"It's a ZANU-PF place," says opposition lawmaker Pishai Muchauraya. "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 Mai Mujuru's Breast. He got only one tiny diamond, which he sold for $150.
A $30,000 deal
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's 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.
'I might die'
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 6 a.m. 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 kilometers [about three miles] 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."
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robyn.dixon@latimes.com
