Western Misconceptions Meet Iranian Reality
June 15, 2009 | 1745 GMT
Strarfor
By George Friedman
In 1979, when we were still young and starry-eyed, a revolution took place in Iran. When I asked experts what would happen, they divided into two camps.
The first group of Iran experts argued that the Shah of Iran would certainly survive, that the unrest was simply a cyclical event readily manageable by his security, and that the Iranian people were united behind the Iranian monarch’s modernization program. These experts developed this view by talking to the same Iranian officials and businessmen they had been talking to for years — Iranians who had grown wealthy and powerful under the shah and who spoke English, since Iran experts frequently didn’t speak Farsi all that well.
The second group of Iran experts regarded the shah as a repressive brute, and saw the revolution as aimed at liberalizing the country. Their sources were the professionals and academics who supported the uprising — Iranians who knew what former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini believed, but didn’t think he had much popular support. They thought the revolution would result in an increase in human rights and liberty. The experts in this group spoke even less Farsi than those in the first group.
Misreading Sentiment in Iran
Limited to information on Iran from English-speaking opponents of the regime, both groups of Iran experts got a very misleading vision of where the revolution was heading — because the Iranian revolution was not brought about by the people who spoke English. It was made by merchants in city bazaars, by rural peasants, by the clergy — people Americans didn’t speak to because they couldn’t. This demographic was unsure of the virtues of modernization and not at all clear on the virtues of liberalism. From the time they were born, its members knew the virtue of Islam, and that the Iranian state must be an Islamic state.
Americans and Europeans have been misreading Iran for 30 years. Even after the shah fell, the myth has survived that a mass movement of people exists demanding liberalization — a movement that if encouraged by the West eventually would form a majority and rule the country. We call this outlook “iPod liberalism,” the idea that anyone who listens to rock ‘n’ roll on an iPod, writes blogs and knows what it means to Twitter must be an enthusiastic supporter of Western liberalism. Even more significantly, this outlook fails to recognize that iPod owners represent a small minority in Iran — a country that is poor, pious and content on the whole with the revolution forged 30 years ago.
There are undoubtedly people who want to liberalize the Iranian regime. They are to be found among the professional classes in Tehran, as well as among students. Many speak English, making them accessible to the touring journalists, diplomats and intelligence people who pass through. They are the ones who can speak to Westerners, and they are the ones willing to speak to Westerners. And these people give Westerners a wildly distorted view of Iran. They can create the impression that a fantastic liberalization is at hand — but not when you realize that iPod-owning Anglophones are not exactly the majority in Iran.
Last Friday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected with about two-thirds of the vote. Supporters of his opponent, both inside and outside Iran, were stunned. A poll revealed that former Iranian Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi was beating Ahmadinejad. It is, of course, interesting to meditate on how you could conduct a poll in a country where phones are not universal, and making a call once you have found a phone can be a trial. A poll therefore would probably reach people who had phones and lived in Tehran and other urban areas. Among those, Mousavi probably did win. But outside Tehran, and beyond persons easy to poll, the numbers turned out quite different.
Some still charge that Ahmadinejad cheated. That is certainly a possibility, but it is difficult to see how he could have stolen the election by such a large margin. Doing so would have required the involvement of an incredible number of people, and would have risked creating numbers that quite plainly did not jibe with sentiment in each precinct. Widespread fraud would mean that Ahmadinejad manufactured numbers in Tehran without any regard for the vote. But he has many powerful enemies who would quickly have spotted this and would have called him on it. Mousavi still insists he was robbed, and we must remain open to the possibility that he was, although it is hard to see the mechanics of this.
Ahmadinejad’s Popularity
It also misses a crucial point: Ahmadinejad enjoys widespread popularity. He doesn’t speak to the issues that matter to the urban professionals, namely, the economy and liberalization. But Ahmadinejad speaks to three fundamental issues that accord with the rest of the country.
First, Ahmadinejad speaks of piety. Among vast swathes of Iranian society, the willingness to speak unaffectedly about religion is crucial. Though it may be difficult for Americans and Europeans to believe, there are people in the world to whom economic progress is not of the essence; people who want to maintain their communities as they are and live the way their grandparents lived. These are people who see modernization — whether from the shah or Mousavi — as unattractive. They forgive Ahmadinejad his economic failures.
