December 8, 2008
Race and History
By Gowans
The crisis in Zimbabwe has intensified. Inflation is incalculably high. The central bank limits – to an inadequate level - the amount of money Zimbabweans can withdraw from their bank accounts daily. Unarmed soldiers riot, their guns kept under lock and key, to prevent an armed uprising. Hospital staff fail to show up for work. The water authority is short of chemicals to purify drinking water. Cholera, easily prevented and cured under normal circumstances, has broken out, leading the government to declare a humanitarian emergency.
In the West, state officials call for the country’s president, Robert Mugabe, to step down and yield power to the leader of the largest faction of the Movement for Democratic Change, Morgan Tsvangirai. In this, the crisis is directly linked to Mugabe, its solution to Tsvangirai, but it’s never said what Mugabe has done to cause the crisis, or how Tsvangirai’s ascension to the presidency will make it go away.
The causal chain leading to the crisis can be diagrammed roughly as follows:
• In the late 90s, Mugabe’s government provokes the hostility of the West by: (1) intervening militarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo on the side of the young government of Laurent Kabila, helping to thwart an invasion by Rwandan and Ugandan forces backed by the US and Britain; (2) it rejects a pro-foreign investment economic restructuring program the IMF establishes as a condition for balance of payment support; (3) it accelerates land redistribution by seizing white-owned farms and thereby committing the ultimate affront against owners of productive property – expropriation without compensation. To governments whose foreign policy is based in large measure on protecting their nationals’ ownership rights to foreign productive assets, expropriation, and especially expropriation without compensation, is intolerable, and must be punished to deter others from doing the same.
• In response, the United States, as prime guarantor of the imperialist system, introduces the December 2001 Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act. The act instructs US representatives to international financial institutions “to oppose and vote against any extension by the respective institution of any loan, credit, or guarantee to the Government of Zimbabwe; or any cancellation or reduction of indebtedness owed by the Government of Zimbabwe to the United States or any international financial institution.”
• The act effectively deprives Zimbabwe of foreign currency required to import necessities from abroad, including chemicals to treat drinking water. Development aid from the World Bank is also cut off, denying the country access to funds to upgrade its infrastructure. The central bank takes measures to mitigate the effects of the act, creating hyper-inflation as a by-product.
The cause of the crisis, then, can be traced directly to the West. Rather than banning the export of goods to Zimbabwe, the US denied Zimbabwe the means to import goods — not trade sanctions, but an act that had the same effect. To be sure, had the Mugabe government reversed its land reform program and abided by IMF demands, the crisis would have been averted. But the trigger was pulled in Washington, London and Brussels, and it is the West, therefore, that bears the blame.
Sanctions are effectively acts of war, with often equivalent, and sometimes more devastating, consequences. More than a million Iraqis died as a result of a decade-long sanctions regime championed by the US following the 1991 Gulf War. This prompted two political scientists, John and Karl Mueller, to coin the phrase “sanctions of mass destruction.” They noted that sanctions had “contributed to more deaths in the post Cold War era than all the weapons of mass destruction in history.”
The Western media refer to sanctions on Zimbabwe as targeted – limited only to high state officials and other individuals. This ignores the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act and conceals its devastating impact, thereby shifting responsibility for the humanitarian catastrophe from the US to Mugabe.
The cholera outbreak has a parallel in the outbreak of cholera in Iraq following the Gulf War. Thomas Nagy, a business professor at George Washington University, cited declassified documents in the September 2001 issue of The Progressive magazine showing that the United States had deliberately bombed Iraq’s drinking water and sanitation facilities, recognizing that sanctions would prevent Iraq from rebuilding its water infrastructure and that epidemics of otherwise preventable diseases, cholera among them, would ensue. Washington, in other words, deliberately created a humanitarian catastrophe to achieve its goal of regime change. There is a direct parallel with Zimbabwe – the only difference is that the United States uses the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act – that is, sanctions of mass destruction – in place of bombing.
Harare’s land reform program is one of the principal reasons the United States has gone to war with Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe has redistributed land previously owned by 4,000 white farmers to 300,000 previously landless families, descendants of black Africans whose land was stolen by white settlers. By contrast, South Africa’s ANC government has redistributed only four percent of the 87 percent of land forcibly seized from the indigenous population by Europeans.
In March, South Africa’s cabinet seemed ready to move ahead with a plan to accelerate agrarian reform. It would abandon the “willing seller, willing buyer” model insisted on by the West, following in the Mugabe government’s footsteps. Under the plan, thirty percent of farmland would be redistributed to black farmers by 2014. But the government has since backed away, its reluctance to move forward based on the following considerations.
1. Most black South Africans are generations removed from the land, and no longer have the skills and culture necessary to immediately farm at a high level. An accelerated land reform program would almost certainly lower production levels, as new farmers played catch up to acquire critical skills.
2. South Africa is no longer a net exporter of food. An accelerated land reform program would likely force the country, in the short term, to rely more heavily on agricultural imports, at a time food prices are rising globally.
3. There is a danger that fast-track land reform will create a crisis of capital flight.
4. The dangers of radical land reform in provoking a backlash from the West are richly evident in the example of Zimbabwe. South Africa would like to avoid becoming the next Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe’s economic crisis is accompanied by a political crisis. Talks on forming a government of national unity are stalled. Failure to strike a deal pivots on a single ministry – home affairs. In the West, failure to consolidate a deal between Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party and the two MDC factions is attributed to Mugabe’s intransigence in insisting that he control all key cabinet posts. It takes two to tango. Tsvangirai has shown little interest in striking an accord, preferring instead to raise objections to every solution to the impasse put forward by outside mediators, as Western ambassadors hover nearby. It’s as if, with the country teetering on the edge of collapse, he doesn’t want to do a deal, preferring instead to help hasten the collapse by throwing up obstacles to an accord, to clear the way for his ascension to the presidency. When the mediation of former South African president Thambo Mbeki failed, Tsvangirai asked the regional grouping, the SADC, to intervene. SADC ordered Zanu-PF and the MDC to share the home affairs ministry. Tsvangirai refused. Now he wants Mbeki replaced.
At the SADC meeting, Mugabe presented a report which alleges that MDC militias are being trained in Botswana by Britain, to be deployed to Zimbabwe early in 2009 to foment a civil war. The turmoil would be used as a pretext for outside military intervention. This would follow the model used to oust the Haitian government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Already, British officials and clergymen are calling for intervention. British prime minister Gordon Brown says the cholera outbreak makes Zimbabwe’s crisis international, because disease can cross borders. Since an international crisis is within the purview of the “international community,” the path is clear for the West and its satellites to step in to set matters straight
Botswana is decidedly hostile. The country’s foreign minister, Phando Skelemani, says that Zimbabwe’s neighbors should impose an oil blockade to bring the Mugabe government down.
Meanwhile, representatives of the elders, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Anan and Graca Machel sought to enter Zimbabwe to assess the humanitarian situation. Inasmuch as an adequate assessment could not be made on the whistle-stop tour the trio had planned, Harare barred their entry, recognizing that the trip would simply be used as a platform to declaim on the necessity of regime change. The elders’ humanitarian concern, however, didn’t stop the trio from agreeing that stepped up sanctions – more misery for the population — would be useful.
The Mugabe government’s pursuit of land reform, rejection of neo-liberal restructuring, and movement to eclipse US imperialism in southern Africa, has put Zimbabwe on the receiving end of a Western attack based on punitive financial sanctions. The intention, as is true of all Western destabilization efforts, has been to make the target country ungovernable, forcing the government to step down, clearing the way for the ascension of the West’s local errand boys. Owing to the West’s attack, Zimbabwe’s government is struggling to provide the population with basic necessities. It can no longer provide basic sanitation and access to potable water at a sufficient level to prevent the outbreak of otherwise preventable diseases.
The replacement of the Mugabe government with one led by the Movement for Democratic Change, a party created and directed by Western governments, if it happens, will lead to an improvement in the humanitarian situation. This won’t come about because the MDC is more competent at governing, but because sanctions will be lifted and access to balance of payment support and development aid will be restored. Zimbabwe will once again be able to import adequate amounts of water purification chemicals. The improving humanitarian situation will be cited as proof the West was right all along in insisting on a change of government.
The downside is that measures to indigenize the economy – to place the country’s agricultural and mineral wealth in the hands of the black majority – will be reversed. Mugabe and key members of the state will be shipped off to The Hague – or attempts will be made to ship them off – to send a message to others about what befalls those who threaten the dominant mode of property relations and challenge Western domination. Cowed by the example of Zimbabwe, Africans in other countries will back away from their own land reform and economic indigenization demands, and the continent will settle more firmly into a pattern of neo-colonial subjugation.
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Zimbabwe and hypocrisy - lessons from history
From Tony McGregor
So the sham election is over and Robert Gabriel Mugabe pronounced to be duly elected President of the Republic of Zimbabwe to a chorus of condemnation from the Western powers and a significant number of African leaders also.
The gleeful condemnation from the West, under the cheerleading of the horrible two-headed monster called Bush/Brown (hereinafter called BB) is loud, vociferous and incredibly hypocritical, not to mention a-historical.
Through the 60s, 70s and 80s the US and its allies maintained Mobutu Sese Seko, the ogre of Zaire, in power while he plundered his country, exploited its people and left it in a state of undemocratic shambles, impoverished and at war with itself.
Through the 70s, 80s and 90s the US and its allies urged on the vicious exploits of Jonas Savimbi against the elected government of Angola, in a wasteful, cruel and totally unnecessary civil war which cost millions of lives.
And now they turn on Mugabe, who has not done nearly as much damage, though the damage he has done is still immense, as Mobutu and Savimbi did, not to mention other “darlings” of the West like Daniel Arap Moi.
The West conveniently forgets, while condemning Mugabe with such breath-taking hypocrisy, that the land which is now called Zimbabwe was originally stolen by chicanery and violence from its people in the late 19th Century. Then the people were again insulted and denied their rights in their own land by Ian Smith’s attempted 1000-year reich, which mercifully only lasted a few decades.
An intelligence report by an official of the British South African Company (the company owned by Cecil John Rhodes and which was the instrument he used to rob the people of Zimbabwe of their land) in a report in February 1897 wrote that the people of Zimbabwe “mean to remain independent.”
This nameless official went on in his report: “Therefore what is required are strong lessons, which we have failed to give them from the very beginning of the war. And this failure only proved to the natives that with all our men and guns we have not even been able to get at them … All this shows that our mode of fighting is not the proper one for Mashonas; even the natives laugh at it…”
The official concluded the report with these words: “In conclusion, my advice would be to give to the natives of the district as severe a lesson as possible, surprising and burning their kraals when it is possible to do so, and, at all events throughout the district, to lay waste their crops.”
Thus the “civilizing” work of the colonists! And let’s not forget that the “natives of the district” were actually the rightful owners of the land and that the lesson they were to be taught was that they should give up their land to the white settlers.
This land was being wrested from them by a combination of trickery, deceit and firepower. The deceit was in the form of the Rudd Concession which an agent of Cecil John Rhodes, one Charles Rudd, had signed with the nDebele King Jando Lopengule (Lobengula) Kumalo.
By this agreement, Lobengula had been assured, only ten settlers would be allowed to mine in his kingdom and that all people there would be considered to be living in his kingdom.
So when hundreds of settlers arrived he was, unsurprisingly, somewhat peeved!
From that time on the indigenous people of Zimbabwe suffered one depredation after another. Their land was stolen, their rights to independence were stolen, their self-esteem was stolen.
In every constitutional arrangement from then on their rights were reduced.
It should be no surprise then that Mugabe rants on about Bush and Blair wanting to rob the Zimbabwean people of their birthright. On what basis should the Zimbabweans trust the West, and Britain in particular?
The final straw for the Black people of Zimbabwe was the unfortunate so-called independence (UDI) declared by Ian Smith on 11 November 1965. This triggered a long “bush” war, known by the people of Zimbabwe as the Second Chimurenga (War of Independence). The first Chimurenga was the struggle against the colonial theft in the 19th Century.
The Second Chimurenga lasted from UDI until the signing of the Lancaster House Agreement in 1979 which led to elections and the installation of a government led by Mugabe as Prime Minister.
See also Zimbabwe Image
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
More Blood on West's Hands
Impact of Sanctions Downplayed in Zimbabwe Crisis
New American Media
Dec 29, 2008
NEW YORK (FinalCall.com) - John Holmes, the United Nations under secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, recently said sanctions imposed by the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union on Zimbabwe are a “side issue” and have nothing to do with the spreading cholera epidemic engulfing the small southern African nation.
Mr. Holmes, who is also the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, spoke at a Dec. 5 press conference here at the UN headquarters. By Dec. 12 there were 16,700 new cases of cholera recorded in Zimbabwe with nearly 800 deaths, mainly children and the elderly who are the most vulnerable. The World Health Organization reported an upward trend in new and suspected cases of the disease in the country.
“The degradation of the water supply and sanitation systems is one of the root causes of the cholera outbreak. There are not sufficient safe sources of drinking water,” observed Mr. Marcus Bachman, Medecins Sans Frontieres’ (Doctors Without Borders) emergency coordinator in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital.
The government of Zimbabwe has been unable to borrow money from international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank since 2001. Because of this, it cannot upgrade its sanitation and sewerage infrastructure which is necessary to halt the spread of cholera.
The Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001, legislation enacted by the United States Congress, empowers the treasury secretary of the United States to “instruct the U.S. executive director of each international financial institution to oppose and vote against any extension by the respective institution of any loan, credit or guarantee to the government of Zimbabwe.” The effect of this infanticidal and unconscionable piece of legislation, according to economists, is the refusal of all banks to extend credit and loans to the government to pay for the country’s medical and infrastructural needs.
“I don’t think that the sanctions which are essentially imposed on individuals and particular entities can be said to be a major contributory factor to the cholera epidemic. The cholera epidemic comes from basic things like the lack of clean water and the collapse of the health system. Any link between individual sanctions and the cholera epidemic is pretty remote,” Mr. Holmes declared.
According to observers, Mr. Holmes’ ignorance of the particulars of the U.S. sanctions legislation is startling. The sanctions are not “essentially imposed on individuals.” They are imposed on the entire country. When asked whether or not he was familiar with the U.S. sanctions legislation, he admitted that he was not familiar with the bill.
Even after being appraised of the specifics of the legislation, Mr. Holmes’ obsequence to the political agenda of the U.S. towards Zimbabwe was palpable. Without offering any evidence, the under secretary-general said that, “The government of Zimbabwe has had plenty of opportunities in different ways to access goods or lines of credit from different places in the world if it chose to do so.”
Some UN diplomats, requesting anonymity, observed that only an unabashed sycophant or a blissfully ignorant individual could make such a statement. They pointed out that banks shun any country that has been blacklisted by U.S. legislation. This is so because if they engage in any commercial transactions with such countries, they will be penalized both civilly and criminally, starting with exclusion from the U.S. banking system.
Mr. Holmes’ posture towards Zimbabwe is regrettable but understandable given his political pedigree. Prior to his appointment as UN Under Secretary-General in January 2007, Mr. Holmes was the private secretary of former UK prime minister, Tony Blair. It was during Mr. Blair’s administration that relations between the UK, U.S. and the EU deteriorated, culminating in the 2001 U.S. legislation cutting off Zimbabwe from the global financial markets.
What’s unsettling is that Mr. Holmes’ attitude vis-à-vis Zimbabwe is at stark variance with his public pronouncements relating to how other humanitarian crises in other parts of the world should be solved.
“Humanitarian relief is no substitute for political action and the active search for conflict prevention and resolution. Which is why as humanitarians we must go on pressing the politicians for more proactive searches for solutions,” Mr. Holmes asserted at a conference in Dubai earlier this year.
U.S. President George Bush ought to read the above. His response to the cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe was to call on the country’s president, Robert Mugabe, to resign. “Across the continent, African voices are bravely speaking out to say now is the time for him to step down,” Mr. Bush crowed.
Not so was the sharp response from the African Union. “Only dialogue between the Zimbabwean parties, supported by the AU and other (African) regional actors, can restore peace and stability to that country,” said Salva Rweyemamu, spokesman for AU chairman and Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete.
