Hardship awaits Sudan's healers
Jeff Adams
For The Calgary Herald
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Caring Calgarians
Special Report: Day 3 of 3
- - -
Every time I meet a doctor, lawyer, engineer, architect or other professional who has left a developing country to continue his or her career in Canada, I cringe a little bit -- knowing how desperately the person's skills are usually needed back home.
I don't blame anyone for coming to Canada. I doubt you do either. If forced to walk in another person's shoes, most of us wouldn't hesitate to leave the poverty, disease and other primitive conditions that are often a sad part of the developing world. The safety, security and affluence of Canada and other western nations are an irresistible lure.
That's what makes the story of 11 Sudan-born doctors trained in Cuba, Canada and Kenya so amazingly different -- and inspiring. After roughly 23 years away from Sudan, during which the largest nation in Africa suffered through a civil war that left two million dead, the 11 returned home recently to help rebuild its severely depleted medical system.
They are people from the developing world, going home to help it develop some more.
None of the 10 men and one woman -- several of whom I have come to know and deeply respect -- were forced to return to southern Sudan. Although they arrived in Canada from Cuba as refugees, they are now Canadian citizens -- with all the same residency rights of other Canadians.
Granted, the medical training they received during their time in Cuba, during their special nine-month upgrading in 2006 at the University of Calgary, and during their recent residencies at hospitals in Kenya did not qualify them to practise medicine in Canada.
But even without a Canadian medical licence, they could have continued at the mostly menial jobs (such as packing meat in High River or Brooks) they had before Samaritan's Purse Canada learned of their wish to return to Sudan and helped arrange for their time at the U of C and at Kenyan hospitals.
How would a factory job in Canada have been easier than a doctor's job in Sudan? Well, let's start with some basics that most Canadians, including me, take for granted.
We have safe drinking water and flush toilets. We have showers and baths. We have refrigerators, stoves, micro-wave ovens, toasters, coffee makers and other appliances -- all of which are fed by readily available electricity. We also have valuable infrastructure including paved roads, sewage treatment plants, phone systems, schools, libraries, police and fire departments, and much more.
Even the lowliest factory employee in Canada has access to most or all of these conveniences; but not in large parts of the developing world -- including war-ravaged South Sudan. There, in the remote village of Werkok, where former Calgarian Ajak Abraham Kuchkon has begun working at a new hospital built by a small U.S. Christian charity.
Although it's the only hospital within several hours' walk of Werkok, with responsibility for serving the region's 420,000 people, it operates almost entirely as an out-patient facility, with very few overnight guests.
That's because Kuchkon is one of only two doctors and 16 total staff. He and the other doctor host a clinic every weekday from 9 a.m. until at least 1 p.m. One of them is also on call for the rest of every weekday and every weekend. Patients often arrive in the middle of the night -- victims of everything from scorpion bites to falling in cooking fires during undiagnosed epileptic seizures.
Their hospital has no air conditioning except in the operating room -- despite the fact temperatures in Werkok often hover in the mid-30s. The entire facility has electricity only a few hours a day, and no running water. The only toilet is an outhouse about 100 metres away. It also lacks basic diagnostic equipment such as an X-ray machine.
Despite these challenges, Kuchkon and his colleagues have served almost 3,000 patients since last January. They've conducted more than 35 minor surgeries, including several caesarian sections, plus 25 tooth extractions. The most common ailments to which they respond are eye diseases (mainly glaucoma and cataracts), malaria, malnutrition, plus respiratory, intestinal skin and urinary infections.
As if all of these work challenges weren't enough, let me describe the living conditions.
Kuchkon and his colleague share a one-room, concrete-walled house with a corrugated steel roof. It has no air conditioning despite the oppressive heat. It also has no television reception, no VCR or DVD, and no indoor plumbing. Electricity is available for reading and listening to the radio only from sundown to 11 p.m. All cooking, which is done by support staff on the hospital compound, is with a kerosene or wood-burning stove.
Like their patients, the only way for Kuchkon and his co-workers to leave Werkok is by air -- departing from a dirt landing strip that becomes too muddy during the roughly three-month rainy season for planes to land or take off. The region is also so swampy that malaria-spreading mosquitoes, horse flies and other insects are constant nuisances.
And don't forget the Werkok region is often the victim of cattle raiders -- heavily armed militia backed by helicopter support who are ready to kill anyone who opposes them.
To endure all of this, you'd think Kuchkon would be earning a very fat salary. But South Sudan's cash-strapped government is barely managing to pay him anything.
Why come to Werkok -- and why stay? "Because I want to serve my people," Kuchkon says simply.
"He is a good man and I will be glad to see him again," said a grateful woman named Agot, who brought her 18-month-old daughter to the hospital, fearing she had malaria. Kuchkon diagnosed her problem as a bronchial infection and prescribed antibiotics.
Then he prepared to greet his next patient. Dozens more were waiting outside.
At Kuchkon's graduation ceremony this past Saturday, before he and his 10 colleagues walked onto the stage to collect their framed certificates, one of several invited speakers told the applauding crowd: "These people are laying the foundation for a strong medical system in South Sudan. They're going to be an inspiration each day they go to work."
Amen.
Jeff Adams is Director of Samaritan's Purse Canada's Communications and Creative Services Department.
*****
There is a related multimdeia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/world ... frica.html
May 20, 2008
South Africans Take Out Rage on Immigrants
By BARRY BEARAK and CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — The man certainly looked dead, lying motionless in the dust of the squatter camp. His body seemed almost like a bottle that had been turned on its side, spilling blood. His pants were red with the moisture.
Nearby was evidence of what he had endured. A large rock had been used to gouge his torso. Embers remained from a fire that had been part of some torture. Shards of a burned jacket still clung to the victim’s left forearm.
Then, as people stepped closer, there was the faintest of breath pushing against his chest. “This guy may be alive,” someone surmised. As if to confirm it, the man moved the fingers of his right hand.
The jaded crowd neither rejoiced nor lamented. After all, the horrific attacks against immigrants around Johannesburg had already been going on for a week, and in their eyes the victim was just some Malawian or Zimbabwean, another casualty in the continuing purge.
This nation is undergoing a spasm of xenophobia, with poor South Africans taking out their rage on the poor foreigners living in their midst. At least 22 people had been killed by Monday in the unrelenting mayhem, the police said.
But the death toll only hints at the consequences. Thousands of immigrants have been scattered from their tumbledown homes. They now crowd the police stations and community centers of Johannesburg, some with the few possessions they could carry before mobs ransacked their hovels, most with nothing but the clothes they wore as they escaped.
“They came at night, trying to kill us, with people pointing out, ‘this one is a foreigner and this one is not,’ ” said Charles Mannyike, 28, an immigrant from Mozambique. “It was a very cruel and ugly hatred.”
Xenophobic violence, once an occasional malady around Johannesburg, is now a contagion, skipping from one area to another. The city has no shortage of neighborhoods where the poor cobble together shacks from corrugated metal and wood planks.
Since the end of apartheid, a small percentage of the nation’s black population — the highly skilled and the politically connected — has thrived. But the gap between the rich and poor has widened. The official rate of unemployment is 23 percent. Housing remains a deplorable problem.
“That’s fueling the rage at the bottom,” said Marius Root, a researcher at the South African Institute of Race Relations. “There’s the perception that they’re not enjoying the fruits of the liberation.”
Here at the Ramaphosa Settlement Camp, the squatter’s colony southeast of the city, six immigrants have been killed in the past two days — or perhaps seven if the man found in the dust Monday morning does not survive.
“We want all these foreigners to go back to their own lands,” said Thapelo Mgoqi, who considers himself a leader in Ramaphosa. “We waited for our government to do something about these people. But they did nothing and so now we are doing it ourselves, and we will not be stopped.”
A familiar litany of complaints against foreigners are passionately, if not always rationally, argued: They commit crimes. They undercut wages. They hold jobs that others deserve.
George Booysen said that as a born-again Christian he did not believe in killing. Still, something had to be done about these unwanted immigrants.
They are bad people, he said: “A South African may take your cellphone, but he won’t kill you. A foreigner will take your phone and kill you.”
Beyond that, he said, immigrants were too easy to exploit.
“White people hire the foreigners because they work hard and they do it for less money,” Mr. Booysen said. “A South African demands his rights and will go on strike. Foreigners are afraid.”
These days, the nights and early mornings belong to Ramaphosa’s marauders. On Monday, soon after dawn, they were boldly celebrating their victories. Stores belonging to immigrants already had been looted, but there were still fires to set and walls to overturn. There was dancing and some singing.
Then the police arrived, quick to fire rubber-tipped bullets. Rocks were tossed by the mob in counterattack, but in order to triumph they really only had to be patient. The police did not stay long. They could not keep up with the widespread frenzy.
Those left behind by the nation’s post-apartheid economy commonly blame those left even further behind, the powerless making scapegoats of the defenseless.
South Africa has 48 million people. It is hard to find a reliable estimate of the number of foreigners in the mix. Most certainly, not all immigrants push ahead of South Africans economically. But Somalis and Ethiopians have proved themselves successful shopkeepers in the townships.
Zimbabweans, who make up this country’s largest immigrant group, benefited from a strong educational system before their homeland plunged into collapse, sending an estimated three million across the border to seek refuge here. Schoolteachers and other professionals — their salaries rendered worthless by Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation — come to work as housekeepers and menial laborers.
Many South Africans consider themselves at a disadvantage with employers. “If you have a surname like mine, you can’t get a job,” said Samantha DuPlessis, 23, a woman of mixed race. “I’ve been looking for a job for four years. All the employers want to hire foreigners.”
So there is a nationalistic sense of jubilation in the areas where the immigrants have been dislodged. “The Maputos, we don’t want them around anymore and we’ll never have to worry about them again,” said Benjamin Matlala, 27, using a common term for people from Mozambique.
Mr. Matlala, who is unemployed, lives in Primrose, a community now emptied of its foreigners. The sections they lived in are being dismantled. First, the belongings of the fleeing immigrants were looted.
On Monday, the dwellings themselves were torn apart by dozens of eager men. It wasn’t difficult. Walls of thin metal were knocked over with a few blows. Wooden posts were pulled from the ground. Picture frames were tossed into a heap of rubbish.
Mr. Matlala had managed to get a shopping cart, which he filled with scrap metal. Each load, he said, would fetch 40 rand in trade, or about $5. He was hoping for three loads, more money than he had made in a long time.
AFRICA
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/scien ... ref=slogin
May 20, 2008
Project Digitizes Works From the Golden Age of Timbuktu
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
From Timbuktu to here, to reverse the expression, the written words of the legendary African oasis are being delivered by electronic caravan. A lode of books and manuscripts, some only recently rescued from decay, is being digitized for the Internet and distributed to scholars worldwide.
These are works of law and history, science and medicine, poetry and theology, relics of Timbuktu’s golden age as a crossroads in Mali for trade in gold, salt and slaves along the southern edge of the Sahara. If the name is now a synonym for mysterious remoteness, the literature attests to Timbuktu’s earlier role as a vibrant intellectual center.
In recent years, thousands of these leather-bound books and fragile manuscripts have been recovered from family archives, private libraries and storerooms. The South African government is financing construction of a library in Timbuktu to house more than 30,000 of the books. Other gifts support renovations of family libraries and projects for preserving, translating and interpreting the documents.
Now, the first five of the rare manuscripts from private libraries have been digitized and made available online (www.aluka.org) to scholars and students. At least 300 are expected to be available online by the end of the year.
The project to collect the digital manuscripts is being organized by Aluka, an international nonprofit company devoted to bringing knowledge from and about Africa to the scholarly world.
In partnership with a consortium of private libraries in Timbuktu and with financing from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Aluka enlisted media technicians from Northwestern University to design and set up a high-resolution digital photo studio in Timbuktu. A local staff was trained to operate the studio.
Many documents in the graceful Arabic calligraphy are a visual delight. Although the writing is mostly in Arabic, quite a few manuscripts are in vernaculars adapted to the Arabic script, which is sure to pose a challenge for scholars.
“The manuscripts of Timbuktu add great depth to our understanding of Africa’s diverse history and civilizations,” said Rahim S. Rajan, the collection development manager at Aluka.
Researchers have been struck by the range of subjects that attracted Timbuktu’s scholars over several centuries and into the 19th century. Most of the first digitized ones are from the 17th through 19th centuries. The topics include the sciences of astronomy, mathematics and botany; literary arts; Islamic religious practices and thought; proverbs; legal opinions; and historical accounts.
“It is a rich corpus of historical and intellectual literature that is just beginning to become more widely understood and accessible to a broader group of scholars and researchers,” said Mr. Rajan, a specialist in Middle East studies.
In a recent seminar conducted online, members of the Aluka-Northwestern team described some of the problems in starting the digitizing facility in Timbuktu: frequent interruptions of electric power and dust storms fouling delicate electronic components.
“It wasn’t as bad as other places that I’ve seen,” said Harlan Wallach, director of the Advanced Media Production Studio at Northwestern, who has set up similar installations in Asia. “We blew out a lot more transformers and equipment working on a project in China than in Timbuktu.”
While there may be no substitute for seeing the actual manuscripts, Mr. Wallach said, it is better to read them in the digitized form. Many of the pages are so fragile they should not be handled.
Even if Timbuktu today is a dusty, mud-brick shadow of its past renown, living mainly on the few tourists attracted by its name and legend, the pages of its history are emerging from obscurity and, in some cases, are being disseminated by the speed of light.
May 20, 2008
Project Digitizes Works From the Golden Age of Timbuktu
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
From Timbuktu to here, to reverse the expression, the written words of the legendary African oasis are being delivered by electronic caravan. A lode of books and manuscripts, some only recently rescued from decay, is being digitized for the Internet and distributed to scholars worldwide.
These are works of law and history, science and medicine, poetry and theology, relics of Timbuktu’s golden age as a crossroads in Mali for trade in gold, salt and slaves along the southern edge of the Sahara. If the name is now a synonym for mysterious remoteness, the literature attests to Timbuktu’s earlier role as a vibrant intellectual center.
In recent years, thousands of these leather-bound books and fragile manuscripts have been recovered from family archives, private libraries and storerooms. The South African government is financing construction of a library in Timbuktu to house more than 30,000 of the books. Other gifts support renovations of family libraries and projects for preserving, translating and interpreting the documents.
Now, the first five of the rare manuscripts from private libraries have been digitized and made available online (www.aluka.org) to scholars and students. At least 300 are expected to be available online by the end of the year.
The project to collect the digital manuscripts is being organized by Aluka, an international nonprofit company devoted to bringing knowledge from and about Africa to the scholarly world.
In partnership with a consortium of private libraries in Timbuktu and with financing from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Aluka enlisted media technicians from Northwestern University to design and set up a high-resolution digital photo studio in Timbuktu. A local staff was trained to operate the studio.
Many documents in the graceful Arabic calligraphy are a visual delight. Although the writing is mostly in Arabic, quite a few manuscripts are in vernaculars adapted to the Arabic script, which is sure to pose a challenge for scholars.
“The manuscripts of Timbuktu add great depth to our understanding of Africa’s diverse history and civilizations,” said Rahim S. Rajan, the collection development manager at Aluka.
Researchers have been struck by the range of subjects that attracted Timbuktu’s scholars over several centuries and into the 19th century. Most of the first digitized ones are from the 17th through 19th centuries. The topics include the sciences of astronomy, mathematics and botany; literary arts; Islamic religious practices and thought; proverbs; legal opinions; and historical accounts.
“It is a rich corpus of historical and intellectual literature that is just beginning to become more widely understood and accessible to a broader group of scholars and researchers,” said Mr. Rajan, a specialist in Middle East studies.
In a recent seminar conducted online, members of the Aluka-Northwestern team described some of the problems in starting the digitizing facility in Timbuktu: frequent interruptions of electric power and dust storms fouling delicate electronic components.
“It wasn’t as bad as other places that I’ve seen,” said Harlan Wallach, director of the Advanced Media Production Studio at Northwestern, who has set up similar installations in Asia. “We blew out a lot more transformers and equipment working on a project in China than in Timbuktu.”
While there may be no substitute for seeing the actual manuscripts, Mr. Wallach said, it is better to read them in the digitized form. Many of the pages are so fragile they should not be handled.
Even if Timbuktu today is a dusty, mud-brick shadow of its past renown, living mainly on the few tourists attracted by its name and legend, the pages of its history are emerging from obscurity and, in some cases, are being disseminated by the speed of light.
African bandits displace 100,000 people
Megan Davies
Reuters
Saturday, May 24, 2008
The Central African Republic has been hit by an upsurge in attacks by armed bandits, with up to 100,000 people forced out of their homes fleeing such attacks, the UN said Friday.
The attacks, which have escalated since early in the year, have been in the north of the former French colony, the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said.
A trend in recent months has seen bandits burn down whole villages, often in revenge for resistance by village self-defense groups, OCHA said.
The bandits -- typically groups of 10 to 30 armed men -- roam the northern areas of the CAR, assaulting and killing travellers and villagers, kidnapping children and adults, looting property and burning homes. One incident in April saw bandits torch 57 out of 67 homes in the village of Bogali, OCHA said.
CAR's history since independence from France in 1960 has been marked by brutal dictatorship, revolts, coups and banditry.
Recently, the country's north has increasingly fallen prey to armed groups as President Francois Bozize's government has battled rebel factions and the spillover from the conflict in Sudan's Darfur region. Bozize, a former army general, seized power in a coup in 2003. He was elected president in 2005.
Despite being diamond and uranium-rich, landlocked CAR is one of the world's poorest countries, with an average income of $350 a year, according to the World Bank.
The UN estimates 1 million people in CAR have been affected by conflict, of whom 108,000 fled into neighboring Cameroon, Chad and Sudan and 197,000 are internally displaced.
The country's population of 4.3 million has an average life expectancy of 44 years, the World Bank reports.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
***
May 24, 2008
Editorial
The Failures of Thabo Mbeki
Crackpot and dangerous theories on AIDS. Extreme and widening levels of income inequality. Enabling Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and only belatedly trying to halt mob atrocities against desperate Zimbabwean and other African immigrants. This is the legacy of South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, who has one more year in his second term.
It would be hard to imagine a more depressing contrast with the leadership of Nelson Mandela, Mr. Mbeki’s predecessor and one of the 20th century’s great heroes.
History will laud Mr. Mandela for leading his country, peacefully, from hateful apartheid to democratic majority rule, marvel at his commitment to honesty and healing and celebrate his promotion of South Africa as a diverse and tolerant “rainbow nation.”
If it remembers Mr. Mbeki at all, it will be for appointing a health minister who favored garlic and beet root as treatment for South Africa’s more than five million citizens infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, and for his stubborn refusal to use South Africa’s economic and political clout to stop Zimbabwe’s horrors.
Instead, Mr. Mbeki declared that there was “no crisis,” even as Zimbabwe’s electoral count was being hijacked, opposition supporters terrorized and thousands of its citizens fleeing over the border to South Africa where they still have not found safety. The only explanation is his misplaced loyalty to Mr. Mugabe, who was once a hero for leading Zimbabwe to majority rule.
South Africa is the richest, most developed country south of the Sahara and the continent’s largest, most exemplary democracy. Africa badly needs its enlightened leadership. A decade ago, under Mr. Mandela, South Africa was swiftly emerging as the respected leader of a proud, postcolonial Africa.
Under Mr. Mbeki’s leadership, the fruits of the nation’s hard-fought victory over apartheid have gone mainly to officials and former officials of the ruling African National Congress, not to the millions of poor people in the townships who faced down the dogs, the bullets and the pass laws and still must live without adequate jobs, education, housing or health services.
The resulting frustration and anger helps explain, though it cannot justify, this week’s outbreak of xenophobic violence in the shantytowns. At least 42 victims have been killed — many beaten, stabbed, hacked or burned to death — and some 25,000 have been chased from their homes.
Mr. Mbeki’s most likely successor, Jacob Zuma, the current leader of the A.N.C., is no Nelson Mandela either. While more popular among the poor than the arrogant and aloof Mr. Mbeki, he has offered few coherent ideas for addressing their economic plight. He has been more willing to criticize Mr. Mugabe’s electoral manipulations, but overly cautious in proposing solutions (though that is Mr. Mbeki’s job, not his). His ignorance on AIDS and appalling attitudes toward women — revealed in a 2006 rape trial that ended in his acquittal — stained his personal reputation. Serious corruption charges against him are still pending.
South Africa can ill afford another five years of failed leadership and frustrated hopes. Whoever succeeds Mr. Mbeki must look long and hard at all that has gone wrong and vow to do better. South Africans and all of Africa need and deserve better.
Megan Davies
Reuters
Saturday, May 24, 2008
The Central African Republic has been hit by an upsurge in attacks by armed bandits, with up to 100,000 people forced out of their homes fleeing such attacks, the UN said Friday.
The attacks, which have escalated since early in the year, have been in the north of the former French colony, the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said.
A trend in recent months has seen bandits burn down whole villages, often in revenge for resistance by village self-defense groups, OCHA said.
The bandits -- typically groups of 10 to 30 armed men -- roam the northern areas of the CAR, assaulting and killing travellers and villagers, kidnapping children and adults, looting property and burning homes. One incident in April saw bandits torch 57 out of 67 homes in the village of Bogali, OCHA said.
CAR's history since independence from France in 1960 has been marked by brutal dictatorship, revolts, coups and banditry.
Recently, the country's north has increasingly fallen prey to armed groups as President Francois Bozize's government has battled rebel factions and the spillover from the conflict in Sudan's Darfur region. Bozize, a former army general, seized power in a coup in 2003. He was elected president in 2005.
Despite being diamond and uranium-rich, landlocked CAR is one of the world's poorest countries, with an average income of $350 a year, according to the World Bank.
The UN estimates 1 million people in CAR have been affected by conflict, of whom 108,000 fled into neighboring Cameroon, Chad and Sudan and 197,000 are internally displaced.
The country's population of 4.3 million has an average life expectancy of 44 years, the World Bank reports.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
***
May 24, 2008
Editorial
The Failures of Thabo Mbeki
Crackpot and dangerous theories on AIDS. Extreme and widening levels of income inequality. Enabling Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and only belatedly trying to halt mob atrocities against desperate Zimbabwean and other African immigrants. This is the legacy of South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, who has one more year in his second term.
It would be hard to imagine a more depressing contrast with the leadership of Nelson Mandela, Mr. Mbeki’s predecessor and one of the 20th century’s great heroes.
History will laud Mr. Mandela for leading his country, peacefully, from hateful apartheid to democratic majority rule, marvel at his commitment to honesty and healing and celebrate his promotion of South Africa as a diverse and tolerant “rainbow nation.”
If it remembers Mr. Mbeki at all, it will be for appointing a health minister who favored garlic and beet root as treatment for South Africa’s more than five million citizens infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, and for his stubborn refusal to use South Africa’s economic and political clout to stop Zimbabwe’s horrors.
Instead, Mr. Mbeki declared that there was “no crisis,” even as Zimbabwe’s electoral count was being hijacked, opposition supporters terrorized and thousands of its citizens fleeing over the border to South Africa where they still have not found safety. The only explanation is his misplaced loyalty to Mr. Mugabe, who was once a hero for leading Zimbabwe to majority rule.
South Africa is the richest, most developed country south of the Sahara and the continent’s largest, most exemplary democracy. Africa badly needs its enlightened leadership. A decade ago, under Mr. Mandela, South Africa was swiftly emerging as the respected leader of a proud, postcolonial Africa.
Under Mr. Mbeki’s leadership, the fruits of the nation’s hard-fought victory over apartheid have gone mainly to officials and former officials of the ruling African National Congress, not to the millions of poor people in the townships who faced down the dogs, the bullets and the pass laws and still must live without adequate jobs, education, housing or health services.
The resulting frustration and anger helps explain, though it cannot justify, this week’s outbreak of xenophobic violence in the shantytowns. At least 42 victims have been killed — many beaten, stabbed, hacked or burned to death — and some 25,000 have been chased from their homes.
Mr. Mbeki’s most likely successor, Jacob Zuma, the current leader of the A.N.C., is no Nelson Mandela either. While more popular among the poor than the arrogant and aloof Mr. Mbeki, he has offered few coherent ideas for addressing their economic plight. He has been more willing to criticize Mr. Mugabe’s electoral manipulations, but overly cautious in proposing solutions (though that is Mr. Mbeki’s job, not his). His ignorance on AIDS and appalling attitudes toward women — revealed in a 2006 rape trial that ended in his acquittal — stained his personal reputation. Serious corruption charges against him are still pending.
South Africa can ill afford another five years of failed leadership and frustrated hopes. Whoever succeeds Mr. Mbeki must look long and hard at all that has gone wrong and vow to do better. South Africans and all of Africa need and deserve better.
June 5, 2008
Editorial
Zimbabwe’s Reign of Terror
In his cynical and bloody bid to hang on to power, Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, has bet on the indifference of his neighbors and the rest of the world. So far, shamefully, he has been right.
On Tuesday, three-and-a-half weeks before a runoff presidential election, Mr. Mugabe’s henchmen detained Morgan Tsvangirai, the popular opposition leader and likely winner of the first round, for nine hours. That is only the latest outrage.
International aid agencies reported this week that they had been ordered to stop distributing food to hundreds of thousands of hungry Zimbabweans, at least until the June 27 vote. Officials working for Mr. Mugabe claimed that the aid groups were backing the opposition, but it is clear that the government wants to further intimidate voters while reducing the number of possible outside witnesses to its campaign of terror.
At least 50 people have been killed since March, when the first round of voting took place, and thousands have been beaten, driven from their homes or both. Still, the international community, and African leaders in particular, have done nothing more than wring their hands.
The spectacle of Mr. Mugabe attending a United Nations food conference in Rome this week as if he was just another world leader was especially shameful. Mr. Mugabe used the conference to blame the West — again — for his country’s implosion.
The truth is that it is his own destructive 30-year rule that destroyed commercial agriculture in Zimbabwe, frightened away foreign investment, pushed inflation to more than 100,000 percent and made millions of people dependent on foreign assistance.
