August 21, 2005 - April 22, 2006
White Zimbabwean farmers apply for seized land
Posted: Saturday, April 22, 2006
About 200 white commercial farmers have asked Zimbabwean authorities to restore their seized land, a senior member of a farmers' union said on Friday.
"I submitted close to 200 applications. Some farmers submitted their applications individually," said Roy Gifford, vice-president of the white-dominated Commercial Farmers' Union (CFU).
Gifford said some CFU members submitted their applications as long back as 2001, but the applications "were never taken seriously by the government".
Zimbabwe's relations with the West became strained after President Robert Mugabe's government launched controversial land reforms six years ago, seizing farms from about 4 000 white farmers for redistribution to landless blacks.
Critics blame the land grabs for the country's downward spiral into poverty and hunger.
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Seven Months After Katrina
Posted: Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Sleeping in Your Car in Front of Your Trailer in Front of Your Devastated Home, Tales of Lunacy and Hope from New Orleans
by Bill Quigley, dissidentvoice.org
In New Orleans, seven months after Katrina, senior citizens are living in their cars. WWL-TV introduced us to Korean War veteran Paul Morris, 74, and his wife Yvonne, 66. They have been sleeping in their two-door sedan since January. They have been waiting that long for FEMA contractors to unlock the 240 square foot trailer in their yard and connect the power so they can sleep inside it in front of their devastated home.
This tale of lunacy does not begin to stop there.
Their 240 square foot trailer may well cost more than their house. While FEMA flat out refuses to say how much the government is paying for trailers, reliable estimates by the New York Times and others place the cost at over $60,000 each.
How could these tiny FEMA trailers cost so much?
Follow the money.
Circle B Enterprises of Georgia was awarded $287 million in contracts by FEMA for temporary housing. At the time, that was the seventh highest award of Katrina money in the country. According to the Washington Post, Circle B was not even being licensed to build homes in its own state of Georgia and filed for bankruptcy in 2003. The company does not even have a website.
Here is how it works. The original contractor takes their cut and subcontracts out the work of constructing the trailer to other companies. Once it is built, they subcontract out the transporting the trailers to yet other companies which pay drivers, gas, insurance and mileage. They then subcontract out the hookups of the trailers to other companies and keep taking cuts for their services. Usually none of the people who make the money are local workers.
With $60,000 many people could adequately repair their homes.
Why not just give the $60,000 directly to the elderly couple and let them fix up their home? Ask Congress. FEMA is not allowed to give grants of that much. Money for fixing up homes comes from somewhere else and people are still waiting for that to arrive.
While many corporations are making big money off of Katrina, Mr. and Mrs. Morris wait in their car.
Craziness continues in the area of the right to vote.
You would think that the nation that put on elections with satellite voting boxes for Iraqis and Afghanis and Haitians and many others would do the same for Katrina evacuees. Wrong. There is no satellite voting for the 230,000 citizens of New Orleans who are out of state. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Advancement Project, ACORN and the Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund have all fought for satellite voting but Louisiana and the courts and the U.S. Justice Department have said no.
The rule of thumb around here is that the poorer you are, the further you have been displaced. African Americans are also much more likely to be poor and renters -- the people who cannot yet come back to a city where rents have doubled. They are the ones bearing the burdens of no satellite voting.
The people already back are much more affluent than the pre-Katrina New Orleans. The city is also much whiter. Many of those already back in New Orleans are not so sure that all of New Orleans should be rebuilt. The consequence of that is not everyone will be allowed to return. Planners and politicians openly suggest turning poor neighborhoods into green spaces. No one yet has said they want to turn their own neighborhood into green space -- only other people's neighborhoods -- usually poor people's neighborhoods. Those who disagree are by and large not here.
New Orleans has not been majority white for decades, but it is quite possible that a majority of those who are able to vote in the upcoming election will be white. Thus the decisions about the future of New Orleans are poised to be made by those who have been able to get back and will exclude many of those still evacuated. Guess what type of plans they will have for New Orleans?
There are many, many more tales of lunacy all over town as all systems have melted down: criminal justice, healthcare, public education, churches, electricity, water, garbage, our environment -- you name it, it melted down and is not yet fully back up.
But, there are also clear signs of hope.
Across New Orleans neighborhood groups are meeting every weekend planning their own comebacks. People catch rides back into town and visit ruined neighborhoods and greet neighbors and together make plans to recover. Because governmental action and contractors are so slow, groups are looking to their own resources and partnering with churches and community groups and universities and businesses to fill in the gaps where the politicos have not yet been able to respond. The citizens themselves are our greatest hope.
We also have allies that give us hope.
We have been amazed and refreshed by the thousands of college students who took their spring break in New Orleans helping our elderly and uninsured families gut houses, clean up streets and advocate for justice with Common Ground Relief, the Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund, Catholic Charities, ACORN and many other church and civic groups. Even law students! Over 1,000 law students helped provide legal aid and are providing the first comprehensive documentation of abuses of local and out of town workers by businesses.
Over 100 clergy from across the US visited New Orleans with the PICO Network, as did hundreds of other people of faith with the Jeremiah community. The Protestant Women are here now and the Interfaith Worker Justice group meets here soon. Together, these groups raise the voices of their faith communities and call for justice in the rebuilding of our communities.
On the national level, we see rising support from numerous social justice groups. Several created the Katrina Information Network, an internet advocacy group that enables people across the country to take action with us to influence all levels of government in the rebuilding effort. We are inspired by the veterans and allies who marched from Florida to New Orleans to highlight the diversion of money from our cities to war efforts.
Yes, we have lunacy in New Orleans. But there are also signs of hope.
Whether lunacy or hope will triumph in New Orleans is yet to be determined. But we appreciate those of you who are working in solidarity with us to try to keep our hope alive.
Bill Quigley is a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. He can be reached at: Quigley@loyno.edu.
Reprinted from:
www.dissidentvoice.org/Mar06/Quigley29.htm
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DR Congo: victims of the power
Posted: Sunday, March 19, 2006
March 18, 2006, socialistworker.co.uk
Imperialism is to blame for the Democratic Republic of Congo's torment, writes Jules-Cesar Malula
Unhappy the nation whose death rates are featured only in the Lancet! This British medical journal has become famous recently for suggesting that 100,000 civilians died after the US/British invasion of Iraq, and then that four million people have died in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) since 1998.
Normal countries have large scale deaths reported in their press, or they are debated in parliament. In Iraq and the DRC nobody counts.
I want to understand why DRC has undergone such torment. Other studies suggest that four million is an under-estimate and that ten million have died in the DRC since civil war began in 1996.
The DRC is a central African country two thirds the size of Western Europe, with a population of 50 million. It has been torn apart by six invading African armies and dozens of local militias. All of these forces have at various times been backed by rapacious multinationals.
But the real actors are the great powers. The US, Belgium, Britain and France in particular have manipulated the conflicts, supplied millions of dollars of arms, aided particular governments and either held back or pushed on the United Nations (UN) forces to suit a particular agenda.
This is clear to anyone who seriously examines the situation. At the end of last year the International Court of Justice ruled that Uganda must pay up to $10 billion compensation to the DRC for looting during 1998-2003.
The court also found Uganda responsible for human rights abuses.
Yoweri Museveni's regime in Uganda is undoubtedly culpable, but the West backed Museveni as one of a "new breed" of African leaders.
Both Rwanda and Uganda are heavily dependent on Western aid – around half of Uganda's national budget comes from European Union (EU) countries. Uganda is useful for US imperialism in this region. The US has a permanent military base in northern Uganda, from which it chases "Al Qaida terrorists".
The illegal invasion of the DRC by Uganda and Rwanda in 1998 had the backing and support of the US and Britain. Large quantities of arms were transferred to Rwanda via Eastern Europe from Israel, Britain and the US.
These arms ended up in the hands of "rebels" in eastern DRC. Britain's official arms sales to Africa neared £1 billion in 2004.
There are many similar examples of the reality of "intervention" in the DRC. I want to analyse what imperialism is, and what it means for the country's people.
Some say that groups of very rich men, seeking further wealth, influence governments to adopt expansionary military policies. So, for example, oil men take over the White House and push for invasion of Iraq.
There is much evidence to support such ideas. You can read Michael Moore and others on the Bush regime's oil links. Though less well known, the same is true of the DRC.
A very useful article by Keith Harmon Snow and David Barouski (www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=2&ItemID=9832) spells out in great detail the links between the DRC's wealth, the firms that steal it and prominent politicians.
They point out that although some Western companies have been implicated in fuelling the slaughter, others have largely escaped attention.
One is Barrick Gold, an important mining multinational operating in the DRC, which has had some very interesting figures lobbying for or advising it.
They include George Bush senior, who was associated with the firm while he was US vice president in Ronald Reagan's administrations from 1981-9, and as US president from 1989-93.
He then became the company's chief lobbyist and honorary senior adviser to Barrick's international advisory board. Adnan Khashoggi, a Bush-allied Saudi billionaire and arms trafficker – and friend of Princess Diana – was involved.
Then there was Peter Munk, a protege of the British royal family, and Khashoggi's partner, who became chairman of Barrick Gold. Brian Mulroney, Canada's prime minister between 1984-93, moved on to the Barrick international advisory board.
Importance
All very compelling, but I don't think we can understand the scale of the forces deployed in the DRC, or the web of interests involved, just by reference to a few individuals.
Clearly much bigger sections of the ruling classes in the West – and in African countries – have been involved.Here we move to a second explanation – the minerals of the Congo and their importance to the world.
As Snow and Barouski report, "Coltan ore is widely used in the aerospace and electronics industries for capacitors, superconductors and transistors after it is refined to tantalum.
"The US is entirely dependant on foreign sources for tantalum, an enabling technology for capacitors essential to aerospace weaponry and every pager, cellphone, computer, VCR, CD player, PDA and TV. US import records show a dramatic jump of purchases from Rwanda and Uganda during the time they were smuggling tantalum and cobalt out of the Congo."
Congo's immense natural wealth has undoubtedly been attractive to imperialist powers for over a century.
These include King Leopold II of Belgium, who in the 19th century grabbed the Congo to make it a vast rubber plantation, and the US, which wanted strategic minerals during the Cold War.
But this is not enough to explain the DRC's pain. The DRC is a fairly limited supplier of coltan.
Australia produces about 12 times the amount mined from the DRC. A single mine in Australia produces more than the whole of the DRC.
So coltan does explain why the small warlords in eastern DRC and those from Uganda, Rwanda, Zimbabwe and elsewhere marshalled thousands of men to tear up the country in a search for profit. But it does not tell us why the much bigger warlords in New York, Paris or London are so involved.
A genuine explanation of the DRC's agony must include prominent individuals, the web or connections between government and private industry, the importance of Congo's minerals.And it must also include the way that imperialism – the competition between great powers for control of the world – brings all of these together.
