Exxon, and Elf/Aquitaine. The other equity partners confirmed are Pro-Dev, Falcon and Naphta - three firms with links to defense and security specialists and no apparent oil industry expertise. Chevron is a longest-standing operator in Angola. Cabinda Gulf Oil Company (CABGOC), the Chevron subsidiary, has worked in Angola largely untroubled by war for more than 40 years.
CABGOC helped export the country's first cargo of crude in 1968 and produced continuously during the anti-colonial war and the civil war that followed Angola's independence from Portugal in 1975.
Chevron employees live aboard an offshore oil platform - a little piece of America perched in the placid Angolan waters a few minutes' helicopter ride off the southwest African coast. Chevron's multinational team of neatly uniformed workers manages 240,000 barrels per day - around half the production from Angola's oldest and most productive wells.
"It is a truly staggering anomaly," said Paul Hare, head of the US-Angola Chamber of Commerce. "On the one hand you have a booming oil sector, and on the other, a resumption of the war and a humanitarian disaster that is only going to grow worse."
The Diamond Wars
While the Angolan government finances its armies with oil profits, Angola's rebel group UNITA buys the arms to wage its ongoing civil war with profits from diamond sales. According to the British human rights group Global Witness [www.oneworld.org/ globalwitness], these diamond sales have bought guns, grenades, and landmines for the rebel fighters. The United Nations estimates that UNITA has earned as much as $4 billion over the last eight years from diamond sales.
A four-year cease-fire in the mid-nineties held promise for permanent peace but, in December 1998, UNITA relaunched the war with money made from investing its diamond profits. "These conflicts are referred to as the diamond wars," said Felix Downes-Thomas, the head of the UN Peace-building Support Office. The UN has imposed sanctions against UNITA.
Diamonds not only finance the war, they are also one of the principal reasons for the fighting, according to Downes-Thomas. Many of Africa's wars, including the one raging in Angola, are being fought in pursuit of mineral riches.
Diamonds have spawned a culture of violence in Angola. According to a 1998 UN report, the DiamondWorks mining company has well-established connections to mercenaries. Tony Buckingham of BranchEnergy, a UK company that owns one-quarter of DiamondWorks' shares, is known for brokering the entry of Executive Outcomes into Angola. (Executive Outcomes is a South African mercenary army that includes former members of apartheid death squads.)
Another threat to civilians is the arrival of "garimpeiros," heavily armed bands of illegal prospectors that have poured into the diamond-rich areas with hopes of digging their way out of poverty.
Global Witness has started a "Fatal Transactions" campaign to expose the "shameful secret" that the world's $42 billion diamond trade is supporting Africa's armed civil strife. The goal is to put diamonds in the same class as fur - ill-gotten gains that are more a source of bloodshed and suffering than of beauty.
In response to the campaign, De Beers Managing Director Gary Ralf announced on October 5 that the company would end diamond-buying operations in Angola. However, De Beers will continue to buy diamonds through a joint venture with the Angolan government, raising questions about De Beers' complicity in the fighting. (De Beers controls 70 percent of the world's rough gem diamonds and half of the mined diamonds.)
"The campaign is not anti-diamond but it is anti-war," Global Witness explains. "Diamond revenue can bring enormous benefit to a country's economy if transparently controlled, such as in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa."
From Drillbits & Tailings, the newsletter of Project Underground [1916A MLK Jr. Way, Berkeley, CA 94704, (510) 705-8981, www.moles.org].
GoldBusters
Life, land, clean water and clean air are more precious than gold. Gold mining damages landscapes, habitats, biodiversity, and human health. Mining pumps vast amounts of water from aquifers, depleting local water supplies. Gold mines contaminate surface waters with cyanide, acid mine drainage, heavy metals and mercury.
Most governments represent the interests of mining corporations. It is time to replace the debt-ridden economic model of mineral extraction with economies based on self-determination and local self-sufficiency.
Because it is the consumption of gold jewelry that drives the gold mining industry, the Goldbusters Coalition is asking people around the world to stop buying gold.
Goldbusters has called for a moratorium on gold exploration and a ban on new mines. Goldbusters is asking that global financial institutions and governments stop funding gold mines.
For more info, contact the Rainforest Information Center [Box 368, Lismore, NSW 2480, Australia, forests.org/ric].
The War of Oil and Diamonds