Second, Ahmadinejad speaks of corruption. There is a sense in the countryside that the ayatollahs — who enjoy enormous wealth and power, and often have lifestyles that reflect this — have corrupted the Islamic Revolution. Ahmadinejad is disliked by many of the religious elite precisely because he has systematically raised the corruption issue, which resonates in the countryside.
Third, Ahmadinejad is a spokesman for Iranian national security, a tremendously popular stance. It must always be remembered that Iran fought a war with Iraq in the 1980s that lasted eight years, cost untold lives and suffering, and effectively ended in its defeat. Iranians, particularly the poor, experienced this war on an intimate level. They fought in the war, and lost husbands and sons in it. As in other countries, memories of a lost war don’t necessarily delegitimize the regime. Rather, they can generate hopes for a resurgent Iran, thus validating the sacrifices made in that war — something Ahmadinejad taps into. By arguing that Iran should not back down but become a major power, he speaks to the veterans and their families, who want something positive to emerge from all their sacrifices in the war.
Perhaps the greatest factor in Ahmadinejad’s favor is that Mousavi spoke for the better districts of Tehran — something akin to running a U.S. presidential election as a spokesman for Georgetown and the Upper East Side. Such a base will get you hammered, and Mousavi got hammered. Fraud or not, Ahmadinejad won and he won significantly. That he won is not the mystery; the mystery is why others thought he wouldn’t win.
For a time on Friday, it seemed that Mousavi might be able to call for an uprising in Tehran. But the moment passed when Ahmadinejad’s security forces on motorcycles intervened. And that leaves the West with its worst-case scenario: a democratically elected anti-liberal.
Western democracies assume that publics will elect liberals who will protect their rights. In reality, it’s a more complicated world. Hitler is the classic example of someone who came to power constitutionally, and then proceeded to gut the constitution. Similarly, Ahmadinejad’s victory is a triumph of both democracy and repression.
The Road Ahead: More of the Same
The question now is what will happen next. Internally, we can expect Ahmadinejad to consolidate his position under the cover of anti-corruption. He wants to clean up the ayatollahs, many of whom are his enemies. He will need the support of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This election has made Ahmadinejad a powerful president, perhaps the most powerful in Iran since the revolution. Ahmadinejad does not want to challenge Khamenei, and we suspect that Khamenei will not want to challenge Ahmadinejad. A forced marriage is emerging, one which may place many other religious leaders in a difficult position.
Certainly, hopes that a new political leadership would cut back on Iran’s nuclear program have been dashed. The champion of that program has won, in part because he championed the program. We still see Iran as far from developing a deliverable nuclear weapon, but certainly the Obama administration’s hopes that Ahmadinejad would either be replaced — or at least weakened and forced to be more conciliatory — have been crushed. Interestingly, Ahmadinejad sent congratulations to U.S. President Barack Obama on his inauguration. We would expect Obama to reciprocate under his opening policy, which U.S. Vice President Joe Biden appears to have affirmed, assuming he was speaking for Obama. Once the vote fraud issue settles, we will have a better idea of whether Obama’s policies will continue. (We expect they will.)
What we have now are two presidents in a politically secure position, something that normally forms a basis for negotiations. The problem is that it is not clear what the Iranians are prepared to negotiate on, nor is it clear what the Americans are prepared to give the Iranians to induce them to negotiate. Iran wants greater influence in Iraq and its role as a regional leader acknowledged, something the United States doesn’t want to give them. The United States wants an end to the Iranian nuclear program, which Iran doesn’t want to give.
On the surface, this would seem to open the door for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Former U.S. President George W. Bush did not — and Obama does not — have any appetite for such an attack. Both presidents blocked the Israelis from attacking, assuming the Israelis ever actually wanted to attack.
For the moment, the election appears to have frozen the status quo in place. Neither the United States nor Iran seem prepared to move significantly, and there are no third parties that want to get involved in the issue beyond the occasional European diplomatic mission or Russian threat to sell something to Iran. In the end, this shows what we have long known: This game is locked in place, and goes on.
See also:
Has the U.S. Played a Role?
Monday, June 29, 2009
Friday, June 26, 2009
Nixon on Abortion
From the NYT
Nixon worried that greater access to abortions would foster “permissiveness,” and said that “it breaks the family.” But he also saw a need for abortion in some cases — like interracial pregnancies, he said.
