Greater Kapa Bokone Community Trust De Beers Petition

The Greater Kapa Bokone Community Trust (section 21) together with Youth Ina City Kimberley and a number of local business, NPO’s, community representatives and individuals in the Northern Cape area have come together to challenge big mining company De Beers who have benefited from mining activities in the Northern Cape.

The compensation of one trillion pounds to the community of the northern Cape province is appropriate as reparations for the 130 years of benefiting from diamond mining in the province exploiting people and the environment without developing and rehabilitating the area.

Social problems are rampant throughout underdeveloped Africa and many can be attributed to the diamond industry. The disregard for human rights has been deplorable and the spread of HIV and AIDS a genocide against humanity. Through the research conducted, it is clear that in the absence of a family structure, miners are prone to high risk behavior leading to the contraction of HIV. Upon their return home, the virus is spread to spouses and other largely unaffected areas.

While the importance of educating miners on such matters has been overlooked for years and contributed to our social conditions today.
In the 1870s and 1880s Kimberley, encompassing the mines that produced 95% of the world's diamonds was home to great wealth and fierce rivalries, most notably that between Rhodes and Barnato, English immigrants consolidated early 31-foot-square prospects into larger holdings and mining companies. In 1888, Rhodes prevailed and merged the holdings of both men into De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd., a company that is still synonymous with diamonds.

Rhodes fought intensely against competing owners of other mines, and by the end of 1889 he had the South African diamond industry under his control. Mining activities are carried out in various stages, each of them involving specific environmental impacts. Broadly speaking, these stages are: deposit prospecting and exploration, mine development and preparation, and mine exploitation. The initial phase that determines if an area is a potential mining site if often not included in the assessment of environmental impacts. During the prospecting phase, the preparation of routes of access, establishment of camps and related facilities, opening up of trenches and pits, and taking samples all require portions of land to be cleared. As seen in Figure 1, heavy machinery is brought in early on to determine the value of a certain area. Though this mostly applies to large, primary site operations, the impact lies in the fact the previously inaccessible tracts of land are now open to human exploitation. Without the proper infrastructure to support waste management, these areas can quickly become polluted.

The most common and productive type of diamond mining, pipe mining, is a type of open-pit mining; therefore it involves similar techniques and environmental stresses as other types of open pit mining, in which large amounts of rock and materials, called overburden, are removed to allow access to the diamonds. Large areas of land and surrounding ecosystems can be disturbed as well as the potential for acid mine drainage causing damage to the ecosystem.

Environmental reclamation surrounding diamond mining operations generally involves some effort to return the altered landscape back to its original shape. This includes not only saving the fill removed from the pit and refilling pits once mining has ceased, but also preserving topsoil to be re-deposited on reclaimed land so that vegetation can be planted. In addition, diamond mining faces challenges relating to energy use and emissions which can contribute to the global climate change.

Mining activities also may lead to large-scale erosion, which is dangerous for local population and can reduce the biodiversity of an area. It destroys river banks, changes how the river flows, where it flows, and what organisms may live within it. Even the slightest change in water speed alters the sediment load and organism make up. In addition to the area disturbed by the excavation, the damage caused by mines on the surface due to the consequent erosion and sedimentation of the river and streambeds is made more serious due to heaps of rock residues lacking economic value (known as tailings), that usually form great mounds, sometimes larger than the area given over to excavation. Such large hills are subject to “sediment slides” and usually cannot support plant life.

Kono, in the heart of the diamond mining region in Sierra Leone has experienced complete loss of rich agricultural soil and farming fields to mining debris.
In Botswana, a long dispute has existed between the interests of the mining company, De Beers, and the relocation of the Bushman tribe from the land, in order to exploit diamond resources. The Bushmen have been facing threats from government policies since at least 1980, when the diamond resources were discovered. A campaign is being fought in an attempt to bring an end to what the indigenous rights organization, Survival International considers it to be genocide against a tribe that has been living in those lands for tens of thousands of years.