Mr. Mugabe was not invited to a ceremonial leaders’ dinner in Rome, and some officials, including from the United States and Britain, refused to meet with him. That may have assuaged some consciences. But it clearly had no effect at all on Mr. Mugabe, who is a master at feeding racial resentments. That is why African leaders urgently need to use all of their clout to halt the reign of terror and ensure that Zimbabwe’s elections are as free and as fair as possible.
They need to demand freedom for Mr. Tsvangirai and others to campaign. They need to send high-level envoys to warn Mr. Mugabe, his generals and other cronies that they will pay a high, personal price — including frozen foreign bank accounts and denied visas — if these abuses continue. (Mr. Mugabe is unlikely to listen, but the rest may be more willing to recalculate their loyalties.) And they need to blanket Zimbabwe with election monitors.
South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, has the most potential influence. But Mr. Mbeki has abdicated his responsibility, so other African leaders must take charge.
Until now, the United States has chosen a comparatively low-key role, rather than feeding Mr. Mugabe’s anti-Western rants. The time for low-key is past. Washington should use its presidency of the United Nations Security Council this month to rally international condemnation of Mr. Mugabe and forge a plan that might have a chance of averting disaster in Zimbabwe.
Editorial
Zimbabwe’s Reign of Terror
In his cynical and bloody bid to hang on to power, Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, has bet on the indifference of his neighbors and the rest of the world. So far, shamefully, he has been right.
On Tuesday, three-and-a-half weeks before a runoff presidential election, Mr. Mugabe’s henchmen detained Morgan Tsvangirai, the popular opposition leader and likely winner of the first round, for nine hours. That is only the latest outrage.
International aid agencies reported this week that they had been ordered to stop distributing food to hundreds of thousands of hungry Zimbabweans, at least until the June 27 vote. Officials working for Mr. Mugabe claimed that the aid groups were backing the opposition, but it is clear that the government wants to further intimidate voters while reducing the number of possible outside witnesses to its campaign of terror.
At least 50 people have been killed since March, when the first round of voting took place, and thousands have been beaten, driven from their homes or both. Still, the international community, and African leaders in particular, have done nothing more than wring their hands.
The spectacle of Mr. Mugabe attending a United Nations food conference in Rome this week as if he was just another world leader was especially shameful. Mr. Mugabe used the conference to blame the West — again — for his country’s implosion.
The truth is that it is his own destructive 30-year rule that destroyed commercial agriculture in Zimbabwe, frightened away foreign investment, pushed inflation to more than 100,000 percent and made millions of people dependent on foreign assistance.
Mr. Mugabe was not invited to a ceremonial leaders’ dinner in Rome, and some officials, including from the United States and Britain, refused to meet with him. That may have assuaged some consciences. But it clearly had no effect at all on Mr. Mugabe, who is a master at feeding racial resentments. That is why African leaders urgently need to use all of their clout to halt the reign of terror and ensure that Zimbabwe’s elections are as free and as fair as possible.
They need to demand freedom for Mr. Tsvangirai and others to campaign. They need to send high-level envoys to warn Mr. Mugabe, his generals and other cronies that they will pay a high, personal price — including frozen foreign bank accounts and denied visas — if these abuses continue. (Mr. Mugabe is unlikely to listen, but the rest may be more willing to recalculate their loyalties.) And they need to blanket Zimbabwe with election monitors.
South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, has the most potential influence. But Mr. Mbeki has abdicated his responsibility, so other African leaders must take charge.
Until now, the United States has chosen a comparatively low-key role, rather than feeding Mr. Mugabe’s anti-Western rants. The time for low-key is past. Washington should use its presidency of the United Nations Security Council this month to rally international condemnation of Mr. Mugabe and forge a plan that might have a chance of averting disaster in Zimbabwe.
June 7, 2008
Zimbabwe Blocks Opposition’s Rallies and Again Detains Its Leader
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — With only three weeks to go before Zimbabwe’s presidential runoff, the police briefly detained the opposition’s standard-bearer, Morgan Tsvangirai, on Friday for the second time this week and directed his party to cancel political rallies, effectively preventing him from addressing voters.
At the same time, the Zimbabwean government’s requirement that all nongovernmental organizations suspend their aid operations, which grew out of the authorities’ allegations that some were supporting the opposition, was condemned Friday by officials in the United States and Europe, as well as the United Nations.
Relief agencies said the order, issued this week, would deprive millions of desperately poor Zimbabweans of food aid and other basic assistance. Unicef, for example, depends on 25 nongovernmental organizations to provide education, health care and food to 185,000 orphans in Zimbabwe.
“It’s a horrible situation,” said James Elder, Unicef’s spokesman in Zimbabwe. “The children and their families continue to find stoic means of surviving, but this is a profoundly disturbing blow to them. We can’t reach these children today.”
Similarly, the World Food Program said on Friday that the prohibition on aid operations would prevent “314,000 of the most vulnerable people in the country” — the elderly, the disabled, schoolchildren, tuberculosis patients and “H.I.V.-positive bedridden” people — from receiving food this month.
World Vision, another large relief agency, said it had planned to feed about 400,000 people in Zimbabwe in June and was particularly concerned about the welfare of the 1.3 million children under 5 who had been orphaned by AIDS.
President Robert Mugabe has led Zimbabwe, which has a population of about 13 million, for almost three decades. In the past few years, the country’s economy has gone into free fall, with more than four in five people unemployed and prices of food staples sent into the stratosphere by hyperinflation. The space for peaceful political protest keeps shrinking, according to officials of Mr. Tsvangirai’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change.
The party said it had received a written notice from the police that rallies it had planned in impoverished townships of the capital, Harare, would have to be canceled because the safety of party leaders could not be guaranteed — a seemingly paradoxical rationale, given that the police had confiscated Mr. Tsvangirai’s armored vehicle on Wednesday.
The government’s decision to block rallies is a blow to Mr. Tsvangirai, a charismatic figure who drew large, enthusiastic crowds before the March election.
He has survived three assassination attempts and was severely beaten by the police in March 2007. In the voting 10 weeks ago, he finished first, but according to official returns he did not have the majority he needed to avoid a runoff election against Mr. Mugabe.
Mr. Tsvangirai left the country not long after that election, fearing another assassination attempt. He returned to Zimbabwe two weeks ago, but he has since been unable to campaign freely for the June 27 runoff vote.
Opposition officials said Mr. Tsvangirai was detained on Wednesday for nine hours and again on Friday for two hours. He was stopped at a roadblock on his way to a rally not far from Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, and sent to a police station for questioning.
A police spokesman, Wayne Bvudzijena, blamed the opposition for Mr. Tsvangirai’s most recent detention, alleging that the candidate’s convoy crashed through a roadblock, according to Reuters.
Zimbabwean police officers and soldiers detained a contingent of American diplomats for five hours on Thursday at a roadblock, slashing the tires of their vehicle after a six-mile chase. The diplomats had been investigating state-sponsored violence against the opposition. The Bush administration has expressed outrage at the police action. The State Department said it would seek a discussion by the United Nations Security Council of the mistreatment of its diplomats.
The Zimbabwean authorities have been aggressively using the state’s power to detain and arrest many of those whom they regard as a threat to the governing party’s hold on power. They have also been forcefully exerting the state’s monopolistic control over television, radio and the nation’s only daily newspaper.
This week, eight employees of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation were sent on leave for two months — a step that the Media Institute of Southern Africa said “can reasonably be perceived as the deliberate purging of journalists at the state broadcaster for the purposes of partisan political expediency.”
The state news media’s coverage of Mr. Tsvangirai, a former trade union leader who has led the opposition for almost a decade, is deeply hostile. He is typically depicted as a coward, a fool and a stooge of Britain, the former colonial power. Zimbabweans have a powerful informal grapevine, spurred by the technology of the text message, but rallies were Mr. Tsvangirai’s principal means of communicating directly with voters.
To tell a man like Mr. Tsvangirai he cannot speak at rallies is “like telling a pastor not to read the Bible,” said an opposition spokesman, Nelson Chamisa, who added, “That’s depriving a politician of the oxygen that helps keep a political institution alive and kicking.”
Zimbabwe Blocks Opposition’s Rallies and Again Detains Its Leader
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — With only three weeks to go before Zimbabwe’s presidential runoff, the police briefly detained the opposition’s standard-bearer, Morgan Tsvangirai, on Friday for the second time this week and directed his party to cancel political rallies, effectively preventing him from addressing voters.
At the same time, the Zimbabwean government’s requirement that all nongovernmental organizations suspend their aid operations, which grew out of the authorities’ allegations that some were supporting the opposition, was condemned Friday by officials in the United States and Europe, as well as the United Nations.
Relief agencies said the order, issued this week, would deprive millions of desperately poor Zimbabweans of food aid and other basic assistance. Unicef, for example, depends on 25 nongovernmental organizations to provide education, health care and food to 185,000 orphans in Zimbabwe.
“It’s a horrible situation,” said James Elder, Unicef’s spokesman in Zimbabwe. “The children and their families continue to find stoic means of surviving, but this is a profoundly disturbing blow to them. We can’t reach these children today.”
Similarly, the World Food Program said on Friday that the prohibition on aid operations would prevent “314,000 of the most vulnerable people in the country” — the elderly, the disabled, schoolchildren, tuberculosis patients and “H.I.V.-positive bedridden” people — from receiving food this month.
World Vision, another large relief agency, said it had planned to feed about 400,000 people in Zimbabwe in June and was particularly concerned about the welfare of the 1.3 million children under 5 who had been orphaned by AIDS.
President Robert Mugabe has led Zimbabwe, which has a population of about 13 million, for almost three decades. In the past few years, the country’s economy has gone into free fall, with more than four in five people unemployed and prices of food staples sent into the stratosphere by hyperinflation. The space for peaceful political protest keeps shrinking, according to officials of Mr. Tsvangirai’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change.
The party said it had received a written notice from the police that rallies it had planned in impoverished townships of the capital, Harare, would have to be canceled because the safety of party leaders could not be guaranteed — a seemingly paradoxical rationale, given that the police had confiscated Mr. Tsvangirai’s armored vehicle on Wednesday.
The government’s decision to block rallies is a blow to Mr. Tsvangirai, a charismatic figure who drew large, enthusiastic crowds before the March election.
He has survived three assassination attempts and was severely beaten by the police in March 2007. In the voting 10 weeks ago, he finished first, but according to official returns he did not have the majority he needed to avoid a runoff election against Mr. Mugabe.
Mr. Tsvangirai left the country not long after that election, fearing another assassination attempt. He returned to Zimbabwe two weeks ago, but he has since been unable to campaign freely for the June 27 runoff vote.
Opposition officials said Mr. Tsvangirai was detained on Wednesday for nine hours and again on Friday for two hours. He was stopped at a roadblock on his way to a rally not far from Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, and sent to a police station for questioning.
A police spokesman, Wayne Bvudzijena, blamed the opposition for Mr. Tsvangirai’s most recent detention, alleging that the candidate’s convoy crashed through a roadblock, according to Reuters.
Zimbabwean police officers and soldiers detained a contingent of American diplomats for five hours on Thursday at a roadblock, slashing the tires of their vehicle after a six-mile chase. The diplomats had been investigating state-sponsored violence against the opposition. The Bush administration has expressed outrage at the police action. The State Department said it would seek a discussion by the United Nations Security Council of the mistreatment of its diplomats.
The Zimbabwean authorities have been aggressively using the state’s power to detain and arrest many of those whom they regard as a threat to the governing party’s hold on power. They have also been forcefully exerting the state’s monopolistic control over television, radio and the nation’s only daily newspaper.
This week, eight employees of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation were sent on leave for two months — a step that the Media Institute of Southern Africa said “can reasonably be perceived as the deliberate purging of journalists at the state broadcaster for the purposes of partisan political expediency.”
The state news media’s coverage of Mr. Tsvangirai, a former trade union leader who has led the opposition for almost a decade, is deeply hostile. He is typically depicted as a coward, a fool and a stooge of Britain, the former colonial power. Zimbabweans have a powerful informal grapevine, spurred by the technology of the text message, but rallies were Mr. Tsvangirai’s principal means of communicating directly with voters.
To tell a man like Mr. Tsvangirai he cannot speak at rallies is “like telling a pastor not to read the Bible,” said an opposition spokesman, Nelson Chamisa, who added, “That’s depriving a politician of the oxygen that helps keep a political institution alive and kicking.”
June 8, 2008
Albinos, Long Shunned, Face Threat in Tanzania
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — Samuel Mluge steps outside his office and scans the sidewalk. His pale blue eyes dart back and forth, back and forth, trying to focus.
The sun used to be his main enemy, but now he has others.
Mr. Mluge is an albino, and in Tanzania now there is a price for his pinkish skin.
“I feel like I am being hunted,” he said.
Discrimination against albinos is a serious problem throughout sub-Saharan Africa, but recently in Tanzania it has taken a wicked twist: at least 19 albinos, including children, have been killed and mutilated in the past year, victims of what Tanzanian officials say is a growing criminal trade in albino body parts.
Many people in Tanzania — and across Africa, for that matter — believe albinos have magical powers. They stand out, often the lone white face in a black crowd, a result of a genetic condition that impairs normal skin pigmentation and strikes about 1 in 3,000 people here. Tanzanian officials say witch doctors are now marketing albino skin, bones and hair as ingredients in potions that are promised to make people rich.
As the threats have increased, the Tanzanian government has mobilized to protect its albino population, an already beleaguered group whose members are often shunned as outcasts and die of skin cancer before they reach 30.
Police officers are drawing up lists of albinos in every corner of the country to better look after them. Officers are escorting albino children to school. Tanzania’s president even sponsored an albino woman for a seat in Parliament to show that “we are with them in this,” said Salvator Rweyemamu, a Tanzanian government spokesman.
Mr. Rweyemamu said the rash of killings was anathema to what Tanzania had been striving toward; after years of failed socialist economic policies, the country is finally getting development, investment and change.
“This is serious because it continues some of the perceptions of Africa we’re trying to run away from,” he said.
But the killings go on. They have even spread to neighboring Kenya, where an albino woman was hacked to death in late May, with her eyes, tongue and breasts gouged out. Advocates for albinos have also said that witch doctors are selling albino skin in Congo.
The young are often the targets. In early May, Vumilia Makoye, 17, was eating dinner with her family in their hut in western Tanzania when two men showed up with long knives.
Vumilia was like many other Africans with albinism. She had dropped out of school because of severe near-sightedness, a common problem for albinos, whose eyes develop abnormally and who often have to hold things like books or cellphones two inches away to see them. She could not find a job because no one would hire her. She sold peanuts in the market, making $2 a week while her delicate skin was seared by the sun.
When Vumilia’s mother, Jeme, saw the men with knives, she tried to barricade the door of their hut. But the men overpowered her and burst in.
“They cut my daughter quickly,” she said, making hacking motions with her hands.
The men sawed off Vumilia’s legs above the knee and ran away with the stumps. Vumilia died.
Yusuph Malogo, who lives nearby, fears he may be next. He is also an albino and works by himself on a rice farm. He now carries a loud, silver whistle to blow for help.
“I’m on the run,” he said.
He is 26, but his skin is thick and leathery from sun damage, making him look 20 years older.
Many albinos in Tanzania are turning to the Tanzanian Albino Society for help. But the nonprofit advocacy group operates on less than $15,000 a year. That’s not enough for the sunscreen, hats and protective clothing that could save lives.
Mr. Mluge, 49, is the society’s general secretary. He grew up with children pelting him with chalk in class. He said he had learned to live with being constantly teased, pinched and laughed at.
“But we have never feared like we do today,” he said.
Al-Shaymaa J. Kwegyir, Tanzania’s new albino member of Parliament, said, “People think we’re lucky. That’s why they’re killing us. But we’re not lucky.”
She said it was a curse to be born in equatorial Africa, where the sun is unsparing, with little or no protective skin pigment. Albinism rates vary throughout the world; about 1 person in 20,000 is an albino in the United States.
It is no accident that the Tanzania Albino Society’s office is on the grounds of a cancer hospital. Many of its members are sick.
The smell of the wards is overpowering, a nose-stinging mix of burn salves and rotting flesh. Many of the albino patients are covered with scabs, sores, welts and burns.
One patient, Nasolo Kambi, sat on his bed, recovering from a recent round of chemotherapy for skin cancer. His arms were splattered with dark brown splotches, like ink stains on white paper.
“People say we can’t die,” he said, referring to a superstition that albinos simply vanish when they get older. “But we can.”
Police officials said the albino killings were worst in rural areas, where people tend to be less educated and more superstitious. They said that some fishermen even wove albino hairs in their nets because they believed they would catch more fish.
On the shores of Lake Victoria, in northern Tanzania, albinos are a touchy subject. When asked if they used albino hairs in their nets, a group of fishermen just stared at the sand.
One traditional healer, a young man in a striped shirt who looked more like a college student than a witch doctor, said: “Yeah, I’ve heard of it. But that’s not real witchcraft. It’s the work of con men.”
Police officials are at a loss to explain precisely why there is a wave of albino killings now. Commissioner Paul Chagonja said an influx of Nigerian movies, which play up witchcraft, might have something to do with it, along with rising food prices that were making people more desperate.
“These witch doctors have many strange beliefs,” he said. “There was a rumor not so long ago that if you use a bald head when fishing, you’ll get rich. There was another one that said if you spread blood on the ground in a mine, you’ll find gold. These rumors come and go. The problem is, the people who follow witch doctors don’t question them.”
Mr. Mluge said whispers swirled around him whenever he walked down the sidewalk.
“I hear people saying, ‘It’s a deal, it’s a deal. Let’s get him and make some money,’ ” he said.
At home, at least, he is not an oddity. His wife is an albino. So are all five of his children. Some have already had skin cancer, in their teens.
The night used to be theirs, a time when Mr. Mluge and his fair-skinned sons and daughters could stroll outside together without worrying about the sun.
Now they bolt themselves in, peering through bars.
Just two weeks ago, while Mr. Mluge’s children were sleeping, a car pulled up to their house and four men got out to look around.
“I’m worried,” he said. “They know we are here.”
Mr. Mluge said he tried to read the license plate. But he couldn’t make out the numbers, and the car drove off.
Albinos, Long Shunned, Face Threat in Tanzania
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — Samuel Mluge steps outside his office and scans the sidewalk. His pale blue eyes dart back and forth, back and forth, trying to focus.
The sun used to be his main enemy, but now he has others.
Mr. Mluge is an albino, and in Tanzania now there is a price for his pinkish skin.
“I feel like I am being hunted,” he said.
Discrimination against albinos is a serious problem throughout sub-Saharan Africa, but recently in Tanzania it has taken a wicked twist: at least 19 albinos, including children, have been killed and mutilated in the past year, victims of what Tanzanian officials say is a growing criminal trade in albino body parts.
Many people in Tanzania — and across Africa, for that matter — believe albinos have magical powers. They stand out, often the lone white face in a black crowd, a result of a genetic condition that impairs normal skin pigmentation and strikes about 1 in 3,000 people here. Tanzanian officials say witch doctors are now marketing albino skin, bones and hair as ingredients in potions that are promised to make people rich.
As the threats have increased, the Tanzanian government has mobilized to protect its albino population, an already beleaguered group whose members are often shunned as outcasts and die of skin cancer before they reach 30.
Police officers are drawing up lists of albinos in every corner of the country to better look after them. Officers are escorting albino children to school. Tanzania’s president even sponsored an albino woman for a seat in Parliament to show that “we are with them in this,” said Salvator Rweyemamu, a Tanzanian government spokesman.
Mr. Rweyemamu said the rash of killings was anathema to what Tanzania had been striving toward; after years of failed socialist economic policies, the country is finally getting development, investment and change.
“This is serious because it continues some of the perceptions of Africa we’re trying to run away from,” he said.
But the killings go on. They have even spread to neighboring Kenya, where an albino woman was hacked to death in late May, with her eyes, tongue and breasts gouged out. Advocates for albinos have also said that witch doctors are selling albino skin in Congo.
The young are often the targets. In early May, Vumilia Makoye, 17, was eating dinner with her family in their hut in western Tanzania when two men showed up with long knives.
Vumilia was like many other Africans with albinism. She had dropped out of school because of severe near-sightedness, a common problem for albinos, whose eyes develop abnormally and who often have to hold things like books or cellphones two inches away to see them. She could not find a job because no one would hire her. She sold peanuts in the market, making $2 a week while her delicate skin was seared by the sun.
When Vumilia’s mother, Jeme, saw the men with knives, she tried to barricade the door of their hut. But the men overpowered her and burst in.
“They cut my daughter quickly,” she said, making hacking motions with her hands.
The men sawed off Vumilia’s legs above the knee and ran away with the stumps. Vumilia died.
Yusuph Malogo, who lives nearby, fears he may be next. He is also an albino and works by himself on a rice farm. He now carries a loud, silver whistle to blow for help.
“I’m on the run,” he said.
He is 26, but his skin is thick and leathery from sun damage, making him look 20 years older.
Many albinos in Tanzania are turning to the Tanzanian Albino Society for help. But the nonprofit advocacy group operates on less than $15,000 a year. That’s not enough for the sunscreen, hats and protective clothing that could save lives.
Mr. Mluge, 49, is the society’s general secretary. He grew up with children pelting him with chalk in class. He said he had learned to live with being constantly teased, pinched and laughed at.
“But we have never feared like we do today,” he said.
Al-Shaymaa J. Kwegyir, Tanzania’s new albino member of Parliament, said, “People think we’re lucky. That’s why they’re killing us. But we’re not lucky.”
She said it was a curse to be born in equatorial Africa, where the sun is unsparing, with little or no protective skin pigment. Albinism rates vary throughout the world; about 1 person in 20,000 is an albino in the United States.
It is no accident that the Tanzania Albino Society’s office is on the grounds of a cancer hospital. Many of its members are sick.
The smell of the wards is overpowering, a nose-stinging mix of burn salves and rotting flesh. Many of the albino patients are covered with scabs, sores, welts and burns.
One patient, Nasolo Kambi, sat on his bed, recovering from a recent round of chemotherapy for skin cancer. His arms were splattered with dark brown splotches, like ink stains on white paper.
“People say we can’t die,” he said, referring to a superstition that albinos simply vanish when they get older. “But we can.”
Police officials said the albino killings were worst in rural areas, where people tend to be less educated and more superstitious. They said that some fishermen even wove albino hairs in their nets because they believed they would catch more fish.
On the shores of Lake Victoria, in northern Tanzania, albinos are a touchy subject. When asked if they used albino hairs in their nets, a group of fishermen just stared at the sand.
One traditional healer, a young man in a striped shirt who looked more like a college student than a witch doctor, said: “Yeah, I’ve heard of it. But that’s not real witchcraft. It’s the work of con men.”
Police officials are at a loss to explain precisely why there is a wave of albino killings now. Commissioner Paul Chagonja said an influx of Nigerian movies, which play up witchcraft, might have something to do with it, along with rising food prices that were making people more desperate.
“These witch doctors have many strange beliefs,” he said. “There was a rumor not so long ago that if you use a bald head when fishing, you’ll get rich. There was another one that said if you spread blood on the ground in a mine, you’ll find gold. These rumors come and go. The problem is, the people who follow witch doctors don’t question them.”
Mr. Mluge said whispers swirled around him whenever he walked down the sidewalk.
“I hear people saying, ‘It’s a deal, it’s a deal. Let’s get him and make some money,’ ” he said.
At home, at least, he is not an oddity. His wife is an albino. So are all five of his children. Some have already had skin cancer, in their teens.
The night used to be theirs, a time when Mr. Mluge and his fair-skinned sons and daughters could stroll outside together without worrying about the sun.
Now they bolt themselves in, peering through bars.
Just two weeks ago, while Mr. Mluge’s children were sleeping, a car pulled up to their house and four men got out to look around.
“I’m worried,” he said. “They know we are here.”
Mr. Mluge said he tried to read the license plate. But he couldn’t make out the numbers, and the car drove off.
June 9, 2008
Lost Letter Raises Questions About Mbeki’s Role in Zimbabwe
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — The curious case of the mysterious letter from Zimbabwe’s opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, to South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, got a new chapter this weekend that raised yet more questions about Mr. Mbeki’s credibility as the regional mediator in Zimbabwe’s increasingly tumultuous political crisis.
News of Mr. Tsvangirai’s impassioned, four-page missive broke a week ago in South African newspapers. In the May 13 letter, marked “privileged, private and confidential,” Mr. Tsvangirai, a former trade union leader, maintained that Mr. Mbeki had favored Zimbabwe’s aging strongman, President Robert Mugabe, and that he should step aside as the sole mediator.
Mr. Tsvangirai, now campaigning for a June 27 runoff election with Mr. Mugabe, recounted his shock at seeing Mr. Mbeki on television on April 12 holding hands with Mr. Mugabe in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, and saying there was no crisis. That day, regional heads of state were meeting in Lusaka, Zambia, to confront Zimbabwe’s crisis, set off by the government’s extraordinary delay in releasing the results of the March presidential election.
“In fact, since the 29 March election, Zimbabwe has plunged into horrendous violence while you have been mediating,” Mr. Tsvangirai wrote. “With respect, if we continue like this, there will be no country left.”
Then last week, the story of the letter to Mr. Mbeki — who had been designated by the Southern African Development Community, a regional bloc of nations, to mediate the political conflict in Zimbabwe — took a strange turn.
Frank Chikane, director general of Mr. Mbeki’s office, held a news conference on Wednesday in which he denied not only that the president had received the letter, but that it even existed, according to the South African Press Association. And in a statement, Mr. Mbeki’s office accused the news media of printing a fabrication and being taken in by a disinformation campaign.
“Regarding these reports, the presidency reiterates that President Thabo Mbeki has not received any such letter from Mr. Tsvangirai,” the statement said.
The statement also took the news media to task for asking about rumors that many South Africans were struggling to understand Mr. Mbeki’s silence since the election as dozens of opposition supporters in Zimbabwe were killed and hundreds brutally beaten.
The rumors “include claims that either President Mbeki or Mrs. Zanele Mbeki are supposed to be blood relatives of Mrs. Grace Mugabe,” Mr. Mugabe’s wife, the statement noted in a tone of disbelief.
