TOM PORTEOUS, the UK Director for Human Rights Watch, released a crucifying report on Zimbabwe's Chiadzwa diamonds, actively usurping the powers of the Kimberley Process monitor, Abbey Chikane, who declared that Zimbabwe met the minimum mining requirements of the KPSC.

Porteous wants Zimbabwe's diamonds banned and he also wants extraction of the diamonds to be "immediately halted", on the alleged grounds of human rights abuses at Chiadzwa.

Tom Porteous is part of the Human Rights Watch machinery, himself being a publicly known British supremacist who once condemned the International Olympic Committee for the "blatant sanitisation that allowed it to report that the Beijing Games were an ‘indisputable success'." He was full of white fury.

He went on to gloat about "our government's commitment to uphold the Olympic charter", in reference to the UK's coming hosting of the 2012 Olympic Games.

Porteous is now counted among the UK's ultra-rightwing foreign policy activists that are often disguised as "experts" and he considers himself an expert on Britain's foreign policy on Africa.
This man joined Human Rights Watch in October 2006 and is a former correspondent for the Guardian newspaper, the BBC and other media.

In the HRW report, Porteous blatantly accused Zimbabwe's military of being run by Zanu-PF and of engaging in "forced labour of children and adults" and of "torturing and beating local villagers" in the Marange diamond fields.

Porteous was mute on the operations of the ZMDC and their partners in the ongoing extraction of diamonds, and this is basically to give an impression of lawlessness and chaos at the diamond fields.

To make this point, he declared that Marange has become a "zone of lawlessness and impunity, a microcosm of the chaos and desperation that currently pervade Zimbabwe".

He did not specify the desperation and the chaos prevailing in Zimbabwe right now, taking a reckless assumption that such an assertion is a matter of public knowledge, totally disregarding the huge strides of stability that has been the image of Zimbabwe in the last two years. Where such stability is acknowledged, credit must go to Tsvangirai or to the West's current preferred MDC leader, Tendai Biti.

Porteous claims that the illegal diamond extraction that used to be rampant at Chiadzwa were only acts of "freelance miners" and that Zanu-PF "seized the diamond fields" from the "freelance miners" during a "major economic crisis" caused by "the failed policies of Zanu-PF, which resulted in astronomical inflation, rampant unemployment, the unchecked spread of disease, and massive food insecurity".

The illegally imposed murderous Western sanctions are not mentioned anywhere in Porteous' report. These are benign and "targeted", of course.

Indeed the illegal sanctions are targeted at the people of Zimbabwe — so they can scream at their leadership and "stone them on the streets", as Chester Crocker and Jack Straw put it to Stan Mdenge.

Zimbabwean soldiers are repeatedly accused of bullying and threatening "freelance miners and civilians" and on the basis of these repeated unsubstantiated allegations Tom Porteous reached a damning conclusion.

He wrote: "Human Rights Watch believes that money from illegal diamond trading is likely to be a significant source of revenue for senior figures in Zanu-PF."

The link between the alleged abuses by soldiers and the flow of revenue to unnamed senior Zanu-PF officials was not explained.

Based on this said belief, Porteous called for investigation of Chiadzwa diamonds, regardless of the fact that the KPSC has done such an investigation already, reaching a conclusion that conditions obtaining at Chiadzwa met "the minimum requirements" of the Kimberley Process and that Zimbabwe's diamonds were to be certified.

These findings are totally misplaced according to Human Rights Watch and its UK director; and on this basis "the KPSC should take urgent measures to audit the Zimbabwean mining sector, to ensure that individuals involved in smuggling return their ill-gotten gains, and act to prevent any further abuse in both the extraction and onward sales of Marange diamonds".

For one in support of so-called freelance miners, it is hard to imagine how Porteous suddenly poses in opposition to "abuse" in the extraction and sales of Chiadzwa diamonds. Are these supposedly persecuted "freelance miners" licensed at law? Are they not part of the "abuse" that Porteous pretends to be fighting?

If Porteous is so much for legal mining at Chiadzwa, why was he so silent on the mining companies currently legally licensed to extract diamonds at these fields?

Of course, these companies are South African in background, not Western. That explains the excising of their existence in this Human Rights Watch report.

Tom Porteous made a very revealing conclusion. He prescribed what he said was the way to proceed.
He wrote: "Regulation of the diamond fields should include settling the question of legal title and ensuring that only those properly licensed are allowed to mine diamonds."

Bingo! So we are back to the issue of ACR and the so-called "properly licensed". And those currently carrying the licences are supposed to be investigated, on the basis that they are not properly licensed, so we are told.

While clearly admitting that the diamond activities in Zimbabwe "did not occur in armed conflict" and as such are not covered by the KPSC definition of "blood diamonds", Human Rights Watch still insisted for an "immediate temporary halt" on the extraction and trade of Marange diamonds – until the "properly licensed" players are back in place.

To understand what is actually happening, we may want to look at this organisation called Human Rights Watch.
As is on record, Human Rights Watch's "anti-atrocity crusade" fuelled murderous wars in the ex-Yugoslavia and this was under Bill Clinton's administration.

When George W. Bush came in Human Rights Watch lost its influence because the neo-conservatives had their own crusaders to front their cause. They hate this Soros project.

Now that Barrack Obama is in, Human Rights Watch have been actively reviving their influence, and it is all made easier because the man who employs Barrack Obama is also the owner of Human Rights Watch. This man is, of course, George Soros.

Human Rights Watch is founded purely on belief in the superiority of American values. It has very close links to the US foreign policy elites and to other interventionist and expansionist lobbies.
The founders of Human Rights Watch believe that where colonialism enhanced expansionism, there can be a suitable replacement through interventionism.

