MUTARE (Zimbabwe): Ronald seems a respectable, church-on-Sunday type. Not the kind you would find prospecting for diamonds here in Zimbabwe’s wild east, a world of swaggering foreigners, dirty money and shoot-to-kill police. Not the sort who would utter movie-script lines like this one: “You can make $15,000 or $20,000 in 30 minutes. But you can die within seconds.”

Ronald, like the rest of Zimbabwe, has caught Africa’s nastiest ailment – diamond fever.

Sleepy towns such as Mutare have blinked awake to find their quiet streets buzzing with opportunists and black marketeers. Every day, illicit miners show up at the hospital with gaping bullet wounds and flimsy excuses for how they got them. Characters straight out of Blood Diamond cruise like sharks.

But the biggest sharks are nowhere to be seen: officials of President Robert Mugabe’s regime are looting the diamonds, industry sources and members of Zimbabwe’s security services say.

Not only are they personally enriching themselves with one of the few natural resources left in this ruined country, party fat cats might be finding life support in the diamond riches, Western diplomats and analysts fear, and gaining one more motive to cling to power.

“I think the political implications are very interesting,” said a diplomat based in Harare, the capital. “Right now, the government’s getting very little. If it can regularise this in some way, it could really prop things up for a while. It could give them some time to pursue their interests and just keep going.”

The diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid political problems with Zimbabwe’s government. Others who were willing to discuss the diamond trade declined to be identified for fear of repercussions.

Industry and security sources say government leaders have their own syndicates to dig and trade diamonds on the black market.

‘Filthiest game in town’

“The diamond game is the filthiest game in town, and everyone’s into it,” says one source familiar with the gem industry. “It’s not even semi-organised chaos. It’s a bunch of thieves who backstab each other.

“A lot of leaders of the political regime are involved in trading. They have their own diggers and traders. But it’s all to their personal account. They’ve all got a vested interest in chaos.”

Diplomats, industry sources and some non-governmental agencies believe that the Marange field here could be one of the most significant diamond discoveries in decades.

Mugabe’s regime is certainly behaving as if it is. In mid-November, the government sent in the military to crack down on unsanctioned miners. Soldiers even fired on miners from helicopters, local sources say. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change says nearly 140 people have been killed.

Crippled economy

In a country where the paralysed economy offers few opportunities, diamonds are almost irresistible. Ronald, 31, who had given up working for an insurance company for black-market currency dealing, was drawn into illegal mining. He gave only his first name, fearing possible jail.

Ronald says he saw five unsanctioned miners, including two women, shot to death by police on the diamond field in late November as they fled carrying large sacks of soil. One of those killed was a policeman mining illegally.

“It’s like war,” Ronald says.

At dawn that same day, he had been in the diamond field filling bags with dirt to carry off and later sieve. “We heard a gunshot. It was very close. Then everybody, including myself, started to run, carrying our bags of soil. We were running and running. We were more than 50 and they were firing shots at us.”

They scattered, but Ronald didn’t want to drop his sack, thinking he might have a gigantic diamond. Finally, exhausted, he ditched it to save himself.

“That was the day I thought, ‘Maybe this is the end of my life.”

Yet he went back in.

Local industry figures say that in the past 12 months, high-quality diamonds have increasingly been turning up. The Reserve Bank chief, Gideon Gono, said last month that more than 500 syndicates were operating in Marange and estimated that the government was losing $1.2 billion in diamond revenue every month.

But a Belgian-based diamond expert scoffed at the figure – equivalent to global diamond production – and said 90 per cent of the gems were low-quality industrial diamonds.

When the rush started, miners were loath to leave their diggings even for water: it was common for them to swap a diamond for a bottle of water, or so the story goes.

Industry sources whisper the names of notorious international diamond dealers said to have fingers in the Marange pie.

“It’s a ZANU-PF place,” opposition lawmaker Pishai Muchauraya says. “No one is allowed to get in there. If you’re a special person, you will go there and you will be allowed just 20 minutes. That’s where you can get clear diamonds.”

But Ronald, the illegal miner, says he paid a bribe to a policeman to spend several hours at the place. He got only one tiny diamond, which he sold for $150. Itai, 28, got into trading diamonds 18 months ago. He smuggles them in his mouth across the border to sell to Lebanese and Israeli dealers in Manica, Mozambique. He has bought two houses and five cars. Three months ago, he says, he and his aunt traded a clear 30-carat stone as big as his thumbnail for $30,000 in a hotel-room deal with an Israeli.

He says most of the illegal miners are well educated: “They’re teachers, nurses, soldiers, policemen and civil servants.”

The prison official said the real aim of the recent crackdown was to give the syndicates operated by top ruling party figures free rein.

“In effect, these operations are not to restore order but to make sure (the syndicates) can take the diamonds,” the official says. “But what is devastating us is that they’re actually killing people. They’re shooting to kill.”

Political violence and power struggles in Manicaland province, where the Marange diamonds are found, suggest how important the area is to Mugabe and ZANU-PF. Manicaland was one of the areas most severely hit by political violence after the elections in March, which saw ZANU-PF lose the Mutare council, the mayoral post and 20 parliamentary seats there to the Movement for Democratic Change.

Although Zimbabwe’s diamonds are not technically “blood diamonds,” or ones that fuel wars, they are bloody in nature.

Isaac, 38, and Richard, 32, brought their brother Cledious to the hospital after he was shot in the back while mining illegally. The three brothers and two cousins were in a tunnel at about 6am when police threw in a tear-gas canister.

“We started running away. He was the last to come out. We heard a gunshot and we looked back and saw our brother on the ground,” Isaac says. Police took him to their camp and dumped him, unattended and bleeding profusely.

“The base wasn’t guarded,” Richard says. “I went in to collect him. We carried him five kilometres to our base camp. He was crying, saying, ‘I might die.”

The brothers assured him that he would live. In their hearts, though, they fear he faces a slow and painful death.

But seeing fortunes being made all around them, they won’t give up mining, even if their brother dies.

“If one person is killed,” Richard says, “there’s more for the rest.”—Dawn/LA Times-Washington Post News Service