During the Cold War the DRC (or Zaire as it was) remained firmly in the Western camp under the dictator Joseph Mobutu. The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and then the fall of Mobutu in 1997 opened up new possibilities for all sorts of petty national regimes, their Western backers and the multinationals.
The US was determined to control the world supply of strategic minerals – not so much to assure its own supply, but to monitor the supply to China, Japan, the EU.
The DRC was a very unstable place.The US therefore backed the DRC government with loans and funding, while also assisting regimes in Rwanda and Uganda which were ripping the country apart. It also maintained links with a whole range of mercenary firms.
From 1999 it brought in the UN. The UN mission in DRC is led by US career diplomat William Swing. The UN's 19,000-strong force is led by Lieutenant General Babacar Gaye of Senegal, a good friend of the Western powers.
Mercenaries
The result is a complicated interpenetration of interests. Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of US company Halliburton, helped build a military base near Cyangugu, Rwanda, just next to the DRC-Rwanda border.
Officially, the company was there to clear land mines. Instead it housed mercenaries from Military Professional Resources Inc (MPRI) who trained the Rwandan Patriotic Front forces and Laurent Kabila's forces for the invasion of the Congo in 1996. It helped the Rwandan army's reinvasion in 1998, after Laurent Kabila threw out the Rwandans, Ugandans, the Bechtel corporation and the IMF.
Snow and Barouski write, "The French intelligence service reported that US special forces and mercenaries from MPRI participated in the murder of Rwandan Hutu refugees on the Oso River near Goma in 1996 and even claim to have found the bodies of two US soldiers killed in combat near Goma.
"MPRI is based in Arlington, Virginia and is staffed and run by 36 retired US generals.
"It is contracted by the Pentagon to fulfil the African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI). This programme includes the Ugandan military, and it supplied military training in guerrilla warfare to Ugandan officers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in July 1996.
"During the invasion of the Congo in 1998, Ugandan soldiers were found with ACRI equipment while Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have implicated Ugandan battalions trained by ACRI in rapes, murders, extortion and beatings of Ugandan civilians."
Another mercenary firm, Executive Outcomes, has established other private military companies that operate around Africa. Cofounder Tony Buckingham's Heritage Oil and Gas company works closely with PMC Sandline International to manipulate the petroleum options around Lake Albert.
It is believed to have signed concession deals with warring armies and governments on both sides of the Uganda-DRC border.
So at the centre of the DRC's pain are the great powers, their competition and their desire to dominate as much as possible of the world.
For France the present crisis in the DRC is a chance to regain the influence it lost when Mobutu went under.
For the US it is an opportunity to control minerals and ration the access of China and other countries to them. Meanwhile ordinary people die as the great powers fight proxy wars.
People sometimes say that the world should spend less time worrying about Iraq and more about DRC because our suffering is so much greater.
But in truth the power of imperialism to distort and to break the development of DRC will be decided on the streets of Iraq, not so much on the streets of DRC – although we will try.
Greetings to those demonstrating around the world on 18 March. We are with you.
Jules-Cesar Malula is a university lecturer living in Kinshasa, the capital of DRC
© Copyright Socialist Worker (unless otherwise stated). You may republish if you include an active link to the original and leave this notice in place.
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Haiti Election Sends World a Message
Posted: Thursday, February 23, 2006
by John Maxwell
This article originally appeared
in the Jamaica Observer.
If you really want to know what's wrong with Haiti consider this: Last Thursday night, when it was clear that Rene Preval was getting something over 60% of the votes in the UN organized Haitian election, one of his opponents, the man coming second with about 12% of the votes was a former stand-in president, Leslie Manigat.
Manigat, recognizing reality, said that the trend suggested that Preval had swept the board and that there might be no need for a runoff.
The candidate running third, a millionaire sweatshop owner named Charles Henri Baker, had a different opinion. Mr. Baker, with about 6% of the vote, one-tenth of Preval's and half as many as Manigat's, was promising to launch an election petition, charging fraud, hoping to overturn the results.
I cannot imagine anything which more clearly illustrates the mind-set of Haiti's so-called ruling class, the Elite, whose rapacious greed, racist intransigence and bone-headed stupidity have provided the main roadblock in Haiti's 200-year-long struggle to establish a free and civilized society.
I don't think it is possible for anyone, anywhere else in the world, to believe that Mr. Baker's initiative makes any sense whatever. I don't believe that even in the US Embassy in Port au Prince or in the State Department itself that there is anyone who could believe that there is any way, short of assassination, to deny the people of Haiti their basic human rights after this week's demonstration of resolution and will.
For the last ten years, Charles Henri Baker and an assortment of freebooters like himself, notably fellow sweatshop owners Reginald Boulos and Andy Apaid, have been able to convince the United States that "populists" like Preval and Jean Bertrand Aristide do not represent the Haitian people. The Elite's stiff-necked refusal to cooperate, negotiate or participate in the democratic process recruited support from the most backward and primitive forces in US politics and effectively brought the operations of Haitian government to a standstill.
"Enhancing democracy"
They also managed to recruit the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, whose Jamaican heritage should have informed him that he and the rest of the world, were being samfied (conned) by the Haitian elite and their co-conspirators against democracy – the International Republican Institute, the National Endowment for Democracy and the Haiti Democracy Project, among others. Under the guise of "enhancing democracy" these apparatchiks sabotaged the hopes of the Haitian people for a new birth of freedom after generations of savage dictatorship initiated by the American invasion of 1915.
The American 1915 intervention was explicitly and essentially racist and was perhaps best exemplified by the notorious remark of the American Secretary of State at the time, William Jennings Bryan. Upon discovering the ethnic character of Haiti he was appalled: "Imagine!" he expostulated, "Niggers speaking French!" encapsulating for a century white American incomprehension of the humanity of people who don't look like them.
This incomprehension extended to the first black American secretary of State, Colin Powell, and even more strongly to his successor, another "brilliant African-American," Dr. Condoleezza Rice.
Powell bought the Elite nonsense so thoroughly that he was able to say, with a perfectly straight face, that President Aristide's "...failure to adhere to democratic principles has contributed to the deep polarization and violent unrest that we are witnessing in Haiti today... His own actions have called into question his fitness to continue to govern Haiti. We urge him to examine his position carefully, to accept responsibility, and to act in the best interests of the people of Haiti." And he suggested that President Aristide was corrupt and that the US with its high tech and pervasive reach, would very soon charge Aristide with high crimes and misdemeanors.
That was two years ago.
According to the North American pundits, the best interests of Haiti meant selling off the few national productive assets and accepting the wise guidance of people like Apaid, Boulos and Baker, all of them suspect as collaborators with the dictatorships under which they had amassed immeasurable wealth and power. Aristide was also supposed to accept the dictates of the International Financial institutions (IFIs), the World bank, the IMF et al, to mortgage his poverty-stricken country to foreign usurers to build super-highways and other hard infrastructure when what Haiti wanted was the development of its people first so they could handle the work of re-inventing and rebuilding their country.
One of the Poorest countries in the World
It wasn't that the US the World Bank and the IFIs didn't know what was needed.
"Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and one of the poorest countries in the developing world. Its per capita income – $ 250 – is considerably less than one-tenth the Latin American average. About 80 percent of the rural Haitian population live in poverty. Moreover, far from improving, the poverty situation in Haiti has been deteriorating over the past decade, concomitant with a rate of decline in per capita GNP of 5.2 percent a year over the 1985-95 period.
"The staggering level of poverty in Haiti is associated with a profile of social indicators that is also shocking. Life expectancy is only 57 years compared to the Latin American average of 69. Less than half of the population is literate. Only about one child in five of secondary-school age actually attends secondary school. Health conditions are similarly poor; vaccination coverage for children, for example, is only about 25 percent. Only about one-fourth of the population has access to safe water. In short, the overwhelming majority of the Haitian population are living in deplorable conditions of extreme poverty." – The World Bank: Challenges of Poverty Reduction.
And they all pledged to support Haiti get her back on her feet. But the Elite, citing Aristide's supposedly divisive populism and dictatorial tendencies, convinced anyone who could help to put their investments somewhere else. The Elite despised "the ghetto priest" – as poor and black as his parishioners. Aristide nevertheless went ahead. Haiti wanted doctors; with the help of the Cubans he established a medical school for the children of the poor. Haiti wanted teachers; Aristide built more schools in his short time than had been built in Haiti in 200 years. Yet, to the foreign NGOs busy building "civil society" the man was a menace. They could not and would not work with him. They "knew" that in a fair fight they would not defeat him, so they refused to contest elections, because they would be stolen.
This time round the ground was better-prepared. Dozens of convicted rapists, torturers and murderers were let loose when the Marines took over. The Marines drove out the students and took the medical school for their barracks; their accomplices in "civil society" burned the new Museum of Haitian Folkloric history. They shut down the children's television station. It was clearly subversive of good government and capitalism.
Press freedom became a memory with journalists tortured and murdered. Leaders of the Lavalas popular movement were sometimes murdered, sometime simply imprisoned without charge. The Prime Minister was jailed, as was the country's leading folklorist, a 69 year old woman named Anne August who was arrested at midnight on Mothers Day 2004 by Marines using stun grenades to shatter her front door. They shot her dog and carried away her young grandchildren in handcuffs. She is still in prison.
Convicted terrorists were freed by a compromised judicial system and one of the most notorious and dangerous even ran for the presidency. The work of years in bringing the torturers and murders to Justice was undone overnight. The US installed "President" acclaimed the murderers as "Freedom Fighters". He was in good company; the Canadian representative of the OAS was on his bandwagon as he hailed the criminal resurgence. And Condoleezza Rice, with more doctorates than common sense, was ecstatic about the prospects of an election. After all, Lavalas had been silenced, the chimeres (Lavalas "terrorists") had been murdered, the people were leaderless. When a leader stepped forward in the person of Father Gerard Jean Juste, a Roman Catholic priest like Aristide, he too was thrown into jail, prevented from becoming a candidate for President and only released two weeks before the election because he had been examined in prison by the internationally known Professor Paul Farmer and found to be suffering from leukemia. Not even the State Department could challenge that diagnosis.
Spreading "democracy"
All was set fair for democracy to sprout. In a country of 8 million people with 4 million voters spread over 28,000 sq. km ( about the size of the US state of Maryland and nearly three times the size of Jamaica) there were 800 designated polling stations, about as many as would serve in the city of Kingston, Jamaica. There were three polling stations outside of the main slum cities adjacent to Port au Prince – to serve nearly 300,000 voters. There were none inside.
Condoleezza Rice had a message for the Haitian people. In an interview last September, before the election was postponed three times, her "message for the Haitian people is don't miss this chance to go out and vote and to decide your own future. There is nothing more important to a human being than to control his own future and the vote is the way to begin to control your own future."
"Nou lèd, Men Nou La!"
The election was expected to be a shambles in which anything could happen to frustrate the popular will: widespread violence, too few polling stations, too many voters convinced that the rich would get many chances to vote while they waited, shoeless and voteless, in mile-long lines under the hot Haitian sun.
