20120209
Reuters
CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - A review of a global scheme to monitor blood diamonds could bring changes to the Kimberley Process, under fire over its damaging loopholes, but the United States on Tuesday dampened hopes of a swift and comprehensive overhaul.

Speaking on the sidelines of a major industry gathering in South Africa, Gillian Milovanovic, the U.S. diplomat appointed last month to chair the process for 2012, said a committee led by Botswana was carrying out the review, but would not present results until November.

"The greatest challenge is to get agreement on what changes have taken place and what kind of an evolution this suggests for the organization," Milovanovic said, in one of her first public appearances since the United States took the rotating chairmanship this year.

"It is important that the process continues to be relevant and I think that requires a certain amount of revision and reform," she told reporters.

But she dashed some campaigners' hopes that the U.S. arrival as chair of the process at the start of 2012, a year short of its 10-year anniversary, would mark rapid change.

"The organization, it is no secret, had two years of extremely painful discussions and I think that now everyone is feeling a sense that its time to refocus on the process itself and on more than one country," she said.

Milovanovic said the process, under the U.S. presidency, would not review the decision to allow Zimbabwean diamonds from Marange, one of the biggest diamond finds in decades, onto world markets.

The Kimberley Process was set up in January 2003, aimed at cutting off "blood diamond" financing for rebel groups fighting a U.N.-recognised government.

But a disagreement over Zimbabwe, where human rights groups estimate at least 200 small-scale miners were killed when Zimbabwe's security forces seized the fields at Marange, exposed a crucial loophole: the scheme had no mechanism to hold a producer country to account.

Zimbabwe in November was finally allowed to export diamonds, after months of debate that brought the $30 billion rough diamond industry to a virtual halt. Campaigner Global Witness, a founding member of the process, pulled out a month later, calling the scheme a failure.

"We don't believe that moderate reforms will achieve much, but rather that a comprehensive overhaul of the KP framework is necessary," Annie Dunnerbacke, a campaigner at Global Witness, told Reuters.

"We don't have a huge amount of optimism and hope the U.S. will seriously consider alternatives to the process."

Angola, a founding and leading member of the process, said it saw little need for change.

"The most important thing is to understand why we set up the process... to ensure diamond money was not used by rebel groups to buy weapons. And in this, we have been successful," Antonio Carlos Sumbula, chairman of Angolan state diamond producer Endiama said.

South Africa takes over the one-year rotating chairmanship in 2013, the tenth anniversary of the Kimberley Process.