Trying to understand Mr. Mbeki is a favorite parlor game here in Johannesburg. Its latest iterations include wondering why he never visited South Africa’s impoverished townships as they exploded with xenophobic violence last month.
Asked this question on Sunday, Mr. Mbeki’s spokesman, Mukoni Ratshitanga, replied that the government had responded appropriately. “Government is a collective,” he said. “It’s not an individual.” Then his phone buzzed with another call that he said was very important and he signed off.
Another persistent question is why Mr. Mbeki has stuck to his “quiet diplomacy” with Mr. Mugabe as Zimbabwe’s economy has sunk ever deeper into ruin and sent millions of despairing Zimbabweans pouring into South Africa.
Does he have a soft spot for the 84-year-old Mr. Mugabe because he led a liberation movement against white rule that resonates in South Africa? Does he dislike Mr. Tsvangirai?
Mr. Tsvangirai, when interviewed in mid-May, seemed to lean toward the theory that the nations’ shared liberation history was the cause.
Asked if Mr. Mbeki liked him, he laughed heartily and said, “If he had his choice of who would be the president of Zimbabwe, I think he would not jump up and say, hallelujah, Morgan Tsvangirai is the president of Zimbabwe!”
Mr. Tsvangirai said Mr. Mbeki seemed to think Zimbabwe could solve its own political problems.
“He said Zimbabweans must solve their own problems,” Mr. Tsvangirai said. “Zimbabweans went on the 29th and voted! How else do you want Zimbabweans to solve their problems?”
On Wednesday, Mr. Tsvangirai was detained for nine hours on his way to a political rally in Zimbabwe. The next day, Mr. Mbeki’s office said he had called the authorities in Zimbabwe on Mr. Tsvangirai’s behalf.
“President Mbeki appeals for calmness and proportionate use of language, the better to manage tensions generally associated with election campaigns in many parts of the world,” the statement from Mr. Mbeki’s office said.
It maintained an evenhanded tone that drives the opposition in Zimbabwe to distraction, particularly since civic and human rights groups insist that the political violence there is carried out overwhelmingly by Mr. Mugabe’s agents.
South Africa’s opposition leader, Helen Zille, denounced Mr. Mbeki in an open letter on Friday. “By appeasing Mugabe and endorsing every fundamentally flawed election in Zimbabwe,” she wrote, “you are complicit in the tyranny that has befallen that country.”
Finally on Saturday, Zimbabwe’s opposition party issued a statement saying that, indeed, it had sent Mr. Tsvangirai’s letter to Mr. Mbeki and promising to send him a fresh copy.
George Sibotshiwe, Mr. Tsvangirai’s spokesman, said the original letter had been sent by courier while Mr. Tsvangirai was in South Africa. “I’ve made sure,” he said. “I’ve confirmed that the letter was delivered to them.”
Lost Letter Raises Questions About Mbeki’s Role in Zimbabwe
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — The curious case of the mysterious letter from Zimbabwe’s opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, to South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, got a new chapter this weekend that raised yet more questions about Mr. Mbeki’s credibility as the regional mediator in Zimbabwe’s increasingly tumultuous political crisis.
News of Mr. Tsvangirai’s impassioned, four-page missive broke a week ago in South African newspapers. In the May 13 letter, marked “privileged, private and confidential,” Mr. Tsvangirai, a former trade union leader, maintained that Mr. Mbeki had favored Zimbabwe’s aging strongman, President Robert Mugabe, and that he should step aside as the sole mediator.
Mr. Tsvangirai, now campaigning for a June 27 runoff election with Mr. Mugabe, recounted his shock at seeing Mr. Mbeki on television on April 12 holding hands with Mr. Mugabe in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, and saying there was no crisis. That day, regional heads of state were meeting in Lusaka, Zambia, to confront Zimbabwe’s crisis, set off by the government’s extraordinary delay in releasing the results of the March presidential election.
“In fact, since the 29 March election, Zimbabwe has plunged into horrendous violence while you have been mediating,” Mr. Tsvangirai wrote. “With respect, if we continue like this, there will be no country left.”
Then last week, the story of the letter to Mr. Mbeki — who had been designated by the Southern African Development Community, a regional bloc of nations, to mediate the political conflict in Zimbabwe — took a strange turn.
Frank Chikane, director general of Mr. Mbeki’s office, held a news conference on Wednesday in which he denied not only that the president had received the letter, but that it even existed, according to the South African Press Association. And in a statement, Mr. Mbeki’s office accused the news media of printing a fabrication and being taken in by a disinformation campaign.
“Regarding these reports, the presidency reiterates that President Thabo Mbeki has not received any such letter from Mr. Tsvangirai,” the statement said.
The statement also took the news media to task for asking about rumors that many South Africans were struggling to understand Mr. Mbeki’s silence since the election as dozens of opposition supporters in Zimbabwe were killed and hundreds brutally beaten.
The rumors “include claims that either President Mbeki or Mrs. Zanele Mbeki are supposed to be blood relatives of Mrs. Grace Mugabe,” Mr. Mugabe’s wife, the statement noted in a tone of disbelief.
Trying to understand Mr. Mbeki is a favorite parlor game here in Johannesburg. Its latest iterations include wondering why he never visited South Africa’s impoverished townships as they exploded with xenophobic violence last month.
Asked this question on Sunday, Mr. Mbeki’s spokesman, Mukoni Ratshitanga, replied that the government had responded appropriately. “Government is a collective,” he said. “It’s not an individual.” Then his phone buzzed with another call that he said was very important and he signed off.
Another persistent question is why Mr. Mbeki has stuck to his “quiet diplomacy” with Mr. Mugabe as Zimbabwe’s economy has sunk ever deeper into ruin and sent millions of despairing Zimbabweans pouring into South Africa.
Does he have a soft spot for the 84-year-old Mr. Mugabe because he led a liberation movement against white rule that resonates in South Africa? Does he dislike Mr. Tsvangirai?
Mr. Tsvangirai, when interviewed in mid-May, seemed to lean toward the theory that the nations’ shared liberation history was the cause.
Asked if Mr. Mbeki liked him, he laughed heartily and said, “If he had his choice of who would be the president of Zimbabwe, I think he would not jump up and say, hallelujah, Morgan Tsvangirai is the president of Zimbabwe!”
Mr. Tsvangirai said Mr. Mbeki seemed to think Zimbabwe could solve its own political problems.
“He said Zimbabweans must solve their own problems,” Mr. Tsvangirai said. “Zimbabweans went on the 29th and voted! How else do you want Zimbabweans to solve their problems?”
On Wednesday, Mr. Tsvangirai was detained for nine hours on his way to a political rally in Zimbabwe. The next day, Mr. Mbeki’s office said he had called the authorities in Zimbabwe on Mr. Tsvangirai’s behalf.
“President Mbeki appeals for calmness and proportionate use of language, the better to manage tensions generally associated with election campaigns in many parts of the world,” the statement from Mr. Mbeki’s office said.
It maintained an evenhanded tone that drives the opposition in Zimbabwe to distraction, particularly since civic and human rights groups insist that the political violence there is carried out overwhelmingly by Mr. Mugabe’s agents.
South Africa’s opposition leader, Helen Zille, denounced Mr. Mbeki in an open letter on Friday. “By appeasing Mugabe and endorsing every fundamentally flawed election in Zimbabwe,” she wrote, “you are complicit in the tyranny that has befallen that country.”
Finally on Saturday, Zimbabwe’s opposition party issued a statement saying that, indeed, it had sent Mr. Tsvangirai’s letter to Mr. Mbeki and promising to send him a fresh copy.
George Sibotshiwe, Mr. Tsvangirai’s spokesman, said the original letter had been sent by courier while Mr. Tsvangirai was in South Africa. “I’ve made sure,” he said. “I’ve confirmed that the letter was delivered to them.”
June 13, 2008
Zimbabwe Detains Opposition Leaders
By CELIA W. DUGGER and ALAN COWELL
JOHANNESBURG — The standard-bearer for Zimbabwe’s opposition was twice detained by the police on Thursday, and one of his most important deputies was arrested to face treason charges. The events underscored the daunting obstacles to campaigning against President Robert Mugabe in the two weeks before a presidential runoff.
The opposition presidential candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, who was detained twice last week, was held up by the police twice more on Thursday in what was supposed to have been a day of rallies and campaigning, his party said.
The arrest of the deputy, Tendai Biti, was even more chilling for the party, the Movement for Democratic Change. Mr. Biti, the party’s secretary general, was swiftly apprehended at Harare’s airport on Thursday as he returned from South Africa after a self-imposed absence of two months. He will be charged with treason, a police spokesman said.
Even before his passport could be stamped, “10 men in plain clothes whisked him away,” his party said. “His whereabouts are unknown.”
Senior officials in Mr. Mugabe’s governing party, in power for 28 years, have accused Mr. Biti, a lawyer who is often the opposition’s public face, of violating the law by announcing the outcome of the initial round of voting in March before the official results were released.
They also alleged that Mr. Biti wrote a paper shortly before the disputed March election laying out the opposition’s strategy for a transition to power and efforts to bribe poll officers “so that they exploit any available opportunity to overstate our votes,” according to a quotation from the document published in the state-owned newspaper, The Herald, in April.
The opposition has dismissed the document as a forgery. Others have also found it implausible that Mr. Biti, a successful lawyer, would have written something so blatantly self-incriminating.
Jonathan Moyo, formerly information minister and member of the governing party’s Politburo and now an independent member of Parliament, said the signature on the document did not look like Mr. Biti’s. “If he authored it, he’s a very stupid fellow,” Mr. Moyo said, adding, “We can accuse him of many things, including political naïveté, but stupidity as a lawyer isn’t one of them.”
The police spokesman, Wayne Bvudzijena, said Mr. Biti was in police custody in Harare. He said Mr. Biti was charged with “falsely indicating” that Mr. Tsvangirai had won the initial election on March 29 before the official results were released. Election officials announced them after a delay of more than a month.
Mr. Biti will be charged with treason, Mr. Bvudzijena said, because of statements made in the document on the party’s transition plans. If found guilty, Mr. Biti could face death by hanging.
Later on Thursday, Mr. Tsvangirai was detained along with an entourage of 20 people at a roadblock near the central town of Kwekwe while they were campaigning, his party said. He was held at the police station in Kwekwe, released after two hours, but later detained again while driving into Gweru, the next stop on his campaign, the Movement for Democratic Change said in a statement. He was released a second time without being charged, a party spokesman told Reuters.
Mr. Bvudzijena, the police spokesman, dismissed as “mischievous” the opposition’s claim that Mr. Tsvangirai had been detained.
“He should expect just like any other citizen to be stopped at a roadblock, which have been there for time immemorial, and they don’t amount to detention,” he said.
Since Mr. Tsvangirai returned to campaign in Zimbabwe, his party’s rallies have frequently been canceled by the authorities, and party officials say Mr. Mugabe appears determined to hang onto power through violence, intimidation and obstruction of a functioning democracy.
In a statement of concern about Mr. Biti’s apprehension, the White House said the actions of Mr. Mugabe’s government, including its “unwarranted arrests of opposition figures,” showed he had ignored calls from southern Africa and international pressure to allow a free and fair election.
Celia W. Dugger reported from Johannesburg, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Graham Bowley contributed reporting from New York.
Celia W. Dugger reported from Johannesburg, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Graham Bowley contributed reporting from New York.
Zimbabwe Detains Opposition Leaders
By CELIA W. DUGGER and ALAN COWELL
JOHANNESBURG — The standard-bearer for Zimbabwe’s opposition was twice detained by the police on Thursday, and one of his most important deputies was arrested to face treason charges. The events underscored the daunting obstacles to campaigning against President Robert Mugabe in the two weeks before a presidential runoff.
The opposition presidential candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, who was detained twice last week, was held up by the police twice more on Thursday in what was supposed to have been a day of rallies and campaigning, his party said.
The arrest of the deputy, Tendai Biti, was even more chilling for the party, the Movement for Democratic Change. Mr. Biti, the party’s secretary general, was swiftly apprehended at Harare’s airport on Thursday as he returned from South Africa after a self-imposed absence of two months. He will be charged with treason, a police spokesman said.
Even before his passport could be stamped, “10 men in plain clothes whisked him away,” his party said. “His whereabouts are unknown.”
Senior officials in Mr. Mugabe’s governing party, in power for 28 years, have accused Mr. Biti, a lawyer who is often the opposition’s public face, of violating the law by announcing the outcome of the initial round of voting in March before the official results were released.
They also alleged that Mr. Biti wrote a paper shortly before the disputed March election laying out the opposition’s strategy for a transition to power and efforts to bribe poll officers “so that they exploit any available opportunity to overstate our votes,” according to a quotation from the document published in the state-owned newspaper, The Herald, in April.
The opposition has dismissed the document as a forgery. Others have also found it implausible that Mr. Biti, a successful lawyer, would have written something so blatantly self-incriminating.
Jonathan Moyo, formerly information minister and member of the governing party’s Politburo and now an independent member of Parliament, said the signature on the document did not look like Mr. Biti’s. “If he authored it, he’s a very stupid fellow,” Mr. Moyo said, adding, “We can accuse him of many things, including political naïveté, but stupidity as a lawyer isn’t one of them.”
The police spokesman, Wayne Bvudzijena, said Mr. Biti was in police custody in Harare. He said Mr. Biti was charged with “falsely indicating” that Mr. Tsvangirai had won the initial election on March 29 before the official results were released. Election officials announced them after a delay of more than a month.
Mr. Biti will be charged with treason, Mr. Bvudzijena said, because of statements made in the document on the party’s transition plans. If found guilty, Mr. Biti could face death by hanging.
Later on Thursday, Mr. Tsvangirai was detained along with an entourage of 20 people at a roadblock near the central town of Kwekwe while they were campaigning, his party said. He was held at the police station in Kwekwe, released after two hours, but later detained again while driving into Gweru, the next stop on his campaign, the Movement for Democratic Change said in a statement. He was released a second time without being charged, a party spokesman told Reuters.
Mr. Bvudzijena, the police spokesman, dismissed as “mischievous” the opposition’s claim that Mr. Tsvangirai had been detained.
“He should expect just like any other citizen to be stopped at a roadblock, which have been there for time immemorial, and they don’t amount to detention,” he said.
Since Mr. Tsvangirai returned to campaign in Zimbabwe, his party’s rallies have frequently been canceled by the authorities, and party officials say Mr. Mugabe appears determined to hang onto power through violence, intimidation and obstruction of a functioning democracy.
In a statement of concern about Mr. Biti’s apprehension, the White House said the actions of Mr. Mugabe’s government, including its “unwarranted arrests of opposition figures,” showed he had ignored calls from southern Africa and international pressure to allow a free and fair election.
Celia W. Dugger reported from Johannesburg, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Graham Bowley contributed reporting from New York.
Celia W. Dugger reported from Johannesburg, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Graham Bowley contributed reporting from New York.
June 15, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The Weapon of Rape
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
World leaders fight terrorism all the time, with summit meetings and sound bites and security initiatives. But they have studiously ignored one of the most common and brutal varieties of terrorism in the world today.
This is a kind of terrorism that disproportionately targets children. It involves not W.M.D. but simply AK-47s, machetes and pointed sticks. It is mass rape — and it will be elevated, belatedly, to a spot on the international agenda this week.
The United Nations Security Council will hold a special session on sexual violence this Thursday, with Condoleezza Rice coming to New York to lead the debate. This session, sponsored by the United States and backed by a Security Council resolution calling for regular follow-up reports, just may help mass rape graduate from an unmentionable to a serious foreign policy issue.
The world woke up to this phenomenon in 1993, after discovering that Serbian forces had set up a network of “rape camps” in which women and girls, some as young as 12, were enslaved. Since then, we’ve seen similar patterns of systematic rape in many countries, and it has become clear that mass rape is not just a byproduct of war but also sometimes a deliberate weapon.
“Rape in war has been going on since time immemorial,” said Stephen Lewis, a former Canadian ambassador who was the U.N.’s envoy for AIDS in Africa. “But it has taken a new twist as commanders have used it as a strategy of war.”
There are two reasons for this. First, mass rape is very effective militarily. From the viewpoint of a militia, getting into a firefight is risky, so it’s preferable to terrorize civilians sympathetic to a rival group and drive them away, depriving the rivals of support.
Second, mass rape attracts less international scrutiny than piles of bodies do, because the issue is indelicate and the victims are usually too ashamed to speak up.
In Sudan, the government has turned all of Darfur into a rape camp. The first person to alert me to this was a woman named Zahra Abdelkarim, who had been kidnapped, gang-raped, mutilated — slashed with a sword on her leg — and then left naked and bleeding to wander back to her Zaghawa tribe. In effect, she had become a message to her people: Flee, or else.
Since then, this practice of “marking” the Darfur rape victims has become widespread: typically, the women are scarred or branded, or occasionally have their ears cut off. This is often done by police officers or soldiers, in uniform, as part of a coordinated government policy.
When the governments of South Africa, China, Libya and Indonesia support Sudan’s positions in Darfur, do they really mean to adopt a pro-rape foreign policy?
The rape capital of the world is eastern Congo, where in some areas three-quarters of women have been raped. Sometimes the rapes are conducted with pointed sticks that leave the victims incontinent from internal injuries, and a former U.N. force commander there, Patrick Cammaert, says it is “more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier.”
The international community’s response so far? Approximately: “Not our problem.”
Yet such rapes also complicate post-conflict recovery, with sexual violence lingering even after peace has been restored. In Liberia, the civil war is over but rape is still epidemic — and half of all reported rapes involve girls younger than 14.
Painfully slowly, the United Nations and its member states seem to be recognizing the fact that systematic mass rape is at least as much an international outrage as, say, pirated DVDs. Yet China and Russia are resisting any new reporting mechanism for sexual violence, seeing such rapes as tragic but simply a criminal matter.
On the contrary, systematic rape has properly been found by international tribunals to constitute a crime against humanity, and it thrives in part because the world shrugs. The U.N. could do far more to provide health services to victims of mass rape and to insist that peacekeepers at least try to stop it.
In Congo, the doctors at Heal Africa Hospital and Panzi Hospital (healafrica .org and panzihospitalbukavu.org) repair the internal injuries of rape victims with skill and humanity. But my most indelible memory from my most recent visit, last year, came as I was interviewing a young woman who had been gang-raped.
I had taken her aside to protect her privacy, but a large group of women suddenly approached. I tried to shoo them away, and then the women explained that they had all been gang-raped and had decided that despite the stigma and risk of reprisal, they would all tell their stories.
So let’s hope that this week the world’s leaders and diplomats stop offering excuses for paralysis and begin emulating the courageous outspokenness of those Congolese women.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.
Op-Ed Columnist
The Weapon of Rape
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
World leaders fight terrorism all the time, with summit meetings and sound bites and security initiatives. But they have studiously ignored one of the most common and brutal varieties of terrorism in the world today.
This is a kind of terrorism that disproportionately targets children. It involves not W.M.D. but simply AK-47s, machetes and pointed sticks. It is mass rape — and it will be elevated, belatedly, to a spot on the international agenda this week.
The United Nations Security Council will hold a special session on sexual violence this Thursday, with Condoleezza Rice coming to New York to lead the debate. This session, sponsored by the United States and backed by a Security Council resolution calling for regular follow-up reports, just may help mass rape graduate from an unmentionable to a serious foreign policy issue.
The world woke up to this phenomenon in 1993, after discovering that Serbian forces had set up a network of “rape camps” in which women and girls, some as young as 12, were enslaved. Since then, we’ve seen similar patterns of systematic rape in many countries, and it has become clear that mass rape is not just a byproduct of war but also sometimes a deliberate weapon.
“Rape in war has been going on since time immemorial,” said Stephen Lewis, a former Canadian ambassador who was the U.N.’s envoy for AIDS in Africa. “But it has taken a new twist as commanders have used it as a strategy of war.”
There are two reasons for this. First, mass rape is very effective militarily. From the viewpoint of a militia, getting into a firefight is risky, so it’s preferable to terrorize civilians sympathetic to a rival group and drive them away, depriving the rivals of support.
Second, mass rape attracts less international scrutiny than piles of bodies do, because the issue is indelicate and the victims are usually too ashamed to speak up.
In Sudan, the government has turned all of Darfur into a rape camp. The first person to alert me to this was a woman named Zahra Abdelkarim, who had been kidnapped, gang-raped, mutilated — slashed with a sword on her leg — and then left naked and bleeding to wander back to her Zaghawa tribe. In effect, she had become a message to her people: Flee, or else.
Since then, this practice of “marking” the Darfur rape victims has become widespread: typically, the women are scarred or branded, or occasionally have their ears cut off. This is often done by police officers or soldiers, in uniform, as part of a coordinated government policy.
When the governments of South Africa, China, Libya and Indonesia support Sudan’s positions in Darfur, do they really mean to adopt a pro-rape foreign policy?
The rape capital of the world is eastern Congo, where in some areas three-quarters of women have been raped. Sometimes the rapes are conducted with pointed sticks that leave the victims incontinent from internal injuries, and a former U.N. force commander there, Patrick Cammaert, says it is “more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier.”
The international community’s response so far? Approximately: “Not our problem.”
Yet such rapes also complicate post-conflict recovery, with sexual violence lingering even after peace has been restored. In Liberia, the civil war is over but rape is still epidemic — and half of all reported rapes involve girls younger than 14.
Painfully slowly, the United Nations and its member states seem to be recognizing the fact that systematic mass rape is at least as much an international outrage as, say, pirated DVDs. Yet China and Russia are resisting any new reporting mechanism for sexual violence, seeing such rapes as tragic but simply a criminal matter.
On the contrary, systematic rape has properly been found by international tribunals to constitute a crime against humanity, and it thrives in part because the world shrugs. The U.N. could do far more to provide health services to victims of mass rape and to insist that peacekeepers at least try to stop it.
In Congo, the doctors at Heal Africa Hospital and Panzi Hospital (healafrica .org and panzihospitalbukavu.org) repair the internal injuries of rape victims with skill and humanity. But my most indelible memory from my most recent visit, last year, came as I was interviewing a young woman who had been gang-raped.
I had taken her aside to protect her privacy, but a large group of women suddenly approached. I tried to shoo them away, and then the women explained that they had all been gang-raped and had decided that despite the stigma and risk of reprisal, they would all tell their stories.
So let’s hope that this week the world’s leaders and diplomats stop offering excuses for paralysis and begin emulating the courageous outspokenness of those Congolese women.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.
Zimbabwe president vows to keep power
'Only God who appointed me will remove me'
Canwest News Service
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe said Friday "only God" can remove him from office, in comments ahead of next week's tense run-off election.
"The MDC will never be allowed to rule this country -- never ever," Mugabe said in a meeting with local business people, referring to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.
"Only God who appointed me will remove me, not the MDC, not the British."
Mugabe has ruled since independence from Britain in 1980 and has frequently accused his presidential run-off opponent Morgan Tsvangirai of being a stooge of the former colonial power.
Later addressing a rally in Zimbabwe's second largest city of Bulawayo, Mugabe said: "We will never allow an event like an election reverse our independence, our sovereignty, our sweat and all that we fought for... all that our comrades died fighting for."
He threatened to "deal with business people who are part of the regime-change agenda after the elections."
Mugabe embarked on a chaotic land reform program at the turn of the decade which saw some 4,000 white-owned farms expropriated by the state.
He earlier warned in comments published in state media that he would not leave power until land was returned to the majority black population.
Critics put much of the blame for the country's economic crisis on Mugabe's land reform program. They argue that it saw some of the country's most productive farms handed to people with no previous farming experience.
Once seen as a potential regional breadbasket, Zimbabwe has an economy in freefall with the world's highest inflation rate and major food shortages.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
'Only God who appointed me will remove me'
Canwest News Service
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe said Friday "only God" can remove him from office, in comments ahead of next week's tense run-off election.
"The MDC will never be allowed to rule this country -- never ever," Mugabe said in a meeting with local business people, referring to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.
"Only God who appointed me will remove me, not the MDC, not the British."
Mugabe has ruled since independence from Britain in 1980 and has frequently accused his presidential run-off opponent Morgan Tsvangirai of being a stooge of the former colonial power.
Later addressing a rally in Zimbabwe's second largest city of Bulawayo, Mugabe said: "We will never allow an event like an election reverse our independence, our sovereignty, our sweat and all that we fought for... all that our comrades died fighting for."
He threatened to "deal with business people who are part of the regime-change agenda after the elections."
Mugabe embarked on a chaotic land reform program at the turn of the decade which saw some 4,000 white-owned farms expropriated by the state.
He earlier warned in comments published in state media that he would not leave power until land was returned to the majority black population.
Critics put much of the blame for the country's economic crisis on Mugabe's land reform program. They argue that it saw some of the country's most productive farms handed to people with no previous farming experience.
Once seen as a potential regional breadbasket, Zimbabwe has an economy in freefall with the world's highest inflation rate and major food shortages.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/world ... ?th&emc=th
June 22, 2008
Assassins in Zimbabwe Aim at the Grass Roots
By BARRY BEARAK and CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — Tonderai Ndira was a shrewd choice for assassination: young, courageous and admired. Kill him and fear would pulse through a thousand spines. He was an up-and-comer in Zimbabwe’s opposition party, a charismatic figure with a strong following in the Harare slums where he lived.
There were rumors his name was on a hit list. For weeks he prudently hid out, but his wife, Plaxedess, desperately pleaded with him to come home for a night. He slipped back to his family on May 12.
The five killers pushed through the door soon after dawn, as Mr. Ndira, 30, slept and his wife made porridge for their two children. He was wrenched from his bed, roughed up and stuffed into the back seat of a double-cab Toyota pickup. “They’re going to kill me,” he cried, Plaxedess said. As the children watched from the door, two men sat on his back, a gag was shoved in his mouth and his head was yanked upward, a technique of asphyxiation later presumed in a physician’s post mortem to be the cause of death.
Zimbabwe will have a presidential runoff election on Friday, an epochal choice between Robert Mugabe, the 84-year-old liberation hero who has run the nation for nearly three decades, and the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. But in the morbid and sinister weeks recently passed, the balloting has been preceded by a calculated campaign of bloodletting meant to intimidate the opposition and strip it of some of its most valuable foot soldiers.
