Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Luanda (Fides Agency)- The Angolan government strikes again against illegal diamond trafficking with a new turn of screw. According to Fides Agency sources, “in the night between July 14th and 15th, the police in Cafunfo, the main centre in Angola for diamond mining (the so-called garimpo), searched the houses of several people from Senegal, Mali, Guinea and other western African Countries, who work as diamond traffickers and arrested some of them”.
“At the beginning - the Fides sources said - we thought it was just one of the routine controls of clandestine immigrants working as illegal diamond traffickers. In the following days the operation spread to other areas, where many other garimperos live. The population then realised the government had initiated stage two of its Operation Brillante, the expulsion of all foreigners connected to mining and illegally trafficking diamonds from Angola” (on Operation Brillante see Fides April 26th, 2004).
According to our sources, at Cafunfo the operation has still not reached the scale of April and May, but at Capenda Camulemba, another “diamond-packed” site, hundreds of western Africans have already been arrested and taken on army trucks to Sarimo, and from there to Luanda. It is not the army that carries out these operations, as in stage one, but a special police unit called “Rapid Intervention Police”, which used to be the Police fighting unit during the war.
In Muxinda, which is part of the City of Capenda Camulemba, some people were reportedly killed by the Police by accident. They shoot to frighten the traffickers and prevent them from escaping. Yesterday, on July 19th, at Xamikelengue, another site within Capenda Camulemba, reports say two people, western Africans, were killed, and the women they used to live with and which protected them were raped. The Police launched an operation to locate and arrest several diamond traffickers who sought refuge in the fields along river Cacuilo. For this reason, the garimperos were ordered to stay in the villages and not to venture along the river, in the sites where diamonds are, to avoid becoming targets for the Police.
Fides sources point out a few shadowy aspects of the operation: “Why are the Police arresting and expelling only western Africans, and not the hundreds of thousands of Congolese who entered Lunda Norte again in June and July?”
One tradesman in Capenda suggests that “it is well-known that Islamic terrorist networks are infiltrated in the African diamond trafficking, to finance their subversive activities; Angola has proof that many people from Senegal and citizens from other Countries in western Africa, 100% Muslims, act on behalf of an Islamic terrorist network, which supports them, protects them and provides them with the sums they need to start their activity by purchasing diamonds”. Our sources add “It is in fact well-known that many mosques born in tens in these years around diamantiferous sites, are places where terrorists are spreading their roots”. Everywhere today the clash between extremist Islamic fundamentalism and true Islam is growing more and more in scale and one’s financing means against the other’s shall be a significant factor in the match between the two forms of Islam. (L.M.) (Fides Agency 21/7/2004 lines 46, words 587)