“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” he told an aide, before adding, “Or a rape.”
Nixon worried that greater access to abortions would foster “permissiveness,” and said that “it breaks the family.” But he also saw a need for abortion in some cases — like interracial pregnancies, he said.
“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” he told an aide, before adding, “Or a rape.”
Thursday, May 07, 2009
More cause for Pakistan worries
Posted by James F. Smith
Boston Globe
May 7, 2009 01:30 PM
As if there weren't enough crises in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Harvard Kennedy School fellow and Pakistan expert Hassan Abbas is offering more cause for worry.
Abbas, a former Pakistan government official who is one of the leading scholars in the United States on security issues in his homeland, says in a new article that most attention has rightly focused on the threat from the Pakistani Taliban in the border tribal areas and the North-West Frontier Province. Those are the traditional Pashtun Taliban militants, who share that ethnic heritage with Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan (and who received US backing in the 1980s to fight the Soviets).
But in a new study in the CTC Sentinel, a publication of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, Abbas describes a growing threat with potentially even greater consequences. He explains that the loosely organized Punjabi Taliban -- from Punjab Province, Pakistan's most populous area -- is gathering strength and momentum. The Punjab is Pakistan's heartland, home to some of Pakistan's largest cities and military installations.
It was these Punjabi Taliban, Abbas notes, who attacked the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team in March, among many notorious attacks. The Punjabi Taliban are working more closely with Pashtun Taliban. The Punjabis are often better-educated, and better-trained in the use of weaponry. Abbas, who is a fellow in the Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, says it is imperative to strengthen Pakistan's law enforcement capacity to counter this threat.
Note this reporting is in start contrast to the trip being published at the Washington Post by Pamela Constable who has been dusted off and reinstalled as their Pakistan "expert."
Boston Globe
May 7, 2009 01:30 PM
As if there weren't enough crises in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Harvard Kennedy School fellow and Pakistan expert Hassan Abbas is offering more cause for worry.
Abbas, a former Pakistan government official who is one of the leading scholars in the United States on security issues in his homeland, says in a new article that most attention has rightly focused on the threat from the Pakistani Taliban in the border tribal areas and the North-West Frontier Province. Those are the traditional Pashtun Taliban militants, who share that ethnic heritage with Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan (and who received US backing in the 1980s to fight the Soviets).
But in a new study in the CTC Sentinel, a publication of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, Abbas describes a growing threat with potentially even greater consequences. He explains that the loosely organized Punjabi Taliban -- from Punjab Province, Pakistan's most populous area -- is gathering strength and momentum. The Punjab is Pakistan's heartland, home to some of Pakistan's largest cities and military installations.
It was these Punjabi Taliban, Abbas notes, who attacked the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team in March, among many notorious attacks. The Punjabi Taliban are working more closely with Pashtun Taliban. The Punjabis are often better-educated, and better-trained in the use of weaponry. Abbas, who is a fellow in the Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, says it is imperative to strengthen Pakistan's law enforcement capacity to counter this threat.
Note this reporting is in start contrast to the trip being published at the Washington Post by Pamela Constable who has been dusted off and reinstalled as their Pakistan "expert."
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Somini Sengupta has discovered child malnutrition
Somini Sengupta has discovered child malnutrition in India.
From the New York Times March 12: "As Indian Growth Soars, Child Hunger Persists"
“Small, sick, listless children have long been India’s scourge” she writes, “even after a decade of galloping economic growth, child malnutrition rates are worse here than in many sub-Saharan African countries, and they stand out as a paradox in a proud democracy.”
Apparently this is not a paradox in America, the worlds richest and most powerful country.
She compares India to China “China, that other Asian economic powerhouse, sharply reduced child malnutrition, and now just 7 percent of its children under 5 are underweight, a critical gauge of malnutrition. In India, by contrast, despite robust growth and good government intentions, the comparable number is 42.5 percent.”
She laments that “There are no simple explanations.” Then goes on to make the incredulous claims that “Economists and public health experts say stubborn malnutrition rates point to a central failing in this democracy of the poor.” And that “Amartya Sen, the Nobel prize-winning economist, lamented that hunger was not enough of a political priority here.”