Yet, suspecting the worst, the Haitians were disciplined and resolute. There was one violent incident in the whole country.
People fainted as they waited for hours to vote, were revived, waited again and no doubt fainted again. All were hungry, I am sure. But they were hungrier for their rights than for food. Despite all the odds, they made the election work. Despite the intimidation, the confusion, the bad faith and the UN peacekeeping forces, they made the election work. If ever there were a people deserving autonomy, it is the Haitians. They proved it 200 years ago, when the Enlightenment made a soft landing in Haiti, when in advance of France and the United States and the world, the Haitians abolished slavery and promulgated the inalienable Rights of Man.
They proved it again on Tuesday when they cocked a snook at their "benefactors" "Nou lèd, Men Nou La!" as they say in Haiti – "We may be ugly, but we are here!" or as we say in Jamaica "You a-go tired fi see mi face"!!
Preval won even in upscale Petionville.
And of course, we need to remember that despite this "election", there is no vacancy in the office of President of Haiti. The President of Haiti is alive and well. He has been prevented from discharging his duties by the illegal machinations of the United States, Canada and France, aided and abetted by Kofi Annan. Those characters are simply attempting to legitimize the illegitimate.
The Haitian people know this and have used the election to explain to the world, as best they can under the circumstances, that they want their democracy and their President back. Of course, the American viceroy in Haiti, Timothy Carney, doesn't buy that. Carney said he was not concerned about Préval's former alliance with Aristide and dismissed speculation that Préval would bring Aristide back to Haiti.
"Aristide is as much a man of the past as Jean-Claude 'Baby Doc' Duvalier is," Carney said in an interview. "I believe the electorate has absolutely understood that."
And of course, Mr. Carney, like Dr. Rice and Mr. Bush, know what the Haitians want – much better than the Haitians themselves.
Colin Powell was fond of speaking about what he said were "the Pottery Barn rules":
"You break it; you've bought it."
The United States, Canada and France broke Haiti on behalf of a thoroughly toxic Elite. The French already owed Haiti $25 billion in blood money extracted by blackmail in the nineteenth century and the Americans, who financed that extortion at usurious rates, owe them even more, having destroyed Haitian governance, killed and exiled their leaders and depraved their landscape as well as their politics.
Will they do the honorable thing and pay for their depredations?
Stay tuned.
Poetic Justice
They say revenge is a dish that men of taste prefer cold.
In his position as Foreign Minister of Canada Mr. Pierre Pettigrew was one of the leading conspirators and mobilizers against President Aristide and Haitian democracy. So, it is with some satisfaction that I record that Mr. Pettigrew, a rising star in the Liberal party, lost his seat in the Canadian Parliament in the recent elections. Pettigrew was defending a seat which had been safe for the Liberals for nearly 80 years – since 1917. He was defeated handsomely by – WAIT FOR IT... (DRUMROLL and FANFARE!!!)
... A Haitian woman.
I am sure that you, too, will feel that somehow, somewhere, there is, occasionally, some Justice.
John Maxwell of the University of the West Indies (UWI) is the veteran Jamaican journalist who in 1999 single-handedly thwarted the Jamaican government's efforts to build houses at Hope, the nation's oldest and best-known botanical gardens. His campaigning earned him first prize in the 2000 Sandals Resort's annual Environmental Journalism Competition, the region's richest journalism prize. He is also the author of How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalists and Journalists (Jamaica, 2000). Mr. Maxwell can be reached at jonmax@mac.com.
Copyright ©2006 John Maxwell
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We don't want to deal with Tsvangirai's meetings
Posted: Wednesday, February 8, 2006
By Bivan Saluseki, postzambia.com
Mwaanga – "TSVANGIRAI'S VISIT WAS INCONSISTENT WITH HIS STATUS"
(ZAMBIA'S) INFORMATION minister Vernon Mwaanga yesterday said Zambia did not want to get involved even remotely in MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai's meetings which he held in Livingstone.
Commenting on reports that Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Tsvangirai met former FBI and CIA agents in Zambia last week, Mwaanga said government knew that Tsvangirai had discussions which were inconsistent with the reasons he had given for coming into the country.
Mwaanga said Tsvangirai went to Sun Hotel in Livingstone and registered under different names.
He said after evaluation, it was found that Tsvangirai's visit was inconsistent with his status hence the decision by the Immigration Department to remove him from Zambia.
"We felt that some of the discussions he had would be better discussed in Zimbabwe rather than in Zambia," he said.
Mwaanga said Zambia enjoyed cordial relations with Zimbabwe and did not want to get involved in the kind of meetings Tsvangirai had while in Zambia.
"We did not want those meetings to be held in our territory," said Mwaanga.
Zimbabwe's Minister of State for National Security, Didymus Mutasa told The Herald that government was seeking to establish the motive behind a secret meeting held between the MDC leadership and a United States of America-funded organisation —Freedom House—in Zambia last week.
According to The Herald, Freedom House is headed by former CIA and FBI agents and claims to be "a voice for democracy and freedom around the world".
"We are very interested in the meeting and we are making a follow-up. We want to know what is going on," said Mutasa.
"Unfortunately, we can't divulge much at this stage because it will work against our interests but this is a matter of national security and we can't ignore it."
Mutasa said Zimbabwe was grateful to the Zambian government for its swift action AGAINST the MDC leadership.
"We are grateful to Zambia and we hope other countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) will act like that in future. We must not allow foreign powers to have their way in our region," he said.
Mutasa said the meeting had also exposed the MDC and the Americans.
"THEY (MDC) CANNOT DO ANYTHING ON THEIR OWN; IT SEEMS EVERYTHING THEY DO IS ORGANISED BY MABHUNU (whites), and if what happened in Zambia is what the Americans call democracy, then their democracy is a sham. Is democracy interference in the affairs of another country?" he asked.
Reprinted from:
www.postzambia.com/post-read_article.php?articleId=6272
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Namibian leader defends land grab on German visit
Posted: Monday, November 28, 2005
Namibian President Hifikepunye Pohamba on Monday defended his country's controversial land-expropriation policy at the start of a five-day visit to Germany.
Following a meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin, Pohamba said that 15 years after shaking off South African rule, land reform to redistribute land from white farmers to black landless people is essential.
The previous willing-buyer, willing-seller policy was proceeding too slowly, the Namibian president said.
The government has issued expropriation orders to 18 white commercial farmers and says the land will be given to almost 250 000 landless people.
Both sides said they aim to enhance mutual relations, according to a statement released in Berlin after Pohamba held talks with President Horst Koehler.
Full Article : mg.co.za
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Farmers need to co-exist
Posted: Monday, October 31, 2005
The Herald Online
IT is not surprising today that the forces that were violently opposed to the liberation struggle and called the liberation movement "terrorism" are the same that today are calling equitable distribution of land, "a land grab". The same hostility towards the majority still manifests itself.
Some Western countries still believe that Zimbabwe's land redistribution programme to the majority is meant to drive the white commercial farmers out of the country.
We all know that the Government is just fairly distributing the land to the landless Zimbabweans who did not have enough land to fend for themselves.
There is a lot of land in Zimbabwe, whites still have a place to live. The resettlement programme was not meant to drive them out but to create an atmosphere which was conducive to the majority.
If it is accepted that the primary cause for taking up the armed struggle stemmed from imbalances in land distribution, how can there ever be peace if those historical injustices remain unrectified?
Threats are made on a daily basis by some Western countries that unless the will of the former oppressors reigns supreme, this country will not benefit from investment.
What, in effect, this means is that perpetration of oppression of the majority in this country, will attract investment.
It is in this context, therefore, that we agree with Vice President Joseph Msika that the land reform programme is based on the principle of the one-man one-farm principle, and that it is not Government's policy to drive all whites out of their farms.
The call by the Vice President to the Zimbabwe Farmers Union Congress that new farmers and white commercial farmers should work together to achieve food security in the country comes at the right time.
"The whites used us during the colonial era. We should also use them this time around. One obviously cannot just wake up a good farmer, you need to learn, you need to acquire experience."
We are happy that there are some genuine white farmers in the country, though in the minority, who have demonstrated a willingness to reciprocate the hand of reconciliation.
They do this by working hand in hand with the new farmers in their neighbourhood. This is how it should be.
The passing of Constitution Amendment Number 17 has put the question of land reform to its final end.
Focus should now be on the productive use of the allocated land.
This is a challenge to the Zimbabwe Farmers' Union to impress upon their members to fully utilise the land they were given under the land redistribution programme.
Failure to use the land, promotes the wishes of our detractors. The rains are just around the corner. Let us put all our detractors to shame by using the land to produce food for our own consumption and export.
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Katrina, Conservative Myth-Making and the Media
Posted: Sunday, October 30, 2005
By Tim Wise
During the flooding of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, many a voice praised the media for its supposedly aggressive coverage. The fact that Anderson Cooper cried on camera, or that Geraldo evinced outrage (imagine that), or that even Fox's Shepard Smith waxed indignant at the suffering in the streets, was taken as evidence of some newfound courage on the part of the press.
Standing up to FEMA's Mike Brown, and making him appear every bit as incompetent as he was -- a task about as difficult as making Paris Hilton look underfed -- inspired plaudits for any number of network anchors and reporters in the field. So too, Cooper's upbraiding of an utterly hapless Mary Landrieu, she of the U.S. Senate, just to show that both parties were fair game in this brave new world of independent media, no longer willing to be led around by the neck on a leash, as it had been with, say, Iraq, for starters.
But just as surely as the media went after those in positions of power, and sought to expose them as witless in all respects, it was even more adept at framing (pun very much intended) low-income black folks in the streets of New Orleans as a collection of deviant criminals. In other words, the more things changed, the more they ultimately stayed the same, with the press presenting images of the desperate and left behind that reinforce negative and racist stereotypes, to the utter exclusion of accuracy and fair-mindedness.
Case in point, the constant repetition of the same five or six video loops of so-called looters. The fact that most of these were taking water, food and medicine didn't seem to matter to camerapersons or, ultimately, a viewing public quick to condemn what they saw. That the relative paucity of such video suggests theft wasn't particularly representative of the crowds on Canal Street -- after all, if looting had been that common, there would have been more than the same half-dozen clips to present -- also mattered not it appears.
An even better case in point, the repetition of unfounded rumors -- later proven false -- to the effect that Children's Hospital had been raided by drug addicts looking for a fix; or that gang rapes were occurring in the Superdome or Convention Center, or that babies were being molested and then having their throats slit, only to be stuffed like trash in abandoned freezers and garbage cans. False, false and false; and for none of these stories had there ever been a first hand witness who had actually seen any of the supposed carnage taking place.
