June 2007
Volume 20 Number 6
AFRICA
"Blood Diamond: Double Think & Deception, Part 1 :
"Naming the players behind the scenes"
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By keith harmon snow & Rick Hines
Z MAGAZINE
On the Web at:
http://zmagsite.zmag.org/June2007/snow0607.html#author
...Where Do Diamonds Come From?
Belgian-born Maurice Tempelsman has a long and bloody history in Africa. When Congo’s first premier, Patrice Lumumba, pledged to return diamond wealth to the newly independent Congo in the early 1960s, Tempelsman, who began with De Beers in the 1950s, helped engineer the coup that consolidated the dictatorship of 29-year-old Colonel Mobutu, as well as the coup against Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah. Diamonds were at stake in each of these coups.
“I believe this was the beginning of what we now know of as conflict diamonds in the Congo,” says blood diamond expert Janine Roberts. “From then on diamonds would be extensively used to discreetly fund wars, coups, repression, and dictatorships in Africa.” According to Roberts, “Tempelsman’s role in the confluence of public policy and private profit as a middleperson for the De Beers diamond cartel may have shaped every major U.S. covert action in Africa since the early 1950s. Declassified memos and cables between former U.S. presidents and State Department officials over the last four decades directly linked Tempelsman to the destabilization of Zaire/Congo, Sierra Leone, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Rwanda and Ghana.”
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni meets with mining tycoon Tony Buckingham (far right)—photo courtesy of New Vision newspaper, Kampala
For over 35 years Maurice and his son Leon Tempelsman worked the diamond connection behind the repression of Mobutu Sese Seko and his Israeli-trained shock troops. Now, 47 years later, the Tempelsman empire remains rock solid behind three companies: Leon Tempelsman & Sons, De Beers, and LKI (which supplies Tiffany & Co. and Cartier). A client of Adlai Stevenson’s law firm during the first Congo crises (1960-1970), Tempelsman later hired Lawrence Devlin, a CIA station chief responsible for covert operations in Katanga, to maintain the Mobutu diamond/cobalt connections into the late 1980s. In 2002 Tempelsman offered Namibia’s President Sam Nujoma an $80 million interest free “loan” to bridge Namibia’s budgetary shortfall against future sales of Namibia’s gemstones.
Tempelsman is the deep pockets of many U.S. politicians, donating to the campaigns of John Kerry (D); Ed Royce (R); Tom Daschle (D); Barack Obama (D); Maxine Waters (D); John Rockefeller (D); Richard Gephardt (D); Howard Wolpe (D); and Patrick (D) and Edward Kennedy (D). He also contributed to the 1988 win of George H. W. Bush. Tempelsman exploited ties with Anthony Lake, Clinton’s National Security adviser, who intervened at the U.S. Export-Import Bank on Tempelsman’s behalf.
Tempelsman contributed some $500,000 to Clinton for president and he is currently backing Hillary. He traveled at Clinton’s side on the 1998 presidential Africa tour...
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