She acknowledges that India runs the largest child feeding program in the world but then eviserarates it by saying that “experts agree it is inadequately designed”.
She makes a trip to a slum in Delhi to make these journalistic observations:
“A tour of Jahangirpuri, a slum in this richest of Indian cities, put the challenge on stark display. Shortly after daybreak, in a rented room along a narrow alley, an all-female crew prepared giant vats of savory rice and lentil porridge.
Purnima Menon, a public health researcher with the International Food Policy Research Institute, was relieved to see it was not just starch; there were even flecks of carrots thrown in. The porridge was loaded onto bicycle carts and ferried to nurseries that vet and help at-risk children and their mothers throughout the neighborhood. “
First of all khichdi – a traditional Indian dish all over the north is not “all strarch” as every Indian knows – the lentils are added to provide protein and it provides a nutritious meal if vegetables are thrown in for the vitamins.
So she deliberately misleads – its not porridge nor is it all starch.
She then provides more anecdotal evidence of how, horror or horrors, some the left over food is given to women.
Somini Sengupta then provides more recycled and some questionable statistics collected from the internet.
She observes there are beggars in Delhi: “A few blocks from the Indian Parliament, tiny, ill-fed children turn somersaults for spare change at traffic signals.”
She also seems amazed that there are rats in slums, there are open drains and malaria. I guess if you move about the five star hotel circuit this could come as a shock.
Here she makes an observation that a more astute journalist would have followed through on: “Neighborhood shops carried small bags of potato chips and soda, evidence that its residents were far from destitute.”
Yes, thanks to globalization, multinationals like Coke and Pepsi, and Indian companies too sell non-nutritious snacks and sugary water drinks. These are consumed by poor under-nourished slum dwellers as a luxury thanks to the constant advertising barrage. This further erodes their finances, which could be better used to buy fresh vegetables or meat.
But instead she moves blithely on ….
---------------
Many of the observations she makes are not new for example here is quote from a World Bank report on the subject:
The South Asian Enigma: Why is undernutrition in South Asia so much higher than in Sub Saharan Africa?
In 1997, Ramalingaswami et al. wrote, “In the public imagination, the home of the malnourished child is Sub-Saharan Africa…but … the worst affected region is not Africa but South Asia”. These statements were met with incredulity. However, undernutrition rates in South Asia, including and especially in India, are nearly double those in Sub-Saharan Africa today. This is not an artifact of different measurement standards or differing growth potential among ethnic groups: several studies have repeatedly shown that given similar opportunities, children across most ethnic groups, including Indian children, can grow to the same levels, and that the same internationally recognized growth references can be used across countries to assess the prevalence of malnutrition. This phenomenon, referred to as the “South Asian Enigma”, is real.
The “South Asian Enigma” can be explained by three key differences between South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa:
- Low birth weight is the single largest predictor of undernutrition; and over 30% Indian babies are born with low birth weights, compared to approximately 16% in Sub-Saharan Africa.
- Women in South Asia tend to have lower status and less decision-making power than women in Sub-Saharan Africa. This limits women’s ability to access the resources needed for their own and their children’s health and nutrition, and has been shown to be strongly associated with low birth weight, as well as poor child feeding behaviors in the first twelve months of life
- Hygiene and sanitation standards in South Asia are well below those in Africa, and have a major role to play in causing the infections that lead to undernutrition in the first two years of life/
Ramalingaswami V, U. Jonson and J. Rohde. 1997 “The Asian Enigma”. In, The
Progress of Nations. New York: UNICEF.
--------------------
Here are some interesting comments to the NYT Article:
Comment 1 one of my favorites reporduced in full below
Comment 2
Comment 3
Comment 4
Comment 5
Comment 6
Comment 7
--- begin comment from nyt ----
240. March 13, 2009 3:22 pm
I will try to write this in the kindest least offensive manner. I worked five years in India (99-2004) managing Unicef's supply operation. Unicef is the UN childrens fund and has been working in India over 60 years; it was the first UN agency to startup in the then newly independent country. It has worked with governments, community groups, large ngo's, religious leaderships, universities, foriegn experts, you name it, anyone and everyone who wants to help nourish India's future, her beautiful children.