Even as hundreds of election observers from neighboring countries were deployed across Zimbabwe in the past few days, the gruesome killings and beatings of opposition figures have continued.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/world ... ?th&emc=th
June 22, 2008
Assassins in Zimbabwe Aim at the Grass Roots
By BARRY BEARAK and CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — Tonderai Ndira was a shrewd choice for assassination: young, courageous and admired. Kill him and fear would pulse through a thousand spines. He was an up-and-comer in Zimbabwe’s opposition party, a charismatic figure with a strong following in the Harare slums where he lived.
There were rumors his name was on a hit list. For weeks he prudently hid out, but his wife, Plaxedess, desperately pleaded with him to come home for a night. He slipped back to his family on May 12.
The five killers pushed through the door soon after dawn, as Mr. Ndira, 30, slept and his wife made porridge for their two children. He was wrenched from his bed, roughed up and stuffed into the back seat of a double-cab Toyota pickup. “They’re going to kill me,” he cried, Plaxedess said. As the children watched from the door, two men sat on his back, a gag was shoved in his mouth and his head was yanked upward, a technique of asphyxiation later presumed in a physician’s post mortem to be the cause of death.
Zimbabwe will have a presidential runoff election on Friday, an epochal choice between Robert Mugabe, the 84-year-old liberation hero who has run the nation for nearly three decades, and the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. But in the morbid and sinister weeks recently passed, the balloting has been preceded by a calculated campaign of bloodletting meant to intimidate the opposition and strip it of some of its most valuable foot soldiers.
Even as hundreds of election observers from neighboring countries were deployed across Zimbabwe in the past few days, the gruesome killings and beatings of opposition figures have continued.
June 23, 2008
Mugabe Rival Quits Zimbabwe Runoff, Citing Attacks
By CELIA W. DUGGER and BARRY BEARAK
JOHANNESBURG — The leader of Zimbabwe’s opposition party withdrew Sunday from a presidential runoff, just five days before it was to be held, saying he could neither participate “in this violent, illegitimate sham of an election process,” nor ask his voters to risk their lives in the face of threats from forces backing President Robert Mugabe.
The opposition candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, the standard-bearer of the Movement for Democratic Change, said at a news conference in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, that his party was facing a war rather than an election, “and we will not be part of that war.”
A governing party militia blocked his supporters from attending a major rally in Harare on Sunday, the head of an election observer team said. The opposition said rowdy youths, armed with iron bars and sticks, beat up people who had come to cheer for Mr. Tsvangirai.
It was the latest incident in a tumultuous campaign season in which Mr. Tsvangirai has been repeatedly detained, his party’s chief strategist jailed on treason charges that many people consider bogus, and rampant state-sponsored violence has left at least 85 opposition supporters dead and thousands injured, according to tallies by doctors treating the victims.
Mr. Tsvangirai’s decision to quit the race seems intended to force Zimbabwe’s neighbors to take a stand. There are growing cracks in the solidarity that African heads of state have shown for Mr. Mugabe, an 84-year-old liberation hero whose defiant anti-Western rhetoric has long struck a resonant chord in a region with a bitter colonial history.
The United States and Britain are pressing to put Zimbabwe’s political crisis on the United Nations Security Council agenda on Monday, a step South Africa, the region’s most powerful nation, has consistently opposed.
Gordon D. Johndroe, the White House National Security Council spokesman, said in an e-mail message that the United States wants the United Nations to consider taking additional steps. “Mugabe cannot be allowed to repress the Zimbabwean people forever,” he said.
It remains to be seen whether southern Africa’s leaders will collectively censure Mr. Mugabe or take tougher steps, such as economic sanctions, to isolate his government. They have never done so before, despite elections in 2002 and 2005 that were widely believed to have been marked by rigging and fraud, but that his regional peers declared legitimate.
Marwick Khumalo, who heads the Pan-African Parliament’s observer team, which witnessed the aborted rally on Sunday, said it would be unfortunate if bodies representing African nations endorsed the current election. He said he had just returned from the Rusape District in Manicaland Province where the police chief told him six people, all from the opposition, had been killed.
“How can you have an election where people are killed and hacked to death as the sun goes down?” Mr. Khumalo asked. “How can you have an election where the leader of one party is not even allowed to conduct rallies?”
Nonetheless, Zimbabwe’s information minister, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, told The Associated Press that the runoff would go forward on Friday despite Mr. Tsvangirai’s departure from the race.
“The Constitution does not say that if somebody drops out or decides to chicken out the runoff will not be held,” Mr. Ndlovu said.
Mr. Tsvangirai notified the South African president, Thabo Mbeki, the regional mediator in Zimbabwe’s crisis, of his withdrawal, Mr. Mbeki’s spokesman, Mukoni Ratshitanga, said, adding that Mr. Mbeki was encouraged that the candidate “is not closing the door on negotiations completely.” Mr. Ratshitanga declined to comment on the legitimacy of the current election.
There may yet be more twists in this saga. Zambia’s president, Levy Mwanawasa, a Mugabe critic and the chairman of the Southern African Development Community, the bloc of 14 nations that chose Mr. Mbeki as mediator, suggested to reporters in Lusaka, Zambia, that the election should be postponed “to avert a catastrophe in the region.”
And Mr. Tsvangirai kept open the possibility that he might re-enter the race in the extremely unlikely event that the United Nations or the African Union stepped in to end the violence by Wednesday, when he intends to announce his party’s next steps.
Mr. Mugabe, in power for 28 years, has made it difficult for his fellow African heads of state to pretend there is anything normal about this election. He has repeatedly declared at public rallies in recent days that he would never allow Mr. Tsvangirai, whom he denounces as a pawn of Britain, the former colonial power in Zimbabwe, to become president through the ballot box, vowing that the bullet is mightier than the ballpoint pen.
“Only God, who appointed me, will remove me, not the M.D.C., not the British,” Mr. Mugabe declared in the city of Bulawayo on Friday. “Only God will remove me!”
Mr. Tsvangirai defeated Mr. Mugabe in a general election on March 29 by 48 percent to 43 percent, according to the government’s count. The opposition claimed it had won a majority outright and that no runoff was needed.
The Movement for Democratic Change has a history of agonizing about whether to participate in elections it presumed would be unfair, and there have long been deep divisions within the party about how to proceed. This year, Mr. Tsvangirai reluctantly entered the race, though he argued that Mr. Mbeki, the mediator, had failed to ensure conditions for a fair contest.
Mr. Tsvangirai said earlier this year that, at a minimum, the election would reveal the ugly face of Mr. Mugabe’s despotic and economically disastrous reign. The opposition then vacillated about participating in the June 27 runoff, but finally decided to do so.
Opposition party leaders assumed that the ferocious violence against its supporters would abate once election observers from across Africa arrived, making it possible for them to campaign openly and mobilize their poll workers. Instead, Mr. Khumalo, the head of the team of election observers, said, “As the election was gaining momentum, so was the violence.”
In a decision that will be likely to disappoint some of his supporters, especially those who have paid a terrible price for backing him, Mr. Tsvangirai apparently decided the level of violence had become intolerable.
The party also concluded that the systematic campaign to displace thousands of its poll workers had been so effective in the three vote-rich Mashonaland provinces, where Mr. Tsvangirai made strong inroads into Mr. Mugabe’s support, that they would be unable to staff the polling stations on election day, leaving them open to ballot-box stuffing.
Mr. Tsvangirai, a charismatic former trade union leader who has been Mr. Mugabe’s hated rival for almost a decade, charged Sunday that the president’s violent, vengeful strategy had displaced 200,000 people, destroyed 20,000 homes and injured and maimed over 10,000 people in what he called “this orgy of violence.”
Sunday evening, downtown Harare was largely peaceful, with Mr. Tsvangirai’s supporters retreating home early, leaving the streets to pro-Mugabe brigades, chanting, “Win or war!”
Mugabe Rival Quits Zimbabwe Runoff, Citing Attacks
By CELIA W. DUGGER and BARRY BEARAK
JOHANNESBURG — The leader of Zimbabwe’s opposition party withdrew Sunday from a presidential runoff, just five days before it was to be held, saying he could neither participate “in this violent, illegitimate sham of an election process,” nor ask his voters to risk their lives in the face of threats from forces backing President Robert Mugabe.
The opposition candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, the standard-bearer of the Movement for Democratic Change, said at a news conference in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, that his party was facing a war rather than an election, “and we will not be part of that war.”
A governing party militia blocked his supporters from attending a major rally in Harare on Sunday, the head of an election observer team said. The opposition said rowdy youths, armed with iron bars and sticks, beat up people who had come to cheer for Mr. Tsvangirai.
It was the latest incident in a tumultuous campaign season in which Mr. Tsvangirai has been repeatedly detained, his party’s chief strategist jailed on treason charges that many people consider bogus, and rampant state-sponsored violence has left at least 85 opposition supporters dead and thousands injured, according to tallies by doctors treating the victims.
Mr. Tsvangirai’s decision to quit the race seems intended to force Zimbabwe’s neighbors to take a stand. There are growing cracks in the solidarity that African heads of state have shown for Mr. Mugabe, an 84-year-old liberation hero whose defiant anti-Western rhetoric has long struck a resonant chord in a region with a bitter colonial history.
The United States and Britain are pressing to put Zimbabwe’s political crisis on the United Nations Security Council agenda on Monday, a step South Africa, the region’s most powerful nation, has consistently opposed.
Gordon D. Johndroe, the White House National Security Council spokesman, said in an e-mail message that the United States wants the United Nations to consider taking additional steps. “Mugabe cannot be allowed to repress the Zimbabwean people forever,” he said.
It remains to be seen whether southern Africa’s leaders will collectively censure Mr. Mugabe or take tougher steps, such as economic sanctions, to isolate his government. They have never done so before, despite elections in 2002 and 2005 that were widely believed to have been marked by rigging and fraud, but that his regional peers declared legitimate.
Marwick Khumalo, who heads the Pan-African Parliament’s observer team, which witnessed the aborted rally on Sunday, said it would be unfortunate if bodies representing African nations endorsed the current election. He said he had just returned from the Rusape District in Manicaland Province where the police chief told him six people, all from the opposition, had been killed.
“How can you have an election where people are killed and hacked to death as the sun goes down?” Mr. Khumalo asked. “How can you have an election where the leader of one party is not even allowed to conduct rallies?”
Nonetheless, Zimbabwe’s information minister, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, told The Associated Press that the runoff would go forward on Friday despite Mr. Tsvangirai’s departure from the race.
“The Constitution does not say that if somebody drops out or decides to chicken out the runoff will not be held,” Mr. Ndlovu said.
Mr. Tsvangirai notified the South African president, Thabo Mbeki, the regional mediator in Zimbabwe’s crisis, of his withdrawal, Mr. Mbeki’s spokesman, Mukoni Ratshitanga, said, adding that Mr. Mbeki was encouraged that the candidate “is not closing the door on negotiations completely.” Mr. Ratshitanga declined to comment on the legitimacy of the current election.
There may yet be more twists in this saga. Zambia’s president, Levy Mwanawasa, a Mugabe critic and the chairman of the Southern African Development Community, the bloc of 14 nations that chose Mr. Mbeki as mediator, suggested to reporters in Lusaka, Zambia, that the election should be postponed “to avert a catastrophe in the region.”
And Mr. Tsvangirai kept open the possibility that he might re-enter the race in the extremely unlikely event that the United Nations or the African Union stepped in to end the violence by Wednesday, when he intends to announce his party’s next steps.
Mr. Mugabe, in power for 28 years, has made it difficult for his fellow African heads of state to pretend there is anything normal about this election. He has repeatedly declared at public rallies in recent days that he would never allow Mr. Tsvangirai, whom he denounces as a pawn of Britain, the former colonial power in Zimbabwe, to become president through the ballot box, vowing that the bullet is mightier than the ballpoint pen.
“Only God, who appointed me, will remove me, not the M.D.C., not the British,” Mr. Mugabe declared in the city of Bulawayo on Friday. “Only God will remove me!”
Mr. Tsvangirai defeated Mr. Mugabe in a general election on March 29 by 48 percent to 43 percent, according to the government’s count. The opposition claimed it had won a majority outright and that no runoff was needed.
The Movement for Democratic Change has a history of agonizing about whether to participate in elections it presumed would be unfair, and there have long been deep divisions within the party about how to proceed. This year, Mr. Tsvangirai reluctantly entered the race, though he argued that Mr. Mbeki, the mediator, had failed to ensure conditions for a fair contest.
Mr. Tsvangirai said earlier this year that, at a minimum, the election would reveal the ugly face of Mr. Mugabe’s despotic and economically disastrous reign. The opposition then vacillated about participating in the June 27 runoff, but finally decided to do so.
Opposition party leaders assumed that the ferocious violence against its supporters would abate once election observers from across Africa arrived, making it possible for them to campaign openly and mobilize their poll workers. Instead, Mr. Khumalo, the head of the team of election observers, said, “As the election was gaining momentum, so was the violence.”
In a decision that will be likely to disappoint some of his supporters, especially those who have paid a terrible price for backing him, Mr. Tsvangirai apparently decided the level of violence had become intolerable.
The party also concluded that the systematic campaign to displace thousands of its poll workers had been so effective in the three vote-rich Mashonaland provinces, where Mr. Tsvangirai made strong inroads into Mr. Mugabe’s support, that they would be unable to staff the polling stations on election day, leaving them open to ballot-box stuffing.
Mr. Tsvangirai, a charismatic former trade union leader who has been Mr. Mugabe’s hated rival for almost a decade, charged Sunday that the president’s violent, vengeful strategy had displaced 200,000 people, destroyed 20,000 homes and injured and maimed over 10,000 people in what he called “this orgy of violence.”
Sunday evening, downtown Harare was largely peaceful, with Mr. Tsvangirai’s supporters retreating home early, leaving the streets to pro-Mugabe brigades, chanting, “Win or war!”
June 24, 2008
Security Council Urges Zimbabwe to Halt Violence
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR and CELIA W. DUGGER
UNITED NATIONS — With Zimbabwe’s opposition under siege and its leader taking refuge at the Dutch Embassy, the Security Council on Monday issued its first sweeping condemnation of the violence gripping the nation, saying it would be “impossible for a free and fair election to take place.”
Zimbabwe has been reeling from a widening campaign of violence and intimidation ever since Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president for nearly 30 years, came in second in the initial round of voting on March 29. On Sunday, only five days before a runoff, Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition standard-bearer, pulled out of the race, citing the extensive violence against his supporters.
Taking its first action on the crisis, the long-divided Council issued a one-page statement calling on the government of Zimbabwe to allow opposition rallies, which had been routinely blocked or canceled, and to free political prisoners.
“The Security Council regrets that the campaign of violence and the restrictions on the political opposition have made it impossible for a free and fair election to take place on 27 June,” said the statement.
Earlier in the day, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, sharply condemned the violence seizing the impoverished nation and took the unusual step of calling for the runoff to be postponed, saying a vote under the current conditions “would lack all legitimacy.”
“It will only deepen divisions within the country and produce a result that cannot be credible,” Mr. Ban said of the runoff, adding that he had spoken with “a number of African leaders” and found a consensus that it would be wrong to proceed with the vote. “There has been too much violence, too much intimidation,” he said.
As if to underscore the point, Mr. Tsvangirai, who has survived three assassination attempts, sought safety, though not political asylum, at the Dutch Embassy in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, on Sunday evening and remained there on Monday, Dutch officials said.
Mr. Tsvangirai’s closest aide, George Sibotshiwe, fled the country in fear for his life on Monday and the police raided the opposition party headquarters, rounding up dozens of people, including women, children and those injured in the recent political violence. Mr. Sibotshiwe arrived in Johannesburg, and in an interview shortly afterward said he saw four men armed with pistols approaching the door of his safe house on Sunday morning and only narrowly escaped capture.
The statement from the Security Council went through several drafts before it won the required unanimous acceptance of all 15 members. Britain led an effort, dominated by the West, to include the toughest language, while South Africa and allies including China and Russia pushed to dilute it somewhat.
Mr. Mugabe, however, has shown disdain for international criticism, so it remained unclear whether the Security Council’s statement would carry more weight in prompting his government to relax its oppressive measures than any previous condemnations from foreign leaders.
Boniface G. Chidyausiku, the United Nations ambassador from Zimbabwe, said that neither the statement from the Council nor the call by Mr. Ban to postpone the vote would affect the timing of the elections.
“The Security Council cannot micromanage elections in any particular country,” Mr. Chidyausiku told reporters. “As far as we are concerned, the date has been set.”
He accused Britain and its allies of pushing for “regime change” and said Mr. Tsvangirai’s decision to drop out of the election was a ploy to attract international sympathy. He also said the opposition in Zimbabwe was exaggerating the violence.
“These are M.D.C. tricks that should be seen for what they are,” he said in a speech, referring to the Movement for Democratic Change. “The British government’s hidden hand in all these political developments is evident and clearly visible.”
Sir John Sawers, the British ambassador to the United Nations, expressed astonishment that Zimbabwe could so readily dismiss the opinion of the Council. “I find that incredible,” he told reporters. “The actions of this regime are unpredictable, and they will pursue only those courses of action which are in their own self-serving interests.”
Mr. Mugabe may also face increasing pressure from his fellow heads of state in southern Africa. Foreign ministers from a regional bloc of 14 nations known as the Southern African Development Community met on Monday in Angola to discuss the crisis.
But the nations in the region have long been divided on the matter, and it is far from clear they will find enough common ground to act decisively. The president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, chosen by the 14-nation bloc as mediator in the Zimbabwean crisis, has maintained a strategy of quiet diplomacy, pushing for negotiations between Zimbabwe’s opposition and ruling parties, without criticizing Mr. Mugabe publicly.
In contrast, Botswana, Tanzania and Zambia have harshly condemned the repeated detention of Zimbabwean opposition leaders during the campaign, as well as the violence against opposition supporters.
South Africa had resisted efforts to bring Zimbabwe’s political woes before the Security Council, contending that they were a domestic matter, not an international one.
On Monday, the wrangling over the Council statement took most of the day.
Opponents of a tougher stance by the Council succeeded in quashing an attempt to say that without a second round of elections, Zimbabwe should rely on the results of the first round in March. In that election, Mr. Tsvangirai won more votes than Mr. Mugabe, but, according to the official government count, less than the majority needed to avoid a runoff.
The back-and-forth at the Security Council reflected the continuing debate over whether electoral crises constitute a threat to international peace and security, the main requirement for them to be taken up by the Council. The United States and others, including Mr. Ban, hold that they do, not least because of the humanitarian crisis caused by the Zimbabwean government’s decision to bar aid organizations from working in the country.
A paragraph expressing concern on the “grave” humanitarian situation and calling on Zimbabwe to let the organizations back in sailed through all the drafts unchanged.
Mr. Tsvangirai told a South African radio station that his party was prepared to negotiate with ZANU-PF, Mr. Mugabe’s governing party, but said that first the violence must stop.
Jendayi E. Frazer, the American assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said in an interview on Monday that adding a mediator whom Mr. Tsvangirai trusts would be helpful, but she said that Mr. Mugabe had voiced no interest in talks.
“It’s going to require an international push to prevent a civil war,” she said.
Many opposition officials and civic leaders in Zimbabwe fear that the violence may well get worse in coming days. The country’s only daily newspaper, The Herald, a state-owned organ, did not even report on Monday that Mr. Tsvangirai had withdrawn from the contest.
Instead, it quoted Constantine Chiwenga, the commander of Zimbabwe’s Defense Forces, who governing party insiders say is a key actor in the campaign of terror against the opposition, boasting that Mr. Mugabe would romp to victory over Mr. Tsvangirai.
Officials at the opposition’s headquarters in Harare said they had received a tip that there would be a raid on Monday morning and most of the 1,500 people who had sought refuge there from the violence ran away.
By the time a busload of more than 30 riot police officers arrived, only a few dozen of the most helpless people, many of them wounded, were left. They were hustled onto a bus and taken away, opposition security officials said.
Neil MacFarquhar reported from the United Nations, and Celia W. Dugger from Johannesburg.
Security Council Urges Zimbabwe to Halt Violence
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR and CELIA W. DUGGER
UNITED NATIONS — With Zimbabwe’s opposition under siege and its leader taking refuge at the Dutch Embassy, the Security Council on Monday issued its first sweeping condemnation of the violence gripping the nation, saying it would be “impossible for a free and fair election to take place.”
Zimbabwe has been reeling from a widening campaign of violence and intimidation ever since Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president for nearly 30 years, came in second in the initial round of voting on March 29. On Sunday, only five days before a runoff, Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition standard-bearer, pulled out of the race, citing the extensive violence against his supporters.
Taking its first action on the crisis, the long-divided Council issued a one-page statement calling on the government of Zimbabwe to allow opposition rallies, which had been routinely blocked or canceled, and to free political prisoners.
“The Security Council regrets that the campaign of violence and the restrictions on the political opposition have made it impossible for a free and fair election to take place on 27 June,” said the statement.
Earlier in the day, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, sharply condemned the violence seizing the impoverished nation and took the unusual step of calling for the runoff to be postponed, saying a vote under the current conditions “would lack all legitimacy.”
“It will only deepen divisions within the country and produce a result that cannot be credible,” Mr. Ban said of the runoff, adding that he had spoken with “a number of African leaders” and found a consensus that it would be wrong to proceed with the vote. “There has been too much violence, too much intimidation,” he said.
As if to underscore the point, Mr. Tsvangirai, who has survived three assassination attempts, sought safety, though not political asylum, at the Dutch Embassy in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, on Sunday evening and remained there on Monday, Dutch officials said.
Mr. Tsvangirai’s closest aide, George Sibotshiwe, fled the country in fear for his life on Monday and the police raided the opposition party headquarters, rounding up dozens of people, including women, children and those injured in the recent political violence. Mr. Sibotshiwe arrived in Johannesburg, and in an interview shortly afterward said he saw four men armed with pistols approaching the door of his safe house on Sunday morning and only narrowly escaped capture.
The statement from the Security Council went through several drafts before it won the required unanimous acceptance of all 15 members. Britain led an effort, dominated by the West, to include the toughest language, while South Africa and allies including China and Russia pushed to dilute it somewhat.
Mr. Mugabe, however, has shown disdain for international criticism, so it remained unclear whether the Security Council’s statement would carry more weight in prompting his government to relax its oppressive measures than any previous condemnations from foreign leaders.
Boniface G. Chidyausiku, the United Nations ambassador from Zimbabwe, said that neither the statement from the Council nor the call by Mr. Ban to postpone the vote would affect the timing of the elections.
“The Security Council cannot micromanage elections in any particular country,” Mr. Chidyausiku told reporters. “As far as we are concerned, the date has been set.”
He accused Britain and its allies of pushing for “regime change” and said Mr. Tsvangirai’s decision to drop out of the election was a ploy to attract international sympathy. He also said the opposition in Zimbabwe was exaggerating the violence.
“These are M.D.C. tricks that should be seen for what they are,” he said in a speech, referring to the Movement for Democratic Change. “The British government’s hidden hand in all these political developments is evident and clearly visible.”
Sir John Sawers, the British ambassador to the United Nations, expressed astonishment that Zimbabwe could so readily dismiss the opinion of the Council. “I find that incredible,” he told reporters. “The actions of this regime are unpredictable, and they will pursue only those courses of action which are in their own self-serving interests.”
Mr. Mugabe may also face increasing pressure from his fellow heads of state in southern Africa. Foreign ministers from a regional bloc of 14 nations known as the Southern African Development Community met on Monday in Angola to discuss the crisis.
But the nations in the region have long been divided on the matter, and it is far from clear they will find enough common ground to act decisively. The president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, chosen by the 14-nation bloc as mediator in the Zimbabwean crisis, has maintained a strategy of quiet diplomacy, pushing for negotiations between Zimbabwe’s opposition and ruling parties, without criticizing Mr. Mugabe publicly.
In contrast, Botswana, Tanzania and Zambia have harshly condemned the repeated detention of Zimbabwean opposition leaders during the campaign, as well as the violence against opposition supporters.
South Africa had resisted efforts to bring Zimbabwe’s political woes before the Security Council, contending that they were a domestic matter, not an international one.
On Monday, the wrangling over the Council statement took most of the day.
Opponents of a tougher stance by the Council succeeded in quashing an attempt to say that without a second round of elections, Zimbabwe should rely on the results of the first round in March. In that election, Mr. Tsvangirai won more votes than Mr. Mugabe, but, according to the official government count, less than the majority needed to avoid a runoff.
The back-and-forth at the Security Council reflected the continuing debate over whether electoral crises constitute a threat to international peace and security, the main requirement for them to be taken up by the Council. The United States and others, including Mr. Ban, hold that they do, not least because of the humanitarian crisis caused by the Zimbabwean government’s decision to bar aid organizations from working in the country.
A paragraph expressing concern on the “grave” humanitarian situation and calling on Zimbabwe to let the organizations back in sailed through all the drafts unchanged.
Mr. Tsvangirai told a South African radio station that his party was prepared to negotiate with ZANU-PF, Mr. Mugabe’s governing party, but said that first the violence must stop.
Jendayi E. Frazer, the American assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said in an interview on Monday that adding a mediator whom Mr. Tsvangirai trusts would be helpful, but she said that Mr. Mugabe had voiced no interest in talks.
“It’s going to require an international push to prevent a civil war,” she said.
Many opposition officials and civic leaders in Zimbabwe fear that the violence may well get worse in coming days. The country’s only daily newspaper, The Herald, a state-owned organ, did not even report on Monday that Mr. Tsvangirai had withdrawn from the contest.
Instead, it quoted Constantine Chiwenga, the commander of Zimbabwe’s Defense Forces, who governing party insiders say is a key actor in the campaign of terror against the opposition, boasting that Mr. Mugabe would romp to victory over Mr. Tsvangirai.
Officials at the opposition’s headquarters in Harare said they had received a tip that there would be a raid on Monday morning and most of the 1,500 people who had sought refuge there from the violence ran away.
