Showing posts with label brits. Show all posts
Showing posts with label brits. Show all posts

Sunday, May 08, 2011

Assainating enemies

The Standard

06/05/2011

By Amos Kareithi

The powers that be have perfected methods of wishing away their nemesis.

From Europe to Africa to Asia, dried bones of yesteryear dictators and liberators litter unmarked graves; their ashes are strewn all over, unremembered.

When America killed global terror kingpin Osama bin Laden and secretly disposed his body at sea in an undisclosed location, tongues started wagging, but history is replete with similar incidences.

Adolf Hitler achieved a rare feat by uniting Germany and triggering off a major military face off which consumed millions, and shaped the face of the world.

He polarised the world, touched off a major conflict, which culminated in the use of biological warfare that claimed millions of civilians.

But when the allied forces closed in on him, the leader, who had a cult like following, turned his gun on his head and left his pursuers to desecrate his remains.

Lurid details are given of how the Fuehrer was first burnt and his ashes flushed down the sewerage system in Ukraine.

Berlin bunker

Some accounts indicate that after Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker, his body was burnt by his staff, along with the remains of his lover Eva Braun.

Soviet troops seized the remains when they captured the bunker. But what happened later has been shrouded in mystery and speculation.

Secret communications between Soviet counter-intelligence units in Germany and the Government in Moscow tell of repeated burials and exhumations of the remains, and of their final destruction by fire in 1970.

Now all that remains is a four inch fragment of his skull, bearing a bullet hole exit, displayed in Moscow for public viewing, while the jaw allegedly used by Soviet investigators to identify the Nazi leader is said to be hidden in secret archives.

Despite the scattering of his remains, Hilter and the organisation he founded, the Nazi, have continued to influence and inspire future generations with some secret organisations copying its mode of dress in ideology of a super human race.

Nearer home in Somalia, Sayyid Muhammad Abdullah Hassan terrorised the British for 20 years until they could stomach his antics no more.

Hassan, the man the British christened Mad Mullah, had set up a separate state in Dervershi, from where he continued humiliating the British.

When he died on December 20, 1920 aged 64, the British authorities were keen to make his final resting place a mystery, and for fear his adherents would transform it into a shrine.

Somali region

His grave is believed to be somewhere close to Imay town of the Somali region of Ethiopia, but the exact spot of the tomb is not known.

There have been attempts to trace and exhume his remains and rebury them at his old castle at Imme, but most people who may have known the exact place are either dead or senile.

In Kenya, the British colonialists used the same script when Waiyaki wa Hinga was killed in 1902 as he was being transported to Mombasa for trial. Despite claims that he was buried alive in Kibwezi, the grave has not been traced despite spirited search by his descendants and the Government.

Koitalel arap Samoei, who also fiercely fought off the European invasion, was lured into a meeting in Nandi Hills, where he and some of his clansmen were shot to death.

The seer’s head was severed from his body and flown to Britain, and his family had to bury a headless body, where a mausoleum has since been erected.

But the biggest mystery of modern times was perpetuated by the British in 1956, when Dedan Kimathi, perceived by the colonial government as the head of the Mau Mau freedom fighters, died.

Although prison authorities in Kamiti executed Kimathi, his grave has remained one of the most guarded secrets.

Efforts by the Government to trace, exhume and accord Kimathi’s remains a decent burial have been in vain.

Several trips to Kamiti and Kin’gong’o in Nyeri by human rights activists have turned into a wild goose chase, as Britain remains tight lipped.

In Cambodia, Pol Pot, who in life was perceived by some as a brutal dictator whose regime killed an estimated one million people, assumed a curious stature after his death.

Pot’s death in 1998 heralded the end of the brutal career of a man responsible for overseeing one of the worst genocides of the 20th century.

His victims died from between 1975 and 1979 from execution, starvation, and disease — as the Khmer Rouge reigned supreme.

All suspected intellectuals were killed and others would be condemned to a painful death for wearing glasses or knowing a foreign language.

The Khmer Rouge government collapsed in 1979 after Vietnam invaded Cambodia after a series of violent border confrontations.

Tourist attraction

Pol Pot and his forces once again fled to the northern jungle as evidence of their atrocities was broadcast around the world.

Ironically, after his death, millions of Cambodians and also tourists have continued to troop to his grave in search of good luck.