According to press reports, President Rweyemamu said sending peacekeeping troops or removing President Mugabe by force as proposed by South African Bishop Desmond Tutu and Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga, who expressed personal opinions, were not options. “We have a serious humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe. We have cholera. Do they think that we can eradicate cholera with guns?” he asked, incredulously.
UN diplomats say the “political action” the U.S. government must take to halt the spread of cholera in Zimbabwe is the rescinding of the sanctions legislation. The shibboleth of “bad governance” often attributed to Zimbabwe is nothing but political prestidigitation, they added.
When Iceland went bankrupt in November—the country couldn’t repay its external debts, the Icelandic currency, the krona, lost all of its value, the banking industry collapsed and businesses could no longer pay for imports—there was no call for Iceland’s president, Olafur Grimsson, to resign. There was no charge of bad governance attributed to the government of Iceland. Instead, the global community responded generously with loans totaling $10 billion. That’s about $33,000 for each of Iceland’s 300,000 citizens. Out of that $10 billion, $2.1 billion came from the IMF.
Unless it is the opinion of the UN that Iceland’s children are more worthy of being saved than the children of Zimbabwe, UN diplomats say Mr. Holmes needs to dispense with his obfuscation and call on the United States to rescind its inhumane sanctions legislation so that the children of Zimbabwe can live.
New American Media
Dec 29, 2008
NEW YORK (FinalCall.com) - John Holmes, the United Nations under secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, recently said sanctions imposed by the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union on Zimbabwe are a “side issue” and have nothing to do with the spreading cholera epidemic engulfing the small southern African nation.
Mr. Holmes, who is also the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, spoke at a Dec. 5 press conference here at the UN headquarters. By Dec. 12 there were 16,700 new cases of cholera recorded in Zimbabwe with nearly 800 deaths, mainly children and the elderly who are the most vulnerable. The World Health Organization reported an upward trend in new and suspected cases of the disease in the country.
“The degradation of the water supply and sanitation systems is one of the root causes of the cholera outbreak. There are not sufficient safe sources of drinking water,” observed Mr. Marcus Bachman, Medecins Sans Frontieres’ (Doctors Without Borders) emergency coordinator in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital.
The government of Zimbabwe has been unable to borrow money from international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank since 2001. Because of this, it cannot upgrade its sanitation and sewerage infrastructure which is necessary to halt the spread of cholera.
The Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001, legislation enacted by the United States Congress, empowers the treasury secretary of the United States to “instruct the U.S. executive director of each international financial institution to oppose and vote against any extension by the respective institution of any loan, credit or guarantee to the government of Zimbabwe.” The effect of this infanticidal and unconscionable piece of legislation, according to economists, is the refusal of all banks to extend credit and loans to the government to pay for the country’s medical and infrastructural needs.
“I don’t think that the sanctions which are essentially imposed on individuals and particular entities can be said to be a major contributory factor to the cholera epidemic. The cholera epidemic comes from basic things like the lack of clean water and the collapse of the health system. Any link between individual sanctions and the cholera epidemic is pretty remote,” Mr. Holmes declared.
According to observers, Mr. Holmes’ ignorance of the particulars of the U.S. sanctions legislation is startling. The sanctions are not “essentially imposed on individuals.” They are imposed on the entire country. When asked whether or not he was familiar with the U.S. sanctions legislation, he admitted that he was not familiar with the bill.
Even after being appraised of the specifics of the legislation, Mr. Holmes’ obsequence to the political agenda of the U.S. towards Zimbabwe was palpable. Without offering any evidence, the under secretary-general said that, “The government of Zimbabwe has had plenty of opportunities in different ways to access goods or lines of credit from different places in the world if it chose to do so.”
Some UN diplomats, requesting anonymity, observed that only an unabashed sycophant or a blissfully ignorant individual could make such a statement. They pointed out that banks shun any country that has been blacklisted by U.S. legislation. This is so because if they engage in any commercial transactions with such countries, they will be penalized both civilly and criminally, starting with exclusion from the U.S. banking system.
Mr. Holmes’ posture towards Zimbabwe is regrettable but understandable given his political pedigree. Prior to his appointment as UN Under Secretary-General in January 2007, Mr. Holmes was the private secretary of former UK prime minister, Tony Blair. It was during Mr. Blair’s administration that relations between the UK, U.S. and the EU deteriorated, culminating in the 2001 U.S. legislation cutting off Zimbabwe from the global financial markets.
What’s unsettling is that Mr. Holmes’ attitude vis-à-vis Zimbabwe is at stark variance with his public pronouncements relating to how other humanitarian crises in other parts of the world should be solved.
“Humanitarian relief is no substitute for political action and the active search for conflict prevention and resolution. Which is why as humanitarians we must go on pressing the politicians for more proactive searches for solutions,” Mr. Holmes asserted at a conference in Dubai earlier this year.
U.S. President George Bush ought to read the above. His response to the cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe was to call on the country’s president, Robert Mugabe, to resign. “Across the continent, African voices are bravely speaking out to say now is the time for him to step down,” Mr. Bush crowed.
Not so was the sharp response from the African Union. “Only dialogue between the Zimbabwean parties, supported by the AU and other (African) regional actors, can restore peace and stability to that country,” said Salva Rweyemamu, spokesman for AU chairman and Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete.
According to press reports, President Rweyemamu said sending peacekeeping troops or removing President Mugabe by force as proposed by South African Bishop Desmond Tutu and Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga, who expressed personal opinions, were not options. “We have a serious humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe. We have cholera. Do they think that we can eradicate cholera with guns?” he asked, incredulously.
UN diplomats say the “political action” the U.S. government must take to halt the spread of cholera in Zimbabwe is the rescinding of the sanctions legislation. The shibboleth of “bad governance” often attributed to Zimbabwe is nothing but political prestidigitation, they added.
When Iceland went bankrupt in November—the country couldn’t repay its external debts, the Icelandic currency, the krona, lost all of its value, the banking industry collapsed and businesses could no longer pay for imports—there was no call for Iceland’s president, Olafur Grimsson, to resign. There was no charge of bad governance attributed to the government of Iceland. Instead, the global community responded generously with loans totaling $10 billion. That’s about $33,000 for each of Iceland’s 300,000 citizens. Out of that $10 billion, $2.1 billion came from the IMF.
Unless it is the opinion of the UN that Iceland’s children are more worthy of being saved than the children of Zimbabwe, UN diplomats say Mr. Holmes needs to dispense with his obfuscation and call on the United States to rescind its inhumane sanctions legislation so that the children of Zimbabwe can live.
African Union urges scrapping of Zimbabwe sanctions
France24
01/02/2009
AFP - The African Union Saturday urged the lifting of sanctions against Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's regime as he prepares to share power with his opposition rival in a unity government.
The AU's executive council adopted a resolution ahead of of Sunday's summit here calling for "the lifting of sanctions against Zimbabwe to help ease the humanitarian situation in the country."
African Union head Jean Ping, when asked about sanctions levied by the United States and European Union, said: "I think that everybody today should help Zimbabwe to rebuild its economy, because an agreement has been reached.
Since disputed elections in March 2008, Zimbabwe's shattered economy has nosedived further. It has the world's highest inflation rate -- 231 million percent -- and is struggling with a cholera epidemic that has claimed some 3,000 lives.
Zimbabwe's opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai this week acceded to a decision by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) regional bloc that a unity government be formed according to a strict timeline which would see him sworn in as prime minister on February 11.
The 53-nation AU asked members and partners "to solidly back the implementation of a comprehensive pact" to end the ruinous political and economic stalemate.
Mugabe's party, which had previously threatened to set up a unity government with or without Tsvangirai, has said it will accept the timetable.
Ping said: "Imagine that you don't help Zimbabwe, who will be blamed? Everybody is expecting that today, because Tsvangirai is going to lead the economy and everything, that the economy should recover. So if you don't do that who will be blamed by the population?
"Today SADC told us they have agreed on a solution, the two parties have agreed on that solution," Ping said, adding: "In politics nothing can be forever. We hope this solution can be a lasting one."
The 84-year-old Mugabe -- in power since Zimbabwe's independence from Britain in 1980 -- has long accused Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change party of being a tool of Britain and the United States, whose governments are opposed to his regime.
Both countries offered up restrained hope in response to the announcement Friday of a unity government being installed in February.
"I've seen the reports about this agreement, but as you can understand, we are a bit skeptical. These types of things have been announced before," US State Department acting spokesman Robert Wood said.
"The key is always implementation," he added.
An equally tempered reaction emerged from London, where British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said he looked forward to seeing details of a deal that would hold Zimbabwean lawmakers accountable.
"The new government will be judged on its actions, above all by the people of Zimbabwe," he said.
EU foreign ministers on Monday tightened sanctions on Zimbabwe, freezing the assets of companies based in British tax havens for the first time and adding 26 more names of people close to the Mugabe regime or their families to a travel-ban list, bringing the number to 203.
The amount of companies whose assets in Europe must be frozen was increased sharply from four to 40 and for the first time European-based firms are included.
According to EU sources, all 18 of the European company names added are based on British territory, including tax havens Jersey, the Isle of Man and the British Virgin Islands.
01/02/2009
AFP - The African Union Saturday urged the lifting of sanctions against Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's regime as he prepares to share power with his opposition rival in a unity government.
The AU's executive council adopted a resolution ahead of of Sunday's summit here calling for "the lifting of sanctions against Zimbabwe to help ease the humanitarian situation in the country."
African Union head Jean Ping, when asked about sanctions levied by the United States and European Union, said: "I think that everybody today should help Zimbabwe to rebuild its economy, because an agreement has been reached.
Since disputed elections in March 2008, Zimbabwe's shattered economy has nosedived further. It has the world's highest inflation rate -- 231 million percent -- and is struggling with a cholera epidemic that has claimed some 3,000 lives.
Zimbabwe's opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai this week acceded to a decision by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) regional bloc that a unity government be formed according to a strict timeline which would see him sworn in as prime minister on February 11.
The 53-nation AU asked members and partners "to solidly back the implementation of a comprehensive pact" to end the ruinous political and economic stalemate.
Mugabe's party, which had previously threatened to set up a unity government with or without Tsvangirai, has said it will accept the timetable.
Ping said: "Imagine that you don't help Zimbabwe, who will be blamed? Everybody is expecting that today, because Tsvangirai is going to lead the economy and everything, that the economy should recover. So if you don't do that who will be blamed by the population?
"Today SADC told us they have agreed on a solution, the two parties have agreed on that solution," Ping said, adding: "In politics nothing can be forever. We hope this solution can be a lasting one."
The 84-year-old Mugabe -- in power since Zimbabwe's independence from Britain in 1980 -- has long accused Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change party of being a tool of Britain and the United States, whose governments are opposed to his regime.
Both countries offered up restrained hope in response to the announcement Friday of a unity government being installed in February.
"I've seen the reports about this agreement, but as you can understand, we are a bit skeptical. These types of things have been announced before," US State Department acting spokesman Robert Wood said.
"The key is always implementation," he added.
An equally tempered reaction emerged from London, where British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said he looked forward to seeing details of a deal that would hold Zimbabwean lawmakers accountable.
"The new government will be judged on its actions, above all by the people of Zimbabwe," he said.
EU foreign ministers on Monday tightened sanctions on Zimbabwe, freezing the assets of companies based in British tax havens for the first time and adding 26 more names of people close to the Mugabe regime or their families to a travel-ban list, bringing the number to 203.
The amount of companies whose assets in Europe must be frozen was increased sharply from four to 40 and for the first time European-based firms are included.
According to EU sources, all 18 of the European company names added are based on British territory, including tax havens Jersey, the Isle of Man and the British Virgin Islands.
Zimbabwe blames EU sanctions for cholera deaths
"The only reason I googled up those articles about Zimbabwe was a few horrifying seconds of BBC News I happened to catch in the car last week, on the public radio program "The World," about the United Nations World Food Program having to cut in half the already inadequate monthly rations it provides that country. It takes about 36 pounds of corn a month to keep an adult alive. But now, because of donor shortfalls (the United States and Europe are unwilling to lift sanctions, including famine aid, on Mugabe), the World Food Program is being forced to reduce its rations to 11 pounds of corn per person per month. They only way someone can survive on that is to scavenge enough wild fruit to stave off malnutrition and disease. Seven million people could die by April."
Zimbabwe blames EU sanctions for cholera deaths
December 7th, 2008 in Medicine & Health / Diseases
AFP
Zimbabwean state media on Sunday blamed the country's cholera outbreak, which has claimed nearly 600 lives, on European sanctions imposed on the regime of President Robert Mugabe.
"The cholera outbreak is a clear example of the effects of sanctions on innocent people," The Sunday Mail newspaper said in its editorial as the European Union prepared to tighten sanctions on the government.
"The people who are suffering most are not politicians they claim they want to punish, but poor people," the newspaper said.
"All the victims (of cholera) are as a result of the freezing of balance of payments support, depriving the country of foreign currency required to buy chemicals to treat our drinking water."
European Union foreign ministers are expected to adopt in Brussels on Monday a draft text tightening sanctions against Zimbabwe amid worries over the deteriorating humanitarian situation and political stalemate in the country.
They will add names to the EU's sanctions list of 168 members of the Zimbabwe regime, including Mugabe and his wife Grace, who are banned from entering EU nations and whose European assets have been frozen.
Meanwhile, a South African team will on Monday meet with stakeholders in Zimbabwe and assess how it can aid the nation stricken by a food crisis and cholera outbreak, a South African government spokesman said on Sunday.
"There is no change in our plans to send an official delegation to Zimbabwe tomorrow (Monday). It is going to be a one-day mission during which the team will meet all stakeholders," Themba Maseko told AFP.
He did not give further details.
Maseko had on Friday told reporters that the team would "assess the situation on the ground, determine the level of assistance required and consult with the representatives of the various stakeholders in Zimbabwe on how a multi-stakeholder distribution and monitoring mechanism could be set up."
The team would then brief South African President Kgalema Motlanthe and ministers who would decide on humanitarian aid to be provided by South Africa.
Mugabe has been under intense pressure over his country's collapse from both the West and his neighbours who have urged a stronger stance against the 84-year-old veteran leader.
© 2008 AFP
Zimbabwe blames EU sanctions for cholera deaths
December 7th, 2008 in Medicine & Health / Diseases
AFP
Zimbabwean state media on Sunday blamed the country's cholera outbreak, which has claimed nearly 600 lives, on European sanctions imposed on the regime of President Robert Mugabe.
"The cholera outbreak is a clear example of the effects of sanctions on innocent people," The Sunday Mail newspaper said in its editorial as the European Union prepared to tighten sanctions on the government.
"The people who are suffering most are not politicians they claim they want to punish, but poor people," the newspaper said.
"All the victims (of cholera) are as a result of the freezing of balance of payments support, depriving the country of foreign currency required to buy chemicals to treat our drinking water."
European Union foreign ministers are expected to adopt in Brussels on Monday a draft text tightening sanctions against Zimbabwe amid worries over the deteriorating humanitarian situation and political stalemate in the country.
They will add names to the EU's sanctions list of 168 members of the Zimbabwe regime, including Mugabe and his wife Grace, who are banned from entering EU nations and whose European assets have been frozen.
Meanwhile, a South African team will on Monday meet with stakeholders in Zimbabwe and assess how it can aid the nation stricken by a food crisis and cholera outbreak, a South African government spokesman said on Sunday.
"There is no change in our plans to send an official delegation to Zimbabwe tomorrow (Monday). It is going to be a one-day mission during which the team will meet all stakeholders," Themba Maseko told AFP.
He did not give further details.
Maseko had on Friday told reporters that the team would "assess the situation on the ground, determine the level of assistance required and consult with the representatives of the various stakeholders in Zimbabwe on how a multi-stakeholder distribution and monitoring mechanism could be set up."
The team would then brief South African President Kgalema Motlanthe and ministers who would decide on humanitarian aid to be provided by South Africa.
Mugabe has been under intense pressure over his country's collapse from both the West and his neighbours who have urged a stronger stance against the 84-year-old veteran leader.
