“Zimbabwe declines US$200 million German investment in diamond mining.”
It’s an interesting article. At the heart of the issues surrounding natural resources in the third world and why richness in same causes so much turmoil and gives birth to things like Blood Diamonds, is how foreign investment comes into these Countries.
It is so much less expensive for foreign investors to pay off local leaders and get extremely favorable contracts, sometimes military “protection”, which includes often slavery and brutality, than it is to come in honestly. Since there is little infrastructure and money in so many of these places, it doesn’t take much money to destabilize the place. These things just don’t make the news and the public has a hard time visualizing what really goes on.
Mineweb is a fantastic journal, but following these issues and understanding them does require reading between the lines.