# Jonas Savimbi Founder of UNITA in 1966, Cold War client of Washington, and then the archetypal sanctioned diamond warlord — a single career spanning the whole arc from anticommunist freedom fighter to the reason the [[Kimberley Process Certification Scheme]] exists. **The American phase.** From 1985 the Reagan administration backed him under the Reagan Doctrine. His Washington representation was handled by **[[Paul Manafort]]'s firm at $600,000 a year**, and he was received at the White House in 1986. It is worth noting the continuity: the same lobbying trade that sold Savimbi to Washington in the 1980s reappears in this vault selling Congolese and Rwandan mineral access to Washington in 2025 — see [[Democratic Republic of the Congo]]. **The diamond phase.** Savimbi rejected the September 1992 election result — he took 40.6% to dos Santos's 49.57%, forcing a run-off he refused to contest — and returned to war, financing UNITA on Angola's alluvial diamond fields. [[Global Witness]]'s *A Rough Trade* (December 1998) estimated **$3.7 billion in diamond revenue between 1992 and 1998**; the Fowler Report hardened it to $3.72 billion or 93% of all sales. **Neither published a methodology.** Treat it as an NGO estimate. > [!note] The complication the clean narrative omits > On **31 October 1992**, government forces attacked UNITA supporters nationwide in what became known as the Halloween Massacre, killing **over 10,000** people including two UNITA negotiators; some estimates put 120,000 dead in the eighteen months after the election. "Savimbi rejected democracy and restarted the war" is true and incomplete. This matters for the definitional argument on [[Blood Diamonds]]: the state killing on that scale was never within reach of any diamond regime. **UN Security Council Resolution 1173** (12 June 1998) banned imports of Angolan diamonds outside the government certificate scheme — the first diamond embargo, and the ancestor of certification. Savimbi was killed in combat in Moxico Province on **22 February 2002** with fifteen gunshot wounds. UNITA collapsed into negotiation within weeks; the Luena Memorandum ended the war in April. The whole 1975–2002 conflict killed 500,000–800,000 people — a figure often, and wrongly, attached to the 1992–2002 diamond phase alone. ## See also [[Blood Diamonds]] · [[Kimberley Process Certification Scheme]] · [[Global Witness]] · [[Paul Manafort]] · [[Conflict Resources Atlas]]