Or consider the reports of thugs shooting on first aid helicopters: fact is, there are no first hand witnesses who claim they saw anyone shoot at the helicopters, as if hoping to bring them down or harm relief workers. Rather, those who were actually there, and saw the gunfire in question, report that it was intended to get the attention of the helicopters, which seemed to be repeatedly passing people by, looking at the catastrophic conditions, but refusing to land and save people in most instances. Perhaps those in the air didn't see those on the ground? Or perhaps they didn't understand the magnitude of the suffering below them? Either way, the gunfire was a desperate attempt to get people to take things seriously and do their jobs: perhaps not the best way to get attention, but hardly the act of mindless, violent thugs aiming indiscriminately at everyone in sight, as reports made it seem.
Yet the media, feeling no need to find witnesses or to verify claims of black deviance (because, after all, what's not to believe?) simply went along. The result? Rescue efforts were delayed because rescue workers had been scared for their lives by a press that led them to think New Orleans was a war zone; the Governor and Mayor actually told law enforcement to stop saving lives and start arresting and shooting lawbreakers on sight; and the public, which rarely needs reasons to think the worst of poor black people, found its stereotypes confirmed. Not only whites, it should be pointed out, but black folks too, like Mayor Nagin and his crony police chief Eddie Compass, both of whom apparently think so little of their own people that they too assumed the stories were true, in spite of no evidence, and repeated the charges on national TV.
Within just a few days, urban legends began zipping around the Internet, in the form of e-mails recounting utterly fabricated events, but all of them -- however false -- fit perfectly within the narrative developed by the media during the catastrophe.
First there was the one about the crack dealer who refused to be evacuated to a hospital because he wouldn't be able to sell his wares there; then there was the one about the thugs (black and poor of course) who destroyed a rest area on the Louisiana/Texas border, during a stop on the way to Houston, even urinating on the walls to show their disregard for civilized norms of behavior; then there was the one from the guy claiming to have volunteered at the Astrodome to feed and help evacuees, all to be shocked by how ungrateful they were--supposedly demanding beer, liquor, cigarettes and four-star restaurant meals. That hundreds of others refuted these nonsensical claims, and noted how unbelievably gracious the evacuees had been did nothing to damper the enthusiasm with which the lies were circulated.
And in each case, the authors of these fantasies made sure to throw in something about how racist the blacks were (calling white aid workers "crackers" and "honkies" of course), and ending with the admonition that those displaced by Katrina deserved no respect or assistance, seeing as how they were a bunch of spoiled brats who should be left to their own devices. In other words, no need to be compassionate, no need to contribute to relief funds, and certainly no need to challenge one's already negative views towards the kinds of people left behind in the flood. They had, ultimately, gotten what they deserved.
Though the mainstream media hadn't created these phony and vicious stories (and indeed, one has to wonder what kind of evil mind and heart would have done so), it is certainly true that they created the conditions that made such tripe believable to a lot of people. Had the media focused less on looters and supposed gang raping murderers, and more on the efforts by thousands to help one another in the midst of hellish conditions -- stories that are only trickling out in the corporate press, but which those who lived through them have been trying to get told via their own accounts from the flood zone -- it would have been impossible for such vile trash as this to have gained traction. But once the climate had been created and the frame set -- one that said, these are bad people, who do bad things -- it took no effort at all for racists to concoct lies and peddle those to a willing and gullible public that never seems to challenge stories of black perfidy, so easily do they fit within their pre-existing racist biases in the first place.
Which brings us to the other big lie told about the poor in New Orleans: one that has yet to be addressed in the media, despite how easily it can be disproved by a mere five minutes worth of research. It is one repeated daily for the past eight weeks by conservative talk show hosts and columnists, and one to which I am exposed many times a day in my email inbox, thanks to the efforts of right wing louts without the seeming desire to do their homework. Namely, it is the argument that the reason 130,000 poor black folks were unable to escape the flooding was because they had grown dependent on the government to save them, thanks to the "welfare state," and that was why they lacked the money and cars to get out before disaster struck.
In other words, liberal social policy had rendered the black poor unable or unwilling to work, content to collect a government check, and thus, had made them incapable of saving themselves. This lie -- and it is just that, not an exaggeration or simplification or overstatement, but a flat-out falsehood -- has been parroted by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Shawn Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Charles Murray (of "Bell Curve" fame), not to mention such viciously self-loathing black conservatives as Star Parker, John McWhorter and the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, all despite the lack of evidence to sustain it, and the amazing amount of evidence, both contemporary and historical, to refute it.
But of course the media, having long ago decided not to challenge the mainstream public's view of folks on welfare -- and indeed to collaborate with the framing of such persons by politicians of both major parties -- has done nothing to set the record straight, suggesting either that they are incredibly inept at research, or just as incredibly craven in their attitudes towards the poorest of this nation's citizens.
But the facts, however unsettling they may be for conservative mythmakers, are clear.
To begin with, as of 2004, according to the Census Bureau, there were only 4600 households in all of New Orleans receiving cash welfare from the nation's principal aid program, TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, formerly Aid to Families With Dependent Children, or AFDC). That is not a misprint: 4600 out of a total of 130,000 households in the black community alone. Which means that even if every welfare receiving household in Orleans Parish had been black (which was not in fact the case), this would have represented only a little more than four percent of black households in the city.
According to the same Census data, the average household size in a welfare receiving family in New Orleans is the same as the citywide average for non-recipients: roughly 3.5 persons. So the number of individuals receiving welfare in New Orleans, by the time of Katrina would have been about 16,000.
Thus, even if we assume that all of the 130,000 persons left behind were poor, and that no persons receiving welfare managed to escape before the flooding with friends or family, this would mean that at most, perhaps twelve percent of the persons left behind (and whose faces we may have been seeing on national TV) would have been welfare recipients at all, let alone persons who had been rendered dependent on such benefits for long periods of time.
And speaking of dependence, or the notion that the city's welfare recipients had grown content to sit back and collect government checks instead of doing for self, this hardly seems likely when you consider that the average annual income received from TANF, for those small numbers actually getting any such benefits at all, was only a little more than $2,800 per year, in New Orleans prior to the catastrophe.
Indeed, such paltry amounts explain why most of the poor in New Orleans, far from being happy to receive so-called handouts, work whenever they can find steady employment, which admittedly, is not often the case.
For example, in the ninety-eight percent black and forty percent poor Lower Ninth Ward, one of the hardest hit communities (and one about which many negative things were said in terms of so-called welfare dependence), seventy-one percent of families prior to the flooding reported income from paid employment, while only eight percent received income from cash welfare. In other words, folks in this community were almost nine times more likely to earn their pay than to receive government benefits. Forty percent of workers from the community worked full-time, and the average commute time for Ninth Ward workers was over 45 minutes each day, suggesting that the work ethic was quite common to the folks who lived there, irrespective of commonly held and utterly false stereotypes.
Even food stamps -- a program with much more lenient terms and where even the near poor can often qualify for minimal benefits -- were only received by eleven percent of New Orleans households as of last year: hardly indicative of a general mindset of welfare entitlement. As for public housing, far from being the location of residence for most poor blacks in New Orleans -- let alone those in the streets in the wake of Katrina -- fewer than 20,000 people lived in such units at the time of the flooding: this representing no more than five percent of black New Orleanians. In the Lower Ninth Ward, for example, few lived in public housing and nearly six in ten families owned their own homes.
Even in the city's poorest communities, like the Iberville or Lafitte housing developments, or parts of Central City, at least a third, and often a majority of households report income from paid employment. What's more, tenants in the B.W. Cooper development have been managing their own housing for years, teaching job and leadership skills to the persons who live there.
Likewise, in the mid-90s, several public housing developments participated in a national Jobs Program, funded by the Annie B. Casey Foundation: a successful effort that matched low-income black residents with businesses looking for employees. In the former St. Thomas development -- the first public housing "project" funded by the federal government under the Roosevelt Administration -- residents had started their own coffee shop and bookstore, and had created innovative teen pregnancy prevention and safe sex initiatives.
When St. Thomas was torn down a few years ago, residents were told there would be mixed-use economic development in its place, and although they mourned for the loss of their neighborhood, many looked forward to participating actively in the economic lifeblood of the community. Then the city reneged on its promises and offered the land to Wal-Mart, which then placed a superstore on the property--the very store whose gun supply was looted during the flooding (an ironic turn of events if ever there was one). Poor folks wanted economic opportunity and jobs; the city's elite (black and white alike) gave them a gun supply shop.
Bottom line: the stereotype of poor blacks in New Orleans (and elsewhere) as lazy and dependent on government is false. In Louisiana, it should be noted that only a very small share of those receiving TANF benefits, and AFDC before that, are able-bodied adults. Indeed, even prior to welfare reform, only eleven percent of those receiving AFDC in the state were able-bodied adults who did no work: the rest were vulnerable children, the elderly, the disabled, or adults who were already working (mostly part-time), but earned too little to come off assistance.
It should also be noted that even when persons do receive so-called welfare, there is still a predicate to doing so: one that is rarely explored, but is simply assumed to be personal incompetence, bad choice-making, laziness or other personal pathologies. So, for example, we are to believe that for those who live in public housing, it was their own lack of initiative or willingness to take personal responsibility for their lives that rendered them so vulnerable to the likes of Hurricane Katrina and the collapse of the city's levees.
Yet what this commonly-repeated claim ignores is what came before folks ended up in public housing, in overcrowded communities, with concentrated levels of extreme poverty; and what came before had nothing to do with the welfare state, or liberal social policy more generally. Rather, what happened was the deliberate and calculated destruction of the inner-city in the name of economic "development" (which benefited only the elite) and to meet the needs of middle-class and above whites.
So, for example, consider the Treme (pronounced truh-may): the oldest free black neighborhood in the United States, home to Congo Square and Louis Armstrong Park. Located on the outer edge of the French Quarter and Central Business District, the Treme is more than ninety percent black and over half of its residents are poor, when you include those in the Iberville and Lafitte housing developments. Though it had long been a lower-income community, with the attendant issues that often emerge in such spaces, the Treme had also been, for the most part, functional. It was the site of dozens of successful black-owned businesses, and hundreds of stable middle-class families, where few lived in the so-called projects. The same was true for the 7th Ward: the base of the city's old-line Creole community.
But beginning in the early 1960s, the city of New Orleans, as with every major city in the United States, began taking federal funds to extend interstate highways through their urban centers, which meant the heart of those places black communities. In New Orleans, plans to extend the interstate through the French Quarter met with stiff opposition from affluent (and mostly white) historic preservationists and business owners. Once their political clout was deployed so as to block construction through the main tourist artery, planners opted to take the I-10 through the Treme and 7th Ward, whose lower income and black residents lacked the power to stop their property from being destroyed in the name of progress.
It was a story repeated throughout the U.S. during this time: by the mid-1960s, interstate construction in urban areas was destroying roughly 37,000 residences annually; this, in addition to the 40,000 more that were being torn down each year in the name of "urban renewal," which translated into the building of shopping malls, office parks and parking lots. By 1969, nearly 70,000 homes, mostly occupied by blacks and Latinos, were being destroyed for the interstate program alone, in virtually every medium and large city in the country.