© 2008 AFP
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Swat valley schools prepare to close doors to girl students
Publish Date: Saturday,27 December, 2008, at 01:22 AM Doha Time
ISLAMABAD: The future of 40,000 girls in the Swat valley is at stake following a Taliban ban on schooling for girls.
Shah Duran, the deputy of Swat-based Taliban cleric Fazlullah, this week warned the administrations of government and private educational institutions not to enrol girls in schools.
The Taliban also issued a deadline of January 15, 2009 for the ban to be implemented, following which they said they would bomb the buildings of schools allowing girls to study.
The Taliban have blown up more than 100 girls’ schools in Swat in the past 14 months.
Locals say they are helpless and have no option but to accede to the Taliban’s pressure as the government has failed to provide securuty.
“This is terrible,” the principal of a private school in Mingora said.
He said the Taliban decision had proved that the government had lost its writ in the valley. “This is a question of the future of our children. The Taliban decision will throw more than 40,000 girls out of schools,” he said.
He said the school owners in Swat district were planning to convene a meeting and form a committee with the help of elders to have dialogue with the Taliban.
The announcement has stamped the statement of the ruling Awami National Party Senator Muhamad Adeel who had told a seminar in Peshawar a fortnight ago that the government had lost control over Swat.
A social worker said people had already started migrating from Swat following threats by the Taliban. “Things are changing dramatically. We cannot say anything because the people and the whole government is helpless before these armed people,” he said.
The man said his three daughters were studying at an English medium school. He had no other option but to shift his family to some other area to educate his children, he added.
Schools are the most vulnerable target since the beginning of trouble in Swat. According to figures provided by a Swat-based non-government organisation, Pakistan Coalition for Education, Taliban have destroyed over 100 of the 490 primary schools for girls in Swat so far.
The destruction of schools and recent threats to teachers and students have forced over 50,000 girls out of schools, the PCE figures said.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai yesterday condemned a ban on female education by Taliban extremists in troubled northwestern Pakistan, calling it un-Islamic and a way to oppress the area’s Pashtuns. A Taliban commander in Pakistan’s Swat valley has banned girls from attending school, this week threatening to kill any female students who went to class after January 15, local officials said.
Karzai called the move “un-Islamic and inhuman”, saying in a statement that Afghanistan had experienced similar “terrorist” threats against education in the south, an area where Taliban insurgents have strong influence.
“Based on Islamic responsibility and humanity for our Pashtun brothers and sisters, we condemn every step which causes this large tribe backwardness and misfortune,” he said. “These kinds of elements, through releasing such statements, want to deprive Pashtun children of education so that they will always be needy.”
Karzai is a member of Afghanistan’s Pashtun majority. The powerful tribe also dominates Pakistan’s western border area where the Taliban, also mostly ethnic Pashtuns, operate.
Education has suffered badly in Swat as a result of the ongoing fighting between Taliban-linked militants and security forces, with only a handful of schools still open in the region’s main city Mingora.
The region has been turned into a battleground since radical cleric Maulana Fazlullah, who has links to Pakistan’s Taliban movement, in 2007 launched a violent campaign for the introduction of Islamic Sharia law in the valley.
Rockets fired by Taliban militants yesterday killed one girl and injured nine people including two paramilitary soldiers in a restive northwestern tribal region bordering Afghanistan, an official said.
The rockets fired in Bajaur district hit a paramilitary post. One blew up on a road nearby, killing the girl and injuring seven civilians, local official Israr Khan said.
–Agencies
ISLAMABAD: The future of 40,000 girls in the Swat valley is at stake following a Taliban ban on schooling for girls.
Shah Duran, the deputy of Swat-based Taliban cleric Fazlullah, this week warned the administrations of government and private educational institutions not to enrol girls in schools.
The Taliban also issued a deadline of January 15, 2009 for the ban to be implemented, following which they said they would bomb the buildings of schools allowing girls to study.
The Taliban have blown up more than 100 girls’ schools in Swat in the past 14 months.
Locals say they are helpless and have no option but to accede to the Taliban’s pressure as the government has failed to provide securuty.
“This is terrible,” the principal of a private school in Mingora said.
He said the Taliban decision had proved that the government had lost its writ in the valley. “This is a question of the future of our children. The Taliban decision will throw more than 40,000 girls out of schools,” he said.
He said the school owners in Swat district were planning to convene a meeting and form a committee with the help of elders to have dialogue with the Taliban.
The announcement has stamped the statement of the ruling Awami National Party Senator Muhamad Adeel who had told a seminar in Peshawar a fortnight ago that the government had lost control over Swat.
A social worker said people had already started migrating from Swat following threats by the Taliban. “Things are changing dramatically. We cannot say anything because the people and the whole government is helpless before these armed people,” he said.
The man said his three daughters were studying at an English medium school. He had no other option but to shift his family to some other area to educate his children, he added.
Schools are the most vulnerable target since the beginning of trouble in Swat. According to figures provided by a Swat-based non-government organisation, Pakistan Coalition for Education, Taliban have destroyed over 100 of the 490 primary schools for girls in Swat so far.
The destruction of schools and recent threats to teachers and students have forced over 50,000 girls out of schools, the PCE figures said.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai yesterday condemned a ban on female education by Taliban extremists in troubled northwestern Pakistan, calling it un-Islamic and a way to oppress the area’s Pashtuns. A Taliban commander in Pakistan’s Swat valley has banned girls from attending school, this week threatening to kill any female students who went to class after January 15, local officials said.
Karzai called the move “un-Islamic and inhuman”, saying in a statement that Afghanistan had experienced similar “terrorist” threats against education in the south, an area where Taliban insurgents have strong influence.
“Based on Islamic responsibility and humanity for our Pashtun brothers and sisters, we condemn every step which causes this large tribe backwardness and misfortune,” he said. “These kinds of elements, through releasing such statements, want to deprive Pashtun children of education so that they will always be needy.”
Karzai is a member of Afghanistan’s Pashtun majority. The powerful tribe also dominates Pakistan’s western border area where the Taliban, also mostly ethnic Pashtuns, operate.
Education has suffered badly in Swat as a result of the ongoing fighting between Taliban-linked militants and security forces, with only a handful of schools still open in the region’s main city Mingora.
The region has been turned into a battleground since radical cleric Maulana Fazlullah, who has links to Pakistan’s Taliban movement, in 2007 launched a violent campaign for the introduction of Islamic Sharia law in the valley.
Rockets fired by Taliban militants yesterday killed one girl and injured nine people including two paramilitary soldiers in a restive northwestern tribal region bordering Afghanistan, an official said.
The rockets fired in Bajaur district hit a paramilitary post. One blew up on a road nearby, killing the girl and injuring seven civilians, local official Israr Khan said.
–Agencies
A MOSAIC OF TERROR
There are so many groups calling themselves al-Qaida, Afghan Taliban, Pakistan Taliban and other names in and near Pakistan’s tumultuous tribal belt that an anti-terrorism expert confessed that he could not remember all of them.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Terrorists from Pakistan's Lashkar-e-Taiba earned international infamy last month when they carried out audacious, multiple attacks on neighbouring Mumbai, India.
The Army of the Righteous, Pure, or Pious, to render Lashkar-e-Taiba's name in English, is one of many Islamic jihadi groups operating in Pakistan. In fact, there are so many jihadis calling themselves al-Qaida, Afghan Taliban, Pakistan Taliban and other names in and near this country's tumultuous tribal belt that retired major-general Jamshed Ayaz, an anti-terrorism expert at the Institute for Regional Studies in Islamabad, confessed that he could not remember all of them.
Matthew Fisher Canwest News Service
Published: Monday, December 29, 2008
Who these shadowy groups are, what motivates them to fight and where, and to which groups they are allied is of crucial importance to soldiers from Canada who are trying to understand the complex war they are fighting across the border in Afghanistan.
The Afghan Taliban, who are all Pushtuns, are led by Mullah Omar, the charismatic one-eyed preacher who is allied by marriage and theology with al-Qaida's leader Osama bin Laden and who shares with him a $10-million US bounty on his head. But there are other Afghan Taliban leaders, such as Jalaluddin Haqqani, who operate out of Pakistan's North Waziristan district as well as Afghan warlords often based in Pakistan who wrap themselves in jihadi rhetoric but are seldom regarded as men of God.
Both the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida believe in an extremely conservative interpretation of the Koran and have long used Pakistan's tribal areas as a sanctuary. The so-called Pakistan Taliban sprang up when Mullah Omar and his followers were chased out of Afghanistan and into this country after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. After they settled here, they used thousands of mostly Saudi-funded madrassas to inspire young Pakistanis to share their core beliefs and take up their holy war.
But groups in the border areas have always been more loyal to their tribes and clans than to any one leader. As a result, the Pakistan Taliban quickly developed so many fractious components with shifting alliances that television journalist Talat Hussain, who has spent the past few years seeking them out in their mountain redoubts, described them as "franchises more than anything else. There are very loose networks, but they are unstable structures."
Despite being only a few years old, the Pakistan Taliban as a collective already controls most of this country's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) where they have set up a number of Islamic mini-states. More troubling for Pakistan's future as a unified state, they have slowly been expanding their reign of terror into North West Frontier Province with bursts of violence in many other parts of the country.
Although Jamshed Ayaz said this was "absolute rot," U.S. intelligence agencies, western diplomats and military commanders strongly believe that the Afghan Taliban and Pakistan Taliban have fluid, generally fruitful relations with officers from the Pakistan army's powerful Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate, which nurtured the Afghan Taliban when they started in the 1990s.
But not all of the Pakistan Taliban have ties to the ISI. One of its main leaders, the mysterious 34-year-old Bailtullah Mehsud, is this country's most wanted man. He is blamed for masterminding the assassination of Benazir Bhutto as well as many suicide bombings and the kidnappings of Pakistani soldiers. However, as Mehsud's gang only fights in Pakistan, it has been spared air strikes by unmanned U.S. Predator drones.
Other important Pakistan Taliban factions are led by Mullah Nazir and the warlord, Gul Bahadur, who is a direct descendent of the legendary Faqir Api, who fought against British rule in the 1900s. Both of these groups are estranged from Mehsud and have made peace deals with the Pakistani army, but because they have fighters in Afghanistan and provide logistical support to al-Qaida and the Afghan Taliban, they have been targeted by American drones operating over Pakistan.
To fight the Pakistan Taliban, the new government of Asif Ali Zardari has recently sent the army into parts of FATA where there have been involved in several major battles. As a part of a divide and rule policy, the army has also been handing out weapons to local tribal militias known as lashkars. But this can be a tricky business in these remote regions because the Lashkars, some of whom may be Taliban by another name, could easily turn their weapons against those who gave them to them.
Lashkar-e-Taiba, which killed 164 people in India last month, is not a traditional lashkar and was not believed to have received any arms from the Pakistani government. But it has long had ties to the Pakistani military intelligence since being established in the late 1980s with the goal of conquering Indian Kashmir and its largely Muslim population. The Mumbai attack, which was directed at Israelis, Britons and Americans, as well as India, represented an ominous broadening of its ambitions.
Over time, Lashkar-e-Taiba has developed a broad following in poor rural areas across Pakistan, from which it draws many recruits. Its operations have been funded by the Dawa Islamic charity, which also has ties to the Taliban.
Opinion had been divided in Pakistan about the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba and other terrorist groups and what, if anything, should be done by Zardari's government or the army to check their rising power. While many Pakistanis are furious at the mayhem caused by Mehsud and Lashkar-e-Taiba, and want them severely dealt with, there has also been admiration for the pluck of some Taliban factions for taking on the might of the American army and air force and for Lashkar-e-Taibi for, among other things, attacking the Indian parliament in Delhi in 2001.
"The conflict is changing," said Ahsan Iqbal, an MP and information secretary for the Pakistan Muslim League-N, the smaller half of the Pakistani People's Party-led coalition government. "The distance between Washington and Alaska is a lot less than between Islamabad and the tribal areas. The difference is 100 years. Their social structures and traditions are very different. If you do not understand this, there is little chance for success against them."
Notwithstanding the Pakistan Taliban's proven ability to cause bloody harm almost anywhere, Iqbal and others doubted that they would succeed in what has been called "the Talibanization" of the entire country.
"Things are very bad along the frontier with many different forces pitted against each other," said Syed Jaffer Ahmed of the Pakistan Study Centre in Karachi, "but I would not go so far as to say that this will shatter the nation. I do not think that Talibanization can take place everywhere here."
Afghanistan and some NATO countries such as Canada have favoured opening a dialogue with moderate Taliban. Initial talks sponsored by Saudi Arabia have already taken place.
However, Mullah Omar is a hugely influential figure among most factions of the Pakistan Taliban and, therefore, a key player in any peace deal on both sides of the border - and he can hardly be considered a moderate.
Ayaz Wazir, who was a member of a Pakistani diplomatic mission which met half a dozen times with the Afghan cleric before the 9/11 attacks, favoured including him in any negotiations.
"We have an expression in Pushto that you can fight for 100 years but eventually you will talk," said Wazir, who grew up in a tribal area and speaks the same dialect as Mullah Omar.
"His vision was already well known then, but my dealings with him were normal. He was quite easy to converse with. I originally thought that he was an ordinary mullah. But over time I learned that he was very shrewd."
Talat Hussain, the broadcaster, said "the Americans are not going to touch Mullah Omar. They have to keep a door open. If they take him out, who are they going to talk to?"
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Terrorists from Pakistan's Lashkar-e-Taiba earned international infamy last month when they carried out audacious, multiple attacks on neighbouring Mumbai, India.
The Army of the Righteous, Pure, or Pious, to render Lashkar-e-Taiba's name in English, is one of many Islamic jihadi groups operating in Pakistan. In fact, there are so many jihadis calling themselves al-Qaida, Afghan Taliban, Pakistan Taliban and other names in and near this country's tumultuous tribal belt that retired major-general Jamshed Ayaz, an anti-terrorism expert at the Institute for Regional Studies in Islamabad, confessed that he could not remember all of them.
Matthew Fisher Canwest News Service
Published: Monday, December 29, 2008
Who these shadowy groups are, what motivates them to fight and where, and to which groups they are allied is of crucial importance to soldiers from Canada who are trying to understand the complex war they are fighting across the border in Afghanistan.
The Afghan Taliban, who are all Pushtuns, are led by Mullah Omar, the charismatic one-eyed preacher who is allied by marriage and theology with al-Qaida's leader Osama bin Laden and who shares with him a $10-million US bounty on his head. But there are other Afghan Taliban leaders, such as Jalaluddin Haqqani, who operate out of Pakistan's North Waziristan district as well as Afghan warlords often based in Pakistan who wrap themselves in jihadi rhetoric but are seldom regarded as men of God.
Both the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida believe in an extremely conservative interpretation of the Koran and have long used Pakistan's tribal areas as a sanctuary. The so-called Pakistan Taliban sprang up when Mullah Omar and his followers were chased out of Afghanistan and into this country after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. After they settled here, they used thousands of mostly Saudi-funded madrassas to inspire young Pakistanis to share their core beliefs and take up their holy war.
But groups in the border areas have always been more loyal to their tribes and clans than to any one leader. As a result, the Pakistan Taliban quickly developed so many fractious components with shifting alliances that television journalist Talat Hussain, who has spent the past few years seeking them out in their mountain redoubts, described them as "franchises more than anything else. There are very loose networks, but they are unstable structures."
Despite being only a few years old, the Pakistan Taliban as a collective already controls most of this country's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) where they have set up a number of Islamic mini-states. More troubling for Pakistan's future as a unified state, they have slowly been expanding their reign of terror into North West Frontier Province with bursts of violence in many other parts of the country.
Although Jamshed Ayaz said this was "absolute rot," U.S. intelligence agencies, western diplomats and military commanders strongly believe that the Afghan Taliban and Pakistan Taliban have fluid, generally fruitful relations with officers from the Pakistan army's powerful Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate, which nurtured the Afghan Taliban when they started in the 1990s.
But not all of the Pakistan Taliban have ties to the ISI. One of its main leaders, the mysterious 34-year-old Bailtullah Mehsud, is this country's most wanted man. He is blamed for masterminding the assassination of Benazir Bhutto as well as many suicide bombings and the kidnappings of Pakistani soldiers. However, as Mehsud's gang only fights in Pakistan, it has been spared air strikes by unmanned U.S. Predator drones.