But the act of concealing the body of an annihilated rival is not the preserve of law enforcement agents; the mafia have excelled in making their adversaries disappear without trace.

One of the most memorable mysteries is the disappearance of controversial trade unionist Jimmy Hoffa, who ran afoul with the mafia.

Hoffa earned the wrath of lawyers after he was convicted of fraud in 1964, together with six other leaders.

He was, however, granted presidential pardon after his sentence was commuted to a sentence served in 1971, but instructed to stay away from labour matters for ten years.

But just when he was trying to have the orders reversed, he was grabbed from the parking lot of Machus Red Fox restaurant in Detroit.

That was the last time Hoffa was heard of, and despite years of FBI carrying out extensive searches following tips from Mafia sources, no one knows where he was interred.

There have been numerous rumours about Hoffa’s ultimate whereabouts, including a tip off attributed to mafia hit man Richard "the Iceman" Kuklinski, who died in prison after he ‘confessed’ that Hoffa’s body was compacted in a car that later became scrap metal in New Jersey.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Kenya: Mau Mau And the Barbaric Face of the British Empire

Ben Macintyre

AllAfrica

10 April 2011


Nairobi — One horrific day in September 1957, Ndiku Mutwiwa Mutua claims, he was castrated by the British Government.

Last week the elderly Kenyan appeared in the High Court in London, along with three others to accuse Britain of being liable for what was done to him 54 years ago, and to demand compensation.

The case of Mutua and others versus the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) relates to events that took place at the height of the Mau Mau emergency -- the uprising against colonial rule in Kenya between 1952 and 1960.

The Mau Mau rebellion was one of the nastiest chapters in British colonial history. Appalling atrocities were perpetrated by both sides, but few stories of cruelty are worse than that of Mr Ndiku Mutwiwa Mutua.

In 1956 Mr Mutua was a 24-year-old herdsman working for Mr Louvaine Dunman, a white settler in Kenya's Eastern Province. Mr Dunman, a police officer in the district force, was known as "Luvai" among the Kamba people who couldn't pronounce the name Louvaine properly.

While working on Mr Dunman's farm, Mr Mutua began supplying food to the Mau Mau rebels hiding out in the nearby forest. On or before September 17, 1957, he was arrested by Mr Dunman and five other African police officers.

According to a court document, he was repeatedly beaten by European and African officers alike and then taken, blindfolded, to a tent.

Inside, he was allegedly handcuffed and pinned to the ground, with his legs pulled apart and tied or strapped down.

"Having been rendered completely powerless and vulnerable," according to the document, Mr Mutua claims that he was "castrated by one or more of the officers present".

For two days he was allegedly left without medical attention and then liberated from the camp by Mau Mau rebels. He remained in the forest for three-and-a-half years before the rebellion ended and he returned home.

Mr Mutua claims that he suffered depression, anguish, mental stress, and "intense flashbacks to the episodes of assault, including castration (and) mourned the fact that he will never have children of his own and never be with a woman".

Like his fellow claimants, Mr Mutua holds the British Government responsible for his suffering. Another of the plaintiffs also claims to have been castrated, while a third was allegedly beaten and left for dead during the infamous Hola Camp massacre of 1959 in which 11 detainees were clubbed to death.

The only woman claimant said that she was subjected to sexual torture in which she was violated using bottles filled with hot water.

The alleged mistreatment of another claimant, Mr Wambugu wa Nyingi, carries echoes of waterboarding. Mr Nyingi claims that he was "suspended by his feet from the hut roof. He was then subjected to a severe beating over a period of about 30 minutes, while cold water was poured on to his face and into his mouth so he could not breathe".

The claimants' case rests on the argument that these acts of brutality were not isolated or random, the spontaneous cruelty of a few sadists, but a systematic policy organised and condoned by the British authorities, "part of a system of torture, inhuman and degrading treatment applied by police, home guards, and other members of the security services with the knowledge of the colonial administration.

"Many detainees were subjected to gross abuse and torture," say the claimants.

"Such abuse included whippings, beating, castration, and sexual abuse of men and women... in many cases the abuse and torture were so brutal and dangerous that the detainee died."

Lawyers representing the British Government argue that the case should be dismissed because the alleged abuse was carried out by the colonial government, which passed all rights and responsibilities to the independent Kenyan Government in 1963.

