Colored Stones
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Report: Taliban seizes Pakistani emerald mines
By Teresa Novellino
April 21, 2009
Peshawar, Pakistan--Gemstone dealers are carefully watching recent news reports that two dormant emerald mines in Pakistan have re-opened under Taliban control, but because the area produces a small supply of mostly small, low-quality stones, the impact on the trade is expected to be minimal.
Militants who seized control of the inactive emerald mines in Pakistan have announced that they will receive one-third of the revenues, a report in Friday's edition of The New York Times says.
The seizure was part of a wide-scale push by Taliban militants for power in the Swat Valley, which has a population of 1.3 million people and boasts not only emerald mines but fertile orchards and vast plots of timber, the newspaper said.
The Taliban seized control of the area by taking advantage of the country's class divisions and organizing local peasants into "shock troops," which helped push out about four dozen landlords who held the most power in the area.
About 50 percent of the world's finest emeralds are mined in Colombia, and perhaps 20 percent comes from Zambia, which is also known for yielding top-quality stones. By contrast, Pakistan is estimated to produce perhaps 1 percent to 2 percent of mostly small stones that are typically cut into small, calibrated stones and used as accents in jewelry and watches.
"You may have once in history a good, fantastic emerald that comes out of Pakistan, but it's mostly very low-end goods," says Jean Claude Michelou, a Bogota, Colombia-based emerald dealer who has for the past three years been a consultant to the World Bank for a gemstone sector development project in Pakistan. "It's not a big market. It's not going to fund the war."
But he says it is a delicate issue, nonetheless, for a colored-gemstone industry that has been impacted in recent years by political issues around the globe. Concern over human rights violations by the government in Myanmar, for instance, prompted a U.S. ban on that country's valuable Burmese rubies and jade.
While this case is different because it involves a minor supply of gemstones, the industry will be warily watching what happens at the mines, which have not been operational for the past several years and were previously being leased by a local mine operator. With the Taliban now offering Swat Valley peasants part of the profits for working in the emerald mines, production could certainly increase, says Michelou.
He estimates that the emerald trade for the entire country, including the Swat Valley and other mines not under Taliban control, could amount to perhaps a couple of million dollars or so per year at market price.
The Pakistani emeralds are generally of small size, perhaps two millimeters by two millimeters, and typically end up being used as small baguette accents in watches or colored-gemstone jewelry manufactured in India, Thailand or Idar-Oberstein, Germany. Nobody could say for certain that the stones could not end up in jewelry sold in the United States, but because of the small size of the stones, and because the stones are typically placed in jewelry with stones from other locations, Michelou thinks it would be "impossible" to track them through the international market.
Although the last owners of the mine were not producing, Pakistani goods have in the past been sold through the gem trade hub in Peshawar, where goods from China and Afghanistan are also sold. From there, the stones frequently end up in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where they might be sold to Indian and Thai dealers and subsequently end up being manufactured into jewelry.
Michelou says that emeralds are not only procured in Pakistan's Swat Valley, but also in other areas not controlled by The Taliban, including northern areas of the country near Skardu, where new deposits were recently found, and on the other side of the Pakistan border, in China's Xinjiang Province.
There are also significant quantities and values of emerald coming from the Panjshir Valley in Afghanistan, a few hundred miles west of Swat, on the other slope of the Hindu Kush/North Suleiman mountain range. The Afghanistan area, though, has always been controlled by Tajik Panjsheris, enemies of the Taliban who are allied with the United States and NATO, Michelou says.
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