Other important Pakistan Taliban factions are led by Mullah Nazir and the warlord, Gul Bahadur, who is a direct descendent of the legendary Faqir Api, who fought against British rule in the 1900s. Both of these groups are estranged from Mehsud and have made peace deals with the Pakistani army, but because they have fighters in Afghanistan and provide logistical support to al-Qaida and the Afghan Taliban, they have been targeted by American drones operating over Pakistan.
To fight the Pakistan Taliban, the new government of Asif Ali Zardari has recently sent the army into parts of FATA where there have been involved in several major battles. As a part of a divide and rule policy, the army has also been handing out weapons to local tribal militias known as lashkars. But this can be a tricky business in these remote regions because the Lashkars, some of whom may be Taliban by another name, could easily turn their weapons against those who gave them to them.
Lashkar-e-Taiba, which killed 164 people in India last month, is not a traditional lashkar and was not believed to have received any arms from the Pakistani government. But it has long had ties to the Pakistani military intelligence since being established in the late 1980s with the goal of conquering Indian Kashmir and its largely Muslim population. The Mumbai attack, which was directed at Israelis, Britons and Americans, as well as India, represented an ominous broadening of its ambitions.
Over time, Lashkar-e-Taiba has developed a broad following in poor rural areas across Pakistan, from which it draws many recruits. Its operations have been funded by the Dawa Islamic charity, which also has ties to the Taliban.
Opinion had been divided in Pakistan about the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba and other terrorist groups and what, if anything, should be done by Zardari's government or the army to check their rising power. While many Pakistanis are furious at the mayhem caused by Mehsud and Lashkar-e-Taiba, and want them severely dealt with, there has also been admiration for the pluck of some Taliban factions for taking on the might of the American army and air force and for Lashkar-e-Taibi for, among other things, attacking the Indian parliament in Delhi in 2001.
"The conflict is changing," said Ahsan Iqbal, an MP and information secretary for the Pakistan Muslim League-N, the smaller half of the Pakistani People's Party-led coalition government. "The distance between Washington and Alaska is a lot less than between Islamabad and the tribal areas. The difference is 100 years. Their social structures and traditions are very different. If you do not understand this, there is little chance for success against them."
Notwithstanding the Pakistan Taliban's proven ability to cause bloody harm almost anywhere, Iqbal and others doubted that they would succeed in what has been called "the Talibanization" of the entire country.
"Things are very bad along the frontier with many different forces pitted against each other," said Syed Jaffer Ahmed of the Pakistan Study Centre in Karachi, "but I would not go so far as to say that this will shatter the nation. I do not think that Talibanization can take place everywhere here."
Afghanistan and some NATO countries such as Canada have favoured opening a dialogue with moderate Taliban. Initial talks sponsored by Saudi Arabia have already taken place.
However, Mullah Omar is a hugely influential figure among most factions of the Pakistan Taliban and, therefore, a key player in any peace deal on both sides of the border - and he can hardly be considered a moderate.
Ayaz Wazir, who was a member of a Pakistani diplomatic mission which met half a dozen times with the Afghan cleric before the 9/11 attacks, favoured including him in any negotiations.
"We have an expression in Pushto that you can fight for 100 years but eventually you will talk," said Wazir, who grew up in a tribal area and speaks the same dialect as Mullah Omar.
"His vision was already well known then, but my dealings with him were normal. He was quite easy to converse with. I originally thought that he was an ordinary mullah. But over time I learned that he was very shrewd."
Talat Hussain, the broadcaster, said "the Americans are not going to touch Mullah Omar. They have to keep a door open. If they take him out, who are they going to talk to?"
Sunday, December 21, 2008
How the West lost us
If the American media rushed to internationalize 9/11, they seemed to be in an equal hurry to domesticize 26/11, as if “terror” is something that happens regularly in India, like water problems, or sly airport touts.
VAMSEE JULURI presents a critique of media coverage of the Mumbai attacks. Pix, Huffington Post.
The Hoot, Dec 14 23:24:27, 2008
It started with what, in my view, was an inappropriate preposition. In the end, what Mumbai ended up looking like to viewers and readers in the West was something far removed from the magnitude of its loss, and from the realities of fact and perspective. From the first hours of the attack on the morning (Pacific Time) of Wednesday, November 26, until the siege ended, American television channels like CNN covered the attacks live. It was Thanksgiving holiday, and "Terror in Mumbai" became the background in innumerable homes that might have had their televisions on in between meals or naps. It was also on in homes where something like outrage was being felt, at the brazenness of the attacks, and at the vested ignorance tainting its coverage.
"Terror in Mumbai." The emphasis on "in" is not mine nor is it to make a point. That is how CNN presented its headline throughout the event. In the following days, even as the networks moved slowly back to their usual Thanksgiving-ish menu of inspirational and heartwarming stories, the follow-up reports all came back under the same headline. It was used on the local news stations in the Bay Area, and in time, even The Economist went with the same words on its cover. Normally, especially in the face of a tragedy of such proportions, one would not bother to fault the media for its choice of words. But the decision to frame the event as "Terror in Mumbai" rather than an "Attack on Mumbai" was not an isolated one. It was merely one part of the broader view with which the media approached it. Nor was it inconsequential. After all, within minutes of the events of 9/11/2001, the American media were calling it an attack "on" America and comparing it to Pearl Harbor, rather than a more recent act of terrorism, the Oklahoma bombing. If the American media rushed to internationalize 9/11, they seemed to be in an equal hurry in the case of 26/11 (as we would call it in India ) to domesticize it, as if "terror" is something that happens regularly in India, like water problems, or sly airport touts. It was this prejudice that provided the locus for all else that emanated, from the awkward platitudes of inexperienced anchors filling airtime to even the more erudite writings of experts and commentators.
In the first few hours of coverage, the domestication of the attacks unfolded almost silently, by virtue of the fact that much of the concern seemed to be about the foreign nationals who were reportedly being targeted (see some of the comments posted on this website for SAJA, the South Asian Journalists Association). To a less attentive viewer, it might have well seemed as if the whole drama was about terrorists "in" India attacking hapless Western tourists. Although some efforts were made in time to address the fact that most of the victims were indeed Indian, those efforts seemed lost in a deeper inertia that seemed to preclude the naming of victims as "Indian," or indeed, the attacks as "on" Mumbai, if not "on" India. Such a step would of course have implied that the media had started to seriously address what was already well established as the likely nationality of the attackers. Instead, there seemed to be something like reluctance in the actions of some of the correspondents. In one of the earliest mentions of the sea-route taken by the attackers, a reporter virtually cried out three times (or perhaps even four) that what she was reporting about the Karachi angle was only an Indian official's accusation. Nothing more. The same sort of journalistic delicacy was also applied to higher government echelons when a "Counterterrorism Expert" on a news channel wondered if Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was having a "knee-jerk reaction" when he mentioned "outsiders."
Naturally, no one would like to see unsubstantiated allegations of such a grave sort reported as fact in the international news media in the middle of an unfolding attack of such unprecedented proportions. But all this hesitation was leading to something which in retrospect Christopher Hitchens would call a "disingenuous failure to state the obvious." Unfortunately though, it wasn't just the silence which was troubling. Even before the siege was formally ended, even as speculation and scrutiny grew, a rather strong group of voices converged in the international press on to what they saw as the obvious issue here: India.
In one of the first stories about the possible nationality of the attackers, the New York Times quoted one such expert, ironically named Ms. Fair, who insisted that "this is a domestic issue" and that it is "not India's 9/11." Interestingly, the same article also got its geography grossly mixed up, reporting that "Deccan" (part of the name that a group claiming responsibility used) was a neighborhood in my Hyderabad! And with erroneous geography, a history goof-up couldn't be far behind either. An article in the Telegraph asserted that Kashmir was gifted to India by the departing British. Perhaps geography and history weren't exactly high on the media's criteria for analyzing the event. After all, most of the experts being quoted were of neither academic persuasion. Instead, we saw mostly security and counter-terrorism experts, including one on television who had dealt with a hotel hostage crisis, somewhere in the United States, sometime long ago.
Trivialities aside, it seemed that the attacks on Mumbai were largely destined to be seen here as a part of "India's increasingly violent history," as the title of an article in the Independent, here, put it. As the days passed, that perception was somewhat complicated, but also, sadly, not really contested, by some of the op-ed pieces that followed in the august pages of the New York Times and elsewhere. Amitav Ghosh , Pankaj Mishra, and Suketu Mehta wrote op-eds which invoked in their opening paragraphs, respectively, the following: a BJP leader's attempts to label the attacks as India's 9/11, the attackers' phone calls condemning injustices in Kashmir and Ayodhya, and that "something" about Mumbai that "appalls religious extremists, Hindu and Muslim alike." In a similar vein, the Los Angeles Times published two op-eds in response to the attacks. Martha Nussbaum's piece acknowledged that the attackers may have come from outside India , but leaps off from that into a critique of what she calls "Indian terrorism." I do not believe she used the term "Pakistani terrorism" anywhere there. Another op-ed in the L.A. Times by Asra Nomani expresses her sorrow while reading a newspaper report on poverty among Indian Muslims while residing in, and this seems to be being said without irony, "Room 721 of the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel."
The irony, it seems, is all elsewhere. All the New York Times op-eds which seem to turn a critical eye on Pakistan were written by non South-Asians, like William Kristol and Thomas Friedman. I don't find this ironic in a simply nationalistic sense though. I find the irony in the fact that even progressive critiques sometimes end up with the same effect as mainstream prejudices when not made in the right time and place.
I think that the Western media has persisted for far too long with a framework of reporting that is disconnected from reality, and this showed all too sadly in its approach to Mumbai. It continues an old imperialism, unreflectively enjoying its discursive overlordship over South Asia by presenting India and Pakistan as "rivals," as if that is what a billion and a half people think of all the time. It continues a selfish cold-war era framework of false moral equivalence between India and Pakistan, reporting that the countries have fought four wars without once naming an aggressor, chirpily discounting every Indian grievance with a clever Pakistani government retort (see this piece in Times of India). And it grants a voice it seems, to only one sort of South Asian and South Asian opinion: one that finds fault in India, even when at least one cause lies elsewhere.
Vamsee Juluri is a professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco. He is the author of The Ideals of Indian Cinema and The Mythologist: A Novel (both forthcoming from Penguin India).
VAMSEE JULURI presents a critique of media coverage of the Mumbai attacks. Pix, Huffington Post.
The Hoot, Dec 14 23:24:27, 2008
It started with what, in my view, was an inappropriate preposition. In the end, what Mumbai ended up looking like to viewers and readers in the West was something far removed from the magnitude of its loss, and from the realities of fact and perspective. From the first hours of the attack on the morning (Pacific Time) of Wednesday, November 26, until the siege ended, American television channels like CNN covered the attacks live. It was Thanksgiving holiday, and "Terror in Mumbai" became the background in innumerable homes that might have had their televisions on in between meals or naps. It was also on in homes where something like outrage was being felt, at the brazenness of the attacks, and at the vested ignorance tainting its coverage.
"Terror in Mumbai." The emphasis on "in" is not mine nor is it to make a point. That is how CNN presented its headline throughout the event. In the following days, even as the networks moved slowly back to their usual Thanksgiving-ish menu of inspirational and heartwarming stories, the follow-up reports all came back under the same headline. It was used on the local news stations in the Bay Area, and in time, even The Economist went with the same words on its cover. Normally, especially in the face of a tragedy of such proportions, one would not bother to fault the media for its choice of words. But the decision to frame the event as "Terror in Mumbai" rather than an "Attack on Mumbai" was not an isolated one. It was merely one part of the broader view with which the media approached it. Nor was it inconsequential. After all, within minutes of the events of 9/11/2001, the American media were calling it an attack "on" America and comparing it to Pearl Harbor, rather than a more recent act of terrorism, the Oklahoma bombing. If the American media rushed to internationalize 9/11, they seemed to be in an equal hurry in the case of 26/11 (as we would call it in India ) to domesticize it, as if "terror" is something that happens regularly in India, like water problems, or sly airport touts. It was this prejudice that provided the locus for all else that emanated, from the awkward platitudes of inexperienced anchors filling airtime to even the more erudite writings of experts and commentators.
In the first few hours of coverage, the domestication of the attacks unfolded almost silently, by virtue of the fact that much of the concern seemed to be about the foreign nationals who were reportedly being targeted (see some of the comments posted on this website for SAJA, the South Asian Journalists Association). To a less attentive viewer, it might have well seemed as if the whole drama was about terrorists "in" India attacking hapless Western tourists. Although some efforts were made in time to address the fact that most of the victims were indeed Indian, those efforts seemed lost in a deeper inertia that seemed to preclude the naming of victims as "Indian," or indeed, the attacks as "on" Mumbai, if not "on" India. Such a step would of course have implied that the media had started to seriously address what was already well established as the likely nationality of the attackers. Instead, there seemed to be something like reluctance in the actions of some of the correspondents. In one of the earliest mentions of the sea-route taken by the attackers, a reporter virtually cried out three times (or perhaps even four) that what she was reporting about the Karachi angle was only an Indian official's accusation. Nothing more. The same sort of journalistic delicacy was also applied to higher government echelons when a "Counterterrorism Expert" on a news channel wondered if Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was having a "knee-jerk reaction" when he mentioned "outsiders."
Naturally, no one would like to see unsubstantiated allegations of such a grave sort reported as fact in the international news media in the middle of an unfolding attack of such unprecedented proportions. But all this hesitation was leading to something which in retrospect Christopher Hitchens would call a "disingenuous failure to state the obvious." Unfortunately though, it wasn't just the silence which was troubling. Even before the siege was formally ended, even as speculation and scrutiny grew, a rather strong group of voices converged in the international press on to what they saw as the obvious issue here: India.
In one of the first stories about the possible nationality of the attackers, the New York Times quoted one such expert, ironically named Ms. Fair, who insisted that "this is a domestic issue" and that it is "not India's 9/11." Interestingly, the same article also got its geography grossly mixed up, reporting that "Deccan" (part of the name that a group claiming responsibility used) was a neighborhood in my Hyderabad! And with erroneous geography, a history goof-up couldn't be far behind either. An article in the Telegraph asserted that Kashmir was gifted to India by the departing British. Perhaps geography and history weren't exactly high on the media's criteria for analyzing the event. After all, most of the experts being quoted were of neither academic persuasion. Instead, we saw mostly security and counter-terrorism experts, including one on television who had dealt with a hotel hostage crisis, somewhere in the United States, sometime long ago.
Trivialities aside, it seemed that the attacks on Mumbai were largely destined to be seen here as a part of "India's increasingly violent history," as the title of an article in the Independent, here, put it. As the days passed, that perception was somewhat complicated, but also, sadly, not really contested, by some of the op-ed pieces that followed in the august pages of the New York Times and elsewhere. Amitav Ghosh , Pankaj Mishra, and Suketu Mehta wrote op-eds which invoked in their opening paragraphs, respectively, the following: a BJP leader's attempts to label the attacks as India's 9/11, the attackers' phone calls condemning injustices in Kashmir and Ayodhya, and that "something" about Mumbai that "appalls religious extremists, Hindu and Muslim alike." In a similar vein, the Los Angeles Times published two op-eds in response to the attacks. Martha Nussbaum's piece acknowledged that the attackers may have come from outside India , but leaps off from that into a critique of what she calls "Indian terrorism." I do not believe she used the term "Pakistani terrorism" anywhere there. Another op-ed in the L.A. Times by Asra Nomani expresses her sorrow while reading a newspaper report on poverty among Indian Muslims while residing in, and this seems to be being said without irony, "Room 721 of the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel."
The irony, it seems, is all elsewhere. All the New York Times op-eds which seem to turn a critical eye on Pakistan were written by non South-Asians, like William Kristol and Thomas Friedman. I don't find this ironic in a simply nationalistic sense though. I find the irony in the fact that even progressive critiques sometimes end up with the same effect as mainstream prejudices when not made in the right time and place.
