Posted on 08/03/2002 3:22:09 AM PDT by Clive
Washington - Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe and his ruling ZANU-PF party have "committed the perfect crime," robbing citizens of their political rights while at the same time turning the "breadbasket of Southern Africa" into an economic wreck facing famine, says former White House official John Prendergast.
Prendergast, a program officer with the International Crisis Committee (ICG), a non-governmental (NGO) human rights organization, served as a special adviser on African conflicts to the State Department and was a director of African Affairs at the National Security Council (NSC) in the 1990's during President Clinton's Administration. He has written six books on Africa, including a study of Sudan: God, Oil & Country: Changing the Logic of War in Sudan, published recently by ICG.
He participated in a "Forum on Zimbabwe: Post Election Crisis," sponsored by the Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa in cooperation with Howard University's Ralph Bunche International Affairs Center. National Summit President Leonard Robinson said the July 30 discussion was timely, in part, because of the rapid decline of grain production in Zimbabwe - "Once characterized as the breadbasket of Southern Africa."
Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Walter Kansteiner III also spoke on the panel stressing that U.S. policy toward Zimbabwe is based on a set of principles that have remained consistent. He said, "Those principles are: democracy, human rights, civil liberties and economic freedoms. That's what drives our interests and policies towards Zimbabwe.
"That said, the regime now headed by Mugabe in fact is not living up to those principles," Kansteiner told the panel. "They are not committed to free and fair elections, as we saw [in the recent presidential election]. They clearly don't abide by a notion of human rights that we find acceptable. And they are not terribly concerned about civil liberties. So, we've got a strained relationship with the government right now."
Kansteiner stressed that "doesn't mean we have no relationship. In fact,....we have some 50,000 metric tons of food that have gone in to help the people of Zimbabwe from the people of the United States. So, there is a practical dialogue on a number of these issues, particularly the humanitarian and food issues, but we do have large problems in our relationship with the government."
Prendergast spoke derisively of Mugabe and ZANU-PF, noting both should be congratulated for a series of "perfect crimes;" the first of which was the stealing of the last presidential election held earlier this year. After using state power to intimidate the political opposition and the nation's judiciary, "the ruling party remains the ruling party and the President remains the president for another six years," he asserted.
"The second of the perfect crimes," said the human rights activist, is "the theft of most of Zimbabwe's most valuable assets. For example, land. If there was a genuine effort to redistribute by the government since independence then one could consider current actions in a much more understanding light," he said. "Instead, the regime only made land an issue when it needed an issue to campaign on and it is now grabbing up many of the choice properties and doling out these estates to ZANU-PF leaders."
Continuing, Prendergast said, "the third and perhaps most elegant of these perfect crimes is the theft of Congo's (DRC) minerals. Rather than contributing to efforts to resolve Congo's wars, Zimbabwe exacerbated them by supporting the Rwandan Hutu militias in their continued effort to destabilize Rwanda; thus keeping the war on a slow burn and justifying Zimbabwe's continued intervention in Congo, which is a brilliant cover-up of the huge mining interests of Zimbabwe's generals and politicians.
"The fourth of the perfect crimes," added the former White House official, is "turning a profit on [Zimbabwe's] economic collapse and famine. One of the crucial requirements to stabilize the economy now would be to allow the foreign exchange rate to float rather than keeping it fixed at an artificial and absurdly low level" as is currently done. "They won't do that because key ZANU officials are making lots of money in the currency market, effectively trading on human suffering."
Prendergast, who traveled to Zimbabwe and observed its controversial presidential elections earlier this year, said, "the fifth of the perfect [Mugabe ZANU-PF] crimes was the destruction of Zimbabwe's independent voices. The government has systematically punished supporters of the [political] opposition through rape, murder, torture and intimidation. It's gone after members of the media and NGOs who try to speak out on issues of concern. It has broken the back of some of the key mass organizations in Zimbabwe."
The former official said, "there are many other crimes that have been perpetrated in Zimbabwe over the last few years, perhaps not as perfect as the ones I've just mentioned, but all with one common denominator - that is they [Mugabe and ZANU-PF] got away with it. There have been hardly any consequences."
On the other hand, Prendergast said the consequences for the people of Zimbabwe have been severe. "There is no compensation for the victims -- for the hundreds of thousands of black farmers, workers and laborers made homeless" by the regime's expropriation of land. The economy has been devastated by the regime's intervention into the market and "has now produced some of the highest unemployment rates on the continent." At the same time, the nation now faces a famine that "has produced rates of deprivation and hunger that are unrivaled, at this point, throughout southern Africa in the midst of its own drought."
He concluded: "Things are bleak for the people of Zimbabwe but it is not hopeless."
Rebutting Prendergast, Zimbabwean Ambassador Simbi Mubako said many of his nation's problems were a legacy of colonialism, which the Mugabe regime had worked hard to overcome. For example in education, "before independence Zimbabwe had only one university with 1,000 students. Now we have 10 universities" with many thousands of students. "This is an achievement of the last 22 years," he emphasized.
The regime's land reform scheme -- characterized as a disastrous "fast-track" grab of property outside the legal process by Malik Chaka, a staff consultant to the Subcommittee on Africa in the U.S. House of Representatives who also participated in the discussion, was fair because it was land that earlier colonialist regimes wrested without compensation from the original African owners, Mubako indicated.
As for Zimbabwe being the breadbasket of southern Africa, Mubako termed it an exaggeration and said the recent reduction in grain production was due to drought affecting the region and not to the Mugabe regime's agricultural policies.
He said, "We had another severe drought I remember in my lifetime in 1947 and this was the first time we received food aid from the United States. That was colonial time and white farmers were in full control at that time." Other serious droughts followed about every ten years starting in 1962, he said, and "again we had to ask for food aid from abroad. It is not true that we had sufficient [grain] for ourselves."
Commenting on the presidential elections, Mubako said, "from the point of view of the Zimbabwean government and from the point of view of Africans, the majority of the people who observed the elections" agreed that "they were not perfect but they were certainly not stolen. I would be the first one to admit there were some flaws but I would also add that those flaws were no greater than the flaws of the elections you had in Florida." (Mubako referred to the disputed vote count in Florida after the U.S. presidential election of November 2000.)
Pointing out that an election is not necessarily "stolen on the day of the vote," Malik Chaka stressed that the Mugabe regime's intimidation of the political opposition and "its use of terror" predated actual balloting by more than a year. While there was political violence on both sides, the Congressional aide said, "most blood is on ZANU-PF's hands -- they had the state power on their side.
"The country is going down fast," Chaka concluded.
(The Washington File is a product of the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
I notice that Mr. Pendergast has no comment about the white farmers who lost their land. I guess they aren't important in the grand scheme of things. But he is a lackey of the Toon, so what do you expect?
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From breadbasket to basket case.
The main thing is to keep the white devil in his place.
Eat Post-Imperialism Today.
What did the hominids know that we don't?
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