A privately owned company from South Africa, New Redemption, is reported to be planning a joint venture with the country of Zimbabwe, according to VOANews.com. The plans are for the mining of diamonds from a deposit that was considered the site of human rights violations. For some time now, world organizations have been calling on Zimbabwe to make reforms and better police the activities in its many under-supervised diamond mining fields.

In a joint venture with the Zimbabwean authorities, the New Reclamation Group will start mining operations in November. The current estimation is that the initial programs will be in eastern Zimbabwe and will be a joint project of New Reclamation and the Zimbabwe State Mining and Development Corporation.

The VOANews.com goes on to reveal that according to documents they obtained, the Chairman of New Reclamation, David Kassel, has recently resigned his position due to the proposed Zimbabwe venture.

Sources claim that New Reclamation will over see the operations via their subsidiary company, Grandwell Holdings Ltd., along with the state owned Zimbabwe Mining Development Company.

The area in question has been under Zimbabwean control since 2006 when the Zimbabwe government seized the lands from a British mining concern, Africa Consolidated Resources. Previously, African Consolidated had held the lease on the lands until discovering diamonds in the region and the subsequent rush of illegal miners thus prompting the military and police to eradicate the more than 20,000 illegal miners. A New York- based human rights organization claims that more than 200 people were killed in the region during the past year alone. The police in Zimbabwe have responded by stating that no reports of atrocities have been recorded.

The VOA News article goes on to say that a spokesman for the African Consolidated Resources Company, Andrew Cranswick, sees the New Reclamation mining plans to be a ‘bad precedent’ for future ventures and investments in Zimbabwe. Cranswick considers the proposed plans to be detrimental, “These diamonds will effectively be stolen diamonds, and any diamonds coming out of there will be stolen goods. So, we have this natural resource plundered and looted in an organized fashion by foreign thugs.”