22 November 2011
by Laura Agustin
from the Naked Anthropologist
Some people find commercial sex or prostitution vulgar. I find Nicholas Kristof vulgar: preening, in love with himself, interfering, condescending, happy to pose grinning with brown people and claim to be saving them. A true colonial character – give me tight dresses and flashy colours any day! Since I find him nauseating, I mostly ignore him, though his Wikipedia entry makes him sound a saint (in the Rich White Man category), with prizes for ‘powerful columns that portrayed suffering among the developing world’s often forgotten people and stirred action’ and for ‘giving voice to the voiceless’. Gag. Ashton Kutcher is way preferable.
Lately Kristof live-tweeted a brothel raid alongside Somaly Mam, supposedly blow-by-blow. I am not going to complain about twitter, but the 140-character limit does foster reductionism and clichés. But more important is his claim later that thanks to him and Mam:
In Anlong Veng, Cambodia, 6 more brothels have closed since the raid I live-tweeted there that rescued a seventh-grader.
Great balls of fire, what colossal nerve to make such a claim. I know he is trying to reach the mainstream but it is so offensive he would refer to a young person in Cambodia with a made-in-USA label like seventh grader. His next claim was:
In part, that’s the power of Twitter. And the fear of traffickers that they could be next to face wrath of @*SomalyMam*
Wrath? A journalist who fosters the notion of a black and white world of bad people punished by good is not a journalist at all but a man selling his own virtue – which by the way is what prostitutes were said to be doing, in the olden days.
But vulgarity and childishness are not so important in the end. The real disorder in Kristof’s blithe chirping about brothels closing is the absence of responsibility towards the people working in them: where did they go? how will they live? do they have a roof over their heads now? How can he not understand that this is just how trafficking can happen, in his own sense of the word?
Not only women who sell sex earn their livelihoods through brothels: barmen, waiters, guards, laundresses, food vendors and others are integrated into these businesses. Those who want to abolish them might at least suggest alternatives if this source of income dries up. As for actual brothel workers, whether they were happy or coerced, the stigma attached to their previous employment could make it difficult to fend for themselves afterwards without turning to unscrupulous characters unless they are very lucky. But in the fairytale land of Rescue, uncomfortable consequences don’t exist and Rescuers are always Doing Good.
A critical perspective is commoner amongst those concerned about so-called Development and Aid. I used the satirical representation at the right on a post about Rescue Tourism, and Africa is a Country also makes fun of him. If you want to read a recent smarmy article by Kristof, try Fighting Back, One Brothel Raid at a Time from 12 November at The New York Times, where he boasts of his own heroism:
But riding beside Somaly in her car toward a brothel bristling with AK-47 assault rifles, it was scary. This town of Anlong Veng is in northern Cambodia near the Thai border, with a large military presence; it feels like something out of the Wild West.
There it is: Rescue as cowboy thrills, a way to live out conceited notions of importance by riding rough-shod through other people’s lives.
–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist
_____Comments____________
Cristina on 22 November 2011 at 20:00
Nick Kristoff is really despicable.I have worked with some “former slaves” he has interviewed and featured and they shared their trafficking stories with me. Interestingly, Mr. Kristoff’s own articles and stories about these girls exaggerate and sometimes alter parts of the story, as if it its some sort of oral history or myth.
One of these girls did not want to be “the face” of trafficking. However, with some pressure that she would “share” the story of trafficking and this would help prevent others from enduring what she did pushed her to agree. However, she does not get paid for her story being rewritten and re-imagined. Meanwhile Mr. Kristoff is praised for his “daring” and “heart wrenching” journalism and he is getting PAID for this work. Shame on him.
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Laura Agustín on 22 November 2011 at 20:23
Cristina, I have heard other such rumours about those supposedly saved by both Kristof and Mam. It’s a shame we can’t find a way to present this as ‘evidence’ of exploitative practices by Helpers and Saviours.