By the time a busload of more than 30 riot police officers arrived, only a few dozen of the most helpless people, many of them wounded, were left. They were hustled onto a bus and taken away, opposition security officials said.
Neil MacFarquhar reported from the United Nations, and Celia W. Dugger from Johannesburg.
June 25, 2008
Ally Warns Outsiders Not to Push Zimbabwe
By ALAN COWELL
Despite an increasingly thunderous chorus of complaints that Zimbabwe’s presidential runoff election will be neither free nor fair, the African National Congress, South Africa’s governing party, rejected outside diplomatic intervention on Tuesday, arguing that “any attempts by outside players to impose regime change will merely deepen the crisis.”
The A.N.C. warned against international intervention a day after the United Nations Security Council took its first action on the electoral crisis in Zimbabwe, issuing a unanimous statement condemning the widespread campaign of violence in the country and calling on the government to free political prisoners and allow the opposition to hold rallies.
But South Africa, the region’s powerhouse, is widely considered to play the pivotal role in bringing about change in neighboring Zimbabwe. While the A.N.C. came out with an unusually strong condemnation of the Zimbabwean government on Tuesday, saying it was “riding roughshod over the hard-won democratic rights” of its people, the party also insisted that outsiders had no role to play in ending its current anguish.
“It has always been and continues to be the view of our movement that the challenges facing Zimbabwe can only be solved by the Zimbabweans themselves,” the statement said. “Nothing that has happened in the recent months has persuaded us to revise that view.”
Zimbabwe’s opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, withdrew from a runoff election with the incumbent president, Robert Mugabe, scheduled for Friday, citing the widespread violence and intimidation facing his party.
“It’s ridiculous to go into an election of that kind,” he said in a radio interview on Tuesday. “It’s a one-man competition.”
On Wednesday, in an article published in The Guardian newspaper in London, Mr. Tsvangirai called for international intervention.
“We do not want armed conflict,” he wrote, “but the people of Zimbabwe need the words of indignation from global leaders to be backed by the moral rectitude of military force.”
Mr. Tsvangirai has been taking refuge at the Dutch Embassy in the capital, Harare, but has said he will leave within 48 hours after moves by Dutch authorities to ensure his safety.
Amid the international outcry over his government’s handling of the crisis, Mr. Mugabe was reported Tuesday as hinting that he might be open to talks with the beleaguered opposition, but only after he won.
He remained defiant about going ahead with the runoff, refusing to postpone it.
“They can shout as loud as they like from Washington or from London or from any other quarter,” Mr. Mugabe said in televised broadcasts.
“Our people, our people, only our people will decide and nobody else.”
Taken together, his remarks were the most explicit affirmation that he intended to go through with an election widely condemned as illegitimate.
But the hint of readiness to talk was also the first sign that Mr. Mugabe might negotiate — as President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa has been urging him to do — once he has what he can depict as a position of strength.
The A.N.C. statement, which was the first official response from South Africa since Mr. Tsvangirai’s withdrawal, was not signed by any individual in the A.N.C. It seemed to represent a marked departure from Mr. Mbeki’s refusal to castigate Mr. Mugabe, and seemed to reflect the increasing frustration with the Zimbabwean president.
At the same time, in what seemed a clear rebuke to the efforts of Western nations to take an aggressive stance against the Zimbabwean government, the A.N.C. included a lengthy criticism of the “arbitrary, capricious power” exerted by Africa’s colonial masters and cited the subsequent struggle by African nations to gain freedoms and rights.
“No colonial power in Africa, least of all Britain in its colony of ‘Rhodesia’ ever demonstrated any respect for these principles,” the A.N.C. said, referring to Zimbabwe before its independence.
Zimbabwe, once one of Africa’s most prosperous countries, has been reeling from a widening campaign of violence and intimidation since Mr. Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president for nearly 30 years, came in second in the initial round of voting on March 29.
In a show of support for the opposition, the powerful Congress of South African Trade Unions declared on Tuesday that it was “appalled at the levels of violence and intimidation being inflicted on the people of Zimbabwe by the illegitimate Mugabe regime.”
“The June 27 presidential election is not an election, but a declaration of war against the people of Zimbabwe by the ruling party,” the union group said.
Urging a blockade of Zimbabwe, it said: “We call on all our unions and those everywhere else in the world to make sure that they never ever serve Mugabe anywhere, including at airports, restaurants, shops, etc.
“Further, we call on all workers and citizens of the world never to allow Mugabe to set foot in their countries.”
Alan Cowell reported from London and Celia W. Dugger from Johannesburg. Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from the United Nations.
Ally Warns Outsiders Not to Push Zimbabwe
By ALAN COWELL
Despite an increasingly thunderous chorus of complaints that Zimbabwe’s presidential runoff election will be neither free nor fair, the African National Congress, South Africa’s governing party, rejected outside diplomatic intervention on Tuesday, arguing that “any attempts by outside players to impose regime change will merely deepen the crisis.”
The A.N.C. warned against international intervention a day after the United Nations Security Council took its first action on the electoral crisis in Zimbabwe, issuing a unanimous statement condemning the widespread campaign of violence in the country and calling on the government to free political prisoners and allow the opposition to hold rallies.
But South Africa, the region’s powerhouse, is widely considered to play the pivotal role in bringing about change in neighboring Zimbabwe. While the A.N.C. came out with an unusually strong condemnation of the Zimbabwean government on Tuesday, saying it was “riding roughshod over the hard-won democratic rights” of its people, the party also insisted that outsiders had no role to play in ending its current anguish.
“It has always been and continues to be the view of our movement that the challenges facing Zimbabwe can only be solved by the Zimbabweans themselves,” the statement said. “Nothing that has happened in the recent months has persuaded us to revise that view.”
Zimbabwe’s opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, withdrew from a runoff election with the incumbent president, Robert Mugabe, scheduled for Friday, citing the widespread violence and intimidation facing his party.
“It’s ridiculous to go into an election of that kind,” he said in a radio interview on Tuesday. “It’s a one-man competition.”
On Wednesday, in an article published in The Guardian newspaper in London, Mr. Tsvangirai called for international intervention.
“We do not want armed conflict,” he wrote, “but the people of Zimbabwe need the words of indignation from global leaders to be backed by the moral rectitude of military force.”
Mr. Tsvangirai has been taking refuge at the Dutch Embassy in the capital, Harare, but has said he will leave within 48 hours after moves by Dutch authorities to ensure his safety.
Amid the international outcry over his government’s handling of the crisis, Mr. Mugabe was reported Tuesday as hinting that he might be open to talks with the beleaguered opposition, but only after he won.
He remained defiant about going ahead with the runoff, refusing to postpone it.
“They can shout as loud as they like from Washington or from London or from any other quarter,” Mr. Mugabe said in televised broadcasts.
“Our people, our people, only our people will decide and nobody else.”
Taken together, his remarks were the most explicit affirmation that he intended to go through with an election widely condemned as illegitimate.
But the hint of readiness to talk was also the first sign that Mr. Mugabe might negotiate — as President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa has been urging him to do — once he has what he can depict as a position of strength.
The A.N.C. statement, which was the first official response from South Africa since Mr. Tsvangirai’s withdrawal, was not signed by any individual in the A.N.C. It seemed to represent a marked departure from Mr. Mbeki’s refusal to castigate Mr. Mugabe, and seemed to reflect the increasing frustration with the Zimbabwean president.
At the same time, in what seemed a clear rebuke to the efforts of Western nations to take an aggressive stance against the Zimbabwean government, the A.N.C. included a lengthy criticism of the “arbitrary, capricious power” exerted by Africa’s colonial masters and cited the subsequent struggle by African nations to gain freedoms and rights.
“No colonial power in Africa, least of all Britain in its colony of ‘Rhodesia’ ever demonstrated any respect for these principles,” the A.N.C. said, referring to Zimbabwe before its independence.
Zimbabwe, once one of Africa’s most prosperous countries, has been reeling from a widening campaign of violence and intimidation since Mr. Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president for nearly 30 years, came in second in the initial round of voting on March 29.
In a show of support for the opposition, the powerful Congress of South African Trade Unions declared on Tuesday that it was “appalled at the levels of violence and intimidation being inflicted on the people of Zimbabwe by the illegitimate Mugabe regime.”
“The June 27 presidential election is not an election, but a declaration of war against the people of Zimbabwe by the ruling party,” the union group said.
Urging a blockade of Zimbabwe, it said: “We call on all our unions and those everywhere else in the world to make sure that they never ever serve Mugabe anywhere, including at airports, restaurants, shops, etc.
“Further, we call on all workers and citizens of the world never to allow Mugabe to set foot in their countries.”
Alan Cowell reported from London and Celia W. Dugger from Johannesburg. Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from the United Nations.
June 26, 2008
Zimbabweans Make Plea for Help as Runoff Nears
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
HARARE, Zimbabwe — As Zimbabwe’s neighbors urged it to postpone this week’s presidential runoff, hundreds of beaten, newly homeless Zimbabweans gathered Wednesday outside the South African Embassy here in a desperate bid for help during the electoral crisis.
By 8:30 p.m., around 400 people, mainly men displaced by the recent political violence, were pulling down their woolen caps and hunching into thin jackets to sit out one of the coldest nights this winter. Few of them had eaten in the last several days; they began converging outside the embassy in hopes of finding food, water and medical attention.
“The situation is absolutely desperate,” said an opposition official trying to find shelter for 80 women and children at the site.
The scene unfolded amid a scramble of regional and international diplomacy, with many African and Western nations saying the vote set for Friday would be neither free nor fair.
On Wednesday, officials from Swaziland, Angola and Tanzania — the so-called troika empowered to speak for the Southern African Development Community, a regional bloc of 14 nations — called on Zimbabwe to put off the voting because the current crisis would undermine its legitimacy.
Taking a different tack, Queen Elizabeth II stripped Robert Mugabe, the country’s president for nearly 30 years, of his honorary knighthood as a “mark of revulsion” at the human rights abuses and “abject disregard” for democracy over which he is presiding, the British Foreign Office said Wednesday.
The rebukes reflected the mounting international frustration over Mr. Mugabe’s insistence in going ahead with the runoff on Friday, even though his sole opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, pulled out of the race on Sunday. Mr. Tsvangirai cited the persistent violence and intimidation against him, his party and their supporters.
Mr. Mugabe’s government has had a long history of human rights abuses, but he was granted the honorary knighthood during an official visit to Britain in 1994 when, the Foreign Office said, “the conditions in Zimbabwe were very different.”
With the widespread attacks on the opposition, the Foreign Office said the honor could no longer be justified. Stripping away the title is exceedingly rare. A Foreign Office spokesman could think of only one other time it had been done: in 1989 with the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Mr. Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, called on the United Nations on Wednesday to send peacekeepers to bring calm and help pave the way for new elections in which he could participate as a “legitimate candidate.”
“Zimbabwe will break if the world does not come to our aid,” he said in an op-ed article published Wednesday in The Guardian newspaper in London.
Mr. Tsvangirai took refuge in the Dutch Embassy here on Sunday. He emerged briefly on Wednesday to hold a news conference in which he proposed negotiations, but only if Mr. Mugabe canceled the runoff first.
“We have said we are prepared to negotiate on this side of the 27th, not the other side of the 27th,” Mr. Tsvangirai said, according to Reuters.
But the American ambassador in Harare, James D. McGee, said that Mr. Mugabe and his party, ZANU-PF, were determined to hold the runoff “at all costs,” according to the State Department.
“We’ve received reports that ZANU-PF will force people to vote on Friday and also take action against those who refuse to vote,” Mr. McGee said in a conference call described by the State Department.
All over the country, destitute people have fled the violence, and are now looking for food, shelter, protection and medical care.
One woman at a church in Harare held her 11-month-old baby, who had casts on his tiny legs. She said that after her husband, an opposition organizer, went into hiding she had gotten word that ZANU-PF supporters were looking for her, too. She fled with the boy.
She returned home the next day, though, and that is when “the youth,” as foot soldiers of the ruling party are often called, came looking for her, she said. They snatched her son from the bed and hurled him onto the concrete floor, shattering his legs, she said.
Afterward, she was too terrified to move. But that night, when all was quiet, she set out for the opposition headquarters, Harvest House, to seek help there. She was able to carry only her distraught child, and the 12-mile walk took most of the night.
Harvest House was bursting with refugees, but she was able to get care at a hospital. Now her son’s legs stick out at an odd angle below his blue romper suit, encased in too-tight plaster of paris.
The woman’s blanket was stolen, and because she has been surviving on one meal a day, her thin skirt and jacket hang on her. Her impossibly thin legs look as if they, too, might snap.
But when she looks at her baby, her strained face softens and becomes beautiful again. For three days the boy has had only water, she said, because her breast milk has dried up.
“I hate Zimbabwe,” she said. “I want to leave.”
Alan Cowell contributed reporting from London, and Graham Bowley from New York.
Zimbabweans Make Plea for Help as Runoff Nears
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
HARARE, Zimbabwe — As Zimbabwe’s neighbors urged it to postpone this week’s presidential runoff, hundreds of beaten, newly homeless Zimbabweans gathered Wednesday outside the South African Embassy here in a desperate bid for help during the electoral crisis.
By 8:30 p.m., around 400 people, mainly men displaced by the recent political violence, were pulling down their woolen caps and hunching into thin jackets to sit out one of the coldest nights this winter. Few of them had eaten in the last several days; they began converging outside the embassy in hopes of finding food, water and medical attention.
“The situation is absolutely desperate,” said an opposition official trying to find shelter for 80 women and children at the site.
The scene unfolded amid a scramble of regional and international diplomacy, with many African and Western nations saying the vote set for Friday would be neither free nor fair.
On Wednesday, officials from Swaziland, Angola and Tanzania — the so-called troika empowered to speak for the Southern African Development Community, a regional bloc of 14 nations — called on Zimbabwe to put off the voting because the current crisis would undermine its legitimacy.
Taking a different tack, Queen Elizabeth II stripped Robert Mugabe, the country’s president for nearly 30 years, of his honorary knighthood as a “mark of revulsion” at the human rights abuses and “abject disregard” for democracy over which he is presiding, the British Foreign Office said Wednesday.
The rebukes reflected the mounting international frustration over Mr. Mugabe’s insistence in going ahead with the runoff on Friday, even though his sole opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, pulled out of the race on Sunday. Mr. Tsvangirai cited the persistent violence and intimidation against him, his party and their supporters.
Mr. Mugabe’s government has had a long history of human rights abuses, but he was granted the honorary knighthood during an official visit to Britain in 1994 when, the Foreign Office said, “the conditions in Zimbabwe were very different.”
With the widespread attacks on the opposition, the Foreign Office said the honor could no longer be justified. Stripping away the title is exceedingly rare. A Foreign Office spokesman could think of only one other time it had been done: in 1989 with the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Mr. Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, called on the United Nations on Wednesday to send peacekeepers to bring calm and help pave the way for new elections in which he could participate as a “legitimate candidate.”
“Zimbabwe will break if the world does not come to our aid,” he said in an op-ed article published Wednesday in The Guardian newspaper in London.
Mr. Tsvangirai took refuge in the Dutch Embassy here on Sunday. He emerged briefly on Wednesday to hold a news conference in which he proposed negotiations, but only if Mr. Mugabe canceled the runoff first.
“We have said we are prepared to negotiate on this side of the 27th, not the other side of the 27th,” Mr. Tsvangirai said, according to Reuters.
But the American ambassador in Harare, James D. McGee, said that Mr. Mugabe and his party, ZANU-PF, were determined to hold the runoff “at all costs,” according to the State Department.
“We’ve received reports that ZANU-PF will force people to vote on Friday and also take action against those who refuse to vote,” Mr. McGee said in a conference call described by the State Department.
All over the country, destitute people have fled the violence, and are now looking for food, shelter, protection and medical care.
One woman at a church in Harare held her 11-month-old baby, who had casts on his tiny legs. She said that after her husband, an opposition organizer, went into hiding she had gotten word that ZANU-PF supporters were looking for her, too. She fled with the boy.
She returned home the next day, though, and that is when “the youth,” as foot soldiers of the ruling party are often called, came looking for her, she said. They snatched her son from the bed and hurled him onto the concrete floor, shattering his legs, she said.
Afterward, she was too terrified to move. But that night, when all was quiet, she set out for the opposition headquarters, Harvest House, to seek help there. She was able to carry only her distraught child, and the 12-mile walk took most of the night.
Harvest House was bursting with refugees, but she was able to get care at a hospital. Now her son’s legs stick out at an odd angle below his blue romper suit, encased in too-tight plaster of paris.
The woman’s blanket was stolen, and because she has been surviving on one meal a day, her thin skirt and jacket hang on her. Her impossibly thin legs look as if they, too, might snap.
But when she looks at her baby, her strained face softens and becomes beautiful again. For three days the boy has had only water, she said, because her breast milk has dried up.
“I hate Zimbabwe,” she said. “I want to leave.”
Alan Cowell contributed reporting from London, and Graham Bowley from New York.
There are interesting related multimedia summarizing the essay linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/28/world ... ?th&emc=th
June 28, 2008
In Zimbabwe, Voters’ Fear Joins Mugabe on Ballot
By BARRY BEARAK
JOHANNESBURG — Many people in Zimbabwe faced a peculiar choice on Friday: cast their ballots for President Robert Mugabe, the only candidate left in the presidential runoff, or be beaten up and perhaps killed.
The opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, dropped out of the election on Sunday, citing a state-run campaign of violence against his followers. He told supporters that if possible, they should stay away from the polls, and many people were able to do so. Turnout appears to have been very low, especially in the opposition’s urban strongholds.
But on Friday, in an open letter, he also offered advice to those who were being forced to vote for Mr. Mugabe by gangs of ruling-party enforcers: “If you need to do this to save your life, be not afraid. Do it.”
In Murehwa, in the province of Mashonaland East, many voters did just that. After a full night of being forced to chant the slogans of Mr. Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF, they were taken to the polls in groups of five, said a teacher who described the events. He was too afraid to provide his name.
“In each group there was a leader who would record the serial number on the ballot so they could detect who you voted for,” he said, because Mr. Tsvangirai withdrew too late to have his name removed from the ballot.
Many voters were desperate for the protection offered by a pinky finger dipped in red ink, evidence that they had voted.
“I just wanted the ink for security reasons,” said MacDonald, 33, a man who voted in a ramshackle Harare suburb and did not want his comments accompanied by his last name. “I fear victimization from the ZANU-PF militia. It is obvious they will come door to door. If they see you do not have the red ink, they will know you are for the opposition.”
Friday’s election, denounced as a sham by many leaders across Africa and throughout the world, was a woeful event in a woebegone nation, afflicted by sinister violence and an economy that has plunged most everyone into penury. The vote was a marked contrast to the election that took place here in March, when optimism tinged the air and people stood in long lines, chatting and joking, welcoming the chance to partake in democracy.
By the official count, Mr. Tsvangirai won that vote over Mr. Mugabe, 48 percent to 43 percent. The 84-year-old president, who has led Zimbabwe since it won independence in 1980, seemed on the ropes.
But the lack of a majority required a runoff, and that is when, according to human rights groups, ZANU-PF began a brass-knuckled approach in preparation for the second round. During the campaign of terror, dozens of Mr. Tsvangirai’s supporters have been killed, thousands have been wounded and tens of thousands have been displaced from their homes, civic groups, doctors and relief agencies say.
As the runoff approached, voters — especially those in rural areas — were warned to vote for Mr. Mugabe or else. Ben Freeth, a commercial farmer near the town of Chegutu in the province of Mashonaland West, said dozens of his workers had been taken away for all-night vigils called pungwe sessions.
“Sleep deprivation is a big part of it,” Mr. Freeth said. “They’re made to chant slogans, and anyone deemed an opposition supporter is singled out and beaten with sticks in front of the rest. They’re told that everyone in the group has to vote for Mugabe or their heads will be chopped off.”
As Friday’s vote went on, and as more stories of intimidation became known, Mr. Tsvangirai called a news conference. “What is happening today is not an election,” he protested. “It is an exercise in mass intimidation with people all over the country being forced to vote.”
And yet the coercion, while common, was not all-pervasive.
In Harare and Bulawayo, the two largest cities, the turnout was light at most polling places, with election workers often outnumbering the voters.
In Kambuzuma, a suburb of Harare, only five voters arrived during the first two hours. “I don’t see the logic of going to vote when there is only one candidate,” said a man too afraid to give his name, adding, “I can’t legitimize an illegitimate process.”
Many Tsvangirai supporters tried to have things both ways, voting in order to stay safe and yet somehow marring their ballot so it would not count.
In Mpopma, a Bulawayo suburb, there was also a parliamentary race. “People tried to take the parliamentary paper and refuse the presidential one, and if they were forced to take the presidential ballot they spoiled it by voting for both candidates,” said Lenox Mhlanga, the information director for Bulawayo Agenda, a coalition of civic groups.
On Friday, the Group of 8 nations, meeting in Kyoto, Japan, lambasted Zimbabwe’s government, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the United Nations Security Council may consider fresh sanctions against it next week.
The leaders of several African states, including Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia, have also condemned Mr. Mugabe’s use of election-season violence.
In remarks published Friday in The Herald, the state-run newspaper, Mr. Mugabe seemed offended at the accusations. But rather than denying the abuses, he suggested that everything is relative.
“Some African countries have done worse things,” he said, adding that when he went to meetings of the African Union next week in Egypt he would dare other heads of state to deny this fact. “I would like some African leaders who are making these statements to point at me and we would see if those fingers would be cleaner than mine.”
Oddly, when Friday’s election results are announced, the tally may prove an embarrassment to Mr. Mugabe. He could win by too much. “They’ll have to give Tsvangirai at least 30 percent to make things look realistic,” said Mike Davies, the chairman of the Combined Harare Residents Association, one of the nation’s largest civic groups.
“That’ll be one of the bizarre ironies of the situation here,” he said. “ZANU will have to rejigger the results from the frightened masses, taking votes from themselves.”
Disappointment at the U.N.
The United Nations Security Council expressed disappointment on Friday that the elections had not been delayed, but members failed to agree on a more strongly worded condemnation.
The American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, speaking as the Council’s monthly president, called the elections a “sham” and expressed “deep regret” that they went ahead under the current circumstances.
He said that if conditions did not change, the American government would push for sanctions. Informal consultations with other Council members had already begun about sanctions, diplomats said.
Employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Harare, Zimbabwe, and Alan Cowell from Paris.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/28/world ... ?th&emc=th
June 28, 2008
In Zimbabwe, Voters’ Fear Joins Mugabe on Ballot
By BARRY BEARAK
JOHANNESBURG — Many people in Zimbabwe faced a peculiar choice on Friday: cast their ballots for President Robert Mugabe, the only candidate left in the presidential runoff, or be beaten up and perhaps killed.
The opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, dropped out of the election on Sunday, citing a state-run campaign of violence against his followers. He told supporters that if possible, they should stay away from the polls, and many people were able to do so. Turnout appears to have been very low, especially in the opposition’s urban strongholds.
But on Friday, in an open letter, he also offered advice to those who were being forced to vote for Mr. Mugabe by gangs of ruling-party enforcers: “If you need to do this to save your life, be not afraid. Do it.”
In Murehwa, in the province of Mashonaland East, many voters did just that. After a full night of being forced to chant the slogans of Mr. Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF, they were taken to the polls in groups of five, said a teacher who described the events. He was too afraid to provide his name.
“In each group there was a leader who would record the serial number on the ballot so they could detect who you voted for,” he said, because Mr. Tsvangirai withdrew too late to have his name removed from the ballot.
Many voters were desperate for the protection offered by a pinky finger dipped in red ink, evidence that they had voted.
“I just wanted the ink for security reasons,” said MacDonald, 33, a man who voted in a ramshackle Harare suburb and did not want his comments accompanied by his last name. “I fear victimization from the ZANU-PF militia. It is obvious they will come door to door. If they see you do not have the red ink, they will know you are for the opposition.”
Friday’s election, denounced as a sham by many leaders across Africa and throughout the world, was a woeful event in a woebegone nation, afflicted by sinister violence and an economy that has plunged most everyone into penury. The vote was a marked contrast to the election that took place here in March, when optimism tinged the air and people stood in long lines, chatting and joking, welcoming the chance to partake in democracy.
By the official count, Mr. Tsvangirai won that vote over Mr. Mugabe, 48 percent to 43 percent. The 84-year-old president, who has led Zimbabwe since it won independence in 1980, seemed on the ropes.
But the lack of a majority required a runoff, and that is when, according to human rights groups, ZANU-PF began a brass-knuckled approach in preparation for the second round. During the campaign of terror, dozens of Mr. Tsvangirai’s supporters have been killed, thousands have been wounded and tens of thousands have been displaced from their homes, civic groups, doctors and relief agencies say.
As the runoff approached, voters — especially those in rural areas — were warned to vote for Mr. Mugabe or else. Ben Freeth, a commercial farmer near the town of Chegutu in the province of Mashonaland West, said dozens of his workers had been taken away for all-night vigils called pungwe sessions.
“Sleep deprivation is a big part of it,” Mr. Freeth said. “They’re made to chant slogans, and anyone deemed an opposition supporter is singled out and beaten with sticks in front of the rest. They’re told that everyone in the group has to vote for Mugabe or their heads will be chopped off.”
As Friday’s vote went on, and as more stories of intimidation became known, Mr. Tsvangirai called a news conference. “What is happening today is not an election,” he protested. “It is an exercise in mass intimidation with people all over the country being forced to vote.”
And yet the coercion, while common, was not all-pervasive.
In Harare and Bulawayo, the two largest cities, the turnout was light at most polling places, with election workers often outnumbering the voters.
In Kambuzuma, a suburb of Harare, only five voters arrived during the first two hours. “I don’t see the logic of going to vote when there is only one candidate,” said a man too afraid to give his name, adding, “I can’t legitimize an illegitimate process.”
Many Tsvangirai supporters tried to have things both ways, voting in order to stay safe and yet somehow marring their ballot so it would not count.
In Mpopma, a Bulawayo suburb, there was also a parliamentary race. “People tried to take the parliamentary paper and refuse the presidential one, and if they were forced to take the presidential ballot they spoiled it by voting for both candidates,” said Lenox Mhlanga, the information director for Bulawayo Agenda, a coalition of civic groups.