I think that the Western media has persisted for far too long with a framework of reporting that is disconnected from reality, and this showed all too sadly in its approach to Mumbai. It continues an old imperialism, unreflectively enjoying its discursive overlordship over South Asia by presenting India and Pakistan as "rivals," as if that is what a billion and a half people think of all the time. It continues a selfish cold-war era framework of false moral equivalence between India and Pakistan, reporting that the countries have fought four wars without once naming an aggressor, chirpily discounting every Indian grievance with a clever Pakistani government retort (see this piece in Times of India). And it grants a voice it seems, to only one sort of South Asian and South Asian opinion: one that finds fault in India, even when at least one cause lies elsewhere.
Vamsee Juluri is a professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco. He is the author of The Ideals of Indian Cinema and The Mythologist: A Novel (both forthcoming from Penguin India).
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Inconvenient Truths
The media's disingenuous failure to state the obvious.
By Christopher Hitchens
Slate Monday, Dec. 8, 2008,
The obvious is sometimes the most difficult thing to discern, and few things are more amusing than the efforts of our journals of record to keep "open" minds about the self-evident, and thus to create mysteries when the real task of reportage is to dispel them. An all-time achiever in this category is Fernanda Santos of the New York Times, who managed to write from Bombay on Nov. 27 that the Chabad Jewish center in that city was "an unlikely target of the terrorist gunmen who unleashed a series of bloody coordinated attacks at locations in and around Mumbai's commercial center." Continuing to keep her brow heavily furrowed with the wrinkles of doubt and uncertainty, Santos went on to say that "[i]t is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene."
This same puzzled expression is currently being widely worn on the faces of all those who wonder if Pakistan is implicated in the "bloody coordinated" assault on the heart of Bombay. To get an additional if oblique perspective on this riddle that is an enigma wrapped inside a mystery, take a look at Joshua Hammer's excellent essay in the current Atlantic. The question in its title—"[Is Syria] Getting Away With Murder?"—is at least asked only at the beginning of the article and not at the end of it.
Here are the known facts: If you are a Lebanese politician or journalist or public figure, and you criticize the role played by the government of Syria in your country's internal affairs, your car will explode when you turn the ignition key, or you will be ambushed and shot or blown up by a bomb or land mine as you drive through the streets of Beirut or along the roads that lead to the mountains. The explosives and weapons used, and the skilled tactics employed, will often be reminiscent of the sort of resources available only to the secret police and army of a state machine. But I think in fairness I must stress that this is all that is known for sure. You criticize the Assad dictatorship, and either your vehicle detonates or your head is blown off. Over time, this has happened to a large and varied number of people, ranging from Sunni statesman Rafik Hariri to Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt to Communist spokesman George Hawi. One would not wish to be a "conspiracy theorist" and allege that there was any necessary connection between the criticisms in the first place and the deplorably terminal experiences in the second.
Hammer's article is good for a laugh in that it shows just how much trouble the international community will go to precisely in order not to implicate the Assad family in this string of unfortunate events. After all, does Damascus not hold the keys to peace in the region? Might not young Bashar Assad, who managed to become president after the peaceful death by natural causes of his father, become annoyed and petulant and even uncooperative if he were found to have been commissioning assassinations? Could the fabled "process" suffer if a finger of indictment were pointed at him? At the offices of the long-established and by now almost historic United Nations inquiry into the Hariri murder, feet are evidently being dragged because of considerations like these, and Hammer describes the resulting atmosphere very well.
In rather the same way, the international community is deciding to be, shall we say, nonjudgmental in the matter of Pakistani involvement in the Bombay unpleasantness. Everything from the cell phones to the training appears to be traceable to the aboveground surrogates of an ostensibly banned group known as Lashkar-i-Taiba, which practices what it preaches and preaches holy war against Hindus, as well as Jews, Christians, atheists, and other elements of the "impure." Lashkar is well-known to be a bastard child—and by no means a disowned one, either—of the Pakistani security services. But how inconvenient if this self-evident and obvious fact should have to be faced.
How inconvenient, for one thing, for the government of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, a new and untried politician who may not exactly be in charge of his own country or of its armed forces but who nonetheless knows how to jingle those same keys of peace. How inconvenient, too, for all those who assume that the Afghan war is the "good" war when they see Pakistani army units being withdrawn from the Afghan frontier and deployed against democratic India (which has always been Pakistan's "real" enemy).
The Syrian and Pakistani situations are a great deal more similar than most people have any interest in pointing out. In both cases, there is a state within the state that exerts the real parallel power and possesses the reserve strength. In both cases, official "secularism" is a mask (as it also was with the Iraqi Baathists) for the state sponsorship of theocratic and cross-border gangster groups like Lashkar and Hezbollah. In both cases, an unknown quantity of nuclear assets are at the disposal of the official and banana republic state and also very probably of elements within the unofficial and criminal and terrorist one. (It is of huge and unremarked significance that Syria did not take the recent Israeli bombing of its hidden reactor to the United Nations or make any other public complaint.) Given these grim and worsening states of affairs, perhaps it is only small wonder that we take consolation in our illusions and in comforting doubts—such as the childlike wonder about whether Jews are deliberately targeted or just unlucky with time and place. This would all be vaguely funny if it wasn't headed straight toward our own streets.
Letter New York Times
New York Times
December 16, 2008
Letter
Mumbai’s Aftermath
To the Editor:
The perverse result of the unspeakable atrocity in Mumbai last month has been to focus attention on the failings of the Indian government, rather than on the perpetrators.
While no one doubts the need for stronger security, one immensely important question remains. With all its flaws, India has focused on the building blocks of a modern nation: secularism, democracy, education and technology. Why should India be expected to pay the price for Pakistan’s failure at nation-building?
In this context, “They Hate Us — and India Is Us,” by Patrick French (Op-Ed, Dec. 8), was a refreshing contrast to the views of commentators who steer the conversation to India’s mistakes and its need for statesmanship in the face of what is, undoubtedly, a state of war.
From people like us who grew up in Mumbai, a huge “thank you” to Mr. French for articulating our outrage at not just the incident, but at the cynical aftermath as well.
Rajesh Kumar
New York, Dec.
8, 2008
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Why Cholera?
(Photo source: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/12/11/world/20081212CHOLERA_index.html?ref=world)According to the WHO the reasons for the cholera outbreak are: lack of clean drinking water and sanitation, weak health services, and health staff strike, mainly by nurses. Health staff are unable to obtain salaries from banks due to the acute shortage of banknotes, making it too burdensome and expensive to travel to work.
The MSF reports: The problems are long-term. The water station does not have the parts to properly repair its pumps. Even if it did, it depends on electricity to pump water from the tower to the city. Electricity depends on a coal mine that has not been paid in over a year and can no longer supply coal. There is no fuel to run the garbage trucks; there is no money to pay salaries for people to collect the garbage. There is no equipment, or supplies, to fix the sewage system, nor money to pay personnel to do it. There are no quick solutions.
________________________________
It is evident that there are very serious problems facing Zimbabwe but it cannot be said that they have simply been caused by the weaknesses of the government of Zimbabwe. Like many other countries, Zimbabwe has attempted to chart its own independent course and escape from the legacy of British colonial rule since gaining independence through armed struggle in 1980. But it has been thwarted in particular by the hostile actions of the governments of Britain and the US, which have meddled in Zimbabwe’s internal affairs and refused to honour their legal responsibilities as required by the Lancaster House agreement of 1979, which brought to an end the armed liberation struggle.
The deterioration of Zimbabwe’s economy, which is still dominated by Anglo-American monopolies, has itself been precipitated by the hostile actions of the World Bank and IMF encouraged by Britain and the US, as well as by economic sanctions especially those imposed by the US under so-called Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act.
But the British and US governments and their allies have also continued to meddle in the internal affairs of Zimbabwe, especially in its elections and political life, directly financing an opposition movement to its government through the Westminster Foundation, the Zimbabwe Democracy Trust and other similar agencies.
In these difficult circumstances, there have been attempts by the African Union and the Southern African Development Community to find a way forward. Discussions were taking place between all the major political parties until recently when the main opposition party, the MDC suddenly withdrew, leading to a renewed political impasse and the conditions were created for Britain, the US and their allies to launch their new offensive.
_____________________________________
Zimbabwe declares national health emergency
4 Dec 2008, 1950 hrs IST, AP
HARARE, Zimbabwe: Zimbabwe has declared a national emergency over a cholera epidemic and the collapse of its health care system, and is seeking more help to pay for food and drugs, the state-run newspaper said on Thursday.
"Our central hospitals are literally not functioning," minister of health David Parirenyatwa said on Wednesday at a meeting of government and international aid officials, according to The Herald newspaper.
The failure of the health care system is one of the most devastating effects of an economic collapse that has left Zimbabweans struggling to eat and find clean drinking water. Little help is coming from the government, which has been paralyzed since disputed March elections as President Robert Mugabe and the opposition wrangle over a power-sharing deal.
The United Nations said the cholera, blamed on lack of water treatment and broken sewage pipes, has killed more than 500 people across the country since August.
Matthew Cochrane, regional spokesman for the international federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said on Thursday that Zimbabwe was "absolutely" facing a cholera epidemic, and said he hoped the government's declaration of an emergency would result in international aid agencies and donors stepping up their response.
"This is about supporting the people of Zimbabwe," Cochrane said, adding that aid should include water treatment plants and more medical staff. He said the costs could climb into tens of millions of dollars.
The international Red Cross shipped in more supplies Wednesday to fight cholera in Zimbabwe.
The health minister declared the state of emergency at Wednesday's meeting, and appealed for money to pay for food, drugs, hospital equipment and salaries for doctors and nurses.
"Our staff is demotivated and we need your support to ensure that they start coming to work and our health system is revived,'' he was quoted as saying.
High levels of cholera are common in the region, but Cochrane, of the Red Cross, said it was hitting a population in Zimbabwe already weakened by hunger and poverty. The toll could be much higher than the official figures, he said, as many Zimbabweans, particularly in rural areas, were not seeking medical treatment and their deaths were not being recorded.
Cochrane said Red Cross experts were in the countryside on Thursday assessing the crisis.
Without help, the situation could get much worse. Walter Mzembi, the deputy water minister who also attended Wednesday's meeting, said the ministry has only enough chemicals to treat water nationally for 12 more weeks.
UN agencies, embassies and aid groups at the meeting pledged to help, The Herald said.
The European Commission said it would provide more than $12 million for drugs and clean water, and the International Red Cross said it would release more funds to help deal with cholera.
"We need to pool our resources together and see how best we can respond to this emergency," Agostinho Zacarias, the UN development program director in Zimbabwe, was quoted as saying.
Zimbabwe has the world's highest inflation, and Zimbabweans face daily shortages of food and other basics.
Even cash is in short supply. A new 100 million Zimbabwean dollar note went into circulation on Thursday in an attempt to ease the cash crunch. Also Thursday, the amount of cash an individual can withdraw was increased to ZW$100 million a week, enough to buy about 85 pints (40 liters) of clean water. The new bills and withdrawal limits meant long lines at banks Thursday.
In neighbouring South Africa, where increasing numbers of Zimbabweans are seeking cholera treatment, President Kgalema Motlanthe planned a Cabinet meeting to consider ways to work with other countries in the region, donor organizations and aid groups to address the urgent need for food and other humanitarian needs, government spokesman Themba Maseko said on Thursday.
Cholera Outbreak Outcome of West's War on Zimbabwe
Cholera Outbreak Outcome of West's War on Zimbabwe
by Stephen Gowans
[….]
The crisis in Zimbabwe has intensified. Inflation is incalculably high. The central bank limits - to an inadequate level - the amount of money Zimbabweans can withdraw from their bank accounts daily. Unarmed soldiers riot, their guns kept under lock and key, to prevent an armed uprising. Hospital staff fail to show up for work. The water authority is short of chemicals to purify drinking water. Cholera, easily prevented and cured under normal circumstances, has broken out, leading the government to declare a humanitarian emergency.
In the West, state officials call for the country's president, Robert Mugabe, to step down and yield power to the leader of the largest faction of the Movement for Democratic Change, Morgan Tsvangirai. In this, the crisis is directly linked to Mugabe, its solution to Tsvangirai, but it's never said what Mugabe has done to cause the crisis, or how Tsvangirai's ascension to the presidency will make it go away.
The causal chain leading to the crisis can be diagrammed roughly as follows:
· In the late 90s, Mugabe's government provokes the hostility of the West by:
1. intervening militarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo on the side of the young government of Laurent Kabila, helping to thwart an invasion by Rwandan and Ugandan forces backed by the US and Britain;
2. it rejects a pro-foreign investment economic restructuring program the IMF establishes as a condition for balance of payment support;
3. it accelerates land redistribution by seizing white-owned farms and thereby committing the ultimate affront against owners of productive property - expropriation without compensation. To governments whose foreign policy is based in large measure on protecting their nationals' ownership rights to foreign productive assets, expropriation, and especially expropriation without compensation, is intolerable, and must be punished to deter others from doing the same.
In response, the United States, as prime guarantor of the imperialist system, introduces the December 2001 Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act. The act instructs US representatives to international financial institutions "to oppose and vote against any extension by the respective institution of any loan, credit, or guarantee to the Government of Zimbabwe; or any cancellation or reduction of indebtedness owed by the Government of Zimbabwe to the United States or any international financial institution."
The act effectively deprives Zimbabwe of foreign currency required to import necessities from abroad, including chemicals to treat drinking water. Development aid from the World Bank is also cut off, denying the country access to funds to upgrade its infrastructure. The central bank takes measures to mitigate the effects of the act, creating hyper-inflation as a by-product.
"The US denied Zimbabwe the means to import goods."
The cause of the crisis, then, can be traced directly to the West. Rather than banning the export of goods to Zimbabwe, the US denied Zimbabwe the means to import goods - not trade sanctions, but an act that had the same effect. To be sure, had the Mugabe government reversed its land reform program and abided by IMF demands, the crisis would have been averted. But the trigger was pulled in Washington, London and Brussels, and it is the West, therefore, that bears the blame.
Sanctions are effectively acts of war, with often equivalent, and sometimes more devastating, consequences. More than a million Iraqis died as a result of a decade-long sanctions regime championed by the US following the 1991 Gulf War. This prompted two political scientists, John and Karl Mueller, to coin the phrase "sanctions of mass destruction." They noted that sanctions had "contributed to more deaths in the post Cold War era than all the weapons of mass destruction in history."
The Western media refer to sanctions on Zimbabwe as targeted - limited only to high state officials and other individuals. This ignores the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act and conceals its devastating impact, thereby shifting responsibility for the humanitarian catastrophe from the US to Mugabe.
The cholera outbreak has a parallel in the outbreak of cholera in Iraq following the Gulf War. Thomas Nagy, a business professor at George Washington University, cited declassified documents in the September 2001 issue of The Progressive magazine showing that the United States had deliberately bombed Iraq's drinking water and sanitation facilities, recognizing that sanctions would prevent Iraq from rebuilding its water infrastructure and that epidemics of otherwise preventable diseases, cholera among them, would ensue. Washington, in other words, deliberately created a humanitarian catastrophe to achieve its goal of regime change. There is a direct parallel with Zimbabwe - the only difference is that the United States uses the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act - that is, sanctions of mass destruction - in place of bombing.
"Sanctions ‘contributed to more deaths in the post Cold War era than all the weapons of mass destruction in history.'"
Harare's land reform program is one of the principal reasons the United States has gone to war with Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe has redistributed land previously owned by 4,000 white farmers to 300,000 previously landless families, descendants of black Africans whose land was stolen by white settlers. By contrast, South Africa's ANC government has redistributed only four percent of the 87 percent of land forcibly seized from the indigenous population by Europeans.
[…]
The Mugabe government's pursuit of land reform, rejection of neo-liberal restructuring, and movement to eclipse US imperialism in southern Africa, has put Zimbabwe on the receiving end of a Western attack based on punitive financial sanctions. The intention, as is true of all Western destabilization efforts, has been to make the target country ungovernable, forcing the government to step down, clearing the way for the ascension of the West's local errand boys. Owing to the West's attack, Zimbabwe's government is struggling to provide the population with basic necessities. It can no longer provide basic sanitation and access to potable water at a sufficient level to prevent the outbreak of otherwise preventable diseases.