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kato on 22 November 2011 at 21:58
Unfortunately these so called rescuers are using cases of people who are held against their will, as a weapon in an attempt to remove the rights of sex workers, thus endangering them, some of those sex workers say that they do not have any real better alternative than sex work, that they would choose to be a sex worker instead of other options that they don’t want to do.
It is extremely dangerous to use a few cases of trafficked victims as justification for society to remove sex workers rights, thus making them more endangered and discriminated against and marginalised, thus affecting their mental health and mind, body and spirit.
If a female or male wants to be a sex worker then they should at least feel comfortable and protected by rights and by the police, even if sex workers are not always liked, they still are human beings who deserve rights and they should have every right to feel safe and protected in their own chosen consentual adult sexual relationships, just like wives, girlfriends, boyfriends and husbands etc have rights in their relationships and sexual relations, then sex workers must also have equal rights to equality in consensual adult sexual relationships.
The people who want to remove sex workers in society, are not listening to sex workers wants, opinions and needs, cause they just do not care, and do not respect them for their relationship choices, farley and bindel with their judgemental attitude are two such examples of people who discriminate against sex workers.
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Kris on 22 November 2011 at 22:59
I find his stories very interesting. He also reports about the DMSC in India. It turns out to be the largest human trafficking ring in the world! They have tens of thousands of sex slaves in their grasp!! That’s more than the total number of prostitutes in the Netherlands. Saban B looks like a wimp compared to these criminals, his gang only occupied 40 women during one moment. But 40 women is a lot obviously.
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Laura Agustín on 23 November 2011 at 16:41
You may find his stories interesting, but that is the second time you have mentioned his slanderous comments about DMSC on this website. They are not true, he did not understand that organisation, as how would he? He finds what he has preconceived notions about. I will appreciate your not repeating this again. Thank you.
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Tracey Tully on 28 November 2011 at 03:20
Kristof is dangerous because he is so widely-read in the English-speaking world and because he propagates memes like the one you describe. It is an absolute lie. I know workers from DMSC and they are doing some incredible grass-roots work. I feel you have to be emotionally invested in his heroic narrative to miss the clues about the toxic ideas he is presenting. His jounalismy activismy jaunt to Cambodia was a voyeuristic perversion, as are many stories about sex trafficking, not just Kristof. Though he is already a long-time offender. Would you want him near your daughter?
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kato on 23 November 2011 at 00:48
Unfortunately those so called rescuers are using cases of trafficked victims as an excuse and as a weapon in an attempt to remove sex workers rights to equality in society, they try to remove those rights by using stigma and spreading misinformation.
There has been a lot of sex workers who have stated that they want to remain doing sex work, as other alternatives are just not that appealing to them, so instead of trying to take away their livelihood and using stigma and discrimination against them, why not just give them rights and better protection in society?
Many sex workers have been murdered cause of bad stigma in society and lack of rights to equality and safety.
Most sex workers agree, it is not the work itself that is dangerous, but the lack of rights to safer conditions, thats the real danger, its hard to get safer conditions with so much disinformation and hatred being spread against sex workers, by people who do not like their chosen profession.
Wives, husbands, adult boyfriend and girlfriends have equal rights to adult consensual sexual relations, sex workers should also have their equal rights to their own adult consensual sexual relations and promotion of safety and better conditions.
It is unfair to hold a huge portion of sex workers as being responsible for any cases of trafficked victims, both are seperate issues that need to be addressed in a fair, cohesive and precise way, much education also needs to be done on both issues for improving the situations of the sex worker and any trafficked victim.
Its surely not impossible to create safer environments for both issues.
But first people should realise that yes they are women and even men in society who want to be sex workers and have a livelihood out of it, and during their time as sex workers they need fair treatment.
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Laura Agustín on 23 November 2011 at 16:44
Well-put summary of the sex worker rights position. I don’t promote the idea that there are two clearly separable groups, though, myself – it’s far more complicated than that!
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kato on 23 November 2011 at 18:36
Laura the USA recently recognised that sex workers have different rights and needs to trafficked victims.
Do you have an opinion on this, curious to know?