Although some had argued for financial assistance to help relocate the low-income families displaced by this process, rarely did such help materialize. Indeed, less than ten percent of those displaced by urban renewal had new single-resident occupancy housing to go to afterward: instead, they had to double up with relatives in small, crowded apartments, or move into public housing projects, which became something akin to concentration camps for the poorest and most vulnerable citizens of the nation.
These policies, known euphemistically as "slum clearance" by those who implemented and supported them, actually created slums, in places where previously had been low-income, but largely working class and stable communities. In New Orleans, this also extended to the Central Business District, including the very land where the now infamous Superdome sits.
Beginning in 1971, construction began on the facility, on which ground had previously existed yet another mostly black and largely low-income and working class neighborhood. But in a contest between the needs and lives of those New Orleanians on the one hand, and the mere wants of wealthy developers, concert promoters, the New Orleans Saints and Tulane University boosters on the other (the latter of which wanted to move their pathetic team's games there, away from the old and decrepit Sugar Bowl), which side can we guess, ultimately prevailed? And so the Dome was completed, in 1975, at a public cost of tens of millions of dollars, and the loss of yet another patch of homesteads for the city's black majority.
All of this "slum clearance," it should be noted, was done for the benefit of whites, and not only the rich developers. Indeed, the primary reason for the interstate highway program was to help facilitate daily movement from the cities where most people still worked, to the suburbs, where large numbers were beginning to live. But of course, it was only whites who could live there in most cases. Blacks were still subject to regular discrimination in housing (indeed, most types of housing bias weren't even illegal until 1968), and had been largely unable to take advantage of the government's FHA and VA home loans for the first 30 years of their existence, thanks to racially discriminatory lending criteria built into this government program.
So while nearly 40 percent of white mortgages were being written on the extremely favorable FHA and VA terms by the early 1960s, (making home ownership possible for some 15-20 million white families who wouldn't have otherwise been able to own their own place), virtually no blacks had access to this form of economic opportunity. To then tear down black neighborhoods so as to build highways that would help whites get to their new and growing communities (like Bill O'Reilly's boyhood Levittown), was an especially pernicious and racist combination of anti-black neglect and white racial preference.
Beyond housing issues, even regular "welfare" receipt is something predicated on history: specifically the history of low-wage employment and inadequate job opportunities, particularly in urban centers. One study from Harlem in the 1990s, found that for every job opening in the area, there were as many as fourteen people looking for work. Nationally, data has long suggested that there are between 7-10 people out of work at any given time, for every above-poverty wage job opening. In other words, there is not enough opportunity in the modern American economy, irrespective of the claims made by conservatives and believed by millions.
In fact, it has long been the official monetary policy of the United States, under the leadership of the Federal Reserve, to raise interest rates whenever unemployment drops "too low," and suddenly the nation is faced with having too many people working. The fear is that too many people working will tighten the labor market, thereby pushing up wages, and then causing a spike in prices, to the detriment of economic well being. By raising the cost of borrowing money, the Fed hopes to cool off business expansion (and thus any attendant and related hiring sprees), and thereby, hold inflation in check.
Putting aside the validity (or lack thereof) of this particular theory, the result of such thinking should be obvious, especially when it is regularly employed to maintain unemployment at around four percent by raising interest rates whenever joblessness drops below that level: namely, it means that millions of people will be out of work at any given time, not because they are lazy, and certainly not because government handouts appear so luxurious to them; but rather, because it is desired by the government and the nation's economic policymakers that they be out of work.
Indeed, since the official unemployment rate fails to count all who are jobless, such as those who have grown so discouraged by their prospects that they've simply stopped looking (or those who are near jobless, able to pull down only a few hours of work each week, but who are still considered fully employed for the sake of the data), administering monetary policy this way results in as many as 10-12 million people being out of work or seriously underemployed at any given time. They and their dependents will then be (surprise, surprise) poor, and require some type of assistance so as to survive. None of this is a reflection on the values of the poor themselves, though it speaks volumes about the values of the rich who have supported this kind of policy for decades.
But of course, in a media culture incapable of looking deeper than the next 30-second, 100-word soundbite, none of this matters. Indeed, most reporters, news anchors, or journalists of any stripe would be unlikely to even know any of this in the first place. All that matters is the here and now: no need for context, background, or history. And so they give us poor people, stealing from stores, carless, penniless and homeless: how they became poor and why they stayed that way doesn't matter, apparently. And by remaining silent on that issue, the mainstream press leaves venal ideologues to fill in the blanks, for an eager public all too willing to believe the worst about people who, for the most part, none of them have ever met.
Thus do we repeatedly plant the seeds for each new round of victim blaming, poor-folks bashing and racism, all the while thinking that just because Anderson Cooper cried on camera and Fox momentarily turned on Bush (but only for a nanosecond), the Earth's center of gravity moved.
In fact, just as with the aftermath of 9/11, and quite contrary to conventional wisdom, nothing at all has changed.
Tim Wise is the author of two new books: White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Soft Skull Press, 2005), and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge: 2005). He can be reached at: timjwise@msn.com
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President Mugabe blasts US, Britain
Posted: Tuesday, October 18, 2005
From Innocent Gore in ROME, Italy
IN a stirring speech which laid bare the open and underhand destabilisation manoeuvres of the United States and Britain, President Mugabe yesterday strongly denounced the two countries for continuously meddling in the internal affairs of developing countries.
This came in the wake of a statement by the US Ambassador to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Mr Tony Hall, who had criticised the United Nations food agency for inviting the President to the organisation’s 60th anniversary commemorations.
Mr Hall was quoted in a number of newspapers here and on the Internet as saying the US was amazed that Cde Mugabe had been invited to speak at the FAO anniversary and that the President had "done so much to hurt the hungry" and had "absolutely turned his back on the poor".
Departing from his prepared speech, President Mugabe said Zimbabwe is a UN member and the world body’s agencies such as FAO and is not an extension of the US.
"Again we have a situation where some countries like the US and Britain have taken it upon themselves to decide and even interfere in our domestic affairs and want to bring about what they call regime change. Where is their morality? Where are their principles? Democracy bids that any political change in any country is the right of the people of that particular country and not the right of a foreign country.
"My people have the right under our Constitution, which is a democratic constitution, to decide who shall govern and who shall not and which party they prefer. We have a multi-party system, but if the US is going to say ‘I am big and stand for all humanity’ and the voice of Mr Bush and Mr Blair can decide who shall rule in Zimbabwe, who shall rule in Venezuela, who shall rule in Iraq, who shall rule in Iran, what world are we living in?"
To applause from the audience, Cde Mugabe asked whether the world should allow Mr Bush and Mr Blair to do the same as what fascist rulers Adolf Hitler of German and Benito Mussolini of Italy — who provoked the 1939-45 Second World War by initially attacking small states in defiance of the League of Nations, the predecessor of the UN — had done and attack an innocent country like Iraq after lying that it possessed weapons of mass destruction.
"Look at the scene in Iraq now — everyday violence, women and children suffering. Who is responsible for that? And that was done in open defiance of the United Nations Charter, defiance of the Security Council, and defiance of us all. Yes, voices were raised in Europe, we heard them, some said no, that’s wrong. But they went on these two on the unholy campaign and what we have now is that inferno in Iraq. Is this what we want to see?
"They continue to threaten us the small countries. Venezuela because of the oil, Iran being threatened and they say you North Korea dare not conduct any nuclear experiments. Neither must you in Iran. Neither must anyone else. But only we are entitled to possess weapons of mass destruction and now they are destroying their own, they have atomic nuclear bombs. They won’t destroy them but they want everyone else not to make them. Who are they? Must we allow them that possession?
"It is that arrogance that we see expressed by this agent of imperialism, Tony Hall.
"I thank you for defying him. I thank you (FAO director general Dr Jacques) Diouf for inviting me. I thank you (Venezuelan President Mr Hugo) Chavez for having mentioned Zimbabwe (in his address to the conference earlier on) and praised it."
President Mugabe said he was aware of the dangers and threats to Mr Chavez coming from the US. He said he was also aware how Mr Chavez was humiliated during his recent visit to the US when some of his security men and his doctor were denied entry into the country.
"Is this the world we desire? The world of giants and international terrorists who will use their muscle, state muscle in order to intimidate us? We become midgets.
"I say small as I am with only 14 million people, I have a soul, I have a heart, I have a conscience and I dare not allow anything that is untoward to happen to my people."
Cde Mugabe said he had been imprisoned for 11 years by the Smith regime for fighting for freedom and independence and together with the late Vice President Joshua Nkomo, they had dislodged British colonial rule and brought democracy to Zimbabwe.
"And we will not see Zimbabwe becoming a colony again," he said, again to much applause.
"I thank those who have supported us; I thank those in Europe who continue to work with us; I thank all who are driven, whose conscience is driven by morality, by honesty, by good neighbourliness, by doing to others what you would want others to do unto you.
"We stand by principle, by honesty, by virtue.
"That’s my teaching, the Jesuits taught me to die for principle and I stand by that. I am Catholic like Chavez and I am a Catholic to the end with my principles which I hold as sacred. I serve my people and I served them when I went to prison. I shall serve them again, but serve them in a context in which we co-operate. We have Sadc, the development community of Southern African."
Sadc countries work together and if there is drought in the region and one country has surplus food, others buy from that country. Zimbabwe had enough funds to buy food for drought relief but if charity comes its way, it will receive it, Cde Mugabe said.
"But we are able to buy food from South Africa this year to save our people. That is how we are organised in Sadc. We have a community which also takes care of the political situation and security in our region.
"Overall, we have the AU (African Union) now and we don’t need America, we don’t need Britain, except in the global context, but not as our mentors," said the President.
In his prepared speech, Cde Mugabe said there was need for the depoliticisation of international humanitarian assistance.
While commending the response of the international community to natural disasters such as droughts and floods caused by climate change and which had affected production systems and wreaked havoc on the transport and communication infrastructure, the President noted that there had been unfortunate instances where the provision of humanitarian assistance had been politicised often on the basis of ideology, race and religion.
Saying there was urgent need for a multilateral response to address the challenges of climate change, he called upon developed countries to accede to the relevant multilateral environment agreements and to meet their obligations and fully implement the action plan of the World Summit on Sustainable Development.
Another challenge to sustainable agriculture and food security, particularly in Africa, was the HIV/Aids pandemic, which had affected mostly the productive age groups, thereby depriving the sector of vital skills, expertise and labour.
The President said there was still need for a comprehensive and robust global response to HIV/Aids so as to promote greater access to affordable anti-retroviral drugs and balanced nutrition.
"The world should respond to the HIV/Aids menace with the same zeal, resolve and resources as we have deployed on the war against terror," said Cde Mugabe.
He also called upon countries to increase their budgetary support to FAO, saying a well-resourced FAO can play a critical role towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.
In Africa, he said, investment in sustainable agricultural production is of core essence for providing food and employment, both critical components in the fight against hunger and poverty.