When Kenya assumed national sovereignty, government lawyers will argue, this included an implicit acceptance of liability for any outstanding claims against the national administration.

The Kenya Government flatly denies any liability. A letter was sent to British Foreign Secretary William Hague on March 31 stating: "The Republic of Kenya fully supports the claimants' case and has publicly denied any notion that responsibility for any acts and atrocities committed by the British colonial administration during the Kenya 'Emergency' was inherited by the Republic of Kenya."

Among those rounded up in the run-up to Mau Mau was Hussein Onyango Obama, Barak Obama's paternal grandfather, who became involved in the Kenyan independence movement while working as a cook for a British Army officer after the war.

He was arrested and jailed for two years in a high security prison where, according to his family, he was subjected to horrific violence to extract information about the growing insurgency.

Further light will be shed by the newly discovered Foreign Office files relating to Mau Mau, which were deliberately removed from Kenya.

On December 3, 1963, nine days before Kenya formally declared independence, three wooden crates containing 1,500 highly sensitive government files were loaded on to a British United Airways flight bound for Gatwick.

A memo written by one Foreign Office official noted that the removal of the documents had been carried out in "meticulous fashion", with files selected on the specific grounds that their contents "might embarrass Her Majesty's Government, members of the police, military forces, public servants, or others".

In a memo marked "Most Secret", the Foreign Office noted that "the vast majority of the files concern the Emergency: eg, intelligence reports and summaries, African associations, activities of Africans, unrest in the districts etc . . . collective punishments, detainees and detention camps".

In 1967, the Kenyan Foreign Ministry asked the British Government to return the missing files. The FCO refused.

A confidential FCO memo written on November 2, 1967, warned that if the documents were sent back to Kenya, it could "set a precedent and encourage other governments to follow suit" and demand "the documents of other former Dependent Territories which are now held here".

A letter on the same subject from the Commonwealth Office clearly shows that the decision to remove the Kenyan documents was not an isolated incident:

"The fact that it has always been British policy to withdraw or destroy certain sensitive records prior to independence has never been advertised or generally admitted," the letter states.

"The reply we give to Kenya could affect the treatment of records and files withdrawn from other former Colonial Territories."

After 1967, the files removed from Kenya apparently vanished into the Foreign Office archives. There has long been speculation among historians about what happened to them, including the rumour that they had been loaded into a Lancaster bomber and dropped into the Indian Ocean.

When the four Kenyans filed suit last year, the High Court was informed that some of the most critical evidence relating to the case was still missing. The FO duly launched a search for the documents and in January the missing files were finally located.

The reparations claim is regarded in Kenya as nationally divisive since the Mau Mau was in large part an ethnic rebellion by the Kikuyu rather than a national uprising. Most of the alleged torture and abuse was carried out by Africans of other tribes, albeit under British supervision, adding a potentially toxic tribal element to the mixture.

The claimants are demanding a welfare fund and a statement of regret.

Mr David Miliband, the Labour Foreign Secretary, is believed to have favoured this approach, but a resolution was blocked by FCO officials.

The implications go far beyond the individual accusations levelled by four Kenyans. Hundreds more former Mau Mau detainees could file suit and countless other former colonial subjects may be able to claim mistreatment at the hands of the British Government.

Leigh Day, the lawyers representing the Kenyans, say they do not believe that the case will establish a precedent.

"The systematic torture which went on in pre-independence Kenya was exceptional in its scale and barbarity," a spokesman for Leigh Day said. "This case is about victims who are alive and are seeking redress. People who suffered similar ill treatment in other colonies who are still alive are very few in number."

In a speech at SOAS, the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, last month, David Anderson, professor of African history at the University of Oxford, who is advising the claimants, said that the files discovered in the FCO archives may be the tip of a huge legal iceberg.

"In other instances -- Malaya, Cyprus, Nigeria, to name just three possible examples -- there might also be missing documents 'retrieved' to London, with much to tell us about the actions of colonial administrations.

"The Mau Mau claim is not the only claim the British Government may have to worry about," he added. "Claims may arise from, for example, Palestine, and there is a fear that a successful claim could set a precedent."