It is true though that both issues are a bit complex
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Adeyemi on 23 November 2011 at 21:20
At this time I have no critique of the work of Nicholas Kristoff as I believe the truth will emerge if actually he is exploiting the victims. However, while I agree the society must find alternative source of livelihood for the sex worker, I completely object to the notion of giving rights to commercial sex workers to continue what they do for a living. The question is how do we protect children used for sex by adults who visit brothels to solicit sex? By giving them such rights, the society would be legalizing commercial sex; it is time to abolish prostitution in it’s entirety I do not favor the mistreatment of a woman’s body in any form therefore, while the society must find an alternative form of survival for people involved, the abolitionists are right we must end prostitution and sex trafficking.
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kato on 24 November 2011 at 02:43
Some sex workers have said they do not want some other alternative source of livelihood cause the alternatives do not pay as much as sex work.
If sex workers want rights, they are entitled to rights.
You are most naive if you ever think that you can abolish human exchanges where sexual services are offered in exchange for material wealth, such activity has been there for hundreds and hundreds of years stretching back to some of the earliest known civilisations, get real.
Trafficking with held victims most definetly should be fought, but not to the level where it creates trouble and danger for sex workers like in sweden where they are forced cause of restrictions into dangerous situations.
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Johnpaul on 28 November 2011 at 19:32
“Some sex workers have said…”
Really, Kato? Than that ends that debate. If “some have said” than clearly we should let them go on undisturbed.
Oh, by the way, “some” of these sex workers are little children…I wonder what they have to say.
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McDuff on 30 November 2011 at 07:15
We wouldn’t find out by asking Nick Kristoff. He’s never very interested in what prostitutes have to say, regardless of their age. Well, apart from prostitutes called Nick Kristoff.
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marc on 28 November 2011 at 20:48
laura
i don’t want to get into the sex worker issue…but the issue of trafficking pre-adolescent girls simply has no defense.
you may be right that Nick Kristof is using an ‘Geraldo’ approach but at least he is getting the message out to millions of people…
your problem is that right or wrong, and not withstanding a short guest appearance on BBC and hanging out with Julian Assange’s legal team, no one knows who you are..
As far as Nick Kriston the Rich, White, Straight, male…I would give that issue a rest…Since, to judge from your photos you are a Rich-World, White, Woman …you fit the neo-colonalist profile too.
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Laura Agustín on 29 November 2011 at 01:57
What problem are you talking about, marc? It doesn’t matter if I am important, it’s a blog, these are my opinions as a researcher in the field for many years. Freedom of speech, remember? And whiteness is not about skin colour, I guess I will have to write about that soon.
Also I never mentioned Geraldo, that was someone else.
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Bittermuch on 6 December 2011 at 21:39
You take criticism well, Laura.
Maybe what Marc was simply stating is that he disagrees with your bashing because, unlike you, Nick is well known and is doing a really good job with the awareness factor. Freedom of speech….remember?
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Gregory A. Butler on 29 November 2011 at 01:51
Marc –
It’s easy to make cheap shots at Dr Agustin.
How about we keep this story focused on the main theme.
That is, a glory-seeking affluent White man from America comes to Cambodia to impose his morality on adult Cambodian sex workers. Many of these sex workers have ended up in Cambodia’s hellish prison system thanks to Kristof’s “rescue efforts”.
That’s the bottom line, no matter what you think of Dr Agustin.
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Pingback from Reality Tour of Human Trafficking in Cambodia: Yes, This Actually Exists | Faine Opines on 29 November 2011 at 18:01
Johnpaul on 29 November 2011 at 23:09
Mr. Butler,
How about we keep this story focused on the important theme.
Children are being forcibly raped.
Somebody needs to do something and Kristof is doing more to raise awareness than anyone else (yes, including you Ashton).
That’s the bottom line, no matter what you think of Mr. Kristof.
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Gregory A. Butler on 30 November 2011 at 05:56
John Paul,
The issue is, Kristof’s raids are leading to adult sex workers, voluntarily employed in the trade, being arrested, beaten, robbed and raped by the Cambodian Police.