"The intention has been to make the target country ungovernable."
The replacement of the Mugabe government with one led by the Movement for Democratic Change, a party created and directed by Western governments, if it happens, will lead to an improvement in the humanitarian situation. This won't come about because the MDC is more competent at governing, but because sanctions will be lifted and access to balance of payment support and development aid will be restored. Zimbabwe will once again be able to import adequate amounts of water purification chemicals. The improving humanitarian situation will be cited as proof the West was right all along in insisting on a change of government.
The downside is that measures to indigenize the economy - to place the country's agricultural and mineral wealth in the hands of the black majority - will be reversed. Mugabe and key members of the state will be shipped off to The Hague - or attempts will be made to ship them off - to send a message to others about what befalls those who threaten the dominant mode of property relations and challenge Western domination. Cowed by the example of Zimbabwe, Africans in other countries will back away from their own land reform and economic indigenization demands, and the continent will settle more firmly into a pattern of neo-colonial subjugation.
-------
See also:
Cholera Outbreak Outcome of West's War on Zimbabwe
Economic sanctions undermine Zimbabwe's economy
Sanctions on Zimbabwe: Africa Under Attack
by Stephen Gowans
[….]
The crisis in Zimbabwe has intensified. Inflation is incalculably high. The central bank limits - to an inadequate level - the amount of money Zimbabweans can withdraw from their bank accounts daily. Unarmed soldiers riot, their guns kept under lock and key, to prevent an armed uprising. Hospital staff fail to show up for work. The water authority is short of chemicals to purify drinking water. Cholera, easily prevented and cured under normal circumstances, has broken out, leading the government to declare a humanitarian emergency.
In the West, state officials call for the country's president, Robert Mugabe, to step down and yield power to the leader of the largest faction of the Movement for Democratic Change, Morgan Tsvangirai. In this, the crisis is directly linked to Mugabe, its solution to Tsvangirai, but it's never said what Mugabe has done to cause the crisis, or how Tsvangirai's ascension to the presidency will make it go away.
The causal chain leading to the crisis can be diagrammed roughly as follows:
· In the late 90s, Mugabe's government provokes the hostility of the West by:
1. intervening militarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo on the side of the young government of Laurent Kabila, helping to thwart an invasion by Rwandan and Ugandan forces backed by the US and Britain;
2. it rejects a pro-foreign investment economic restructuring program the IMF establishes as a condition for balance of payment support;
3. it accelerates land redistribution by seizing white-owned farms and thereby committing the ultimate affront against owners of productive property - expropriation without compensation. To governments whose foreign policy is based in large measure on protecting their nationals' ownership rights to foreign productive assets, expropriation, and especially expropriation without compensation, is intolerable, and must be punished to deter others from doing the same.
In response, the United States, as prime guarantor of the imperialist system, introduces the December 2001 Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act. The act instructs US representatives to international financial institutions "to oppose and vote against any extension by the respective institution of any loan, credit, or guarantee to the Government of Zimbabwe; or any cancellation or reduction of indebtedness owed by the Government of Zimbabwe to the United States or any international financial institution."
The act effectively deprives Zimbabwe of foreign currency required to import necessities from abroad, including chemicals to treat drinking water. Development aid from the World Bank is also cut off, denying the country access to funds to upgrade its infrastructure. The central bank takes measures to mitigate the effects of the act, creating hyper-inflation as a by-product.
"The US denied Zimbabwe the means to import goods."
The cause of the crisis, then, can be traced directly to the West. Rather than banning the export of goods to Zimbabwe, the US denied Zimbabwe the means to import goods - not trade sanctions, but an act that had the same effect. To be sure, had the Mugabe government reversed its land reform program and abided by IMF demands, the crisis would have been averted. But the trigger was pulled in Washington, London and Brussels, and it is the West, therefore, that bears the blame.
Sanctions are effectively acts of war, with often equivalent, and sometimes more devastating, consequences. More than a million Iraqis died as a result of a decade-long sanctions regime championed by the US following the 1991 Gulf War. This prompted two political scientists, John and Karl Mueller, to coin the phrase "sanctions of mass destruction." They noted that sanctions had "contributed to more deaths in the post Cold War era than all the weapons of mass destruction in history."
The Western media refer to sanctions on Zimbabwe as targeted - limited only to high state officials and other individuals. This ignores the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act and conceals its devastating impact, thereby shifting responsibility for the humanitarian catastrophe from the US to Mugabe.
The cholera outbreak has a parallel in the outbreak of cholera in Iraq following the Gulf War. Thomas Nagy, a business professor at George Washington University, cited declassified documents in the September 2001 issue of The Progressive magazine showing that the United States had deliberately bombed Iraq's drinking water and sanitation facilities, recognizing that sanctions would prevent Iraq from rebuilding its water infrastructure and that epidemics of otherwise preventable diseases, cholera among them, would ensue. Washington, in other words, deliberately created a humanitarian catastrophe to achieve its goal of regime change. There is a direct parallel with Zimbabwe - the only difference is that the United States uses the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act - that is, sanctions of mass destruction - in place of bombing.
"Sanctions ‘contributed to more deaths in the post Cold War era than all the weapons of mass destruction in history.'"
Harare's land reform program is one of the principal reasons the United States has gone to war with Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe has redistributed land previously owned by 4,000 white farmers to 300,000 previously landless families, descendants of black Africans whose land was stolen by white settlers. By contrast, South Africa's ANC government has redistributed only four percent of the 87 percent of land forcibly seized from the indigenous population by Europeans.
[…]
The Mugabe government's pursuit of land reform, rejection of neo-liberal restructuring, and movement to eclipse US imperialism in southern Africa, has put Zimbabwe on the receiving end of a Western attack based on punitive financial sanctions. The intention, as is true of all Western destabilization efforts, has been to make the target country ungovernable, forcing the government to step down, clearing the way for the ascension of the West's local errand boys. Owing to the West's attack, Zimbabwe's government is struggling to provide the population with basic necessities. It can no longer provide basic sanitation and access to potable water at a sufficient level to prevent the outbreak of otherwise preventable diseases.
"The intention has been to make the target country ungovernable."
The replacement of the Mugabe government with one led by the Movement for Democratic Change, a party created and directed by Western governments, if it happens, will lead to an improvement in the humanitarian situation. This won't come about because the MDC is more competent at governing, but because sanctions will be lifted and access to balance of payment support and development aid will be restored. Zimbabwe will once again be able to import adequate amounts of water purification chemicals. The improving humanitarian situation will be cited as proof the West was right all along in insisting on a change of government.
The downside is that measures to indigenize the economy - to place the country's agricultural and mineral wealth in the hands of the black majority - will be reversed. Mugabe and key members of the state will be shipped off to The Hague - or attempts will be made to ship them off - to send a message to others about what befalls those who threaten the dominant mode of property relations and challenge Western domination. Cowed by the example of Zimbabwe, Africans in other countries will back away from their own land reform and economic indigenization demands, and the continent will settle more firmly into a pattern of neo-colonial subjugation.
-------
See also:
Cholera Outbreak Outcome of West's War on Zimbabwe
Economic sanctions undermine Zimbabwe's economy
Sanctions on Zimbabwe: Africa Under Attack
US and Britain are starving Zimbabwe to death
Zimbabwe is slowly but surely being strangled by the Anglo-American cabal and the current "public health" crisis is a direct consequence of the sanctions.
Zimbabwe: Water crisis and cholera funerals
Harare (Zimbabwe) — "Funerals of people dying of cholera are a common feature of our daily lives," said Tapiwa Hove, a resident Budiriro, a high-density suburb of Harare. "But it seems no one cares. Sewage is flowing all over. It's like living in hell."
By Inter Press Service (IPS) | 12.04.2008
Budiriro was teeming with aid workers frantically trying to distribute water from big water bowsers to desperate residents. There is commotion and the exchange of harsh words, as children, men and women with toddlers strapped to their backs try to secure at least a bucketful of clean drinking water.
All across Harare, people tell of how healthy-looking people are dying within hours of consuming the dirty water that many residents have resorted to in the absence of clean drinking water. "People are dying at an alarming rate. There are funeral wakes in many households. The government might try to deny this, but the reality is there for all to see," said Hove.
Local rights groups such as the Zimbabwe Doctors for Human Rights estimate the death toll is already over 1000, much higher than the government admits.
And there are fears that the situation will only grow worse. "What I am afraid of is that now that the rain season has come, all faeces lying in the bushes will be washed into shallow wells and contaminate the water," health minister David Parirenyatwa told state media.
CARE International, Red Cross Society and United National Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) are building latrines, distributing medicines and hygiene kits and have taken over ZINWA's responsibility of delivering water, and repairing blocked sewers across Zimbabwe to mitigate the cholera emergency.
Most of Zimbabwe's urban areas have gone for several months without water. Many urban households are unable to use their toilets, which are completely blocked by overflowing sewage. Last month, key institutions such as the High Court and Parliament buildings in Harare had to be closed because of the acute lack of water.
Zimbabwean cities have battled to provide water and refuse collection services while the country is subject to frequent power cuts, a result of a severe foreign currency squeeze. To the daily search for currency, bread, oil and transport, Harare residents now spend much of their time looking for water. Those still fortunate enough to be in formal employment now carry with them an empty bucket of water to work every day, in case there is clean water at the work place. Those in other hard-hit areas such as Budiriro and Glen View have to walk distances of up to five kilometres to get water at local council boreholes.
Those still receiving water from the taps hardly dare risk using it. "The water comes out with a heavy smell. It's sometimes greenish in colour, other times brown. It's never helpful at all, in fact, we only use it to clean the toilet," said Tadiwa Chireya, a gardener in the upmarket suburb of Greendale.
President Robert Mugabe's government blames the water woes on sanctions that it says were imposed on Zimbabwe by Western countries. The European Union and United States have imposed targeted sanctions on senior Zimbabwean officials because of authoritarianism and human rights abuses. International donors from these countries are feeding nearly one-half of the population and in recent years have provided most of the drugs used in government health service including those that are now used to treat water and victims of cholera.
The first democratically-elected mayor of Harare, civil engineer Elias Mudzuri is just one of the experts who warned several years ago that the city's water distribution and sewage systems were on the verge of collapse and needed urgent attention. In 2004 the running of water affairs was transferred from local authorities to ZINWA.
"ZINWA took over responsibility of water provision, equipment such as cars and other engineering equipment but reneged on taking over the responsibility of repairing the infrastructure, yet it had taken away all the monetary means of meeting such responsibility which came with revenues of water usage," said a Harare City Council engineer who asked for anonymity.
Under this arrangement ZINWA would collect revenue for water usage but the responsibility of fixing and maintaining Harare's water system was left to Harare City Council engineers whose financial capacity has been drastically reduced. At one point the city council was faced with an exodus of disgruntled engineers. Many others left the country for neighbouring countries while those still in employment often refuse to take instructions from ZINWA.
Zimbabwe's Minister of Water Resources, Munacho Mutezo, under whose leadership ZINWA falls, has refused to comment on the catastrophic water shortages.
meanwhile.....
US mulls tougher sanctions against Zimbabwe
November 21, 2008
The United States Ambassador to Zimbabwe James McGee has warned of new targeted U.S. sanctions on Robert Mugabe’s government if there is no progress toward political power-sharing.
In an interview with reporters, Ambassador McGee said he saw no easing of conditions until President Robert Mugabe starts to act in good faith on power-sharing with ,the President of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.
He said despite the economic crisis, including runaway inflation, Mr. Mugabe has been able to funnel money to key allies and maintain their support, and that getting him to yield powers will not be easy.
“He has made it clear that he is not easily going to give up power here in Zimbabwe,” said McGee. “SADC, the Southern African Development Community, clearly came out with statements saying that there should be a unity government, there should be power-sharing, and Mugabe has pretty much said that Morgan Tsvangirai would never sit in a government here in Zimbabwe with any true power.”
But he nonetheless insisted that international sanctions targeted against Mugabe, family members and close associates, have had real impact. He made clear the Bush administration is ready to move on further sanctions in the absence of a political breakthrough.
“We have additional sanctions that we are prepared to roll out, if this political impasse continues,” said McGee. “Right now we continue to look carefully at what is going on here in the country. And we feel that unless something does happen in the very, very near future we have no choice but to become more, difficult, tougher, on our sanctions.”
The U.S. envoy said there will no reductions in the U.S. humanitarian aid program to Zimbabwe, which is well in excess of $200 million a year.
McGee creditedthe government for easing financial and travel curbs on non-governmental organizations trying to distribute aid in the countryside, but said he was alarmed by conditions he observed on a recent trip to Harare from South Africa.
“It is grim,” he said. “It is very, very grim. There are a lot of people standing around, doing absolutely nothing. There are a lot of distended bellies out there among small children. A lot of people picking non-nutritious foods from trees, trying to find anything to eat. When you pass through villages, it is a total look of hopelessness on the peoples’ faces there.”
Zimbabwe: Water crisis and cholera funerals
Harare (Zimbabwe) — "Funerals of people dying of cholera are a common feature of our daily lives," said Tapiwa Hove, a resident Budiriro, a high-density suburb of Harare. "But it seems no one cares. Sewage is flowing all over. It's like living in hell."
By Inter Press Service (IPS) | 12.04.2008
Budiriro was teeming with aid workers frantically trying to distribute water from big water bowsers to desperate residents. There is commotion and the exchange of harsh words, as children, men and women with toddlers strapped to their backs try to secure at least a bucketful of clean drinking water.
All across Harare, people tell of how healthy-looking people are dying within hours of consuming the dirty water that many residents have resorted to in the absence of clean drinking water. "People are dying at an alarming rate. There are funeral wakes in many households. The government might try to deny this, but the reality is there for all to see," said Hove.
Local rights groups such as the Zimbabwe Doctors for Human Rights estimate the death toll is already over 1000, much higher than the government admits.
And there are fears that the situation will only grow worse. "What I am afraid of is that now that the rain season has come, all faeces lying in the bushes will be washed into shallow wells and contaminate the water," health minister David Parirenyatwa told state media.
CARE International, Red Cross Society and United National Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) are building latrines, distributing medicines and hygiene kits and have taken over ZINWA's responsibility of delivering water, and repairing blocked sewers across Zimbabwe to mitigate the cholera emergency.
Most of Zimbabwe's urban areas have gone for several months without water. Many urban households are unable to use their toilets, which are completely blocked by overflowing sewage. Last month, key institutions such as the High Court and Parliament buildings in Harare had to be closed because of the acute lack of water.
Zimbabwean cities have battled to provide water and refuse collection services while the country is subject to frequent power cuts, a result of a severe foreign currency squeeze. To the daily search for currency, bread, oil and transport, Harare residents now spend much of their time looking for water. Those still fortunate enough to be in formal employment now carry with them an empty bucket of water to work every day, in case there is clean water at the work place. Those in other hard-hit areas such as Budiriro and Glen View have to walk distances of up to five kilometres to get water at local council boreholes.
Those still receiving water from the taps hardly dare risk using it. "The water comes out with a heavy smell. It's sometimes greenish in colour, other times brown. It's never helpful at all, in fact, we only use it to clean the toilet," said Tadiwa Chireya, a gardener in the upmarket suburb of Greendale.
President Robert Mugabe's government blames the water woes on sanctions that it says were imposed on Zimbabwe by Western countries. The European Union and United States have imposed targeted sanctions on senior Zimbabwean officials because of authoritarianism and human rights abuses. International donors from these countries are feeding nearly one-half of the population and in recent years have provided most of the drugs used in government health service including those that are now used to treat water and victims of cholera.
The first democratically-elected mayor of Harare, civil engineer Elias Mudzuri is just one of the experts who warned several years ago that the city's water distribution and sewage systems were on the verge of collapse and needed urgent attention. In 2004 the running of water affairs was transferred from local authorities to ZINWA.
"ZINWA took over responsibility of water provision, equipment such as cars and other engineering equipment but reneged on taking over the responsibility of repairing the infrastructure, yet it had taken away all the monetary means of meeting such responsibility which came with revenues of water usage," said a Harare City Council engineer who asked for anonymity.