The files were spirited out of Kenya in 1963 because they "might embarrass Her Majesty's Government". Some 48 years later, they have at last come to light, with their capacity to embarrass the government intact.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Why the Brits hate Mugabe

Racist, colonial fantasies of superiority and white privilege are alive and well among the English. The recent news coverage and rabid hatred of Mugabe shines a bright light on their inner deamons. White-washed (no pun intended) as a human rights exercise the roots of this hatred are a reaction to his audacity in attempting address and remove white privilege in his country.

____________________________________
The reason whites hate Mugabe.
#1802094382 - 19/11/07 10:44 PM


Do you want to know the real reason Whites governments and their followers hate Mugabe? Let me walk you through the real reason they hate our Legend. Whites governments world wide have always worked as a team to accomplish slavery, genocides in Africa, America, Australia, New Zealand, India and elsewhere. Just like yesterday they worked as a team to accomplish those sad and inhuman crimes, just like today they still work as a team to further their selfish, illegal, criminal and oppressive goals in Zimbabwe, against the people of Zimbabwe.

From UK to the USA via France, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the EU, you hear the same message about Mugabe and the same tone about Mugabe. The reason you hear that same message and tone it is because they work as a team to maintain their illegally and criminally acquired supremacy in the world.

If you stop relying on their propaganda on TV’s, radios, news papers, magazines and the internet about human right, and take your time to do some research on the internet and other source of information that they have no influence on, and by observing events as they pass by, you will discover that these governments hates Africans deeply and are the only cause of the past and current problems of the African people, and they are actually happy when we are starving.

So why are they giving the false impression about human right violation in Zimbabwe when they are the masters of human right violation in the world. There is no government in the world that violates human right like whites governments do.

Racial discrimination, racial attacks, racial oppression, racial invasions and racial exploitations are the pillars of their progress, yet they want to give the impression to the African people who paid heavily and ruthlessly in their hands for centuries and up to today that they care about our Zimbabweans brothers’ human right.

It is a mockery that the meaning of oppression and human right violation dare to accuse a man that has dedicated all his life to fight against human right violation and oppression.
They, white’s government and their followers are not honest enough to tell the African people that we hate Mugabe because he did justice by liberating the land our kin and kith use to illegal occupy.

How can they talk about human right when they do not condemn the human right violation against us when our land were stolen and are still occupied by their kith and kin?

You and I know whites governments do not care about browns “blacks”, they are the reason we are in this situation of poverty, disease and desperation in many part of Africa. So why are they not ashamed to talk about human right in Zimbabwe?

The answer is, if they dare to act openly, they will not be able to advance their criminal cause by even an inch.

So to achieve their traditional goal of domination, neo-colonialism and oppression, they play with your emotion about human right in Zimbabwe.

Did they tell you that they are the one who almost collapsed Zimbabwe economy with their illegal sanction, declared and undeclared and economic sabotage?

Did they tell you that it is them who want regime change in Zimbabwe and not the Zimbabwean people?

No, they would not because they know the African people will get so angry and cut all ties with them and ban them by law never to even look at us ever again.

So I am calling on you African people, to stand with your own people, whether in the Zimbabwe, Brazil or the USA, because our enemy is one and he is the devil with a long history of enslaving our people.

We must help Zimbabwe where we can, we must form our united state of Africa and we must work for justice.

Viva President Mugabe, Viva Zimbabwe, Viva Africa and to hell with the devils


Our Racist Demonology

Mugabe's Crimes Pale Next to What Black Small Farmers Endure in the Name of Development

by George Monbiot


The most evil man on earth, after Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, is Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe. That, at least, is the view of most of the western world's press.

Yesterday Mugabe insisted that 2,900 white farmers will have to leave their land. He claims to be redistributing their property to landless peasants, but many of the farms he has seized have been handed instead to army officers and party loyalists. Twelve white farmers have been killed and many others beaten. He stole the elections in March through ballot-rigging and the intimidation of his political rivals.

His assault on white-owned farms has been cited by the Daily Telegraph as the principal reason for the current famine. Now, the paper maintains, he is using "food aid as a political weapon". As a candidate for the post of World's Third Most Evil Man, he appears to possess all the right credentials.

There is no doubt that Mugabe is a ruthless man, or that his policies are contributing to the further impoverishment of the Zimbabweans. But to suggest that his land seizures are largely responsible for the nation's hunger is fanciful.

Though the 4,500 white farmers there own two-thirds of of the best land, many of them grow not food but tobacco. Seventy per cent of the nation's maize - its primary staple crop - is grown by black peasant farmers hacking a living from the marginal lands they were left by the whites.