We (unicef) had some of the best nutrition and child development experts on our staff and advising us. Amartya Sen, nobel winner from his work on famine in Bangladesh; arguably the world leader in these issues regularly offered assistance. I am not a nutrition or development expert, I managed the spending of money, we spent about $130 million yearly, most of that went for vaccines, most of that for polio eradication. In nutrition unicef mostly offered training and meetings called 'advocacy' a nice way of saying, trying to convince people to nourish their children better. So my naive gleanings and reactions to comments here I've just read.
1. India has plenty of food, in fact large surpluses that are a financial/market stability problem; food is not lacking; its in the wrong spots at the wrong time. Teen girls & their babies need good food now.
2. India knows more about child feeding than most; they have received the world's most dedicated specialists in this area for many years.
3. 'Corruption' in government is not nearly the issue westerners blurt out whenever they use the word India. I worked with senior, middle and lower level officials, in tendering, ajudication and contracting of all sorts of local and international contracts for five years. I worked with government donor agencies, World Bank and well intended groups with money. I'm a typical middle class American male business fellow, with years in the US drug industry before Unicef. I've worked in Europe, Africa, Latin America, former Soviet, most south and east asian govt's managing contracts that spent your hard earned donations. India is no worse, and on balance better than some in the realm of corrupted contracting. They have corruption, but so do we (America)--it seems to be part of life. But, resistance to changing how things are always done is a bigger than the usual small time grifters trying to get over. India has active anti fraud teams, and a more agressive press than we do now in America.
4. 'Government' is not the problem. All comments seem to blame govt, but India's govt is a large complex group criticized from so many sides I wonder how they carry on. India is over six hundred districts, equivalent to US counties, only these have power. Nothing affects people through govt without the district. There are 600,000 towns & villages, each with elected vested interests--sound familiar? There are 26 states, each remarkably different; each zealous in its authorities. There are at least 10 powerful 'learned societies' of nutrition and child development in India, who field real experts in all subjects of child nutrition. They gather as often as someone will pay for their visit to Delhi or Mumbai and present learned papers. In my experience they disagree more over every aspect of nutrition than I thought was possible. In hindsight I found the gov't people trying to manage this 'nutrition' process to be powerless peons caught in the middle of angry partisans.
5. 'Caste', I love how westerners write about caste. In five years of very concentrated effort in all sorts of health programs with the smartest people I ever worked with, the word & concept of caste never entered the discussions. The only people who say things like 'untouchables' are westerners. Caste is a nice conception from watching films like Gandhi--who was high caste, but not part of the educated governance culture of the country. There is caste, it is illegal, there are exceptions who make it to the top, but caste is not causing this alone, and it is taboo to discuss--no one admits they have it.
6. Religion; to my surprise none of the comments I saw mentioned what is a measurable; muslim children and mothers in India suffer, and they are the largest 'minority' group. They are also the largest muslim population within a nation excepting Indonesia, over 100 million Indians are Muslim; most of them are poor hungry and fed up--call it a security risk, these teenage moms and babies need vitamins minerals and real food now.
'India's problem' in my view? It's similar to ours in America; selfishness. When we (the well off in America), and the same 'we' in India feel the pain of our poor, we will move forward. Thank you NYT for these opportunities, John Gilmartin
— John Gilmartin, Rhode Island, USA
--- end comment from nyt ----
From the New York Times March 12: "As Indian Growth Soars, Child Hunger Persists"
“Small, sick, listless children have long been India’s scourge” she writes, “even after a decade of galloping economic growth, child malnutrition rates are worse here than in many sub-Saharan African countries, and they stand out as a paradox in a proud democracy.”
Apparently this is not a paradox in America, the worlds richest and most powerful country.
She compares India to China “China, that other Asian economic powerhouse, sharply reduced child malnutrition, and now just 7 percent of its children under 5 are underweight, a critical gauge of malnutrition. In India, by contrast, despite robust growth and good government intentions, the comparable number is 42.5 percent.”
She laments that “There are no simple explanations.” Then goes on to make the incredulous claims that “Economists and public health experts say stubborn malnutrition rates point to a central failing in this democracy of the poor.” And that “Amartya Sen, the Nobel prize-winning economist, lamented that hunger was not enough of a political priority here.”
She acknowledges that India runs the largest child feeding program in the world but then eviserarates it by saying that “experts agree it is inadequately designed”.
