Parliamentarians from across the country want to ban the import of Russian diamonds into Europe, suspected of helping to finance the war. The lobby of the Antwerp platform, through which a quarter of Russian diamonds transit, believes that this ban would be circumvented and catastrophic for them.
Diamonds stained – even symbolically – with the blood of war lose all their beauty.
It was already the sense of the prohibitions carried in the years against the “diamonds of the blood” resulting from the African continent and whose trade was used to nourish conflicts, in particular in Angola in the Nineties.
The Russian diamonds are now in the sights of the Belgian deputies, who wish to have their imports banned by the European Commission. They have unanimously voted for a resolution to this effect, which must still be submitted to the House’s plenary session at the beginning of May for final adoption.
The parliamentary text asks the Belgian government to “explicitly advocate within the European Council the introduction of an import ban on both the direct and indirect trade in Russian diamonds.”
Strong signal
“After such a strong signal from the Belgian Parliament, I don’t really see how diamonds could be ignored in the eleventh package of EU sanctions, targeting Russia,” said Wednesday to AFP the ecologist deputy Samuel Cogolati, active defender of the text.
The gesture has nothing neutral indeed, coming from a country that is traditionally located at the main platform of the world trade in rough diamonds, namely the city of Antwerp. “About 85% of the world’s rough diamonds, half of the polished diamonds, and 40% of the industrial diamonds pass through Antwerp. “25% of these diamonds come from Russia,“ according to several sources.
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Featured photo : © Presse