The seizure of the white farms is both brutal and illegal. But it is merely one small scene in the tragedy now playing all over the world. Every year, some tens of millions of peasant farmers are forced to leave their land, with devastating consequences for food security.

For them there are no tear-stained descriptions of a last visit to the graves of their children. If they are mentioned at all, they are dismissed by most of the press as the necessary casualties of development.

Ten years ago, I investigated the expropriations being funded and organized in Africa by another member of the Commonwealth. Canada had paid for the ploughing and planting with wheat of the Basotu Plains in Tanzania.

Wheat was eaten in that country only by the rich, but by planting that crop, rather than maize or beans or cassava, Canada could secure contracts for its chemical and machinery companies, which were world leaders in wheat technology.

The scheme required the dispossession of the 40,000 members of the Barabaig tribe. Those who tried to return to their lands were beaten by the project's workers, imprisoned and tortured with electric shocks. The women were gang-raped.

For the first time in a century, the Barabaig were malnourished. When I raised these issues with one of the people running the project, she told me: "I won't shed a tear for anybody if it means development." The rich world's press took much the same attitude: only the Guardian carried the story.

Now yet another member of the Commonwealth, the United Kingdom, is funding a much bigger scheme in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Some 20 million people will be dispossessed. Again this atrocity has been ignored by most of the media.

These are dark-skinned people being expelled by whites, rather than whites being expelled by black people. They are, as such, assuming their rightful place, as invisible obstacles to the rich world's projects. Mugabe is a monster because he has usurped the natural order.

Throughout the coverage of Zimbabwe there is an undercurrent of racism and of regret that Britain ever let Rhodesia go. Some of the articles in the Telegraph may as well have been headlined "The plucky men and women holding darkest Africa at bay". Readers are led to conclude that Ian Smith was right all along: the only people who know how to run Africa are the whites.

But, through the IMF, the World Bank and the bilateral aid programs, with their extraordinary conditions, the whites do run Africa, and a right hash they are making of it.

Over the past 10 years, according to the UN's latest human development report, the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa living on less than a dollar a day has risen from 242 million to 300 million. The more rigorously Africa's governments apply the policies demanded by the whites, the poorer their people become.

Just like Mugabe, the rich world has also been using "food aid as a political weapon". The United States has just succeeded in forcing Zimbabwe and Zambia, both suffering from the southern African famine, to accept GM maize as food relief.

Both nations had fiercely resisted GM crops, partly because they feared that the technology would grant multinational companies control over the foodchain, leaving their people still more vulnerable to hunger. But the US, seizing the opportunity for its biotech firms, told them that they must either accept this consignment or starve.

Malawi has also been obliged to take GM maize from the US, partly because of the loss of its own strategic grain reserve. In 1999, the IMF and the European Union instructed Malawi to privatize the reserve.

The private body was not capitalized, so it had to borrow from commercial banks to buy grain. Predictably enough, by 2001 it found that it couldn't service its debt. The IMF told it to sell most of the reserve.

The private body sold it all, and Malawi ran out of stored grain just as its crops failed. The IMF, having learnt nothing from this catastrophe, continues to prevent that country from helping its farmers, subsidizing food or stabilizing prices.

The same agency also forces weak nations to open their borders to subsidized food from abroad, destroying their own farming industries. Perhaps most importantly, it prevents state spending on land reform.

Land distribution is the key determinant of food security. Small farms are up to 10 times as productive as large ones, as they tend to be cultivated more intensively. Small farmers are more likely to supply local people with staple crops than western supermarkets with mangetout.

The governments of the rich world don't like land reform. It requires state intervention, which offends the god of free markets, and it hurts big farmers and the companies that supply them. Indeed, it was Britain's refusal either to permit or to fund an adequate reform program in Zimbabwe that created the political opportunities Mugabe has so ruthlessly exploited. The Lancaster House agreement gave the state to the black population but the nation to the whites. Mugabe manipulates the genuine frustrations of a dispossessed people.

The president of Zimbabwe is a very minor devil in the hellish politics of land and food. The sainted Nelson Mandela has arguably done just as much harm to the people of Africa, by surrendering his powers to the IMF as soon as he had wrested them from apartheid.