On Friday, the Group of 8 nations, meeting in Kyoto, Japan, lambasted Zimbabwe’s government, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the United Nations Security Council may consider fresh sanctions against it next week.
The leaders of several African states, including Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia, have also condemned Mr. Mugabe’s use of election-season violence.
In remarks published Friday in The Herald, the state-run newspaper, Mr. Mugabe seemed offended at the accusations. But rather than denying the abuses, he suggested that everything is relative.
“Some African countries have done worse things,” he said, adding that when he went to meetings of the African Union next week in Egypt he would dare other heads of state to deny this fact. “I would like some African leaders who are making these statements to point at me and we would see if those fingers would be cleaner than mine.”
Oddly, when Friday’s election results are announced, the tally may prove an embarrassment to Mr. Mugabe. He could win by too much. “They’ll have to give Tsvangirai at least 30 percent to make things look realistic,” said Mike Davies, the chairman of the Combined Harare Residents Association, one of the nation’s largest civic groups.
“That’ll be one of the bizarre ironies of the situation here,” he said. “ZANU will have to rejigger the results from the frightened masses, taking votes from themselves.”
Disappointment at the U.N.
The United Nations Security Council expressed disappointment on Friday that the elections had not been delayed, but members failed to agree on a more strongly worded condemnation.
The American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, speaking as the Council’s monthly president, called the elections a “sham” and expressed “deep regret” that they went ahead under the current circumstances.
He said that if conditions did not change, the American government would push for sanctions. Informal consultations with other Council members had already begun about sanctions, diplomats said.
Employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Harare, Zimbabwe, and Alan Cowell from Paris.
There is a striking video capturing the essence of the essay linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/opini ... ?th&emc=th
June 29, 2008
If Only Mugabe Were White
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Patson Chipiro, a democracy activist, wasn’t home when Robert Mugabe’s thugs showed up looking for him.
So they grabbed his wife, Dadirai, and tormented her by chopping off one of her hands and both of her feet. Finally, they threw her into a hut, locked the door and burned it to the ground.
That has been the pattern lately: with opposition figures in hiding, Mr. Mugabe’s goons kill loved ones to send a message of intimidation. Even the wife of the mayor-elect of Harare, the capital, was kidnapped and beaten to death.
When the white supremacist regime of Ian Smith oppressed Zimbabweans in the 1970s, African countries rallied against it. Eventually, even the white racist government in South Africa demanded change and threatened to cut off electricity supplies if it didn’t happen.
Yet South African President Thabo Mbeki continues to make excuses for Mr. Mugabe — who is more brutal than Ian Smith ever was — out of misplaced deference for a common history in the liberation struggle. Zimbabweans suffered so much for so many decades from white racism that the last thing they need is excuses for Mr. Mugabe’s brutality because of his skin color.
Life expectancy in Zimbabwe has already dropped from the low 60s to the high 30s. It’s true that he has created more trillionaires than any other country, but that’s only because inflation may be as much as 10 million percent. Anyone with $90 is a trillionaire in Zimbabwean dollars, and buying a small loaf of bread costs one billion Zimbabwean dollars.
When I grew up in the 1970s, a central truth was that Ian Smith was evil and Mr. Mugabe heroic. So it was jolting on my last visit to Zimbabwe, in 2005, to see how many Zimbabweans looked back on oppressive white rule with nostalgia. They offered a refrain: “Back then, at least parents could feed their children.”
Africa’s rulers often complain, with justice, that the West’s perceptions of the continent are disproportionately shaped by buffoons and tyrants rather than by the increasing number of democratically elected presidents presiding over 6 percent growth rates. But as long as African presidents mollycoddle Mr. Mugabe, they are branding Africa with his image.
To his credit, Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa has taken the lead in denouncing Mr. Mugabe’s abuses, and Nelson Mandela bluntly deplored Mr. Mugabe’s “tragic failure of leadership.” Mr. Mandela could also have been talking about Mr. Mbeki’s own failures.
The United States doesn’t have much leverage, and Britain squandered its influence partly by focusing on the plight of dispossessed white farmers. (That’s tribalism for Anglo-Saxons.) But there is a way out.
The solution is for leaders at the African Union summit this week to give Mr. Mugabe a clear choice.
One option would be for him to “retire” honorably — “for health reasons” after some face-saving claims of heart trouble — at a lovely estate in South Africa, taking top aides with him. He would be received respectfully and awarded a $5 million bank account to assure his comfort for the remainder of his days.
The other alternative is that he could dig in his heels and cling to power. African leaders should make clear that in that case, they will back an indictment of him and his aides in the International Criminal Court. Led by the Southern African Development Community, the world will also impose sanctions against Mr. Mugabe’s circle and cut off all military supplies and spare parts. Mozambique, South Africa and Congo will also cut off the electricity they provide to Zimbabwe.
If those are the alternatives, then the odds are that Mr. Mugabe will publicly clutch his chest and insist that he must step down. There will still be risks of civil conflict and a military coup, but Zimbabwe would have a reasonable prospect of again becoming, as Mr. Mugabe once called it, “the jewel of Africa.”
Some people will object that a tyrant shouldn’t be rewarded with a pot of cash and a comfortable exile. That’s true. But any other approach will likely result in far more deaths, perhaps even civil war.
How do we know that sanctions will work? Well, we have Mr. Mugabe’s own testimony.
In a 1987 essay in Foreign Affairs, Mr. Mugabe called on the U.S. to impose sanctions on white-ruled South Africa for engaging in a “vicious and ugly civil war” against its own people. Mr. Mugabe demanded that the world “accept the value of sanctions as a means of raising the cost” of brutal misrule.
If only Mr. Mugabe were a white racist! Then the regional powers might stand up to him. For the sake of Zimbabweans, we should be just as resolute in confronting African tyrants who are black as in confronting those who are white.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.
****
June 29, 2008
Zimbabwe Faces Wider Sanctions Under Bush Plan
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and CELIA W. DUGGER
WASHINGTON — President Bush called Saturday for an international arms embargo against Zimbabwe in the wake of last week’s “sham election,” and announced that the United States is drafting new economic sanctions that, for the first time, would take aim at the entire government of President Robert Mugabe.
“The international community has condemned the Mugabe regime’s ruthless campaign of politically motivated violence and intimidation,” Mr. Bush said in a statement from the presidential retreat at Camp David, Md., adding that he had directed his secretaries of treasury and state to develop sanctions “against this illegitimate government of Zimbabwe and those who support it.”
The announcement came a day after Zimbabweans voted in a presidential runoff that has been widely denounced by Western leaders because of state-sponsored violence and efforts to intimidate voters with threats of beatings if they failed to cast their ballots for Mr. Mugabe, the sole candidate. Dozens of opposition supporters were killed in the weeks leading to the runoff.
The opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, dropped out of the race, citing continuing attacks against his supporters, and he later sought refuge in the Dutch Embassy. By taking the rare step of imposing sanctions on the government, the United States would put Zimbabwe in a league with nations like North Korea and Iran — a significant toughening of current policy toward Zimbabwe. The Bush administration has already imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe, but they apply only to about 140 members of the governing elite and the businesses they own and control.
“This certainly steps up pretty dramatically the scale of punitive action,” said J. Stephen Morrison, who directs the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here, and worked on Africa issues in the State Department under President Clinton. “It’s long overdue, but having Bush get out there and say some hard things is very important.”
The call for an international arms embargo, which Mr. Bush coupled with a proposed ban on travel by officials of the Mugabe government, is unlikely to be successful. American officials said it would almost certainly run into opposition at the United Nations from South Africa, Russia and China; South Africa’s position has long been that the Zimbabwe election is an internal affair.
The United States’ own sanctions, by contrast, can be carried out unilaterally. American officials and outside experts said they hope the sanctions would put pressure on Zimbabwe’s mining industry, a crucial source of foreign exchange for a government that is very short of it. The sanctions are expected to restrict the government’s ability to do business with American companies, although it is unclear which agencies or state-controlled businesses would be affected.
Africa experts and human rights advocates have not generally been calling for sanctions, in part, Mr. Morrison said, because they have been so focused on trying to tamp down the violence and abuses surrounding the elections. In Washington, Mr. Morrison and a colleague, Mark Bellamy, a former ambassador to Kenya, have been pressing for a diplomatic offensive to create an international consensus that Mr. Mugabe must be ousted.
Zimbabwe’s opposition spokesman, Nelson Chamisa, asked whether his party favored sanctions, would say only that it sought intensified international pressure. It seems likely that the opposition is reluctant to demand sanctions for fear of playing into Mr. Mugabe’s hands. The state media, daily, in story after story, blame the limited sanctions imposed by the United States and Europe on the Zimbabwean elite for having led to the country’s economic ruin.
It is almost certain that Mr. Mugabe will argue that any new sanctions are part of a Western plot to topple him.
It is unclear how much pain that sanctions would actually inflict on the Mugabe government, especially if Zimbabwe continues to get support from countries like South Africa and China.
A senior American official said Saturday that the decision on the United States’ sanctions had been made in the previous 48 hours, and research on how to carry them out had just begun. Although officials, for instance, said sanctions might allow the United States to freeze Zimbabwean assets in American banks, it was unclear if such assets existed.
Arvind Ganesam, director of the business and human rights program at Human Rights Watch, said sanctions on mining could have a significant impact, depending on how they were worded. “As long as the government can draw on mining revenues, it’s got a revenue stream independent of its own population,” he said. “And as long as it has access to those assets it can be as irresponsible as it wants.”
United States officials said the sanctions, which would take at least two weeks to draw up, could still be averted if Mr. Mugabe installs what the United States considers a legitimate government. Mr. Tsvangirai drew 48 percent of the votes in the general election in March, to Mr. Mugabe’s 43 percent, but the runoff was called because neither side had a majority.
“We don’t have a government in Zimbabwe that reflects the will of the people; the pressure has to be ratcheted up,” said Gordon D. Johndroe, a deputy White House press secretary and spokesman for Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley.
The results of Friday’s runoff are expected to be announced as early as Sunday.
In making the statement about sanctions, Mr. Bush was defying warnings last week by the African National Congress, South Africa’s governing party, to stay out of Zimbabwe’s business.
The White House had been monitoring the situation all week. On Monday Mr. Bush’s top advisers on Africa briefed him. On Wednesday, he met at the White House with the permanent representatives to the United Nations Security Council, and later called on the African Union to “continue to remind the world that this election is not free and it’s not fair.”
On Friday night, Mr. Hadley briefed Mr. Bush again. By that time, the United States had already begun discussions with its European allies in the Security Council about possible sanctions. American officials circulated a draft resolution Friday that would include an arms embargo and travel and financial restrictions on important members of the government, diplomats said.
The sanctions would extend to individuals who “engaged in or provided support for actions or policies to undermine democratic processes or institutions in Zimbabwe including having ordered, planned or participated in acts of politically-motivated violence,” the draft reads, according to one diplomat who read aloud from the document but requested anonymity for sharing it.
South Africa has torpedoed most attempts to criticize Zimbabwe. Dumisani Kumalo, South Africa’s ambassador to the United Nations, said last week that the Council should not weigh in before the African heads of state at an African Union summit in Egypt on Monday.
“It’s an African issue,” he said.
Although the proposed embargo seems destined to fail, Mr. Morrison said the push at the United Nations could increase pressure on the international community. “The fact that they’re willing to push it and embarrass people and make them uncomfortable is a good thing,” he said. “It will stigmatize the arms transactions; it will get the Chinese to think twice; it will perhaps get others to think twice.”
Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported from Washington, and Celia W. Dugger from Johannesburg. Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/opini ... ?th&emc=th
June 29, 2008
If Only Mugabe Were White
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Patson Chipiro, a democracy activist, wasn’t home when Robert Mugabe’s thugs showed up looking for him.
So they grabbed his wife, Dadirai, and tormented her by chopping off one of her hands and both of her feet. Finally, they threw her into a hut, locked the door and burned it to the ground.
That has been the pattern lately: with opposition figures in hiding, Mr. Mugabe’s goons kill loved ones to send a message of intimidation. Even the wife of the mayor-elect of Harare, the capital, was kidnapped and beaten to death.
When the white supremacist regime of Ian Smith oppressed Zimbabweans in the 1970s, African countries rallied against it. Eventually, even the white racist government in South Africa demanded change and threatened to cut off electricity supplies if it didn’t happen.
Yet South African President Thabo Mbeki continues to make excuses for Mr. Mugabe — who is more brutal than Ian Smith ever was — out of misplaced deference for a common history in the liberation struggle. Zimbabweans suffered so much for so many decades from white racism that the last thing they need is excuses for Mr. Mugabe’s brutality because of his skin color.
Life expectancy in Zimbabwe has already dropped from the low 60s to the high 30s. It’s true that he has created more trillionaires than any other country, but that’s only because inflation may be as much as 10 million percent. Anyone with $90 is a trillionaire in Zimbabwean dollars, and buying a small loaf of bread costs one billion Zimbabwean dollars.
When I grew up in the 1970s, a central truth was that Ian Smith was evil and Mr. Mugabe heroic. So it was jolting on my last visit to Zimbabwe, in 2005, to see how many Zimbabweans looked back on oppressive white rule with nostalgia. They offered a refrain: “Back then, at least parents could feed their children.”
Africa’s rulers often complain, with justice, that the West’s perceptions of the continent are disproportionately shaped by buffoons and tyrants rather than by the increasing number of democratically elected presidents presiding over 6 percent growth rates. But as long as African presidents mollycoddle Mr. Mugabe, they are branding Africa with his image.
To his credit, Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa has taken the lead in denouncing Mr. Mugabe’s abuses, and Nelson Mandela bluntly deplored Mr. Mugabe’s “tragic failure of leadership.” Mr. Mandela could also have been talking about Mr. Mbeki’s own failures.
The United States doesn’t have much leverage, and Britain squandered its influence partly by focusing on the plight of dispossessed white farmers. (That’s tribalism for Anglo-Saxons.) But there is a way out.
The solution is for leaders at the African Union summit this week to give Mr. Mugabe a clear choice.
One option would be for him to “retire” honorably — “for health reasons” after some face-saving claims of heart trouble — at a lovely estate in South Africa, taking top aides with him. He would be received respectfully and awarded a $5 million bank account to assure his comfort for the remainder of his days.
The other alternative is that he could dig in his heels and cling to power. African leaders should make clear that in that case, they will back an indictment of him and his aides in the International Criminal Court. Led by the Southern African Development Community, the world will also impose sanctions against Mr. Mugabe’s circle and cut off all military supplies and spare parts. Mozambique, South Africa and Congo will also cut off the electricity they provide to Zimbabwe.
If those are the alternatives, then the odds are that Mr. Mugabe will publicly clutch his chest and insist that he must step down. There will still be risks of civil conflict and a military coup, but Zimbabwe would have a reasonable prospect of again becoming, as Mr. Mugabe once called it, “the jewel of Africa.”
Some people will object that a tyrant shouldn’t be rewarded with a pot of cash and a comfortable exile. That’s true. But any other approach will likely result in far more deaths, perhaps even civil war.
How do we know that sanctions will work? Well, we have Mr. Mugabe’s own testimony.
In a 1987 essay in Foreign Affairs, Mr. Mugabe called on the U.S. to impose sanctions on white-ruled South Africa for engaging in a “vicious and ugly civil war” against its own people. Mr. Mugabe demanded that the world “accept the value of sanctions as a means of raising the cost” of brutal misrule.
If only Mr. Mugabe were a white racist! Then the regional powers might stand up to him. For the sake of Zimbabweans, we should be just as resolute in confronting African tyrants who are black as in confronting those who are white.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.
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June 29, 2008
Zimbabwe Faces Wider Sanctions Under Bush Plan
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and CELIA W. DUGGER
WASHINGTON — President Bush called Saturday for an international arms embargo against Zimbabwe in the wake of last week’s “sham election,” and announced that the United States is drafting new economic sanctions that, for the first time, would take aim at the entire government of President Robert Mugabe.
“The international community has condemned the Mugabe regime’s ruthless campaign of politically motivated violence and intimidation,” Mr. Bush said in a statement from the presidential retreat at Camp David, Md., adding that he had directed his secretaries of treasury and state to develop sanctions “against this illegitimate government of Zimbabwe and those who support it.”
The announcement came a day after Zimbabweans voted in a presidential runoff that has been widely denounced by Western leaders because of state-sponsored violence and efforts to intimidate voters with threats of beatings if they failed to cast their ballots for Mr. Mugabe, the sole candidate. Dozens of opposition supporters were killed in the weeks leading to the runoff.
The opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, dropped out of the race, citing continuing attacks against his supporters, and he later sought refuge in the Dutch Embassy. By taking the rare step of imposing sanctions on the government, the United States would put Zimbabwe in a league with nations like North Korea and Iran — a significant toughening of current policy toward Zimbabwe. The Bush administration has already imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe, but they apply only to about 140 members of the governing elite and the businesses they own and control.
“This certainly steps up pretty dramatically the scale of punitive action,” said J. Stephen Morrison, who directs the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here, and worked on Africa issues in the State Department under President Clinton. “It’s long overdue, but having Bush get out there and say some hard things is very important.”
The call for an international arms embargo, which Mr. Bush coupled with a proposed ban on travel by officials of the Mugabe government, is unlikely to be successful. American officials said it would almost certainly run into opposition at the United Nations from South Africa, Russia and China; South Africa’s position has long been that the Zimbabwe election is an internal affair.
The United States’ own sanctions, by contrast, can be carried out unilaterally. American officials and outside experts said they hope the sanctions would put pressure on Zimbabwe’s mining industry, a crucial source of foreign exchange for a government that is very short of it. The sanctions are expected to restrict the government’s ability to do business with American companies, although it is unclear which agencies or state-controlled businesses would be affected.
Africa experts and human rights advocates have not generally been calling for sanctions, in part, Mr. Morrison said, because they have been so focused on trying to tamp down the violence and abuses surrounding the elections. In Washington, Mr. Morrison and a colleague, Mark Bellamy, a former ambassador to Kenya, have been pressing for a diplomatic offensive to create an international consensus that Mr. Mugabe must be ousted.
Zimbabwe’s opposition spokesman, Nelson Chamisa, asked whether his party favored sanctions, would say only that it sought intensified international pressure. It seems likely that the opposition is reluctant to demand sanctions for fear of playing into Mr. Mugabe’s hands. The state media, daily, in story after story, blame the limited sanctions imposed by the United States and Europe on the Zimbabwean elite for having led to the country’s economic ruin.
It is almost certain that Mr. Mugabe will argue that any new sanctions are part of a Western plot to topple him.
It is unclear how much pain that sanctions would actually inflict on the Mugabe government, especially if Zimbabwe continues to get support from countries like South Africa and China.
A senior American official said Saturday that the decision on the United States’ sanctions had been made in the previous 48 hours, and research on how to carry them out had just begun. Although officials, for instance, said sanctions might allow the United States to freeze Zimbabwean assets in American banks, it was unclear if such assets existed.
Arvind Ganesam, director of the business and human rights program at Human Rights Watch, said sanctions on mining could have a significant impact, depending on how they were worded. “As long as the government can draw on mining revenues, it’s got a revenue stream independent of its own population,” he said. “And as long as it has access to those assets it can be as irresponsible as it wants.”
United States officials said the sanctions, which would take at least two weeks to draw up, could still be averted if Mr. Mugabe installs what the United States considers a legitimate government. Mr. Tsvangirai drew 48 percent of the votes in the general election in March, to Mr. Mugabe’s 43 percent, but the runoff was called because neither side had a majority.
“We don’t have a government in Zimbabwe that reflects the will of the people; the pressure has to be ratcheted up,” said Gordon D. Johndroe, a deputy White House press secretary and spokesman for Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley.
The results of Friday’s runoff are expected to be announced as early as Sunday.
In making the statement about sanctions, Mr. Bush was defying warnings last week by the African National Congress, South Africa’s governing party, to stay out of Zimbabwe’s business.
The White House had been monitoring the situation all week. On Monday Mr. Bush’s top advisers on Africa briefed him. On Wednesday, he met at the White House with the permanent representatives to the United Nations Security Council, and later called on the African Union to “continue to remind the world that this election is not free and it’s not fair.”
On Friday night, Mr. Hadley briefed Mr. Bush again. By that time, the United States had already begun discussions with its European allies in the Security Council about possible sanctions. American officials circulated a draft resolution Friday that would include an arms embargo and travel and financial restrictions on important members of the government, diplomats said.
The sanctions would extend to individuals who “engaged in or provided support for actions or policies to undermine democratic processes or institutions in Zimbabwe including having ordered, planned or participated in acts of politically-motivated violence,” the draft reads, according to one diplomat who read aloud from the document but requested anonymity for sharing it.
South Africa has torpedoed most attempts to criticize Zimbabwe. Dumisani Kumalo, South Africa’s ambassador to the United Nations, said last week that the Council should not weigh in before the African heads of state at an African Union summit in Egypt on Monday.
“It’s an African issue,” he said.
Although the proposed embargo seems destined to fail, Mr. Morrison said the push at the United Nations could increase pressure on the international community. “The fact that they’re willing to push it and embarrass people and make them uncomfortable is a good thing,” he said. “It will stigmatize the arms transactions; it will get the Chinese to think twice; it will perhaps get others to think twice.”
Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported from Washington, and Celia W. Dugger from Johannesburg. Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from New York.
June 30, 2008
Mugabe Is Sworn In to Sixth Term After Victory in One-Candidate Runoff
By CELIA W. DUGGER and BARRY BEARAK
JOHANNESBURG — Robert Mugabe, the runaway winner in a one-horse race, was quickly inaugurated Sunday as president of Zimbabwe after a runoff election on Friday. His opponent had already dropped out because state-sponsored enforcers were beating and killing his followers.
“I, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, do swear that I will truly serve in the office of president, so help me God,” he said somberly as he stood before a white-wigged judge under a red-carpeted tent at his official residence in Harare.
So began the 84-year-old Mr. Mugabe’s sixth term as president, the victor in an election many world leaders have denounced as illegitimate.
In another blow to his credibility, election observers for the Southern African Development Community, a bloc of 14 nations, concluded in a statement that the election “did not represent the will of the people of Zimbabwe,” Reuters reported.
Mr. Mugabe is now expected to travel to Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, for a meeting of the African Union on Monday. There, representatives of Zimbabwe’s opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, will ask the continent’s leaders to refuse to recognize Mr. Mugabe’s election and to appoint a mediator who can help find a negotiated way out of the country’s political impasse.
Mr. Tsvangirai, who won 48 percent of the vote to Mr. Mugabe’s 43 percent in the March 29 general election, cannot attend the meeting in person. He is unable to travel because Zimbabwean authorities have refused to give him back his passport after he turned it in to have pages added.
In a telephone interview on Sunday from the Dutch Embassy in Harare, where he has sought safe haven, Mr. Tsvangirai said the African Union’s response to Mr. Mugabe’s power grab is a test of the continent’s commitment to democracy. “Africa is poised for a defining challenge,” he said.
Several African leaders have harshly condemned Mr. Tsvangirai’s repeated detention during the campaign season, the arrest of his chief strategist on treason charges and the violence against his supporters, but they have yet to say what if anything they are willing to do about it.
Mr. Mugabe, a revered liberation hero and the leader of the ZANU-PF party, has often roused audiences of African officials with his stirring anti-Western rhetoric. The continent’s leaders have a history of inaction when it comes to Mr. Mugabe’s misdeeds. Mr. Mugabe himself said in a recent speech that many of them have worse records for clean elections than he does.
Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai have said they are willing to enter talks, and despite their mutual antipathy, each has reasons for wanting to negotiate. Mr. Mugabe’s party lost control of the lower house of Parliament, which will make it difficult for him to govern. Mr. Tsvangirai is now completely shut out of power.
In a speech after his inauguration, Mr. Mugabe said he hoped the parties would soon start negotiations “as we minimize our differences and enhance the area of unity and cooperation,” according to Reuters.
But the opposition leader said he expected there would be no simple way to ease out Mr. Mugabe, who, after holding on to power for 28 years through other elections that were also denounced as rigged, has now claimed five more years. “He wants to keep power for himself until he drops dead,” Mr. Tsvangirai said. “I have now come to the conclusion that he wants to die in office, and that when he dies, he wants ZANU-PF to continue in power.”
Mr. Tsvangirai has expressed his deep dissatisfaction with the region’s official Zimbabwe mediator, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, saying he is biased in Mr. Mugabe’s favor. Even as other African leaders have spoken out, Mr. Mbeki has not publicly criticized Mr. Mugabe, contending that he must maintain neutrality. The opposition is hoping that the African Union will choose an additional mediator.
“If we get the African Union to condemn the June 27 election, that’d be good,” said an opposition political strategist, who asked not to be quoted by name because he was discussing internal party matters. “If we can get them to appoint a mediator, we’d be ecstatic. If we can get them to explicitly say they don’t recognize the election, and Mugabe shouldn’t even be there as Zimbabwe’s leader, that’d be historic.”
The quick scheduling of Mr. Mugabe’s swearing-in on Sunday, after election officials announced that he won 85 percent of the vote in Friday’s runoff, differed from the pace after his second-place finish in the general election.
Then, it took election authorities more than a month to announce that neither candidate had won the majority needed to avoid a runoff. His governing party used the three months before the runoff to pursue a campaign of violence against the opposition that left dozens of Mr. Tsvangirai’s supporters dead and thousands wounded, according to civic groups, Western diplomats and the victims themselves.
The runoff on Friday was marred by physical threats against those who failed to vote for Mr. Mugabe, said human rights groups and Zimbabweans interviewed on election day. Mr. Tsvangirai had asked his supporters to boycott the runoff, but told them to vote for Mr. Mugabe with a clear conscience if they needed to do so to avoid being beaten or killed.
Kennedy Abwao contributed reporting from Sharm el Sheik, Egypt.
Mugabe Is Sworn In to Sixth Term After Victory in One-Candidate Runoff
By CELIA W. DUGGER and BARRY BEARAK
JOHANNESBURG — Robert Mugabe, the runaway winner in a one-horse race, was quickly inaugurated Sunday as president of Zimbabwe after a runoff election on Friday. His opponent had already dropped out because state-sponsored enforcers were beating and killing his followers.