It was for this reason that in 2004, the AU Assembly agreed to implement the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad)’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme, which commits African governments to allocate at least 10 percent of their national budgets to agriculture.
President Mugabe said the land reform programme was not only an economic empowerment undertaking and a redress of the past gross imbalances in land ownership which were institutionalised by British colonial rule, but was also the provision of a wealth-creating resource.
He said the constitutional amendment had brought finality to the previously long-protracted legal process of land acquisition and provided greater clarity to land tenure.
Venezuelan President Chavez said global hunger was a political problem, which needed the intervention of political leaders. He said FAO’s budget of US$1 billion was inadequate for its operations in poor countries of Africa, Latin America and Asia. In glaring contrast, US companies were given more than that in subsidies a day and the American defence budget was US$500 billion a year, which was enough to finance FAO operations for 500 years, Mr Chavez said.
He said it was impossible to halve the number of hungry people in the world by 2015 as long as there was no political solution.
Reprinted from:
www.zimbabweherald.com/index.php?id=47965&pubdate=2005-10-18
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Farrakhan: Africa Must Unite!
Posted: Saturday, October 15, 2005
Farrakhan said African leaders understand what’s at stake and support Mugabe and have even borrowed from his lessons. “There is a movement in South Africa to take back the tremendous hectares of land that white land owners have, and return it to the people. Well if Thabo Mbeki takes that route, will he now be another pariah? Now the question every Black leader has to answer is ‘Do I want the friendship of white people, or do I want the liberation of my people? Do I want friendship with the former slave masters, the former colonial masters and be rubbed on the head and patted on the behind, or do I want to see my people free?’”
Full Article : blackstarnews.com
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Fallacy of Western Democracy Exposed
Posted: Friday, October 14, 2005
The Herald (Harare)
October 14, 2005
By Caesar Zvayi
OFTEN a myth is peddled that the western world has resolved democracy in all its manifestations, be it popular democracy entailing the resolution of the national question and the concomitant bread and butter issues; or elite democracy that evokes smooth electoral processes.
This is why US President George W. Bush arrogantly dismissed the prospect of observers from the developing world for his country's presidential election last year saying the US does not need foreign observers as it is not a developing country.
Over the past five years, events in the north have shown that Bush's statement is a misplaced attempt to buttress the concept of western supremacy.
The month of September was not kind to Germany and the United States, two of the world's biggest economies.
In the US in particular, the world came to realise that democracy is a pipe dream especially among dark skinned African-Americans and Hispanic people.
This class of people was left at the mercy of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans because they either lacked the resources to finance their own escape or were ignored by State rescue teams that targeted white Americans.
After the September 18 elections in Germany, there was a three-week power vacuum as both the winner and the loser, were separated by one percentage point.
The then opposition leader Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party won 35,2 percent of the vote translating to 225 seats in the German parliament, a point ahead of former Chancellor, Gerard Schroeder's Social Democratic Party (SDP) which managed 34,4 percent translating to 222 seats.
Schroeder, who had clearly lost, claimed the Chancellorship arguing that he was more capable of forming a stable ruling majority than Merkel, because his SDP had made a strong showing on election day in spite of having trailed the CDU in opinion polls.
Schroeder accused Merkel of squandering a 20 percent lead to finish just one percent ahead of him.
A defiant Schroeder appeared on BBC refusing to accept defeat, raising his hands like a champion amid joyful scenes among his supporters.
"I feel myself confirmed in ensuring on behalf of our country that there is in the next four years a stable government under my leadership. I do not understand how the (Christian Democratic) Union, which started off so confidently and arrogantly, takes a claim to political leadership from a disastrous election result."
Schroeder told cheering supporters at his Social Democrat party headquarters, adding that he would only accept a grand coalition if he were the leader.
Merkel on the other hand rightly claimed victory saying the results showed that she had a mandate from the people,
"What is important now is to form a stable government for the people in Germany, and we quite clearly have the mandate to do that," Merkel told CNN.
However, Schroeder continued to refuse to concede defeat precipitating the so-called "Chancellor war" the western media has been feasting on without castigating Schroeder's lack of respect for the democratic process.
It had to take three weeks of endless meetings and Merkel's own magnanimity for "mighty" Schroeder to stand down on Monday, after seven years in power and 21 days of trying to subvert the democratic process.
Merkel had to agree to a grand coalition in which the defeated SDP will have the lion's share of cabinet posts taking the key ministries of foreign affairs, finance, labour and justice, as well as health, aid and co-operation, transport and environment.
Merkel's CDU settled for the economy, interior, defence, agriculture, education and family ministries.
The SDP and CDU are expected to hold party conventions to endorse the agreement next month, but the new parliament begins office on October 18, but is unlikely to vote on a Chancellor until the party meetings are concluded.
In the intervening period, the power hungry Schroeder will continue holding reins till a new Chancellor, most likely Merkel, is nominated by the legislature.
It is important to note that it is the winning party that had to make concessions, while Schroeder the vanquished made the demands.
Had this happened in Africa, let alone Zimbabwe, we would never hear the end of it, as it would be likened to hanging on to power, but we never got to read, hear or see such language in the way the western media described the Germany plebiscite.
The debacle was couched in euphemistic language that described it either as an "impasse, stalemate, deadlock or policy difference."
What has been riveting is the silence from the European Union and the United States, two power blocs that always make so much noise about elections in Zimbabwe or the developing world.
The EU did not even release a statement, though several European leaders commented individually but only to the extent of expressing a wish for a speedy resolution of the "impasse".
The problem can be traced to the German electoral system that elects, on a federal level, a legislature with two chambers; the 598 member Federal Diet (Bundestag) and the 69-member Federal Council (Bundesrat) that represents the governments of the states.
Two different systems are used to elect the Bundestag.
Of the 598 members, 299 are elected in single-seat constituencies according to a first-past-the-post system, while a further 299 members are allocated from state-wide party lists to achieve a proportional distribution in the legislature, conducted according to a system of proportional representation (the additional member system).
On election day, voters vote once for a constituency representative and a second time for a party, and the lists are used to make the party balances match the distribution of second votes.
This is the system that produced the stalemate after separating the two main parties by one percentage point.
But this is not the first time weird western electoral systems have produced embarrassing stalemates that have also exposed western double standards.
It also happened on November 7 2000, when two winners emerged from the US presidential election.
Democratic Party candidate, Al Gore beat Republican candidate and incumbent president George W. Bush by 500 000, Bush on the other hand won more Electoral College votes than Gore.
Neither candidate conceded defeat. It took a whole month of recounts and court challenges before the US Supreme Court, dominated by Republican Judges, ruled that Bush was the winner based on his 527 vote margin over Gore in Florida, that gave him 25 electoral college votes.
The US system thus chose to ignore the national decision of 101 million voters in favour of 538 electors who vote in the Electoral College system.
Bush's re-election last year was also marred by over 40 000 allegations of massive fraud, including forging vote totals, vote stealing, widespread voter intimidation, irregularities with the distribution of voting machines, mishandled absentee and provisional ballots, malfunctioning or inaccurate machines and/or apparent hacking and vote tampering.
But again on December 13 the US Electoral College vote gave Bush a 286-251 victory over Kerry, and the US Congress duly certified him on January 6 this year, effectively killing all pending court challenges.
British Prime Minister, Tony Blair's re-election last year was also characterised by irregularities that the right wing western media ignored.
The media instead chose to celebrate the fact that Blair had won a third term which they hailed as historic, when elsewhere in the world they would consider that holding on to power.
These are the allegations they pass regarding President Robert Mugabe's re-election in 2002, in spite of the fact that Zimbabwe uses one system of electing the head of state, the first-past-the-post system which saw the President beating the western favourite, Morgan Tsvangirai by over 400 000 votes.
Zimbabwe's elections have never produced a stalemate, as the ruling party has always emerged with a clear majority.
In election 2000 Zanu-PF had 48,83 percent of the vote whilst the main challenger the MDC had 46,03 percent.
In the 2002 presidential elections President Mugabe had 56,20 percent to Tsvangirai's 41.96 percent and in the March 31 poll, Zanu-PF walloped the MDC by 59.08 percent to 40,04 percent of the ballots cast.
It therefore comes as a surprise that western countries, including Germany and the United States, allege that Zimbabwean elections are flawed and have produced a crisis of legitimacy.
We hope they soon realise the wisdom of the adage that says, "those in glass houses should not throw stones."
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IMF payment shames West
Posted: Monday, October 3, 2005
By Caesar Zvayi, zimbabweherald.com
THE plague that afflicted our beloved country Zimbabwe over the past five years can be summed up by the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel.
It is said after the great flood, about three centuries before the call of Abraham, the descendants of Noah had one language and a common speech and were united in purpose when they decided to build a beautiful city with a tower that stretches to the heavens.
Genesis 11:1-9 says that the people decided to make bricks, which they baked thoroughly and used to build the tower instead of stone.
They fortified the tower using tar for mortar in the hope that the tower would make a name for them and retain them from scattering over all the face of the earth.
But when the Lord, being a jealous God, came down to see the city and the tower, he said:
"If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. (He said to his angels) Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.
"So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city."
This is why the tower was called Babel (from the Hebrew baw-bel, which means confusion) because the Lord confused their language which spawned conflicts that dispersed them all over the globe.
The site of the tower of Babel is at Borsippa, just south of Babylon, (in present-day Iraq).
Transpose Borsippa for Zimbabwe and Noah's flood for our independence, the beautiful city for Zimbabwe, the tower for agrarian reforms (the precursor of genuine black economic empowerment) and the Lord for the misguided Western cousins, US President George Bush and British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and the tale would read.
After vanquishing the white settler regime, the children of Chaminuka and Mzilikazi had one speech and one common language, which enabled them to transform their post-independent society into an African success story.
They thus decided to make their independence more meaningful through economic empowerment by building an economic power-base whose ramifications would be felt even in the London bourse (the equivalent of heaven to Zimbabwean economic refugees).
When "god Bush" saw this, he said that "if as one people they have begun to do this then nothing they want to do will be impossible for them" and they would also inspire other African countries to follow suit at Albion's expense. So he said to his prophet Blair and his angels of destabilisation (such as the West Minister Foundation for Democracy and various Non Governmental Organisations), let's descend on Harare to sow the seed of confusion.
The seed of baw-bel was duly sowed on September 11 1999, with the formation of the MDC.
From then on the Zimbabwean social contract was torn to shreds, as government, industry and labour became diametrically opposed foes.
And as the proponent of the social contract, French political philosopher, Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778) pointed out,
"As soon as any man says of the affairs of the State ‘What does it matter to me?' the State may be given up for lost."
This is what almost became of Zimbabwe over the past five years, as the social partners pulled in different directions, a development that severely stunted national socio-economic and political development.
Some misguided politicians, individuals and industrialists began working to bring about Zimbabwe's socio-economic collapse for political expediency, a development that saw the nation failing to meet some of its obligations to its international partners.