Let us condemn Mugabe's attacks upon Zimbabwe's whites by all means, but only if we are also prepared to condemn the far bloodier war that the rich world wages against the poor.
_____________________________________


We Share the Blame for Zimbabwe

Posted April 20, 2000

Britain’s Debt to its People Runs into Billions

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 20th April 2000

The British establishment is poorly qualified to lecture Robert Mugabe about racism. The government’s condemnation of the murders of two white Zimbabwean farmers contrasts oddly with the blandishments with which it greeted Vladimir Putin, the killer of thousands of Chechens. Just as it revealed that Zimbabwe’s white refugees are welcome, for “reasons of ancestry”, to settle here permanently, it announced that it would expel 3,000 Kosovan Albanians. While the newspapers devoted hundreds of column inches to the horrible killings of the two white farmers, they scarcely mentioned the equally horrible killing of the black foreman who worked for one of them. The dispute between London and Harare is a dispute between racists.

Like Jack Straw and William Hague, Mugabe is using racism as a cheap - and not very effective - means of winning votes. But while he has made life miserable for Zimbabwe’s white population, he has also compromised the survival of millions of blacks. For he is destroying the very cause he claims to espouse: Robert Mugabe has become the enemy of land reform.

The recent land seizures mirror the thefts which first enabled the whites to control so much of Zimbabwe’s economy. In the 1890s, Cecil Rhodes and the settlers he led first cheated and then forcibly dispossessed the Shona and the Ndebele. The whites stole their land, their cattle and, through taxation, their labour. When they rebelled against these impositions, the blacks were cruelly suppressed and their leaders were hanged. From 1930 onwards, blacks were forbidden to own land outside the barren and crowded “reserves”. Even the cities were secured by the settlers: native people were confined to rented property in peripheral townships.

Today, though the laws have changed, the distribution of land has scarcely altered. Zimbabwe’s 4,500 white farmers occupy 70 per cent of the best land, while some seven million blacks still inhabit the old reserves. Some of the white farmers claim that if this dispensation were to change, Zimbabwe would starve, but any visit to a British supermarket shows that this is nonsense. Much of Zimbabwe’s most fertile land is used to grow not necessities for the hungry, but luxuries for the sated: mange tout, radicchio, french beans and tobacco. Redistribution would enable the poor both to support themselves and to produce staple crops for the landless: all over the Third World it is smallholders who keep their own countries fed.

Land reform in Zimbabwe, in other words, is an urgent necessity. But by manipulating the distribution programme to secure his own survival, Mugabe is keeping his people hungry. He is, however, not solely to blame for its failures.

The 1979 Lancaster House Agreement, which oversaw the transition to majority rule in Zimbabwe, ensured that the Zimbabwean government could use local currency only to buy land from farmers who were willing to sell. If it were to expropriate their property, it would have to compensate them with scarce and precious foreign exchange. The agreement bound the country to a programme of land reform, in other words, whose comprehensive implementation would have cost billions. Having hinted that we would pay for it, our government handed over only a fraction of the money required - £44 million - to make it happen.

Had a sterner settlement been struck, in other words, or had Britain been more generous, there might not have been a land distribution problem in Zimbabwe today. Our meanness, compounded perhaps by an unwillingness to undermine the white economic hegemony, perpetuated Zimbabwe’s racial segregation. Mugabe, unable to oversee a full and fair redistribution, acquired an excuse to turn land into a gift, to be deployed as political imperatives demanded. When the Lancaster House Agreement expired, he changed the constitution to allow the government to make compulsory purchases in Zimbabwe dollars, but he used the new power to reward his friends and purchase his enemies.

So Robert Mugabe is right about one thing: Britain does have a moral obligation to pay for a comprehensive land reform programme in Zimbabwe, to absolve not only the theft of land and labour by British-born farmers, but also to correct the inequitable settlement of 1979. And the foreign office minister, Peter Hain, is right to suggest that any money we hand over should bypass Mugabe’s regime. But he is wrong to imagine that he can implement “a programme of genuine land reform” with “some millions of pounds.” Our debt to the people of Zimbabwe runs into billions.

If we fail to recognise that Britain sits at the heart of this problem, then we condemn Zimbabwe’s poor to decades of manipulation, segregation and starvation. If our politics are to be distinguished from Mr Mugabe’s, then we must extend to Zimbabwe’s blacks the munificence we have offered the whites.