“I, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, do swear that I will truly serve in the office of president, so help me God,” he said somberly as he stood before a white-wigged judge under a red-carpeted tent at his official residence in Harare.
So began the 84-year-old Mr. Mugabe’s sixth term as president, the victor in an election many world leaders have denounced as illegitimate.
In another blow to his credibility, election observers for the Southern African Development Community, a bloc of 14 nations, concluded in a statement that the election “did not represent the will of the people of Zimbabwe,” Reuters reported.
Mr. Mugabe is now expected to travel to Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, for a meeting of the African Union on Monday. There, representatives of Zimbabwe’s opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, will ask the continent’s leaders to refuse to recognize Mr. Mugabe’s election and to appoint a mediator who can help find a negotiated way out of the country’s political impasse.
Mr. Tsvangirai, who won 48 percent of the vote to Mr. Mugabe’s 43 percent in the March 29 general election, cannot attend the meeting in person. He is unable to travel because Zimbabwean authorities have refused to give him back his passport after he turned it in to have pages added.
In a telephone interview on Sunday from the Dutch Embassy in Harare, where he has sought safe haven, Mr. Tsvangirai said the African Union’s response to Mr. Mugabe’s power grab is a test of the continent’s commitment to democracy. “Africa is poised for a defining challenge,” he said.
Several African leaders have harshly condemned Mr. Tsvangirai’s repeated detention during the campaign season, the arrest of his chief strategist on treason charges and the violence against his supporters, but they have yet to say what if anything they are willing to do about it.
Mr. Mugabe, a revered liberation hero and the leader of the ZANU-PF party, has often roused audiences of African officials with his stirring anti-Western rhetoric. The continent’s leaders have a history of inaction when it comes to Mr. Mugabe’s misdeeds. Mr. Mugabe himself said in a recent speech that many of them have worse records for clean elections than he does.
Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai have said they are willing to enter talks, and despite their mutual antipathy, each has reasons for wanting to negotiate. Mr. Mugabe’s party lost control of the lower house of Parliament, which will make it difficult for him to govern. Mr. Tsvangirai is now completely shut out of power.
In a speech after his inauguration, Mr. Mugabe said he hoped the parties would soon start negotiations “as we minimize our differences and enhance the area of unity and cooperation,” according to Reuters.
But the opposition leader said he expected there would be no simple way to ease out Mr. Mugabe, who, after holding on to power for 28 years through other elections that were also denounced as rigged, has now claimed five more years. “He wants to keep power for himself until he drops dead,” Mr. Tsvangirai said. “I have now come to the conclusion that he wants to die in office, and that when he dies, he wants ZANU-PF to continue in power.”
Mr. Tsvangirai has expressed his deep dissatisfaction with the region’s official Zimbabwe mediator, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, saying he is biased in Mr. Mugabe’s favor. Even as other African leaders have spoken out, Mr. Mbeki has not publicly criticized Mr. Mugabe, contending that he must maintain neutrality. The opposition is hoping that the African Union will choose an additional mediator.
“If we get the African Union to condemn the June 27 election, that’d be good,” said an opposition political strategist, who asked not to be quoted by name because he was discussing internal party matters. “If we can get them to appoint a mediator, we’d be ecstatic. If we can get them to explicitly say they don’t recognize the election, and Mugabe shouldn’t even be there as Zimbabwe’s leader, that’d be historic.”
The quick scheduling of Mr. Mugabe’s swearing-in on Sunday, after election officials announced that he won 85 percent of the vote in Friday’s runoff, differed from the pace after his second-place finish in the general election.
Then, it took election authorities more than a month to announce that neither candidate had won the majority needed to avoid a runoff. His governing party used the three months before the runoff to pursue a campaign of violence against the opposition that left dozens of Mr. Tsvangirai’s supporters dead and thousands wounded, according to civic groups, Western diplomats and the victims themselves.
The runoff on Friday was marred by physical threats against those who failed to vote for Mr. Mugabe, said human rights groups and Zimbabweans interviewed on election day. Mr. Tsvangirai had asked his supporters to boycott the runoff, but told them to vote for Mr. Mugabe with a clear conscience if they needed to do so to avoid being beaten or killed.
Kennedy Abwao contributed reporting from Sharm el Sheik, Egypt.
July 1, 2008
Undeterred by Criticism, Mugabe Joins Peers at African Union Meeting
By KENNEDY ABWAO and ALAN COWELL
SHARM EL SHEIK, Egypt — Unabashed by critics and challenging his peers to prove their own democratic credentials, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe went to an African Union meeting here on Monday, displaying his victory in a one-candidate election that his neighbors said did not “represent the will of the people of Zimbabwe.”
The trip, his first formal act after being inaugurated Sunday to a sixth term, showed his determination to take his seat among African leaders despite international criticism. The rebukes included a pronouncement from southern African election monitors that last Friday’s presidential runoff was not free, fair or credible. The African Union’s own election observers concluded Monday that the vote “fell short” of the organization’s standards.
But African leaders showed little appetite for public confrontation with Mr. Mugabe. Mr. Mugabe, 84, once hailed as a liberation hero, slumped in an armchair in a cavernous conference hall at this Red Sea resort, using a headset to follow speeches that, in part, demanded negotiations to end his absolute power.
Asha-Rose Migiro, the United Nations deputy secretary general, told the African leaders here that they had reached a “moment of truth.”
“We are facing an extremely grave crisis,” Ms. Migiro said. “This is the single greatest challenge to regional stability in southern Africa, not only because of its terrible humanitarian and security consequences, but because of the dangerous political precedent it sets.”
“Only dialogue between the Zimbabwean parties, supported by the African Union and other regional actors, can restore peace and stability to the country,” she said.
That call for discussions was echoed in South Africa, the main regional power broker. Its Foreign Ministry urged Mr. Mugabe and the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, to “enter into negotiations which will lead to the formation of a transitional government that can extricate Zimbabwe from its current political challenges.”
According to the official tally of Friday’s election, Mr. Mugabe won some 85 percent of the ballot. But his opponent, Mr. Tsvangirai, pulled out of the race days before the voting, citing widespread violence and intimidation. Mr. Tsvangirai took refuge in the Dutch Embassy in Harare five days before the election.
Even in the closing stages of his campaign, Mr. Mugabe served notice that he “was prepared to face any of his African Union counterparts disparaging Zimbabwe’s electoral conduct because some of their countries had worse” election records, the state-run newspaper The Herald reported Monday.
In a statement on Monday, Mr. Tsvangirai’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change, urged the meeting participants here to reject the results of the runoff and to appoint “up to three African envoys to work full time on the crisis until it is resolved.” At present, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa is the sole mediator in the crisis. The statement repeated Mr. Tsvangirai’s claim that Mr. Mbeki was “too partial” toward Mr. Mugabe.
One of the few African voices raised publicly against Mr. Mugabe on Monday was that of Raila Odinga, the prime minister of Kenya, where elections last December set off bloody confrontations until a power-sharing deal was brokered. Some have depicted that deal as a potential model for Zimbabwe. Speaking in Nairobi, Mr. Odinga urged the African Union to suspend Mr. Mugabe until new elections could be held.
Mr. Tsvangirai won 48 percent of the vote to Mr. Mugabe’s 43 percent in the first round of the presidential election on March 29. In parliamentary elections on the same day, the opposition party won control of the lower house.
Each man wants any negotiations to be based on his own electoral arithmetic — Mr. Tsvangirai’s from March 29 and Mr. Mugabe’s from Friday.
“Sooner or later, as diverse political parties, we shall start serious talks,” Mr. Mugabe said in a speech after his inauguration, The Associated Press reported.
The African Union meeting was supposed to address developmental issues, but has come under the shadow of the Zimbabwean crisis. For Mr. Mugabe, his unchallenged presence among fellow African leaders offers what his aides depict as legitimacy.
Thokozani Khupe, the vice president of Mr. Tsvangirai’s political party, said in an interview here on Monday that the opposition wanted the establishment of a “transitional authority” based on the outcome of the March 29 vote, a formula that would give Mr. Tsvangirai the upper hand.
“Zimbabwe is burning,” Ms. Khupe said. “It is on fire. It is important that the African leaders save it before it burns beyond recognition.”
The United States ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, said Monday that the United States might introduce a Security Council resolution this week to impose formal sanctions against members of the Mugabe government. Given that Mr. Mugabe flouted last week’s statement from the Council calling for an end to the violence surrounding the elections, the Council has to act in some manner, the ambassador said.
“I’m pretty confident that the Council cannot remain silent on this issue,” Mr. Khalilzad told reporters. Although the 15-member Council passed a unanimous statement condemning the violence in Zimbabwe a week ago, an attempt to declare the runoff illegitimate on Friday sank after South Africa, one of the Council members, led the opposition to further criticism, saying Africans should resolve the issue.
Mr. Khalilzad expressed confidence that the United States could muster the nine votes needed to push the sanctions through, but predicted that doing so would involve “tough” negotiations.
“We are looking for focused sanctions on the regime itself,” he said. “Those who would oppose such action would have a lot to explain.”
Kennedy Abwao reported from Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from the United Nations.
Kennedy Abwao reported from Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from the United Nations.
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July 1, 2008
Editorial
Enabling Mr. Mugabe
Robert Mugabe brazenly and brutally stole his latest re-election as president of Zimbabwe. Now Africa’s leaders, who have looked the other way for far too long, must decide what they will do.
They can continue to enable Mr. Mugabe out of political cynicism or misplaced solidarity with a former liberation leader turned tyrant. Or they can follow the wiser example of the living symbol of African liberation, Nelson Mandela, who last week condemned Zimbabwe’s “tragic failure of leadership.”
The signals from Monday’s opening session of the African Union summit, with Mr. Mugabe smugly in attendance, were not encouraging. While African election monitors rightly denounced the voting, few summit speakers went beyond muted and indirect criticism.
More than truth telling is at stake. Zimbabwe and its people are dying at Mr. Mugabe’s hand — ravaged by an imploding economy, skyrocketing inflation, man-made famine and a governmental machinery whose only visible function is to reward the dictator’s collaborators and cronies and beat and kill his critics and opponents.
Zimbabwe needs a transitional government that reflects the true will of its voters, who gave a convincing first-round victory to the opposition candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai. And it needs a fair rerun of the election.
Africa’s leaders are best placed to keep Zimbabwe from further destabilizing the whole region. They can do so by refusing to recognize Mr. Mugabe’s election theft and by pressuring those who continue to collaborate with him by denying them visas, freezing bank accounts and calling on the rest of the world to follow suit.
While far too many African leaders — most notably President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa — refuse to accept that responsibility, the United States and other Western countries have taken the lead.
President Bush has extended unilateral sanctions against Zimbabwean officials. The United States is pressing the United Nations Security Council to impose an arms embargo on Zimbabwe and sanctions on Mr. Mugabe’s cronies.
Unfortunately, Russia, China and South Africa seem determined to block such moves.
That is yet another reason Africa’s other leaders must take the lead. They must speak the truth about Mr. Mugabe and all the horrors he has visited on Zimbabwe, back their words with sanctions and call on the Security Council to do the same.
Undeterred by Criticism, Mugabe Joins Peers at African Union Meeting
By KENNEDY ABWAO and ALAN COWELL
SHARM EL SHEIK, Egypt — Unabashed by critics and challenging his peers to prove their own democratic credentials, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe went to an African Union meeting here on Monday, displaying his victory in a one-candidate election that his neighbors said did not “represent the will of the people of Zimbabwe.”
The trip, his first formal act after being inaugurated Sunday to a sixth term, showed his determination to take his seat among African leaders despite international criticism. The rebukes included a pronouncement from southern African election monitors that last Friday’s presidential runoff was not free, fair or credible. The African Union’s own election observers concluded Monday that the vote “fell short” of the organization’s standards.
But African leaders showed little appetite for public confrontation with Mr. Mugabe. Mr. Mugabe, 84, once hailed as a liberation hero, slumped in an armchair in a cavernous conference hall at this Red Sea resort, using a headset to follow speeches that, in part, demanded negotiations to end his absolute power.
Asha-Rose Migiro, the United Nations deputy secretary general, told the African leaders here that they had reached a “moment of truth.”
“We are facing an extremely grave crisis,” Ms. Migiro said. “This is the single greatest challenge to regional stability in southern Africa, not only because of its terrible humanitarian and security consequences, but because of the dangerous political precedent it sets.”
“Only dialogue between the Zimbabwean parties, supported by the African Union and other regional actors, can restore peace and stability to the country,” she said.
That call for discussions was echoed in South Africa, the main regional power broker. Its Foreign Ministry urged Mr. Mugabe and the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, to “enter into negotiations which will lead to the formation of a transitional government that can extricate Zimbabwe from its current political challenges.”
According to the official tally of Friday’s election, Mr. Mugabe won some 85 percent of the ballot. But his opponent, Mr. Tsvangirai, pulled out of the race days before the voting, citing widespread violence and intimidation. Mr. Tsvangirai took refuge in the Dutch Embassy in Harare five days before the election.
Even in the closing stages of his campaign, Mr. Mugabe served notice that he “was prepared to face any of his African Union counterparts disparaging Zimbabwe’s electoral conduct because some of their countries had worse” election records, the state-run newspaper The Herald reported Monday.
In a statement on Monday, Mr. Tsvangirai’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change, urged the meeting participants here to reject the results of the runoff and to appoint “up to three African envoys to work full time on the crisis until it is resolved.” At present, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa is the sole mediator in the crisis. The statement repeated Mr. Tsvangirai’s claim that Mr. Mbeki was “too partial” toward Mr. Mugabe.
One of the few African voices raised publicly against Mr. Mugabe on Monday was that of Raila Odinga, the prime minister of Kenya, where elections last December set off bloody confrontations until a power-sharing deal was brokered. Some have depicted that deal as a potential model for Zimbabwe. Speaking in Nairobi, Mr. Odinga urged the African Union to suspend Mr. Mugabe until new elections could be held.
Mr. Tsvangirai won 48 percent of the vote to Mr. Mugabe’s 43 percent in the first round of the presidential election on March 29. In parliamentary elections on the same day, the opposition party won control of the lower house.
Each man wants any negotiations to be based on his own electoral arithmetic — Mr. Tsvangirai’s from March 29 and Mr. Mugabe’s from Friday.
“Sooner or later, as diverse political parties, we shall start serious talks,” Mr. Mugabe said in a speech after his inauguration, The Associated Press reported.
The African Union meeting was supposed to address developmental issues, but has come under the shadow of the Zimbabwean crisis. For Mr. Mugabe, his unchallenged presence among fellow African leaders offers what his aides depict as legitimacy.
Thokozani Khupe, the vice president of Mr. Tsvangirai’s political party, said in an interview here on Monday that the opposition wanted the establishment of a “transitional authority” based on the outcome of the March 29 vote, a formula that would give Mr. Tsvangirai the upper hand.
“Zimbabwe is burning,” Ms. Khupe said. “It is on fire. It is important that the African leaders save it before it burns beyond recognition.”
The United States ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, said Monday that the United States might introduce a Security Council resolution this week to impose formal sanctions against members of the Mugabe government. Given that Mr. Mugabe flouted last week’s statement from the Council calling for an end to the violence surrounding the elections, the Council has to act in some manner, the ambassador said.
“I’m pretty confident that the Council cannot remain silent on this issue,” Mr. Khalilzad told reporters. Although the 15-member Council passed a unanimous statement condemning the violence in Zimbabwe a week ago, an attempt to declare the runoff illegitimate on Friday sank after South Africa, one of the Council members, led the opposition to further criticism, saying Africans should resolve the issue.
Mr. Khalilzad expressed confidence that the United States could muster the nine votes needed to push the sanctions through, but predicted that doing so would involve “tough” negotiations.
“We are looking for focused sanctions on the regime itself,” he said. “Those who would oppose such action would have a lot to explain.”
Kennedy Abwao reported from Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from the United Nations.
Kennedy Abwao reported from Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from the United Nations.
****
July 1, 2008
Editorial
Enabling Mr. Mugabe
Robert Mugabe brazenly and brutally stole his latest re-election as president of Zimbabwe. Now Africa’s leaders, who have looked the other way for far too long, must decide what they will do.
They can continue to enable Mr. Mugabe out of political cynicism or misplaced solidarity with a former liberation leader turned tyrant. Or they can follow the wiser example of the living symbol of African liberation, Nelson Mandela, who last week condemned Zimbabwe’s “tragic failure of leadership.”
The signals from Monday’s opening session of the African Union summit, with Mr. Mugabe smugly in attendance, were not encouraging. While African election monitors rightly denounced the voting, few summit speakers went beyond muted and indirect criticism.
More than truth telling is at stake. Zimbabwe and its people are dying at Mr. Mugabe’s hand — ravaged by an imploding economy, skyrocketing inflation, man-made famine and a governmental machinery whose only visible function is to reward the dictator’s collaborators and cronies and beat and kill his critics and opponents.
Zimbabwe needs a transitional government that reflects the true will of its voters, who gave a convincing first-round victory to the opposition candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai. And it needs a fair rerun of the election.
Africa’s leaders are best placed to keep Zimbabwe from further destabilizing the whole region. They can do so by refusing to recognize Mr. Mugabe’s election theft and by pressuring those who continue to collaborate with him by denying them visas, freezing bank accounts and calling on the rest of the world to follow suit.
While far too many African leaders — most notably President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa — refuse to accept that responsibility, the United States and other Western countries have taken the lead.
President Bush has extended unilateral sanctions against Zimbabwean officials. The United States is pressing the United Nations Security Council to impose an arms embargo on Zimbabwe and sanctions on Mr. Mugabe’s cronies.
Unfortunately, Russia, China and South Africa seem determined to block such moves.
That is yet another reason Africa’s other leaders must take the lead. They must speak the truth about Mr. Mugabe and all the horrors he has visited on Zimbabwe, back their words with sanctions and call on the Security Council to do the same.
July 2, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Does Zimbabwe Need a President?
By MARK Y. ROSENBERG
Johannesburg, South Africa
NOW that President Robert Mugabe has been sworn into a sixth term after an election widely viewed as illegitimate, what is the rest of the world going to do about it?
So far, the response has been slow or ineffective; the United Nations Security Council has managed to pass only watered-down condemnations of Mr. Mugabe’s electoral terror because of resistance from South Africa, China and Russia. And Tuesday, the African Union urged Mr. Mugabe to join in a power-sharing agreement — a government of national unity.
But a better idea may be for Zimbabwe’s elected officials to cut the 84-year-old Mr. Mugabe out altogether — by getting rid of the office of president.
At first glance that may appear difficult: the Zimbabwean regime is marked by an extremely powerful executive presidency coupled with a largely neutered Parliament. Nearly all state power now rests with Mr. Mugabe, who has run the country since independence in 1980, and now presides over a nation with severe fuel and food shortages and an inflation rate of more than a million percent a year.
Yet it is possible for the Parliament to jettison the presidency. Recall that Zimbabwe’s parliamentary elections in March gave the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change led by Morgan Tsvangirai, 109 seats in the House of Assembly to 97 for Mr. Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF. Though by no means flawless, these elections were not marred by the same degree of violence and intimidation as the recent presidential election, in which the winner of the first round, Mr. Tsvangirai, withdrew from the race in fear for his life and those of his supporters.
The Movement for Democratic Change’s slight majority is a relatively accurate depiction of the country’s political landscape, giving both sides significant representation in Parliament, with the M.D.C. controlling the 210-seat lower house, and the parties effectively tied in the Senate. That would allow a Prime Minister Tsvangirai to govern while still requiring his party to compromise with ZANU-PF to gain the two-thirds majority needed to pass constitutional amendments — like getting rid of the presidency for good. That would also help protect ZANU-PF supporters, including military officers, from state-sponsored revenge.
More immediately, a newly empowered Parliament would give reformist elements in ZANU-PF a forum in which to conduct politics and make deals. The party is no longer a monolith: former Finance Minister Simba Makoni ran for president against Mr. Mugabe in the first round, and there are leaders within ZANU-PF who are more than willing to abandon the “old man” given the opportunity to do so. These leaders — including Gen. Solomon Mujuru and former Home Affairs Minister Dumiso Dabengwa — are the natural negotiating partners of the Movement for Democratic Change, not the indefatigable Mr. Mugabe and his coterie of hard-liners.
The newly elected parliamentarians haven’t been sworn in yet, and some seats remain contested. But once they find a way to meet, they could rather quickly declare the Parliament sovereign and terminate Mr. Mugabe’s reign. In the last few decades, African countries like Benin and Mali made transitions from authoritarian rule by taking similar actions at so-called national conferences.
What’s more, a sovereign parliament with significant ZANU-PF backing could credibly offer amnesty deals to the generals who had sustained Mr. Mugabe’s tyranny. Although distasteful, such amnesty deals would be critical to any lasting settlement and would be far easier to achieve without Mr. Mugabe in the picture — particularly if the Parliament’s sovereignty were recognized by the African Union and the United Nations.
A parliamentary government would have the virtue of not only dislodging Mr. Mugabe, but assuring a more democratic Zimbabwe in the future. Indeed, Zimbabwe began as a parliamentary democracy, but Mr. Mugabe found that form of government too restrictive and abolished the office of prime minister in 1987, concentrating power in an executive presidency.
Political scientists have demonstrated that parliamentary regimes are more likely to remain democratic than their presidential counterparts. Power and legitimacy in the new regime would be vested in a representative body, not a single person or office. Moreover, parliaments are institutionally appropriate for politically and ethnically divided societies like Zimbabwe: they ensure representation for political minorities and generally require compromise in order to form governments.
With other geriatric presidents clinging to power throughout Africa — Omar Bongo in Gabon and Paul Biya in Cameroon are but two examples — more Zimbabwe-like crises may be on the horizon. The international community would be well served to support institutional alternatives to the continent’s over-empowered executives, beginning with a parliamentary (and free) Zimbabwe.
Mark Y. Rosenberg is the southern Africa analyst for Freedom House.
Op-Ed Contributor
Does Zimbabwe Need a President?
By MARK Y. ROSENBERG
Johannesburg, South Africa
NOW that President Robert Mugabe has been sworn into a sixth term after an election widely viewed as illegitimate, what is the rest of the world going to do about it?
So far, the response has been slow or ineffective; the United Nations Security Council has managed to pass only watered-down condemnations of Mr. Mugabe’s electoral terror because of resistance from South Africa, China and Russia. And Tuesday, the African Union urged Mr. Mugabe to join in a power-sharing agreement — a government of national unity.
But a better idea may be for Zimbabwe’s elected officials to cut the 84-year-old Mr. Mugabe out altogether — by getting rid of the office of president.
At first glance that may appear difficult: the Zimbabwean regime is marked by an extremely powerful executive presidency coupled with a largely neutered Parliament. Nearly all state power now rests with Mr. Mugabe, who has run the country since independence in 1980, and now presides over a nation with severe fuel and food shortages and an inflation rate of more than a million percent a year.
Yet it is possible for the Parliament to jettison the presidency. Recall that Zimbabwe’s parliamentary elections in March gave the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change led by Morgan Tsvangirai, 109 seats in the House of Assembly to 97 for Mr. Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF. Though by no means flawless, these elections were not marred by the same degree of violence and intimidation as the recent presidential election, in which the winner of the first round, Mr. Tsvangirai, withdrew from the race in fear for his life and those of his supporters.
The Movement for Democratic Change’s slight majority is a relatively accurate depiction of the country’s political landscape, giving both sides significant representation in Parliament, with the M.D.C. controlling the 210-seat lower house, and the parties effectively tied in the Senate. That would allow a Prime Minister Tsvangirai to govern while still requiring his party to compromise with ZANU-PF to gain the two-thirds majority needed to pass constitutional amendments — like getting rid of the presidency for good. That would also help protect ZANU-PF supporters, including military officers, from state-sponsored revenge.
More immediately, a newly empowered Parliament would give reformist elements in ZANU-PF a forum in which to conduct politics and make deals. The party is no longer a monolith: former Finance Minister Simba Makoni ran for president against Mr. Mugabe in the first round, and there are leaders within ZANU-PF who are more than willing to abandon the “old man” given the opportunity to do so. These leaders — including Gen. Solomon Mujuru and former Home Affairs Minister Dumiso Dabengwa — are the natural negotiating partners of the Movement for Democratic Change, not the indefatigable Mr. Mugabe and his coterie of hard-liners.
The newly elected parliamentarians haven’t been sworn in yet, and some seats remain contested. But once they find a way to meet, they could rather quickly declare the Parliament sovereign and terminate Mr. Mugabe’s reign. In the last few decades, African countries like Benin and Mali made transitions from authoritarian rule by taking similar actions at so-called national conferences.
What’s more, a sovereign parliament with significant ZANU-PF backing could credibly offer amnesty deals to the generals who had sustained Mr. Mugabe’s tyranny. Although distasteful, such amnesty deals would be critical to any lasting settlement and would be far easier to achieve without Mr. Mugabe in the picture — particularly if the Parliament’s sovereignty were recognized by the African Union and the United Nations.
A parliamentary government would have the virtue of not only dislodging Mr. Mugabe, but assuring a more democratic Zimbabwe in the future. Indeed, Zimbabwe began as a parliamentary democracy, but Mr. Mugabe found that form of government too restrictive and abolished the office of prime minister in 1987, concentrating power in an executive presidency.
Political scientists have demonstrated that parliamentary regimes are more likely to remain democratic than their presidential counterparts. Power and legitimacy in the new regime would be vested in a representative body, not a single person or office. Moreover, parliaments are institutionally appropriate for politically and ethnically divided societies like Zimbabwe: they ensure representation for political minorities and generally require compromise in order to form governments.
With other geriatric presidents clinging to power throughout Africa — Omar Bongo in Gabon and Paul Biya in Cameroon are but two examples — more Zimbabwe-like crises may be on the horizon. The international community would be well served to support institutional alternatives to the continent’s over-empowered executives, beginning with a parliamentary (and free) Zimbabwe.
Mark Y. Rosenberg is the southern Africa analyst for Freedom House.
