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I would not boast of Marc Rich and Gary Winnick being donors to any charity I was involved with. I would want my name off the list. Apparently Lev Leviev doesn't have a problem with it.

That's because you're a bigot.

March 7, 2002 UPI Story
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"Antwerp and dirty diamond rumors"

In his office high above this city's bustling diamond sector, Mark Van Bockstael offered a lesson of sorts on African geography.

"These," said Van Bockstael, "are the good guys." With a pointer, the international affairs director of Belgium's Diamond High Council tapped a giant map of the Democratic Republic of Congo hanging on the wall of his office, which overlooks the city's bustling diamond district. Sprinkled across the vast relief were small pins indicating diamond mines controlled by the government of Congolese President Joseph Kabila.

"And these," he continued, pointing to another set of pins indicating rebel-held diamond mines, "are the bad guys. "But in the Congo, because of the political balances, nobody wants to say these are the good guys, and these are the bad guys," Van Bockstael told United Press International. "And the problem for us is -- how, on the trade floor, are we going to do anything about it?"

Defining legal or illicit diamonds is only one of many problems besetting Antwerp's venerable diamond industry, where 80 percent of the world's rough diamonds are bought and sold.

Stung two years ago by a United Nations report criticizing lax Belgian diamond regulations, the government imposed some of the world's strictest import rules. But new allegations suggest rough diamonds from conflict-torn countries like Congo are still being traded illegally in Antwerp, enriching not only tribal warlords, but Middle Eastern terrorists as well.

Reports in The Washington Post late last year claimed Hezbollah and al Qaida terrorist networks reaped millions of dollars from illicit diamonds mined by rebels in Sierra Leone and Congo, with the best stones smuggled into Antwerp. Not only did two Antwerp diamond dealers facilitate the trade, the newspaper said citing intelligence sources, but the city was transforming into a financial headquarters for radical Islamic groups.

If true, the accounts pose new challenges for Europe's fight against terrorism. But Belgian officials are reluctant to admit that illicit diamond dollars could be bankrolling local terrorist networks.

"From the very start, the Belgians have been careful not to make assumptions about the motivation and purpose in the arrests they've made," said one American diplomat. "But the information that's been pieced together suggests that there is a connection."

The tangled ties between diamonds and terrorism also raise questions about the effectiveness of Belgian diamond regulations, and an ambitious international plan to control trafficking of conflict diamonds. Known as the Kimberly Process, the new international system aims to be up and running by the year's end.

"The Belgium government has successfully managed to give the impression they are concentrating and cracking down on illicit diamonds," said Alex Yearsley, a campaigner against conflict diamonds for Global Witness, a London-based advocacy group. "But from all the information we get from diamond dealers, it's business as usual in Antwerp."

In interviews with UPI, government officials and diamond dealers said they were stunned by the Post's reports and argued the amount of illicit diamonds entering Antwerp had dropped significantly in the past two years.

Nonetheless, the allegations recently prompted an Antwerp court to launch a judicial investigation. A former U.S. ambassador to Sierra Leone, Joe Melrose, also visited Antwerp in December, to speak with diamond dealers and experts.

"Do we have terrorists as diamond people in Antwerp? I'm pretty confident that we don't," said Van Bockstael of the diamond council, which co-regulates the industry with the Belgian government. "Is it possible that somebody has, as a client, a terrorist network? That's a totally different question."

In the closed and secretive world of Antwerp's diamond industry, where Lebanese Muslims, Hassidic Jews, Israelis and Indians collaborate and compete, an answer is hard to find.

But Christian Dietrich, an African diamond analyst at Antwerp's International Peace Information Service, recently traced almost a dozen local companies with direct or indirect ties to one of the diamond dealers in the investigation, Aziz Nassour, who now lives in Lebanon.

"I think it's quite common there's money laundered through the diamond trade," said Dietrich, who nonetheless remains skeptical about alleged local terrorist links. "But it's not just here. It's South Africa, and Israel, and a lot of other places."

In a separate incident last month, Belgian police arrested another alleged diamond middleman, Sanjivan Ruprah, outside Brussels. According to French and Belgian news reports, Ruprah worked closely with Victor Bout, a Russian suspected of supplying the Taliban and Al Qaida with weapons.

French and Belgium newspapers have reported that Ruprah was allowed to remain free for months in exchange for providing the CIA and other U.S. authorities with information on alleged arms deals with al Qaida and the Taliban.

But Johan Peleman, a Belgian weapons and diamonds expert suggests Ruprah may have been delivering bogus information.

"I met Ruprah almost weekly in the last few months," Peleman said in a telephone interview. "And since early October, he traveled to Washington at least three times. He was milking me on al Qaida, and connections to Africa, and feeding that to the Americans."

For their part, diamond merchants and government officials argue Belgium alone cannot regulate illegal diamond sales made in dirt-poor African countries, where customs agents are corruptible, and the lines of legality are blurred at best.

The United Nations, for example, has banned trade in conflict diamonds -- those enriching certain African rebel groups -- mined in Angola and Sierra Leone, and demanded special certificates for all others. But no such ban, or certification system, currently exists for diamonds mined in Congo, which have helped fuel more than three years of civil war.

"There is an ethics problem and a business problem" when it comes to Congo, said diamond dealer Samy Doppelt, whose company, S. Langer Diamonds, does business with the Congolese government. "Should you work in rebel territory? That's an ethics problem. But when it comes to business, it's totally legal."

At a July 2000 meeting in Antwerp, the world's major diamond organizations issued a joint resolution vowing to crack down on the conflict-diamond trade. The city's top diamond banks warned customers they would sever relations with anyone dealing in conflict diamonds.

Brussels also earned kudos for issuing import statistics, and working with several African governments to put controls in place.

But critics claim Belgium's own regulations are not always enforced, and customs agents screen flights from Africa with a casual eye.

"You can basically lie and say the diamonds are from the Caribbean," said Dietrich, who travels to Africa regularly. "Even though there wasn't a flight that day from the Caribbean."

Governments and private groups hope international regulations under the Kimberly Process will root out most conflict diamonds from the market. The new rules would require certificates for all legal diamonds, and procedures to trace their journey from mines to trading hubs like Antwerp.

Even so, Antwerp dealers like Gregg Hupert argue terrorists and ordinary crooks will merely switch their sights to other lucrative raw materials, such as exotic timber and coltan, a metallic ore that ends up in most laptops, mobile phones and other electronic devices.

"People don't fight because of diamonds. They fight for power," said Hupert, managing director of Independent Diamond Valuators and who has worked in Africa for years. "Everybody wants to come down on the diamond business. They think this is going to be the quick fix. Wrong."

You play the guilt by association game to further your agenda. There are a fair number of priests who have molested kids in the current incarnation of the Church. Is the Church guilty of sex abuse, when, most of the priests until recently were just shfited to area?? Yes or no answer will do.

Also, if I had a website I would not allow you to post there. You post lies and innuendo. But I am forced to share this place with the likes of you. In spite of that, I am not guilty of the sort of innuendo and game playing you are, just because you post at the same site.