Under this arrangement ZINWA would collect revenue for water usage but the responsibility of fixing and maintaining Harare's water system was left to Harare City Council engineers whose financial capacity has been drastically reduced. At one point the city council was faced with an exodus of disgruntled engineers. Many others left the country for neighbouring countries while those still in employment often refuse to take instructions from ZINWA.
Zimbabwe's Minister of Water Resources, Munacho Mutezo, under whose leadership ZINWA falls, has refused to comment on the catastrophic water shortages.
meanwhile.....
US mulls tougher sanctions against Zimbabwe
November 21, 2008
The United States Ambassador to Zimbabwe James McGee has warned of new targeted U.S. sanctions on Robert Mugabe’s government if there is no progress toward political power-sharing.
In an interview with reporters, Ambassador McGee said he saw no easing of conditions until President Robert Mugabe starts to act in good faith on power-sharing with ,the President of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.
He said despite the economic crisis, including runaway inflation, Mr. Mugabe has been able to funnel money to key allies and maintain their support, and that getting him to yield powers will not be easy.
“He has made it clear that he is not easily going to give up power here in Zimbabwe,” said McGee. “SADC, the Southern African Development Community, clearly came out with statements saying that there should be a unity government, there should be power-sharing, and Mugabe has pretty much said that Morgan Tsvangirai would never sit in a government here in Zimbabwe with any true power.”
But he nonetheless insisted that international sanctions targeted against Mugabe, family members and close associates, have had real impact. He made clear the Bush administration is ready to move on further sanctions in the absence of a political breakthrough.
“We have additional sanctions that we are prepared to roll out, if this political impasse continues,” said McGee. “Right now we continue to look carefully at what is going on here in the country. And we feel that unless something does happen in the very, very near future we have no choice but to become more, difficult, tougher, on our sanctions.”
The U.S. envoy said there will no reductions in the U.S. humanitarian aid program to Zimbabwe, which is well in excess of $200 million a year.
McGee creditedthe government for easing financial and travel curbs on non-governmental organizations trying to distribute aid in the countryside, but said he was alarmed by conditions he observed on a recent trip to Harare from South Africa.
“It is grim,” he said. “It is very, very grim. There are a lot of people standing around, doing absolutely nothing. There are a lot of distended bellies out there among small children. A lot of people picking non-nutritious foods from trees, trying to find anything to eat. When you pass through villages, it is a total look of hopelessness on the peoples’ faces there.”
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Guest Post - A Rejoinder to the Financial Times
Guest Post - A Rejoinder to the Financial Times
Dear Sir or Madam:
Thank you very much for writing an editorial ("Turning Mumbai’s trial to advantage", FT Nov. 30, 2008) in your newspaper on our country’s suffering in the hands of terrorists.
Since most of us are not “native” speakers of English, I had decided to translate your editorial into simple English so that our limited intelligence could comprehend the profound insights that you had generated, for our sake.
When you called for statesmanship of a high order, I was feeling despondent how my country’s leaders would be able to act any more statesmanlike than characterising Pakistan as the victim of terrorism. I was relieved by your kind-heartedness in demystifying it in the next paragraph.
On Pakistan’s part, they have to stop its soldiers and spies from dabbling in Jihad because it now undermines Pakistan. It would be stupid – and not statesmanlike - of them to stop its soldiers and spies if it was only undermining India, as before. My untrained mind wondered if it would not be more appropriate to call it an act of self-interest on the part of Pakistan to stop their soldiers and spies from dabbling in Jihad. I quickly banished all such doubts as, after all, descendants of Englishmen who colonised the world for centuries would know more than any one else in the world the distinction between self-interest and statesmanship.
My doubts turned to gratefulness at the absence of confusion in the suggestion for India to be statesmanlike. India must settle Kashmir issue. Since it is not possible for Jihadists to be satisfied if India settled the Kashmir issue in its own favour, it goes without saying, of course, that the Kashmir issue must be settled in their favour.
A fear rose in my heart: what if the Jihadists are not satisfied and continue to attack my country? My wife chided me for entertaining such silly doubts. It was unbecoming of a native to question the Englishman’s logic. She suggested that the FT editorial board would have received credible information that the Jihadists would end their campaign against India once Kashmir is settled in their favour.
Still, I wanted to be doubly sure that my country would behave statesmanlike to the fullest extent. I asked her what if the Jihadists were not satisfied with the handover of Kashmir? Of course, she replied, then it meant that India was inadequately statesmanlike and should hand over more territories to the Jihadists until there was no more of India left to be turned over to them.
With anxiety still lingering in my mind as to whether India would still be fully discharging its responsibilities, I continued to read. But, I need not have worried. You had thought of everything.
If our behaviour was not satisfactory, you have a new Sheriff in town to ensure that errant behaviour does not go unpunished. No longer will it possible for any country in the world – except the United States and the United Kingdom – to attach its regional conflicts to the wagon of global terror. Only attacks on these two countries would be deemed unprovoked and qualify for retaliation under the global war on terror. Further, authorities only in these two countries can institute intrusive safeguards and security, watch over their citizens 24*7 with cameras installed in every corner so that FT Editors could come up with pearls of wisdom undisturbed by fears over their personal safety and security.
When terrorists strike other countries – particularly the ones you had cared to name – those countries are simply asking for it. Their only task is to act statesmanlike, settle with the terrorists and wait for their benevolence. If they even whisper about taking action, they risk damaging fragile domestic communal amity, escalating conflicts internationally and would be scaring away Western journalists and capitalists.
If we still did not understand our roles and obligations, now that the FT editors have their man in the White House, he would de-recognise the governments of Israel, India, China and Russia, install jihadists in their place and declare war on these governments.
It is always the mark of thorough analysis and articulation that not only recommends a course of action to others but also spells out consequences should lesser mortals fail to comply.
That should have been enough lessons for one day. But, I had not reckoned with your large heart. You had taken the trouble to define terrorism.
I had a stupid question. I was not sure if Mumbai was a victim of terrorism. My 7-year old son chided me that FT editors would have told us if they thought so. He said that what happened in Mumbai was not random since the targets were very carefully chosen after systematic selection and screening. There was nothing random about it. It did not have a multiplying effect. Neither did the terrorists multiply nor did their acts of terrorism multiply beyond South Mumbai.
He asked me to take another look at the title of the leader. It was about Mumbai’s trial and not about terrorism in Mumbai. The jihadists were conducting a trial-run.
I concluded my reading of your leading article wondering how much I had understood and how much I had not.
Thanking you,
Sincerely,
Anantha Nageswaran
Dear Sir or Madam:
Thank you very much for writing an editorial ("Turning Mumbai’s trial to advantage", FT Nov. 30, 2008) in your newspaper on our country’s suffering in the hands of terrorists.
Since most of us are not “native” speakers of English, I had decided to translate your editorial into simple English so that our limited intelligence could comprehend the profound insights that you had generated, for our sake.
When you called for statesmanship of a high order, I was feeling despondent how my country’s leaders would be able to act any more statesmanlike than characterising Pakistan as the victim of terrorism. I was relieved by your kind-heartedness in demystifying it in the next paragraph.
On Pakistan’s part, they have to stop its soldiers and spies from dabbling in Jihad because it now undermines Pakistan. It would be stupid – and not statesmanlike - of them to stop its soldiers and spies if it was only undermining India, as before. My untrained mind wondered if it would not be more appropriate to call it an act of self-interest on the part of Pakistan to stop their soldiers and spies from dabbling in Jihad. I quickly banished all such doubts as, after all, descendants of Englishmen who colonised the world for centuries would know more than any one else in the world the distinction between self-interest and statesmanship.
My doubts turned to gratefulness at the absence of confusion in the suggestion for India to be statesmanlike. India must settle Kashmir issue. Since it is not possible for Jihadists to be satisfied if India settled the Kashmir issue in its own favour, it goes without saying, of course, that the Kashmir issue must be settled in their favour.
A fear rose in my heart: what if the Jihadists are not satisfied and continue to attack my country? My wife chided me for entertaining such silly doubts. It was unbecoming of a native to question the Englishman’s logic. She suggested that the FT editorial board would have received credible information that the Jihadists would end their campaign against India once Kashmir is settled in their favour.
Still, I wanted to be doubly sure that my country would behave statesmanlike to the fullest extent. I asked her what if the Jihadists were not satisfied with the handover of Kashmir? Of course, she replied, then it meant that India was inadequately statesmanlike and should hand over more territories to the Jihadists until there was no more of India left to be turned over to them.
With anxiety still lingering in my mind as to whether India would still be fully discharging its responsibilities, I continued to read. But, I need not have worried. You had thought of everything.
If our behaviour was not satisfactory, you have a new Sheriff in town to ensure that errant behaviour does not go unpunished. No longer will it possible for any country in the world – except the United States and the United Kingdom – to attach its regional conflicts to the wagon of global terror. Only attacks on these two countries would be deemed unprovoked and qualify for retaliation under the global war on terror. Further, authorities only in these two countries can institute intrusive safeguards and security, watch over their citizens 24*7 with cameras installed in every corner so that FT Editors could come up with pearls of wisdom undisturbed by fears over their personal safety and security.
When terrorists strike other countries – particularly the ones you had cared to name – those countries are simply asking for it. Their only task is to act statesmanlike, settle with the terrorists and wait for their benevolence. If they even whisper about taking action, they risk damaging fragile domestic communal amity, escalating conflicts internationally and would be scaring away Western journalists and capitalists.
If we still did not understand our roles and obligations, now that the FT editors have their man in the White House, he would de-recognise the governments of Israel, India, China and Russia, install jihadists in their place and declare war on these governments.
It is always the mark of thorough analysis and articulation that not only recommends a course of action to others but also spells out consequences should lesser mortals fail to comply.
That should have been enough lessons for one day. But, I had not reckoned with your large heart. You had taken the trouble to define terrorism.
I had a stupid question. I was not sure if Mumbai was a victim of terrorism. My 7-year old son chided me that FT editors would have told us if they thought so. He said that what happened in Mumbai was not random since the targets were very carefully chosen after systematic selection and screening. There was nothing random about it. It did not have a multiplying effect. Neither did the terrorists multiply nor did their acts of terrorism multiply beyond South Mumbai.
He asked me to take another look at the title of the leader. It was about Mumbai’s trial and not about terrorism in Mumbai. The jihadists were conducting a trial-run.
I concluded my reading of your leading article wondering how much I had understood and how much I had not.
Thanking you,
Sincerely,
Anantha Nageswaran
Monday, December 08, 2008
The media's disingenuous failure to state the obvious
Inconvenient Truths
The media's disingenuous failure to state the obvious.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted on Slate Monday, Dec. 8, 2008, at 12:08 PM ET
The obvious is sometimes the most difficult thing to discern, and few things are more amusing than the efforts of our journals of record to keep "open" minds about the self-evident, and thus to create mysteries when the real task of reportage is to dispel them. An all-time achiever in this category is Fernanda Santos of the New York Times, who managed to write from Bombay on Nov. 27 that the Chabad Jewish center in that city was "an unlikely target of the terrorist gunmen who unleashed a series of bloody coordinated attacks at locations in and around Mumbai's commercial center." Continuing to keep her brow heavily furrowed with the wrinkles of doubt and uncertainty, Santos went on to say that "[i]t is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene."
This same puzzled expression is currently being widely worn on the faces of all those who wonder if Pakistan is implicated in the "bloody coordinated" assault on the heart of Bombay. To get an additional if oblique perspective on this riddle that is an enigma wrapped inside a mystery, take a look at Joshua Hammer's excellent essay in the current Atlantic. The question in its title—"[Is Syria] Getting Away With Murder?"—is at least asked only at the beginning of the article and not at the end of it.
Here are the known facts: If you are a Lebanese politician or journalist or public figure, and you criticize the role played by the government of Syria in your country's internal affairs, your car will explode when you turn the ignition key, or you will be ambushed and shot or blown up by a bomb or land mine as you drive through the streets of Beirut or along the roads that lead to the mountains. The explosives and weapons used, and the skilled tactics employed, will often be reminiscent of the sort of resources available only to the secret police and army of a state machine. But I think in fairness I must stress that this is all that is known for sure. You criticize the Assad dictatorship, and either your vehicle detonates or your head is blown off. Over time, this has happened to a large and varied number of people, ranging from Sunni statesman Rafik Hariri to Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt to Communist spokesman George Hawi. One would not wish to be a "conspiracy theorist" and allege that there was any necessary connection between the criticisms in the first place and the deplorably terminal experiences in the second.
Hammer's article is good for a laugh in that it shows just how much trouble the international community will go to precisely in order not to implicate the Assad family in this string of unfortunate events. After all, does Damascus not hold the keys to peace in the region? Might not young Bashar Assad, who managed to become president after the peaceful death by natural causes of his father, become annoyed and petulant and even uncooperative if he were found to have been commissioning assassinations? Could the fabled "process" suffer if a finger of indictment were pointed at him? At the offices of the long-established and by now almost historic United Nations inquiry into the Hariri murder, feet are evidently being dragged because of considerations like these, and Hammer describes the resulting atmosphere very well.
In rather the same way, the international community is deciding to be, shall we say, nonjudgmental in the matter of Pakistani involvement in the Bombay unpleasantness. Everything from the cell phones to the training appears to be traceable to the aboveground surrogates of an ostensibly banned group known as Lashkar-i-Taiba, which practices what it preaches and preaches holy war against Hindus, as well as Jews, Christians, atheists, and other elements of the "impure." Lashkar is well-known to be a bastard child—and by no means a disowned one, either—of the Pakistani security services. But how inconvenient if this self-evident and obvious fact should have to be faced.
How inconvenient, for one thing, for the government of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, a new and untried politician who may not exactly be in charge of his own country or of its armed forces but who nonetheless knows how to jingle those same keys of peace. How inconvenient, too, for all those who assume that the Afghan war is the "good" war when they see Pakistani army units being withdrawn from the Afghan frontier and deployed against democratic India (which has always been Pakistan's "real" enemy).
The Syrian and Pakistani situations are a great deal more similar than most people have any interest in pointing out. In both cases, there is a state within the state that exerts the real parallel power and possesses the reserve strength. In both cases, official "secularism" is a mask (as it also was with the Iraqi Baathists) for the state sponsorship of theocratic and cross-border gangster groups like Lashkar and Hezbollah. In both cases, an unknown quantity of nuclear assets are at the disposal of the official and banana republic state and also very probably of elements within the unofficial and criminal and terrorist one. (It is of huge and unremarked significance that Syria did not take the recent Israeli bombing of its hidden reactor to the United Nations or make any other public complaint.) Given these grim and worsening states of affairs, perhaps it is only small wonder that we take consolation in our illusions and in comforting doubts—such as the childlike wonder about whether Jews are deliberately targeted or just unlucky with time and place. This would all be vaguely funny if it wasn't headed straight toward our own streets.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, Calif.
The media's disingenuous failure to state the obvious.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted on Slate Monday, Dec. 8, 2008, at 12:08 PM ET
The obvious is sometimes the most difficult thing to discern, and few things are more amusing than the efforts of our journals of record to keep "open" minds about the self-evident, and thus to create mysteries when the real task of reportage is to dispel them. An all-time achiever in this category is Fernanda Santos of the New York Times, who managed to write from Bombay on Nov. 27 that the Chabad Jewish center in that city was "an unlikely target of the terrorist gunmen who unleashed a series of bloody coordinated attacks at locations in and around Mumbai's commercial center." Continuing to keep her brow heavily furrowed with the wrinkles of doubt and uncertainty, Santos went on to say that "[i]t is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene."
This same puzzled expression is currently being widely worn on the faces of all those who wonder if Pakistan is implicated in the "bloody coordinated" assault on the heart of Bombay. To get an additional if oblique perspective on this riddle that is an enigma wrapped inside a mystery, take a look at Joshua Hammer's excellent essay in the current Atlantic. The question in its title—"[Is Syria] Getting Away With Murder?"—is at least asked only at the beginning of the article and not at the end of it.
