The United Nations, stung by continued reports of sanctions-busting in arms and diamond trade with Angolan guerrillas, is seeking to tighten the UN sanctions imposed on the rebel National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).

One year after the UN Security Council voted to prohibit all commerce in diamonds with the UNITA rebels, Robert Fowler – chairman of the UN Security Council sanctions committee dealing with Angola – now wants sanctions monitors deployed in Africa.

Fowler, a Canadian, presented a report to the Council Monday which said that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan could study within the next three months ways, to deploy civilian monitors throughout the continent to investigate reports of sanctions- busting.

“We’re not talking about big battalions,” Fowler told IPS later. The monitors could number “fewer than 100” to deal with allegations of sanctions violations.

Fowler noted that, Angola already has traded accusations with Zambia over whether the Zambian government has been aiding UNITA rebels to buy arms and petroleum in exchange for diamonds.

Several Security Council resolutions have banned the sale of arms and petroleum to UNITA and also diamond trafficking with the rebels, which is blamed for the bulk of the violence in Angola.

Despite the sanctions, human rights groups and the Angolan government maintain that the rebels continue to fund their long- running war through diamond sales. According to Fowler’s report, UNITA collected an estimated 200 million dollars in diamond sales last year and as much as four billion dollars since 1992.

Fighting has been going on in Angola since Spring, resulting in a death toll in the tens of thousands, and sanctions-busting is seen by officials here as a major problem for southern Africa. As one minister told Fowler, the violations had caused a “crisis of African solidarity.”

The Canadian envoy travelled to Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe last month in an effort to find ways to enforce the embargo more strictly.

Fowler said he found a willingness by the region’s governments to find ways to tighten sanctions enforcement. Even diamond companies agreed, he said. “We received wholehearted support from the diamond community,” he claimed.

The head of the South African De Beers conglomerate, the controls most of the world’s diamond trade through the Central Selling Organisation (CSO), assured Fowler that they intended to support the UN sanctions and to ensure that UNITA was not involved in diamond sales through them.

Fowler received similar assurances from major diamond companies in Botswana and Namibia, where diamond sales account for more than two-thirds of the gross national product.

Yet such assurances are hard to enforce. Fowler noted that countries like Botswana and Namibia have difficulty in managing their airspace to ensure that outside aircraft cannot use them for improper activities like sanctions-busting.

One of the Fowler report’s recommendations is for the United Nations to help such countries with air surveillance and interdiction.

The idea of diamond monitors could prove to be more complex. Fowler said that issues such as whether the monitors should carry arms would need to be explored by the Security Council, and could depend on where they are deployed.

Fowler, who intends to visit the Diamond High Council – a major diamond-industry centre in Antwerp, Belgium – next month, suggested in his report that the United Nations could establish liaisons with major diamond buyers. Such links, the report contended, could help to devise “practical measures to limit UNITA’s access to legitimate diamond markets.”

Still, there are tremendous hurdles to implementing the recommendations to tighten the sanctions. The war in neighbouring Congo-Kinshasa has complicated regional politics, sending refugees and arms streaming through the region’s borders.

Meanwhile, a growing number of nations in the 15-member Security Council have displayed what Annan calls “sanctions fatigue,” with support for UN embargoes in decline in general.

Sanctions against Libya were dropped in April, while momentum is building for an end to the embargo on Iraq.

Such a climate has encouraged UNITA to spurn peace efforts in Angola and accuse the government of responsibility for the recent violence. In a directive issued May 14, UNITA’s standing committee for politics explicitly refused to cooperate with Fowler’s review of UN sanctions.

“To the Canadian Robert Fowler – UNITA rejects any attempt to lecture Angolans,” the standing committee wrote.

“Do not come to our country with your hands dripping with the blood of the native people of Canada, the Eskimos, whom you murder on a daily basis in your country.”