One of the partners is the multilateral lending institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which is also among ‘god Bush and prophet Blair's angels of confusion.
MDC Secretary for Legal Affairs David Coltart helped the US government to draft the sanctions law called, "Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act."
In spite of its romantic name, the sanctions law is a misnomer for it sought to destroy Zimbabwe's economy, in addition to subverting popular democracy - which is the empowerment of people through ownership of the means of production.
The US sanctions that were buttressed by the European Union denied Zimbabwe assistance from major multilateral lending institutions.
Anglo-American transnational corporations moved their funds from Zimbabwe, and some even closed shop and relocated to neighbouring countries, what all this meant was that Zimbabwe's industry was severely depressed and the economy's capacity to generate foreign currency was retarded.
Thus Zimbabwe, which received IMF loans to drive the IMF-imposed neo-liberal economic policies - the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (Esap) and its surrogate, Zimbabwe Programme for Economic and Social Transformation (Zimprest) between 1991 and the turn of the millennium, failed to repay the loans and was in arrears from February 2001.
Harare did not pay anything to the IMF, a development that saw compulsory withdrawal procedures being mulled in December 2003 - these are steps taken to expel members from the institution.
An expulsion makes a state a credit risk, which means that it would be difficult for it to borrow funds.
Zimbabwe made a token payment in March 2004, following the initiation of compulsory withdrawal steps a month earlier, on February 6, after the IMF managing director issued a formal complaint over the country's persistent failure to pay its debts.
Suffice to say, the IMF was also to blame for this failure after it stopped giving Zimbabwe balance of payments support following disagreements over Zimbabwe's intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) war.
The DRC impasse was instigated by the US government that was backing rebels forces through Rwanda and Uganda, the US took its subversion a step further by passing the sanctions law that forbade the IMF from supporting Zimbabwe.
However, since early last year, Zimbabwe has been making quarterly payments to the Bretton Woods institution that started off at US$1,5 million, which rose to US$5 million by the end of the year, before shooting to US$9 million in April this year.
The payment of US$131 million that was made at the end of August is thus the biggest and most momentous as it effectively cut the IMF debt to US$175 million.
The significance is that the payment was made at a time the western world was scheming to entrap Zimbabwe at a time we are in the grip of a crippling fuel crisis that could have been partly solved by these funds. The pith does not end there for the American government, was planning a coup de grace as Zimbabwe's expulsion was due for discussion on September 9.
A month before the IMF board meeting in Washington, the US government impressed on IMF deputy managing director, Anne O Krueger to approach South African President, Thabo Mbeki to ask him to extend a US$1 billion loan to Zimbabwe to enable the country to repay its loan to avoid expulsion.
Whilst the reason Krueger gave was that Zimbabwe's expulsion would severely affect the South African economy, since Harare is Tshwane's biggest trading partner, it later emerged that the US government wanted to influence President Mbeki to drop his hands-off approach on Zimbabwe.
They hoped that once he advanced that loan, just like any investor, he would want to ensure that the socio-political environment in Harare is conducive for the security of his investment, which would have made him move from a policy of quiet diplomacy to active involvement in Zimbabwe's internal affairs.
This is why when news of the loan began filtering through, there was a lot of excitement in western capitals, in Zimbabwe's opposition circles and the South African right wing media.
It was not long before political instead of economic conditions began to be attached to the loan by various forces.
It was also at that time that MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai clamoured for dialogue with President Mugabe, echoing the major condition being attached to the loan by various forces in and outside President Mbeki's government.
Interestingly, the condition was not coming from President Mbeki.
To his credit, President Mugabe remained steadfast in his resolve that he did not ask for the loan and would not accept any political conditions.
Meanwhile, Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Governor, Dr Gideon Gono mobilised local resources to come up with funds to pay part of the debt to the IMF ahead of the board meeting that detractors hoped would result in Zimbabwe's expulsion from the institution.
When the payment was made against all odds, the detractors were devastated as they had hoped that desperation would force the Government to compromise the nation's sovereignty by letting outsiders not only pay our debts but also dictate the direction of our national politics.
In fact had the payment been made from borrowed funds, the same forces would have had a field day alleging that Zimbabwe had proved nothing by paying using borrowed funds.
This is why the mobilisation of local resources was critical as it sent a clear message that, even though some westerners keep pushing the country under the water, it has the capacity to rise to meet its obligations.
The funds; that were sourced from export proceeds, free funds and foreign currency liquidations; could not have been raised if stakeholders had not put their heads together to stave off the vultures who were ready to pounce.
The events that followed the IMF payment showed that nothing Zimbabwe does will satisfy the detractors as they began peddling lies over the source of the funds, prompting Dr Gono to divulge confidential banking information.
The behaviour of the detractors and the payment shows the importance of resuscitating the social contract, through the Tripartite Negotiating Forum (TNF), that collapsed after the withdrawal of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) on April 23 2003 following disagreements over fuel price increases. It is only through the TNF that a sustainable social contract, which would help to remove the artificial investment "risk" tag foisted on Zimbabwe, can be revived and developed.
The challenges to be overcome require such collective efforts. All stakeholders should, thus, adhere to the spirit of the Kadoma Declaration that says all stakeholders should move "towards a shared national economic and social vision".
As long as Zimbabwe is challenging the false colonial "gods", the real God will be on the country's side and its people can build their tower of prosperity for posterity.
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S. A. Whites fear land grab as black heirs win
Posted: Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Whites fear land grab as black heirs win claim to family farm
WHITE South African farmers are watching with mounting unease as the Government finalises plans to take over a white-owned farm and hand the land to descendants of its original black owners.
The seizure, which follows the failure of talks lasting more than two years between the authorities and an Afrikaner family, will signal the end of the willing seller/willing buyer policy. Other white farmers fear that it could mark the start of a far more aggressive land redistribution programme.
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I can not identify with racist: Udo Froese
Posted: Saturday, August 27, 2005
Saturday, 27 August 2005; www.zimbabweherald.com
Conversation with Caesar Zvayi
AT a time some misguided Zimbabweans in the Diaspora and some journalists at home are demonising the country for personal gain, there are non-Zimbabwean voices that choose to tell the truth simply because it is the truth.
One such voice belongs to South African business consultant, media columnist and independent political and socio-economic analyst, Udo W. Froese, who always tells the Zimbabwean story from a perspective some people either decide to reject or ignore for fear of recriminations from right wing forces. Today Udo speaks about his experiences, South Africa and Zimbabwe-South Africa relations among other issues.
Q: You are a white South African, who writes so passionately about African independence and black emancipation, what motivates you?
A: Having been born in the third generation of German colonial settler background into Africa, more precisely into Namibia, I was brought up knowing the difference between right and wrong, good manners and bad manners, kind and unkind.
My mother is very religious and brought us up according to her beliefs. Being of German background, we never had house helpers. I always believed that we Caucasians, who actually had conquered Africa and became wealthy from the new "continent-of-storage" for the international West's manufacturing industries, should be respectful, as we are mere guests! Biting the hand that supplies you (feeds you), is not only amoral, but un-Christian and uncivilised. Honestly, I feel very embarrassed and even ashamed, coming from such an alien people, who would do anything for their own greed, using the Judeo-Christian civilisation, calling all black Africans "pagans" and other more racist names, therefore, people of a lesser race. I cannot identify with that mindset. I also have no interest in "group escapism" of British sports — cricket and rugby — just to please and justify my personal and exclusive greed. May I take this opportunity to apologise sincerely for all the vicious racism and collective evil we, as white, Caucasian colonial imperialists have meted out to you, your land and your continent.
Q: You also do not make your admiration of President Robert Mugabe a secret, don't you face any problems in your business dealings because of your Pan-African stance?
A: In fact, I firmly believe in Afro-centricity and Pan-Africanism. My columns hopefully reflect my convictions. Africa has delivered great leaders, who had to continuously adapt to alien imperialism, based on a racist, petty-cash mentality with a huge negative and amoral mindset. Africa's revered leaders include His Excellency, Comrade President Robert Gabriel Mugabe; His Excellency, Comrade President Sam S. Nujoma; His Excellency, Comrade President Kwame Nkrumah; H.E. Cde President Agostinho Neto; H.E. Cde. President Samora Machel; H.E. Cde. Pri! me Minister Patrice Lumumba; H.E. Cde. President Jomo Kenyatta; Her Excellency, Comrade Winnie Mandela; Comrade Chris Hani, the list goes on. And it is not only political leaders from Africa, I also admire. Africa's warmth, never-ending forgiveness and endless and humane wisdom. You know, why I embrace Africanism, Pan-Africanism and Afro-centrity? It is humane. It is based on love and respect for your fellow human beings, it is fair! Many of those traits were ridiculed by the conquerors' brutalities such as slavery, colonialism, its natural predecessor of apartheid and UDI (Unilateral Declaration Of Independence) and today's international Western imperialism.
Can you imagine a reversed role in Europe and the USA, transferring laws, judiciaries, "civil society" (whatever that new post-modern creation means), "democracy and a free market economy" (merely a new coat for the old imperialist exploitation), freedom of media, freedom of expression etc. to their communities and doing it exclusively? I am sure we would have war.
So what, if it takes business away from me? I couldn't care less. In fact, I am proud to say that I have more often than not been marginalised. I am not a rich man, but I am not a mercenary either. My conscience is clean! My hands are clean! My children were not only born on this good continent; they are from an African mother! I am very proud of them.
Imagine we would all be eating in the same kitchen as the mercenary-media in South Africa and its hooligan armchair academics, church leaders and egotistical leaders of dubious "civil society" organisations. Where would this continent be?
Q: South Africa has adopted a policy of quiet diplomacy towards Harare, and has been attacked by the right wing media for that. What do you feel about the policy?
A: South Africa's President Mbeki and his government have very little else, they could do. It is therefore, realistic, pragmatic and hopefully, it will work out. Not only the right wing foreign-owned and foreign-controlled media based in South Africa, (has attacked it); but also the South African Council of Churches (SACC) and a host of opportunistic mercenaries, among them dubious academics and analysts. These have increased their public, fascist noise against not only President Mugabe and his Zanu-PF led Government, but against any Africa-focused leader critical of international Western neo-imperialism. Democracy is a mere figment of their imagination, cunningly used and abused, when it suits them. Add the HIV/Aids and NGO industries, and you have a new, alternative well resourced economy-of-propaganda. But they are only a front for those with vested interests on this continent.
Q: Is it true that there are two South Africas, one white and rich; and the other black and poor? How do you evaluate race relations in South Africa?
A: President Mbeki actually defined South Africa as a country with two people and two economies. Yes it is true! Did you know that Johannesburg's northern suburb, Sandton, is considered Africa's wealthiest living area? The occupants are mostly white, among them foreigners from Europe and the USA. Next door is one of the poorest suburbs, the blacks' only living area of Alexandra. There, children below the age of five are exposed to diseases like kwashiorkor and marasmus; both based on abject poverty and starvation.