She makes a trip to a slum in Delhi to make these journalistic observations:
“A tour of Jahangirpuri, a slum in this richest of Indian cities, put the challenge on stark display. Shortly after daybreak, in a rented room along a narrow alley, an all-female crew prepared giant vats of savory rice and lentil porridge.
Purnima Menon, a public health researcher with the International Food Policy Research Institute, was relieved to see it was not just starch; there were even flecks of carrots thrown in. The porridge was loaded onto bicycle carts and ferried to nurseries that vet and help at-risk children and their mothers throughout the neighborhood. “
First of all khichdi – a traditional Indian dish all over the north is not “all strarch” as every Indian knows – the lentils are added to provide protein and it provides a nutritious meal if vegetables are thrown in for the vitamins.
So she deliberately misleads – its not porridge nor is it all starch.
She then provides more anecdotal evidence of how, horror or horrors, some the left over food is given to women.
Somini Sengupta then provides more recycled and some questionable statistics collected from the internet.
She observes there are beggars in Delhi: “A few blocks from the Indian Parliament, tiny, ill-fed children turn somersaults for spare change at traffic signals.”
She also seems amazed that there are rats in slums, there are open drains and malaria. I guess if you move about the five star hotel circuit this could come as a shock.
Here she makes an observation that a more astute journalist would have followed through on: “Neighborhood shops carried small bags of potato chips and soda, evidence that its residents were far from destitute.”
Yes, thanks to globalization, multinationals like Coke and Pepsi, and Indian companies too sell non-nutritious snacks and sugary water drinks. These are consumed by poor under-nourished slum dwellers as a luxury thanks to the constant advertising barrage. This further erodes their finances, which could be better used to buy fresh vegetables or meat.
But instead she moves blithely on ….
---------------
Many of the observations she makes are not new for example here is quote from a World Bank report on the subject:
The South Asian Enigma: Why is undernutrition in South Asia so much higher than in Sub Saharan Africa?
In 1997, Ramalingaswami et al. wrote, “In the public imagination, the home of the malnourished child is Sub-Saharan Africa…but … the worst affected region is not Africa but South Asia”. These statements were met with incredulity. However, undernutrition rates in South Asia, including and especially in India, are nearly double those in Sub-Saharan Africa today. This is not an artifact of different measurement standards or differing growth potential among ethnic groups: several studies have repeatedly shown that given similar opportunities, children across most ethnic groups, including Indian children, can grow to the same levels, and that the same internationally recognized growth references can be used across countries to assess the prevalence of malnutrition. This phenomenon, referred to as the “South Asian Enigma”, is real.
The “South Asian Enigma” can be explained by three key differences between South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa:
- Low birth weight is the single largest predictor of undernutrition; and over 30% Indian babies are born with low birth weights, compared to approximately 16% in Sub-Saharan Africa.
- Women in South Asia tend to have lower status and less decision-making power than women in Sub-Saharan Africa. This limits women’s ability to access the resources needed for their own and their children’s health and nutrition, and has been shown to be strongly associated with low birth weight, as well as poor child feeding behaviors in the first twelve months of life
- Hygiene and sanitation standards in South Asia are well below those in Africa, and have a major role to play in causing the infections that lead to undernutrition in the first two years of life/
Ramalingaswami V, U. Jonson and J. Rohde. 1997 “The Asian Enigma”. In, The
Progress of Nations. New York: UNICEF.
--------------------
Here are some interesting comments to the NYT Article:
Comment 1 one of my favorites reporduced in full below
Comment 2
Comment 3
Comment 4
Comment 5
Comment 6
Comment 7
--- begin comment from nyt ----
240. March 13, 2009 3:22 pm
I will try to write this in the kindest least offensive manner. I worked five years in India (99-2004) managing Unicef's supply operation. Unicef is the UN childrens fund and has been working in India over 60 years; it was the first UN agency to startup in the then newly independent country. It has worked with governments, community groups, large ngo's, religious leaderships, universities, foriegn experts, you name it, anyone and everyone who wants to help nourish India's future, her beautiful children.