So HRW will advocate for the intervention of the US and other Western countries wherever the US says human rights are not obtaining. So all of the US's foreign policy goals can then be pushed through the human rights crusade and Zimbabwe is currently a target of this massively funded wave, something Nelson Chamisa keeps calling "real change".

Through interventionism we saw American soldiers killing, torturing and raping in order to prevent killings, torture and rape. This is what happened in Yugoslavia.

The same interventionism premised on the human rights regime resulted in the mass killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis by US soldiers, as well as other hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians, again killed by US soldiers since 2001.

No US citizen or organisation has any right whatsoever to impose US values on Africa or any other part of the world.

The US' interventionist belief is fostered by foreign policy elites and these same elites are pushing all Western countries into this interventionist crusade — the so-called democratisation. Human Rights Watch is part of these elites. Also included are NGOs, government departments, foundations and intellectuals.
Human Rights Watch is everything else but an association of "concerned private citizens".

It is littered with ex-intelligence officers, ex-diplomats and ex-civil servants and known supremacists.

The summary of Human Rights Watch is quite simple. It was created as a joint venture between George Soros and the US Department of State. Essentially, HRW carries all the fundamentals of US culture — as founded by America's doctrine of exceptionalism.

George Soros is the don of the human rights movement; a rich man using his wealth to spread his own values across the world. He is the chief financier of Human Rights Watch as he does numerous other organisations.

Among HRW's major donors are the Aaron Diamond Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Novib (the Dutch Organisation for Development Co-operation), Oxfam, the Rockefeller Foundation and, of course, Susan and George Soros.

In 2004 George Soros appointed his personal tax lawyer as a board member to HRW.

Other members of the HWR committee as at March 2004 included Peter Osnos (chairperson), who was George Soros' publisher and CEO of Public Affairs publishers.

Alice Henkin was the vice chair and she was a member of the US State Department's Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). This is the most influential foreign policy lobby group in the US.

Henry Barkey was a committee member as well. He is an International Relations Professor at Lehigh University. He was also an advisor to the Department of State and married to Ellen Laipson, former assistant to Madeline Albright, when she was still the UN ambassador for the US.

Jonathan Fanton was also in there until 2003. He worked with Transregional Centre for Democratic Studies (TCDS), a rightwing think tank, and he was president of MacArthur Foundation, itself a major donor to Human Rights Watch.

Morton Abramowitz was also in there for a while. He was an ex-US envoy to Turkey (1989-91), Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research (1985-1989).

Steven Dell Rosso is an ex-diplomat for the US and he also was part of this committee.

Felice Gaer is a known Zionist who once praised Madeline Albright for an "outstanding human rights record" after she praised Israel for building settlements in the Gaza strip — at the expense of bombed and displaced Palestinians. She also was part of this committee.

Human Rights Watch began as a propaganda instrument during the Cold War and the organisation was a founding member of the crusade for human rights — not for the moral cause of the campaign, but as a means of pressuring the Soviet Union.

What we have today is a crusade for US expansionism.

It will just not do for the US to proclaim publicly, "We own the world!" or to say, "We are the master race, and everyone else is our subject". Higher values are needed to mask this brazen attitude.

The preached higher values must be universal in appearance and this explains the choice of human rights.
If the US said, "We want you to adopt American values" then the answer would be an outright "We are not Americans here".

So something more appealing has had to be cooked up and this is where the issue of human rights comes in.
Human Rights Watch does not care much for the rights of the villagers for whose plight they purport to have done their report on the diamonds of Zimbabwe. Rather they care so much for the US interests on those diamonds. This is why the rights of villagers in places where there are no diamonds deposits will never be investigated.

To the HRW the Marange diamonds fields are currently in the wrong hands. But the US cannot blatantly declare, "We want your diamonds!"

That would be ridiculed by the world and resisted by the whole of Africa. So some way of intervention to stop Mugabe from controlling these diamonds has had to be found.

Human rights are not the only ideology of interventionism. The civilisation mission of the 19th century was another. Congo lost almost half its population when Belgium was "civilising" the huge country.

Today it is the human rights regime and the democratisation scheme from the West. Iraq and Afghanistan have paid a heavy price already for the establishment of US values within their borders.

The important issue not to be missed by any Zimbabwean is that Zimbabwe will not benefit anything from Western interventionism.

It is just another path to Western expansionism, a new world order where colonies are run through puppet regimes controlled from Western capitals. In place of colonies the US wants client states.

The opposition to Zimbabwe's diamond trade at the KPSC is from Canada, the US and Australia and these three Western countries are but a tiny minority in that body.

These are the only countries taking the Human Rights Watch report seriously, and as Abbey Chikane said in his report, Zimbabwe is way better at securing its mines than most of the KPSC members, especially those from Africa.

Chikane was the KPSC monitor who Western countries do not even want to remember. His report does not exist. His findings have been excised from history and what we have is this Human Rights Watch Report — a report promoted as truth although all it carries is hearsay and claims by numerous unnamed sources.

Human Rights Watch is an Anglo-American outfit masquerading as an international organisation. Its stated "regions" are New York, Northern California, Southern California, and London.

One would have thought the regions would be Africa, Asia, Europe and so on.

We need to open our eyes and this writer will repeat what Innocent Chofamba Sithole already wrote in a related piece in The Herald.

He said: "We are not stupid . . . ," and for sure this is the time to show organisations like HRW that they cannot fool us in the 21st century.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death.

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer and can be contacted on wafawarova@yahoo.co.uk This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or reason@rwafawa rova.com or visit www.rwafawarova.com

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