Let us not be fooled --- getting rid of colonial-apartheid has actually set us whites free from international sanctions and isolation. Never has business been as good. However, very few, if any black South Africans have any form of access to the foreign, white owned and controlled economy. This economy is a very powerful constituency. The ANC-led government has in fact, been able to incorporate some blacks into the economy. There is also the programme of "affirmative action". Both are working. But, the economy remains exclusive, despite spreading its wings into Africa at a rate that would make the arch-conqueror, Cecil John Rhodes pink with envy. I am afraid that black South Africans are merely used as a tool to get what the real owners want — opening the doors to governments and government institutions in South Africa and the rest of Africa. It seems, the record of South Africa's industries expanding into Africa is not a fine one.
Q: The South African media has been touted as a model for the whole continent, how do you see it and do you feel it is the media the rest of the continent should have?
A: A model for whom and for what? Is it, because it is so well resourced? Is it, because it regularly insults this continent? Are we forgetting the advertising industry and its role? No! As I mentioned earlier in this interview, the South Africa-based media is foreign-owned and foreign-controlled with so-called experts in their field being used daily to aggressively and propagandistically campaign against Africa. Everything north of the Limpopo seems bad, riddled with hunger, starvation, HIV and Aids, ethnic and civil wars — an uncivilised continent. Everything south of the Limpopo smells of roses — African settlements happen in Sun City and five star luxury hotels in Tshwane (Pretoria), Johannesburg/Sandton, Cape Town and Durban. There is international golf, international summits etc. According to that alien media, South Africa now works. No wonder that some South Africans feel uncomfortable about being part of Africa.
We should not forget that SA's media was used during the colonial-apartheid era to condemn Africans as "communist terrorists".
In the early nineties, up to the first democratic elections, when the apartheid military machine, the Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB), launched one of its most vicious programmes of urban terrorism into the townships and over 40 000 black South Africans were mass slaughtered, the same media defined that brutality as "black-on-black violence," questioning, if blacks were ready for democracy.
This same media with the same ownership and its "house boys and girls" has now again turned its manufactured war on Africa, against President Mugabe, against former President Nujoma, against Winnie Mandela, Allan Boesak and Africa's so-called short-comings. Living in South Africa, it seems that Africa should be renamed to Zimbabwe. We read, hear and see in all our local newspapers and current affairs programmes nothing else, but what a "dictator and tyrant" President Mugabe is.
No, South Africa's print and electronic media is an abused instrument for propaganda, a weapon-of-mass-destruction. It is self-righteous, arrogant, self-censored, propagandistic and vicious, but not informative and definitely not African. The ownership has to change and ownership certainly means real financial ownership by black African South Africans. But, blacks in SA also have no money and no access to it.
Q: You read South African papers daily, yet you write for other papers outside South Africa, did you try to put your articles in the SA media as well?
A: I was published in a national Sunday newspaper, "City Press", which belongs to "Media 24" or "Na sionale Pers". But they sacked me overnight. Then I tried to have my columns published in the "Sunday World" and had some printed. This was short-lived too.
I was headhunted to co-host a current affairs programme on SABC-Africa. But, after three months, the contract was just not renewed. They have their own reasons. Ever since, I could not have anything published again. Friends in the print and electronic media tell me that I am defined as a "terrorist journalist", a "Mugabe apologist" and a "Winnie Mandela thug". Whatever that all means ... the racist colonial-apartheid mindset becomes vicious, when confronted with the truth, particularly, when one doesn't tow their line of international Western civilised propaganda.
Q: How does the "Zimbabwe" in the South African and Western media compare with the Zimbabwe you encounter during your visits?
A: There must be two Zimbabwes, as there are two South Africas. The real Zimbabwe is to my observation, peaceful, where not much happens every five hours. Of course, people struggle. And, it is working. The current economic hardships have been inflicted upon them by international financial, economic sanctions and certain local economic sabotage. The black majority suffers in South Africa too.
Q: South Africa is planning to advance a US$1 billion to Zimbabwe, amid so much opposition in the right wing media, yet this is not the first time Africans have bailed each other out, the ANC launched its offensive against apartheid from Zambia and Zimbabwe. Why do you think there is so much opposition to the loan?
A: Who opposes that loan? Is it not Tony Leon and his colonial-apartheid rooted "Democratic Alliance" (DA) and their cronies, their paymasters? Who owns the SA-based media? Who pays the NGO and church industries? Where do all those funds come from?
The media based in SA has to date actually failed to inform its clientele that the US$1billion is a loan, motivated by Washington and guaranteed by the IMF. According to your media reports and to my reliable information, President Mbeki was approached by a representative from the IMF, much to his surprise.
No, Zimbabweans should not be discouraged! H.E. President Mugabe and his Zanu-PF-led Government are very much respected on the ground in South Africa as real Africans! Don't be fooled by the vicious propaganda from this minuscule, xenophobic press.
Did you know that hardly 5 percent of South Africa's population actually read all daily, weekly and monthly printed matter? So why should you be bothered by white, racist and fascist apartheid hangovers? Focus on repairing your economy and know your friends. You have more than you think!
Q: As you said earlier, initially the loan was viewed as a South African initiative but it has since emerged that the US government approached South Africa to help Zimbabwe. How do you read the US move?
A: The international Western community and its fronts in this region are hell-bent to divide and rule, to split South Africa from the rest of the continent and use South Africa to discipline the rest. They also know, that it will be difficult to do that. But, as I mentioned earlier, the foreign owned and controlled economy in SA is a powerful constituency.
Q: The Jacob Zuma saga generated so much interest, and one can say the media lynched him, why was the South African media against him?
A: Why was the South Africa-based media against Winnie Mandela, against Chris Hani, against Allan Boesak, Peter Mokaba and Tony Yengeni? Why is that media against President Mugabe and President Nujoma? Does this media have any respect? What is its agenda?
Q: Is Zuma likely to affect the ANC and what are his chances in 2009?
A: The ANC deputy president's sacking and "investigation" has and still is affecting the ANC almost at all levels, but more so at leadership level. Personally, I don't think that Cde Jacob Zuma will stand a chance in 2009. All odds are against him.
Q: It is said South Africa is sitting on a worse time bomb than Zimbabwe, in terms of addressing colonial inequalities. What is your view of the South African situation?
A: Now you understand the brutal activities of the international Western community and its henchmen and women in this part of the world. Destabilisations to control ill-gotten gains (strategic raw materials) are important for the manufacturing industries of the G8. There is just no way out of the land question. It is becoming very urgent. People on the ground, the voters are indeed aware of their role, their rights and their situation. They are pushing for a change in ownership of land, the economy and judiciary. It could become very difficult to handle. The government would have to speed up its land resettlement programme with urgency. The extremely wealthy and the starving poor can never live together in peace.
Q: Finally Udo, the UN Security Council reforms, do you think the seats should be occupied permanently by individual countries or should it be on a rotational basis? If permanently who, between South Africa and Nigeria, do you think deserves the seat?
A: There is no question — the two UN Security seats envisaged for Africa have to be accepted on a rotational basis only. Are other African countries lesser countries than South Africa and Nigeria? If so on what basis? What about the "democratic order"?
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The real scandal in Zimbabwe is white control
Posted: Sunday, August 21, 2005
By Ayinde
Re: A New Muldergate Scandal in Africa this in Zimbabwe
by Scott Morgan: Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Most of the attacks and defensive moves being played out about Zimbabwe are as a result of Land. Some land was reclaimed from whites and returned to Blacks and a few whites got killed. Most whites, in and out of Zimbabwe, together with immature pro-white Blacks (who felt that they were having upward social mobility under white domination), are opposed to the challenges to white hegemony.
European and American powers know that the idea of reclaiming the land from whites and returning it to Blacks is very popular among the poor Blacks in Africa. Just as they have done with Haiti, they would not allow Zimbabwe or any other Black nation to challenge their dominance and succeed; they would not allow Zimbabwe to reclaim the land and prosper and become an inspiration to other nations. Like they did with President Aristide of Haiti, they are bent on 'regime change' in Zimbabwe. Like Haiti, they will align themselves with any and all manners of people to accomplish this task.
A lot of European and American funds are going into the anti-Mugabe campaigns and the opposition in Zimbabwe is a recipient of these funds.
One would have to be against President Mugabe for reclaiming lands from Whites and returning them to Blacks to not see how worthless Morgan's article is. One would have to be of the view that these Black peasant farmers in Zimbabwe are backward for not following the Western-oriented 'sound business practices'. One would have to hold the view that the peasants who do not operate with these Western-oriented 'sound business practices' should not have a voice. And one would have to be of the view that the Zimbabwe government should not be supported in regards to reclaiming the land from whites. It would seem, therefore, that the holders of these views believe that the thief is entitled to remain with the loot while the victims suffer.
Now bar all the propaganda.
The majority of newspapers and websites that cover Zimbabwe are white-owned and anti-Mugabe. They do not publish arguments in favour of Black Africans wanting to reclaim land. Their extreme criticisms and attempts to demonize President Mugabe started after whites were forced from the land that they occupied and a few of them got killed. Given the overwhelming anti-Mugabe media out there, it is silly to fault the Zimbabwe government for trying to get its side of the story out.
Here is a comment about those allegations from Nathaniel Manheru:
"Trevor's 'Independent' newspaper generated a story last week that claimed the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) had a substantial stake in the Financial Gazette, the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Mirror.
"This was said to be a covert operation to muzzle the voice of the 'private media' so we were led to believe, until the story lost direction when it also claimed that the CIO was also going after the Zanu-PF weekly mouthpiece, the Voice.
"It does make perfect sense to Trevor. Well, for argument's sake, supposing that were true (and it isn't), what is more sinister than George Soros buying into the Independent Newspapers Group and the Third Way? And why even go that far when the Rhodesians are very actively working with Trevor.
"What is the issue here? This is a clear effort to try and cripple these newspapers which are seen as an impediment to the establishment of the so-called Third Force or the Third Way. Icho!"
www.zimbabweherald.com/index.php?id=46152&pubdate=2005-08-20
We already know that the majority of the media, both in and out of Zimbabwe, is hostile to the Zimbabwe Government and President Mugabe. Their racist, white stories are dominant in the mainstream press.
If the allegations in Morgan's article about the Zimbabwe government investing in media are true, then the writer is also trying to conceal the fact that the majority of the media is white-owned and opposed to the Zimbabwe government. The article is attempting to fault the Zimbabwe government for trying to ensure that their side of the story gets out. It is in the best interest of those who support the Land Reclamation Exercise and President Mugabe for the Zimbabwe government, to invest in media to ensure that their views get out. White interest groups made the same accusations about President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela (Uneasy Standoff in Venezuela's Media Wars). Like Venezuela, the majority of the mainstream media reporting about Zimbabwe is owned by whites who are against returning the lands that they occupy to Black Africans.
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