We (unicef) had some of the best nutrition and child development experts on our staff and advising us. Amartya Sen, nobel winner from his work on famine in Bangladesh; arguably the world leader in these issues regularly offered assistance. I am not a nutrition or development expert, I managed the spending of money, we spent about $130 million yearly, most of that went for vaccines, most of that for polio eradication. In nutrition unicef mostly offered training and meetings called 'advocacy' a nice way of saying, trying to convince people to nourish their children better. So my naive gleanings and reactions to comments here I've just read.
1. India has plenty of food, in fact large surpluses that are a financial/market stability problem; food is not lacking; its in the wrong spots at the wrong time. Teen girls & their babies need good food now.
2. India knows more about child feeding than most; they have received the world's most dedicated specialists in this area for many years.
3. 'Corruption' in government is not nearly the issue westerners blurt out whenever they use the word India. I worked with senior, middle and lower level officials, in tendering, ajudication and contracting of all sorts of local and international contracts for five years. I worked with government donor agencies, World Bank and well intended groups with money. I'm a typical middle class American male business fellow, with years in the US drug industry before Unicef. I've worked in Europe, Africa, Latin America, former Soviet, most south and east asian govt's managing contracts that spent your hard earned donations. India is no worse, and on balance better than some in the realm of corrupted contracting. They have corruption, but so do we (America)--it seems to be part of life. But, resistance to changing how things are always done is a bigger than the usual small time grifters trying to get over. India has active anti fraud teams, and a more agressive press than we do now in America.
4. 'Government' is not the problem. All comments seem to blame govt, but India's govt is a large complex group criticized from so many sides I wonder how they carry on. India is over six hundred districts, equivalent to US counties, only these have power. Nothing affects people through govt without the district. There are 600,000 towns & villages, each with elected vested interests--sound familiar? There are 26 states, each remarkably different; each zealous in its authorities. There are at least 10 powerful 'learned societies' of nutrition and child development in India, who field real experts in all subjects of child nutrition. They gather as often as someone will pay for their visit to Delhi or Mumbai and present learned papers. In my experience they disagree more over every aspect of nutrition than I thought was possible. In hindsight I found the gov't people trying to manage this 'nutrition' process to be powerless peons caught in the middle of angry partisans.
5. 'Caste', I love how westerners write about caste. In five years of very concentrated effort in all sorts of health programs with the smartest people I ever worked with, the word & concept of caste never entered the discussions. The only people who say things like 'untouchables' are westerners. Caste is a nice conception from watching films like Gandhi--who was high caste, but not part of the educated governance culture of the country. There is caste, it is illegal, there are exceptions who make it to the top, but caste is not causing this alone, and it is taboo to discuss--no one admits they have it.
6. Religion; to my surprise none of the comments I saw mentioned what is a measurable; muslim children and mothers in India suffer, and they are the largest 'minority' group. They are also the largest muslim population within a nation excepting Indonesia, over 100 million Indians are Muslim; most of them are poor hungry and fed up--call it a security risk, these teenage moms and babies need vitamins minerals and real food now.
'India's problem' in my view? It's similar to ours in America; selfishness. When we (the well off in America), and the same 'we' in India feel the pain of our poor, we will move forward. Thank you NYT for these opportunities, John Gilmartin
— John Gilmartin, Rhode Island, USA
--- end comment from nyt ----
Friday, February 06, 2009
What happened to the $20 laptop?
BBC
6 February 09
The only problem was that the "$20 laptop" turned out to be no such thing - it's not a laptop and it's not clear exactly what it is, when it will appear or what it wil cost. But the world's technology journalists fell for the story - along with the BBC - so how did that happen?
6 February 09
The only problem was that the "$20 laptop" turned out to be no such thing - it's not a laptop and it's not clear exactly what it is, when it will appear or what it wil cost. But the world's technology journalists fell for the story - along with the BBC - so how did that happen?
Another Quality Washington Post Reporter!
This goes a long way towards explaining the myopic view at the WP. Jay Mattews is typical of the ill informed, supremacist, reporter that the Washington Post employs.
In contrast to this blowhard there is Bob Compton.
The segment starts at 1:00 min.
In contrast to this blowhard there is Bob Compton.
The segment starts at 1:00 min.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Cholera Outbreak Outcome of West’s War on Zimbabwe
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.
_____________________________
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
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.
_____________________________
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
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-Ã -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-Ã -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
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