Here are the known facts: If you are a Lebanese politician or journalist or public figure, and you criticize the role played by the government of Syria in your country's internal affairs, your car will explode when you turn the ignition key, or you will be ambushed and shot or blown up by a bomb or land mine as you drive through the streets of Beirut or along the roads that lead to the mountains. The explosives and weapons used, and the skilled tactics employed, will often be reminiscent of the sort of resources available only to the secret police and army of a state machine. But I think in fairness I must stress that this is all that is known for sure. You criticize the Assad dictatorship, and either your vehicle detonates or your head is blown off. Over time, this has happened to a large and varied number of people, ranging from Sunni statesman Rafik Hariri to Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt to Communist spokesman George Hawi. One would not wish to be a "conspiracy theorist" and allege that there was any necessary connection between the criticisms in the first place and the deplorably terminal experiences in the second.
Hammer's article is good for a laugh in that it shows just how much trouble the international community will go to precisely in order not to implicate the Assad family in this string of unfortunate events. After all, does Damascus not hold the keys to peace in the region? Might not young Bashar Assad, who managed to become president after the peaceful death by natural causes of his father, become annoyed and petulant and even uncooperative if he were found to have been commissioning assassinations? Could the fabled "process" suffer if a finger of indictment were pointed at him? At the offices of the long-established and by now almost historic United Nations inquiry into the Hariri murder, feet are evidently being dragged because of considerations like these, and Hammer describes the resulting atmosphere very well.
In rather the same way, the international community is deciding to be, shall we say, nonjudgmental in the matter of Pakistani involvement in the Bombay unpleasantness. Everything from the cell phones to the training appears to be traceable to the aboveground surrogates of an ostensibly banned group known as Lashkar-i-Taiba, which practices what it preaches and preaches holy war against Hindus, as well as Jews, Christians, atheists, and other elements of the "impure." Lashkar is well-known to be a bastard child—and by no means a disowned one, either—of the Pakistani security services. But how inconvenient if this self-evident and obvious fact should have to be faced.
How inconvenient, for one thing, for the government of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, a new and untried politician who may not exactly be in charge of his own country or of its armed forces but who nonetheless knows how to jingle those same keys of peace. How inconvenient, too, for all those who assume that the Afghan war is the "good" war when they see Pakistani army units being withdrawn from the Afghan frontier and deployed against democratic India (which has always been Pakistan's "real" enemy).
The Syrian and Pakistani situations are a great deal more similar than most people have any interest in pointing out. In both cases, there is a state within the state that exerts the real parallel power and possesses the reserve strength. In both cases, official "secularism" is a mask (as it also was with the Iraqi Baathists) for the state sponsorship of theocratic and cross-border gangster groups like Lashkar and Hezbollah. In both cases, an unknown quantity of nuclear assets are at the disposal of the official and banana republic state and also very probably of elements within the unofficial and criminal and terrorist one. (It is of huge and unremarked significance that Syria did not take the recent Israeli bombing of its hidden reactor to the United Nations or make any other public complaint.) Given these grim and worsening states of affairs, perhaps it is only small wonder that we take consolation in our illusions and in comforting doubts—such as the childlike wonder about whether Jews are deliberately targeted or just unlucky with time and place. This would all be vaguely funny if it wasn't headed straight toward our own streets.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, Calif.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Blood Diamonds
I finally saw “Blood Diamonds” last week. The movie was difficult to watch for a number of reasons and I had to stop about half way through, do something else until the nausea passed before I could finish it.
The story is fairly predictable: tough, worldly wise, white man searches for jewels and riches in jungle, meets white woman, and finally redeems himself.
The lead character in the movie Danny Archer is an Afrikaner, or “Rhodesian” as he euphemistically prefers to call himself, who smuggles weapons into Sierra Leone, trades them to the RUF guerrillas for uncut diamonds and smuggles the diamonds out. He had also served in Angola as part of the South African military presumably during the 80’s when the South African Defense Forces entered Angola to fight with UNITA and were accused of repeatedly of atrocities against civilians. For example in a 1978 attack South African troops killed more than six hundred Namibians at a SWAPO camp in Angola. South Africa's Truth Commission called it "one of the biggest single incidents of gross [human rights] violations." For many veterans of the South African military, however, it is still celebrated as the largest paratroop drop since World War II and "a complete success," with "at least 608 SWAPO fighters killed" and only four dead among the attackers. More recently mass graves have been found near SADF camps.
Nice guy.
To make this despicable man palatable, the director casts one of Hollywood’s heart throbs Leonardo DiCaprio in this role. The baby faced Archer shows up in a plane – tough talks to a bunch of RUF militia and commander – who you cant help thinking would have this guy for breakfast in real life if he didn’t have the white establishment behind him.
He’s caught trying to cross the border on foot with the diamonds sown into a goat’s back. One is left wondering why they didn’t fly over the border using the same plane they came in. In the meantime, the devastiatingly handsome model, Djimon Hounsou, who plays Solomon Vandy has also been captured, first by the RUF to work in the diamond fields then by the Army and they both arrive at the same prison. Archer interest in Solomon is piqued when overhears a RUF commander accuse Solomon of hiding a large “pink diamond.”
The contrast between these two characters is striking – Archer is calculating, able to make decision and take actions to protect himself and his interests both financial and personal. Solomon on the other hand seems incapable of any thought or action to save himself or his family. Even though he finds the diamond and tries to hide it, he’s found out and only saved by fate as the army attacks the rebels at that exact moment. As the movie unfolds he falls from one disaster into the next unable to save himself and seems on the verge of despair until he finally accepts Danny’s offer of help in exchange for showing him where he hid the diamond.
Probably the only sympathetic black character with some semblance of intelligence is the savvy black bartender M’ed (Ntare Mwine). He’s obviously the kind of person westerners relate to when they are in Africa – people in the service industry who “befriend” then and who get them things not otherwise easily accessible, drugs, women, and guns in the case of Danny. According to the script: “Every war zone has a place like this. Soldiers, smugglers, opportunist of every stripe stand shoulder to shoulder at a bamboo bar. Bad guys and do-gooders, UN workers and eco-backpackers drink overpriced, watered down liquor, trade gossip and hook up for desperate expatriate sex.”
At one point when the bar is damaged by some shelling Danny tells M’ed that it “Might be time to get your family out my friend.” M’ed : “And go where, mahn? Jus’ fire up de chopper and fly away like you people? No, mahn, dis my country. We here long ‘fore you came and long after you gone.” You know then that M’ed has just become another of Hollywood expendable black man. Later we see him dead in the background.
At the bar we are introduced to Maddy(Jennifer Connelly) – an American journalist. Perhaps unwittingly, Zwick shows us an uncomfortable reality - the way most American journalists work nowadays – from their hotels in an alcoholic haze talking with other expatriates. Maddy has only been there four months but seems to know all of Archer’s professional history as well as his connections to the underground diamond trade – names, places everything. Even as she sanctimoniously lectures him, you know she will be falling for the white lead in the movie. Within minutes of meeting him she peppers him with questions and asks for his help with a hint of sex to trade for it. Embedded American journalists! Later she offers to help Solomon find his family – but only because Archer promises her a scoop – waving his notebook that presumably documents names, dates and places.
At one point in the movie Archer is telling her how his parents were brutally murdered and she melts into his arms all of his repugnant past actions are justified and forgiven.
As with Archer and Solomon, the contrast between the two main military commanders, one black and the other white, couldn’t be more cartoonish. On the one side is the hilariously named RUF commander Captain Poison, and the South African Mercenary Colonel Theo Coetsee. One is 60, suave, handsome, cultured and drinks martinis, the other is vicious, young, ugly with a deformed eye, covered by a pirate eye patch and smokes joints. In reality Coetsee would have mutilated and killed many more people than Poison ever could yet he painted with a sympathetic brush while Poison in spite of his emancipating rhetoric is shown as pure evil. Towards the end of the movie, Coetsee gives orders to snuff out the population in a whole area while the RUF lives among them. The South African lives comfortably on a farm, surrounded by wealth and status, putting him in the same class as the other whites portrayed in the movie and one can imagine him easily mixing with the hypocritical western diplomats seen in the movie. Poison on the other hand is a man who scrapes out an uncomfortable existence never sure if he will live to see another day. Coetsee is coldly efficient and professional while Poison is volatile, disorganized and impulsive. Yet the real exploiters of Africa are portrayed sympathetically while those who, however misguided, fight for their land’s self determination are vilified.
There are instances of racism depicted casually throughout the movie, it would seem to provide the same dirty pleasure provided by documentaries on “sex trade” and “prostitutes in Thailand, Philippines or Russia” type documentaries on TV or the sexploitation movies that exploit and moralize simultaneously. Archer brushing off girl prostitutes callously, African getting out of a white man’s path, Archer telling Solomon, “I know people, white people. Without me, you’re just another black man in Africa, all right?” Perhaps the worst incident occurs during march through the countryside as the dynamic between Archer and Solomon changes imperceptibly to that of master and slave. When Archer commands Solomon to head in a particular direction (toward the diamond) rather than the camp where Dia might be staying, the father refuses to follow orders. “You gonna need some of that old discipline, eh?” taunts Archer. Again, Solomon denies him, “You are not the master.” But then Archer reveals what’s at stake, not just power and wealth, but racism, calling Solomon “kaffir.” But Zwick shows its true colors when he has Solomon say “I know good people who say there is something wrong with us, besides our black skin, that we were better off when the white men ruled.”
As Rebecca Beirne states: It is this statement that echoes across the film, acting as a justification of and incitement to colonialism, disavowing the role colonialism has played in creating Africa's problems, and proclaiming that Africans are childlike or savage beings that need white masters to rule over them in order to stop them from killing one another: a chilling message from a contemporary Hollywood feature film, and a reflection of how much western societies' attitudes have cycled back to the colonialist mentalities of time past.
Here is another review
The story is fairly predictable: tough, worldly wise, white man searches for jewels and riches in jungle, meets white woman, and finally redeems himself.
The lead character in the movie Danny Archer is an Afrikaner, or “Rhodesian” as he euphemistically prefers to call himself, who smuggles weapons into Sierra Leone, trades them to the RUF guerrillas for uncut diamonds and smuggles the diamonds out. He had also served in Angola as part of the South African military presumably during the 80’s when the South African Defense Forces entered Angola to fight with UNITA and were accused of repeatedly of atrocities against civilians. For example in a 1978 attack South African troops killed more than six hundred Namibians at a SWAPO camp in Angola. South Africa's Truth Commission called it "one of the biggest single incidents of gross [human rights] violations." For many veterans of the South African military, however, it is still celebrated as the largest paratroop drop since World War II and "a complete success," with "at least 608 SWAPO fighters killed" and only four dead among the attackers. More recently mass graves have been found near SADF camps.
Nice guy.
To make this despicable man palatable, the director casts one of Hollywood’s heart throbs Leonardo DiCaprio in this role. The baby faced Archer shows up in a plane – tough talks to a bunch of RUF militia and commander – who you cant help thinking would have this guy for breakfast in real life if he didn’t have the white establishment behind him.
He’s caught trying to cross the border on foot with the diamonds sown into a goat’s back. One is left wondering why they didn’t fly over the border using the same plane they came in. In the meantime, the devastiatingly handsome model, Djimon Hounsou, who plays Solomon Vandy has also been captured, first by the RUF to work in the diamond fields then by the Army and they both arrive at the same prison. Archer interest in Solomon is piqued when overhears a RUF commander accuse Solomon of hiding a large “pink diamond.”
The contrast between these two characters is striking – Archer is calculating, able to make decision and take actions to protect himself and his interests both financial and personal. Solomon on the other hand seems incapable of any thought or action to save himself or his family. Even though he finds the diamond and tries to hide it, he’s found out and only saved by fate as the army attacks the rebels at that exact moment. As the movie unfolds he falls from one disaster into the next unable to save himself and seems on the verge of despair until he finally accepts Danny’s offer of help in exchange for showing him where he hid the diamond.
Probably the only sympathetic black character with some semblance of intelligence is the savvy black bartender M’ed (Ntare Mwine). He’s obviously the kind of person westerners relate to when they are in Africa – people in the service industry who “befriend” then and who get them things not otherwise easily accessible, drugs, women, and guns in the case of Danny. According to the script: “Every war zone has a place like this. Soldiers, smugglers, opportunist of every stripe stand shoulder to shoulder at a bamboo bar. Bad guys and do-gooders, UN workers and eco-backpackers drink overpriced, watered down liquor, trade gossip and hook up for desperate expatriate sex.”
At one point when the bar is damaged by some shelling Danny tells M’ed that it “Might be time to get your family out my friend.” M’ed : “And go where, mahn? Jus’ fire up de chopper and fly away like you people? No, mahn, dis my country. We here long ‘fore you came and long after you gone.” You know then that M’ed has just become another of Hollywood expendable black man. Later we see him dead in the background.
At the bar we are introduced to Maddy(Jennifer Connelly) – an American journalist. Perhaps unwittingly, Zwick shows us an uncomfortable reality - the way most American journalists work nowadays – from their hotels in an alcoholic haze talking with other expatriates. Maddy has only been there four months but seems to know all of Archer’s professional history as well as his connections to the underground diamond trade – names, places everything. Even as she sanctimoniously lectures him, you know she will be falling for the white lead in the movie. Within minutes of meeting him she peppers him with questions and asks for his help with a hint of sex to trade for it. Embedded American journalists! Later she offers to help Solomon find his family – but only because Archer promises her a scoop – waving his notebook that presumably documents names, dates and places.
At one point in the movie Archer is telling her how his parents were brutally murdered and she melts into his arms all of his repugnant past actions are justified and forgiven.
As with Archer and Solomon, the contrast between the two main military commanders, one black and the other white, couldn’t be more cartoonish. On the one side is the hilariously named RUF commander Captain Poison, and the South African Mercenary Colonel Theo Coetsee. One is 60, suave, handsome, cultured and drinks martinis, the other is vicious, young, ugly with a deformed eye, covered by a pirate eye patch and smokes joints. In reality Coetsee would have mutilated and killed many more people than Poison ever could yet he painted with a sympathetic brush while Poison in spite of his emancipating rhetoric is shown as pure evil. Towards the end of the movie, Coetsee gives orders to snuff out the population in a whole area while the RUF lives among them. The South African lives comfortably on a farm, surrounded by wealth and status, putting him in the same class as the other whites portrayed in the movie and one can imagine him easily mixing with the hypocritical western diplomats seen in the movie. Poison on the other hand is a man who scrapes out an uncomfortable existence never sure if he will live to see another day. Coetsee is coldly efficient and professional while Poison is volatile, disorganized and impulsive. Yet the real exploiters of Africa are portrayed sympathetically while those who, however misguided, fight for their land’s self determination are vilified.
There are instances of racism depicted casually throughout the movie, it would seem to provide the same dirty pleasure provided by documentaries on “sex trade” and “prostitutes in Thailand, Philippines or Russia” type documentaries on TV or the sexploitation movies that exploit and moralize simultaneously. Archer brushing off girl prostitutes callously, African getting out of a white man’s path, Archer telling Solomon, “I know people, white people. Without me, you’re just another black man in Africa, all right?” Perhaps the worst incident occurs during march through the countryside as the dynamic between Archer and Solomon changes imperceptibly to that of master and slave. When Archer commands Solomon to head in a particular direction (toward the diamond) rather than the camp where Dia might be staying, the father refuses to follow orders. “You gonna need some of that old discipline, eh?” taunts Archer. Again, Solomon denies him, “You are not the master.” But then Archer reveals what’s at stake, not just power and wealth, but racism, calling Solomon “kaffir.” But Zwick shows its true colors when he has Solomon say “I know good people who say there is something wrong with us, besides our black skin, that we were better off when the white men ruled.”
As Rebecca Beirne states: It is this statement that echoes across the film, acting as a justification of and incitement to colonialism, disavowing the role colonialism has played in creating Africa's problems, and proclaiming that Africans are childlike or savage beings that need white masters to rule over them in order to stop them from killing one another: a chilling message from a contemporary Hollywood feature film, and a reflection of how much western societies' attitudes have cycled back to the colonialist mentalities of time past.
Here is another review
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