That’s the real issue here, as the vast majority of sex workers rounded up in Kristof’s raids (about a 200 to 1) ratio, are adult sex workers.
As for Nick Kristof, he’s a rich White man from the west with a messiah complex, an unhealthy obsession with young women having sex and more money than brains.
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Tracey Tully on 30 November 2011 at 05:52
John Paul, we do not know if or when and where children are being forcibly raped. In case you haven’t noticed, Kristof is a liar. It’s all part of the neocolonialist mindset. If sex work was vested with labour rights, it would prevent trafficking. It is the best safeguard against it, as well as against HIV, STIs and violence. Especially state violence.
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Johnpaul on 30 November 2011 at 22:27
Thanks Greg and Tracey, where do you get your statistics from and Tracey why do you say Kristof is a liar?
I heard from a lot of people that don’t like Nick Kristof but I don’t really understand where the anger comes from. Surely it can’t be for refering to one of the Cambodian children as a “Seventh grader” (which, in my opinion, is the pettiest criticism I’ve ever heard).
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Gregory A. Butler on 1 December 2011 at 22:23
Kristof sets himself up as this “great White father” out to “save” the dirty fallen girls of Cambodia.
His raids lead to Cambodian women being herded into prison camps, where, according to Human Rights Watch, they are subject to beatings, rape and robbery by Cambodian police officers.
Incidentally, most of these women are ADULTS who are VOLUNTARILY working as sex workers.
That’s my beef with Kristof.
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Tracey Tully on 2 December 2011 at 05:24
I am opposed to western neocolonialism in the developing world.
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Casey Nelson on 30 November 2011 at 22:30
“Great balls of fire, what colossal nerve to make such a claim. I know he is trying to reach the mainstream but it is so offensive he would refer to a young person in Cambodia with a made-in-USA label like seventh grader.”
This does seem something of a pedantic point, but taking it a bit further, one of the things I find odd about this characterization of the girl as a “seventh-grader” is that if she is imprisoned in a brothel, she’s not going to school, regardless of the grade. And if she is a 14-year-old that’s been trafficked from Vietnam and debt-bonded into a brothel in Cambodia, most likely by her parents, it is highly unlikely that she is from a background in which she has received any significant schooling, let alone 7 years of it. While being, as I said, a rather pedantic point, it hints, in part, that Kristof is not acting as a journalist reporting on a brothel raid and the people involved, but as a dramatist of sorts, spinning a narrative in which the details of the real-world individuals are not as important as painting a particular picture. The messy particulars of actual individuals are smoothed into characters in a narrative (which do in fact fit neatly into Twitter-size blurbs.) We are not supposed to think about the complex and difficult real world circumstances leading to girls (and women) like this ending up in brothels or as some other sort of CSW, but merely have a visceral reaction that demands simple, immediate, uncomplicated solutions.
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Frank on 7 December 2011 at 16:52
I guess I came to the party a little late, but since Kristof has a movie coming out soon, this issue isn’t going away anytime soon.
marc – When you say, “I don’t want to get into the sex worker issue here…”, either you are uninformed or you are following the tack of Kristof and his cohorts who, because they cannot debate the issue of sex work straight up, have to hide behind the relatively rare 10 year old forced into prostitution to promulgate a global ban on sex work. This issue is about sex work (and imperialism) and little else.
Furthermore, taking cheap shots at Laura proves that:
1) You are losing the argument.
2) You have nothing else to add.
If you can’t handle the truth, go back to reading and listening to people like Sorvino, Hunt, and Kutcher; they have a far bigger presence on the web than people like Laura.
Lastly, regarding your “give it a rest” remark, it is pretty difficult to “give it a rest” when you have all this White ***** (in the thousands, with millions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies behind them) floating around Asia trying to impose those good ‘ole superior “Western Values” on people who never asked for or want it. Saying that Laura is some sort of neo-colonialist is ridiculous.
Frank
Showing posts with label white power. Show all posts
Showing posts with label white power. Show all posts
Sunday, March 18, 2012
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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