July 3, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Mbeki’s Shame
By ROGER COHEN
Sometimes stubbornness gets measured in blood, and sometimes the wounds of race are blinding.
That’s the kindest verdict I can find for the listless mediation in a devastated Zimbabwe of Thabo Mbeki, the South African president. Faced by all the brutal expressions of his neighbor Robert Mugabe’s megalomania, Mbeki has prodded here and there, like a learned physician mildly intrigued by a corpse.
As a once flourishing economy has imploded, as inflation has assumed Weimar proportions, as millions have fled to South Africa and as an octogenarian tyrant has dispatched goons to murder and ravage, Mbeki has gone on mumbling that the people of Zimbabwe must solve their own problems.
They tried by giving a clear victory to the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, in the March 29 election. But the 48 percent to 43 percent lead over Mugabe fell short of an absolute majority, conveniently so, allowing the liberator-turned-despot to terrorize his way to a sham second-round victory and sixth term.
Enough already! Mugabe in his labyrinth is ruinous. That, however, has scarcely bestirred Mbeki of “What crisis?” fame. As Georgina Godwin, a Zimbabwean journalist, put it: “Mbeki’s quiet diplomacy is comatose.”
Herding cats is easier than finding significance in the Delphic utterances of Africa’s Mr. Imperturbable. I interviewed Mbeki back in 2003, along with my New York Times colleague Felicity Barringer. The conversation yielded a 345-word story, huge given Mbeki’s erudite-sounding vacuity, worthy of a Soviet apparatchik.
Mbeki did, however, say that he’d been urging Mugabe to meet with his political opponents — sound familiar? — and declared of Zimbabwe: “The political problems and conflicts they’ve experienced, I think they’ll get over that.”
Right.
That was five years ago. Now, we hear that Mbeki’s hopeful of arranging a meeting between Mugabe and Tsvangirai, and we have the African Union calling this week for a Zimbabwean “government of national unity.”
Fine sentiments, but it’s late in the day. I can’t see Tsvangirai, even if he were offered the post of prime minister, finding any “unity” with Mugabe and his militarized ZANU-PF party, which he wants to disarm.
This mess is Mugabe’s, but Mbeki has been his enabler. Why? The filial respect of a fellow African liberation fighter? Distaste for Tsvangirai, a former trade union leader, at a time when Mbeki’s own power has been undermined by South African trade unions and their man, Jacob Zuma? A loathing of Western interventionism?
No doubt the above play a part, but I think the real clue lies in Mbeki’s previous act of blind stubbornness, whose harvest was not the blood of neighbors but of his fellow citizens.
For more than three years, Mbeki indulged in a bout of AIDS denialism that stopped antiretroviral drugs from getting to millions infected with H.I.V. Hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths ensued.
Mbeki was never specific about the roots of his dissent, now sidelined if never disavowed. But when asked in Parliament in 2004 if he believed widespread rape played any role in spreading AIDS, he exploded:
“The disease of racism,” he said, led to blacks being portrayed as “lazy, liars, foul-smelling, diseased, corrupt, violent, amoral, sexually depraved, animalistic, savage and rapist.”
The link between H.I.V. and AIDS, in this angry vision, was a fabrication foisted on Africans by whites determined to distract the continent from real problems of racism and poverty, and accepted by blacks afflicted with the slave mentality engendered by apartheid.
Mbeki’s pseudoscience was death-propagating nonsense. But his theories of sexuality under apartheid were not.
I spent enough time under apartheid to see that the portrayal of blacks as sexual animals was integral to a white policy of dehumanizing them. More than once, I was asked with a boozy sneer by South African whites if I could ever imagine being attracted to a black woman.
So when Mugabe rails against the white colonialists, and expropriates white farmers, and portrays himself as the African fighting back white colonialism — when he resurrects the long struggle — I suspect he strikes a chord with Mbeki, whose own pragmatism is no Mandela-like conciliation.
“The racial petulance lives on in Mbeki,” said Peter Godwin, whose superb book, “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun,” chronicles how he and his sister Georgina saw their family’s life in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, destroyed. “He’s the black intellectual living with the fact that whites think they are better.”
Mbeki should read Godwin’s book. It might even inspire him to criticize Mugabe. But then, he’d say, it’s a white man’s work. And that’s the truth.
But what the disaster of Mugabe and of Mbeki’s nonmediation teaches us is that the wounds of a racist past, however deep, cannot justify a nation’s dismemberment. Mugabe must go, South Africa move on, and Mbeki must consider the blood that has flowed from his myopia and now tarnishes his legacy.
Blog: www.iht.com/passages
Op-Ed Columnist
Mbeki’s Shame
By ROGER COHEN
Sometimes stubbornness gets measured in blood, and sometimes the wounds of race are blinding.
That’s the kindest verdict I can find for the listless mediation in a devastated Zimbabwe of Thabo Mbeki, the South African president. Faced by all the brutal expressions of his neighbor Robert Mugabe’s megalomania, Mbeki has prodded here and there, like a learned physician mildly intrigued by a corpse.
As a once flourishing economy has imploded, as inflation has assumed Weimar proportions, as millions have fled to South Africa and as an octogenarian tyrant has dispatched goons to murder and ravage, Mbeki has gone on mumbling that the people of Zimbabwe must solve their own problems.
They tried by giving a clear victory to the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, in the March 29 election. But the 48 percent to 43 percent lead over Mugabe fell short of an absolute majority, conveniently so, allowing the liberator-turned-despot to terrorize his way to a sham second-round victory and sixth term.
Enough already! Mugabe in his labyrinth is ruinous. That, however, has scarcely bestirred Mbeki of “What crisis?” fame. As Georgina Godwin, a Zimbabwean journalist, put it: “Mbeki’s quiet diplomacy is comatose.”
Herding cats is easier than finding significance in the Delphic utterances of Africa’s Mr. Imperturbable. I interviewed Mbeki back in 2003, along with my New York Times colleague Felicity Barringer. The conversation yielded a 345-word story, huge given Mbeki’s erudite-sounding vacuity, worthy of a Soviet apparatchik.
Mbeki did, however, say that he’d been urging Mugabe to meet with his political opponents — sound familiar? — and declared of Zimbabwe: “The political problems and conflicts they’ve experienced, I think they’ll get over that.”
Right.
That was five years ago. Now, we hear that Mbeki’s hopeful of arranging a meeting between Mugabe and Tsvangirai, and we have the African Union calling this week for a Zimbabwean “government of national unity.”
Fine sentiments, but it’s late in the day. I can’t see Tsvangirai, even if he were offered the post of prime minister, finding any “unity” with Mugabe and his militarized ZANU-PF party, which he wants to disarm.
This mess is Mugabe’s, but Mbeki has been his enabler. Why? The filial respect of a fellow African liberation fighter? Distaste for Tsvangirai, a former trade union leader, at a time when Mbeki’s own power has been undermined by South African trade unions and their man, Jacob Zuma? A loathing of Western interventionism?
No doubt the above play a part, but I think the real clue lies in Mbeki’s previous act of blind stubbornness, whose harvest was not the blood of neighbors but of his fellow citizens.
For more than three years, Mbeki indulged in a bout of AIDS denialism that stopped antiretroviral drugs from getting to millions infected with H.I.V. Hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths ensued.
Mbeki was never specific about the roots of his dissent, now sidelined if never disavowed. But when asked in Parliament in 2004 if he believed widespread rape played any role in spreading AIDS, he exploded:
“The disease of racism,” he said, led to blacks being portrayed as “lazy, liars, foul-smelling, diseased, corrupt, violent, amoral, sexually depraved, animalistic, savage and rapist.”
The link between H.I.V. and AIDS, in this angry vision, was a fabrication foisted on Africans by whites determined to distract the continent from real problems of racism and poverty, and accepted by blacks afflicted with the slave mentality engendered by apartheid.
Mbeki’s pseudoscience was death-propagating nonsense. But his theories of sexuality under apartheid were not.
I spent enough time under apartheid to see that the portrayal of blacks as sexual animals was integral to a white policy of dehumanizing them. More than once, I was asked with a boozy sneer by South African whites if I could ever imagine being attracted to a black woman.
So when Mugabe rails against the white colonialists, and expropriates white farmers, and portrays himself as the African fighting back white colonialism — when he resurrects the long struggle — I suspect he strikes a chord with Mbeki, whose own pragmatism is no Mandela-like conciliation.
“The racial petulance lives on in Mbeki,” said Peter Godwin, whose superb book, “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun,” chronicles how he and his sister Georgina saw their family’s life in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, destroyed. “He’s the black intellectual living with the fact that whites think they are better.”
Mbeki should read Godwin’s book. It might even inspire him to criticize Mugabe. But then, he’d say, it’s a white man’s work. And that’s the truth.
But what the disaster of Mugabe and of Mbeki’s nonmediation teaches us is that the wounds of a racist past, however deep, cannot justify a nation’s dismemberment. Mugabe must go, South Africa move on, and Mbeki must consider the blood that has flowed from his myopia and now tarnishes his legacy.
Blog: www.iht.com/passages
July 8, 2008
Bush Pushes Hard Line on Zimbabwe at G-8
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
TOYAKO, Japan — As world leaders convened in this resort town in northern Japan on Monday for three days of talks on issues including climate change and rising food and energy prices, the agenda quickly shifted to the political crisis in Zimbabwe, exposing a split between Western and African leaders.
The leaders of seven African countries and eight industrialized nations emerged divided after three hours of closed-door meetings dominated by the crisis in Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe was sworn in last month for a sixth term as president. He was re-elected in a one-candidate runoff that leaders around the world called a sham after weeks of violence against his opposition.
The United States and Britain have proposed an international arms embargo and sanctions on the Zimbabwe government. But with Mr. Mugabe warning Western nations not to interfere, and the African Union already on record as rejecting sanctions, the union’s head, President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania, suggested that a power-sharing agreement was the answer.
“We are saying no party can govern alone in Zimbabwe,” Mr. Kikwete said at a news conference with President Bush after the meetings, “and therefore the parties have to work together to come up to — to come out, work together, in a government, and then look at the future of their country together.”
Addressing Mr. Bush, he said: “We understand your concerns, but I want to assure you that the concerns you have expressed are indeed the concerns of many of us on the African continent. The only area that we may differ on is the way forward.”
Mr. Bush said he and other Western leaders had “listened carefully” to their African counterparts.
“You know I care deeply about the people of Zimbabwe,” he said. “I’m extremely disappointed in the elections, which I labeled a sham election.” But he did not mention any discussion of sanctions and ignored reporters’ questions on the issue.
The leaders are gathered here on the mountainous northern Japanese island of Hokkaido for the so-called Group of 8 summit meeting. Technically, the group includes the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, Russia and Japan. The annual event has broadened to include heads of state from around the world, including the “Africa outreach” group of seven African leaders, from Tanzania, Algeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the meeting is drawing protesters and a shadow meeting as well. Two hours north of the official meeting site, globalization foes held a third day of protests in Hokkaido’s largest city, Sapporo, focused on agriculture on Monday.
About 150 people, some made up as clowns or dressed in black-spotted cow suits, marched through downtown Sapporo. Organizers said the current food crisis was a chance to rethink agricultural trade, and rely more on locally grown products.
The marchers, who chanted “No More G-8” in English and Japanese, included Japanese farmers and a handful of activists from Europe, the United States and Latin America. In the heavy-handed style of Japan’s security during the summit meeting so far, there were about the same number of police officers as protesters. The police formed a cordon around the march and followed in four blue and white buses.
“We face a food crisis, but the G-8 has no answers,” said a march organizer, Yoshitaka Mashima, who is vice chairman of the Japan Family Farmers Movement. “This is an opening for us to appeal to the public with new ideas.”
The food crisis was also an issue in the meeting with African leaders, according to officials who attended. Mr. Bush has made aid to Africa, especially his program to fight global AIDS, a centerpiece of his foreign policy agenda, and has said repeatedly that he intends to use this year’s meeting to press his fellow Group of 8 leaders to live up to their 2005 pledge to double development aid to Africa by 2010.
According to the advocacy group One, which is based in Washington and focuses on fighting poverty and AIDS around the world, just 14 percent of those pledges have been filled. Dan Price, a deputy national security adviser to Mr. Bush, said the African leaders spoke of the “essential need” for wealthy nations to live up to their pledges at the Monday meeting.
But despite the focus on poverty and disease, it was clear that Zimbabwe weighed most heavily on the leaders’ minds.
Mr. Bush said the leaders spent “a fair amount of time” talking about the political situation there.
The African Union leaders have publicly offered only limited criticism of Mr. Mugabe over the violence before the June 27 runoff. In the weeks before the vote, state-sponsored enforcers beat and killed followers of Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader who won 48 percent to Mr. Mugabe’s 43 percent in the first round of elections. Days before the runoff, Mr. Tsvangirai withdrew.
Many African leaders have sought to persuade Mr. Mugabe to agree to a power-sharing arrangement with Mr. Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change, so far to no avail.
Last week, the United States formally introduced a sanctions resolution at the United Nations, calling for an international arms embargo and punitive measures against the 14 people deemed to be most responsible for the violence. But the African Union argues that the idea is a local problem that can be dealt with locally, and after Monday’s session, it was clear that had not changed.
Martin Fackler contributed reporting.
Bush Pushes Hard Line on Zimbabwe at G-8
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
TOYAKO, Japan — As world leaders convened in this resort town in northern Japan on Monday for three days of talks on issues including climate change and rising food and energy prices, the agenda quickly shifted to the political crisis in Zimbabwe, exposing a split between Western and African leaders.
The leaders of seven African countries and eight industrialized nations emerged divided after three hours of closed-door meetings dominated by the crisis in Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe was sworn in last month for a sixth term as president. He was re-elected in a one-candidate runoff that leaders around the world called a sham after weeks of violence against his opposition.
The United States and Britain have proposed an international arms embargo and sanctions on the Zimbabwe government. But with Mr. Mugabe warning Western nations not to interfere, and the African Union already on record as rejecting sanctions, the union’s head, President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania, suggested that a power-sharing agreement was the answer.
“We are saying no party can govern alone in Zimbabwe,” Mr. Kikwete said at a news conference with President Bush after the meetings, “and therefore the parties have to work together to come up to — to come out, work together, in a government, and then look at the future of their country together.”
Addressing Mr. Bush, he said: “We understand your concerns, but I want to assure you that the concerns you have expressed are indeed the concerns of many of us on the African continent. The only area that we may differ on is the way forward.”
Mr. Bush said he and other Western leaders had “listened carefully” to their African counterparts.
“You know I care deeply about the people of Zimbabwe,” he said. “I’m extremely disappointed in the elections, which I labeled a sham election.” But he did not mention any discussion of sanctions and ignored reporters’ questions on the issue.
The leaders are gathered here on the mountainous northern Japanese island of Hokkaido for the so-called Group of 8 summit meeting. Technically, the group includes the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, Russia and Japan. The annual event has broadened to include heads of state from around the world, including the “Africa outreach” group of seven African leaders, from Tanzania, Algeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the meeting is drawing protesters and a shadow meeting as well. Two hours north of the official meeting site, globalization foes held a third day of protests in Hokkaido’s largest city, Sapporo, focused on agriculture on Monday.
About 150 people, some made up as clowns or dressed in black-spotted cow suits, marched through downtown Sapporo. Organizers said the current food crisis was a chance to rethink agricultural trade, and rely more on locally grown products.
The marchers, who chanted “No More G-8” in English and Japanese, included Japanese farmers and a handful of activists from Europe, the United States and Latin America. In the heavy-handed style of Japan’s security during the summit meeting so far, there were about the same number of police officers as protesters. The police formed a cordon around the march and followed in four blue and white buses.
“We face a food crisis, but the G-8 has no answers,” said a march organizer, Yoshitaka Mashima, who is vice chairman of the Japan Family Farmers Movement. “This is an opening for us to appeal to the public with new ideas.”
The food crisis was also an issue in the meeting with African leaders, according to officials who attended. Mr. Bush has made aid to Africa, especially his program to fight global AIDS, a centerpiece of his foreign policy agenda, and has said repeatedly that he intends to use this year’s meeting to press his fellow Group of 8 leaders to live up to their 2005 pledge to double development aid to Africa by 2010.
According to the advocacy group One, which is based in Washington and focuses on fighting poverty and AIDS around the world, just 14 percent of those pledges have been filled. Dan Price, a deputy national security adviser to Mr. Bush, said the African leaders spoke of the “essential need” for wealthy nations to live up to their pledges at the Monday meeting.
But despite the focus on poverty and disease, it was clear that Zimbabwe weighed most heavily on the leaders’ minds.
Mr. Bush said the leaders spent “a fair amount of time” talking about the political situation there.
The African Union leaders have publicly offered only limited criticism of Mr. Mugabe over the violence before the June 27 runoff. In the weeks before the vote, state-sponsored enforcers beat and killed followers of Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader who won 48 percent to Mr. Mugabe’s 43 percent in the first round of elections. Days before the runoff, Mr. Tsvangirai withdrew.
Many African leaders have sought to persuade Mr. Mugabe to agree to a power-sharing arrangement with Mr. Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change, so far to no avail.
Last week, the United States formally introduced a sanctions resolution at the United Nations, calling for an international arms embargo and punitive measures against the 14 people deemed to be most responsible for the violence. But the African Union argues that the idea is a local problem that can be dealt with locally, and after Monday’s session, it was clear that had not changed.
Martin Fackler contributed reporting.
July 11, 2008
Zimbabwe Opponents Begin Talking About Talks
By BARRY BEARAK
JOHANNESBURG — Zimbabwe’s ruling party began preliminary discussions with the opposition on Thursday in an effort to settle a political crisis in which both sides stake a claim to the nation’s presidency.
But in a statement late in the day Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, stressed that these talks, in Pretoria, South Africa, cannot lead to genuine negotiations until state-sponsored violence stops and 1,500 of his supporters are released from prison.
He denounced efforts by the government of President Robert Mugabe to portray Thursday’s meeting as a negotiation imminently leading to a settlement, saying the ruling party, ZANU-PF, is “being disingenuous and exploiting the plight of the Zimbabwean people for political gain.”
Mr. Tsvangirai was in an awkward position. For the past two days, his party, the Movement for Democratic Change, has issued categorical statements that it will not participate in any kind of talks until its conditions were met. The government’s announcement that talks were in the works was a “figment of the dictator’s imagination,” read one opposition statement.
But Thursday, Mr. Tsvangirai nevertheless sent emissaries to Pretoria.
Both sides have mentioned the need for some sort of unity government, though ZANU-PF demands that President Mugabe remain on top while the opposition insists on Mr. Tsvangirai.
Mr. Tsvangirai outpolled Mr. Mugabe in a March election but then pulled out of a June 27 runoff, citing the ongoing violence.
Thursday’s meetings may indeed prove to be nothing more than finger-pointing. But the fact that any discussions are occurring at all is something of a victory for the regional mediator, South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, who is a Mugabe ally of long standing and whom the opposition has accused of bias in the mediation. Mr. Mbeki traveled to Harare last weekend but failed to get Mr. Tsvangirai to meet with Mr. Mugabe.
Neither Mr. Mugabe nor Mr. Tsvangirai has come to Pretoria. The opposition is represented by its secretary general, Tendai Biti, who was only recently freed on bail on treason charges, and deputy treasurer-general Elton Mangoma. The ZANU-PF negotiators are Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa and Labor Minister Nicholas Goche, according to Zimbabwe’s state-run newspaper The Herald.
By most accounts, the bloodletting continues in Zimbabwe. In the pre-dawn hours on Monday, hundreds of people displaced by earlier violence were attacked at a rehabilitation center near Harare. Victims blamed the assault on ZANU-PF militia.
“Where do I go now?” asked an opposition activist contacted by phone. He was afraid to have his name appear in the newspaper. “Someone who escaped with me was killed. I don’t know what to do or where to go. This city is too small for me now and there is no protection.”
Weeks ago, charitable organizations were ordered by the Mugabe government to stop helping the country’s poor and the hungry. Church groups and other volunteers are hastily attempting to step into the breach. The number of displaced people is estimated in the tens of thousands.
“We’re feeding a thousand people, men, women and children, and that’s just a small part of the displaced,” said a volunteer in Harare who was also afraid to have her name published. “People — white and black — have been very generous with what little they have: money, tooth brushes, oil, soap, whatever. We can feed people but we can’t help them if the government is going to root them out and attack them.”
Zimbabwe Opponents Begin Talking About Talks
By BARRY BEARAK
JOHANNESBURG — Zimbabwe’s ruling party began preliminary discussions with the opposition on Thursday in an effort to settle a political crisis in which both sides stake a claim to the nation’s presidency.
But in a statement late in the day Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, stressed that these talks, in Pretoria, South Africa, cannot lead to genuine negotiations until state-sponsored violence stops and 1,500 of his supporters are released from prison.
He denounced efforts by the government of President Robert Mugabe to portray Thursday’s meeting as a negotiation imminently leading to a settlement, saying the ruling party, ZANU-PF, is “being disingenuous and exploiting the plight of the Zimbabwean people for political gain.”
Mr. Tsvangirai was in an awkward position. For the past two days, his party, the Movement for Democratic Change, has issued categorical statements that it will not participate in any kind of talks until its conditions were met. The government’s announcement that talks were in the works was a “figment of the dictator’s imagination,” read one opposition statement.
But Thursday, Mr. Tsvangirai nevertheless sent emissaries to Pretoria.
Both sides have mentioned the need for some sort of unity government, though ZANU-PF demands that President Mugabe remain on top while the opposition insists on Mr. Tsvangirai.
Mr. Tsvangirai outpolled Mr. Mugabe in a March election but then pulled out of a June 27 runoff, citing the ongoing violence.
Thursday’s meetings may indeed prove to be nothing more than finger-pointing. But the fact that any discussions are occurring at all is something of a victory for the regional mediator, South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, who is a Mugabe ally of long standing and whom the opposition has accused of bias in the mediation. Mr. Mbeki traveled to Harare last weekend but failed to get Mr. Tsvangirai to meet with Mr. Mugabe.
Neither Mr. Mugabe nor Mr. Tsvangirai has come to Pretoria. The opposition is represented by its secretary general, Tendai Biti, who was only recently freed on bail on treason charges, and deputy treasurer-general Elton Mangoma. The ZANU-PF negotiators are Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa and Labor Minister Nicholas Goche, according to Zimbabwe’s state-run newspaper The Herald.
By most accounts, the bloodletting continues in Zimbabwe. In the pre-dawn hours on Monday, hundreds of people displaced by earlier violence were attacked at a rehabilitation center near Harare. Victims blamed the assault on ZANU-PF militia.
“Where do I go now?” asked an opposition activist contacted by phone. He was afraid to have his name appear in the newspaper. “Someone who escaped with me was killed. I don’t know what to do or where to go. This city is too small for me now and there is no protection.”
Weeks ago, charitable organizations were ordered by the Mugabe government to stop helping the country’s poor and the hungry. Church groups and other volunteers are hastily attempting to step into the breach. The number of displaced people is estimated in the tens of thousands.
“We’re feeding a thousand people, men, women and children, and that’s just a small part of the displaced,” said a volunteer in Harare who was also afraid to have her name published. “People — white and black — have been very generous with what little they have: money, tooth brushes, oil, soap, whatever. We can feed people but we can’t help them if the government is going to root them out and attack them.”
Canuck aid workers attacked by machete-wielding thugs
Brutal beatings in Kenya shocks agency officials
Kent Spencer
Canwest News Service
Friday, July 11, 2008
Two missionaries from Vernon, B.C., who were brutally beaten by thugs in Kenya, face a tough road when they return home.
John and Eloise Bergen had sold everything to make the trip and were without medical insurance, friend Alicia Chirkoff said Thursday.
"The Bergens are wonderful, fabulous people," Chirkoff said.
Thugs wielding clubs and machetes attacked the couple in a home invasion Wednesday.
The Bergens had recently moved to their own house located about 10 kilometres away from their sponsoring organization, the Hope for the Nations non-profit society. They wanted to be nearer to widows and orphans in the city of Kitale, helping refugees who have fled a political crisis.
The assailants struck John's skull, jaw, arm, knee and leg with their clubs. The 70-year-old was also severely cut with machetes. A broken knee and leg will require extensive surgery.
"They left him for dead in the bushes," said Ralph Bromley, president of the Hope society, which is based in Kelowna. "The brutality of it is very difficult to handle."
Eloise, 66, was tied up, assaulted, and pinned under a pile of furniture.
She later managed to free herself, found John and drove him to the Hope centre. The pair were treated at a local hospital and then airlifted to Nairobi, Bromley added.
Although the locals are desperately poor, Bromley said it doesn't explain the viciousness of the assaults.
"Especially at their age, why can't the (thugs) just tie them up and take the stuff?" he asked.
Chirkoff, who spoke with Eloise by phone, said John "is not in great shape, but is going to survive."
The couple have two sons and two daughters. Son Josh, 20, is flying to Nairobi to be with his parents.
Chirkoff said the couple sold their house, vehicle and furniture before departing. They tried to buy medical insurance before leaving last March, but couldn't get any because of their ages.
They are relying on the B.C. medical plan to pay for hospital and air evacuation bills. "We don't know how much B.C. medical will pay," Chirkoff said, adding that the society has set up a process to make donations.
Chirkoff said Kenyan media report seven people have been arrested, including two security guards.
Bergen, an experienced international aid worker originally from Alberta, had retired from the construction industry.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Brutal beatings in Kenya shocks agency officials
Kent Spencer
Canwest News Service
Friday, July 11, 2008
Two missionaries from Vernon, B.C., who were brutally beaten by thugs in Kenya, face a tough road when they return home.
John and Eloise Bergen had sold everything to make the trip and were without medical insurance, friend Alicia Chirkoff said Thursday.
"The Bergens are wonderful, fabulous people," Chirkoff said.
Thugs wielding clubs and machetes attacked the couple in a home invasion Wednesday.
The Bergens had recently moved to their own house located about 10 kilometres away from their sponsoring organization, the Hope for the Nations non-profit society. They wanted to be nearer to widows and orphans in the city of Kitale, helping refugees who have fled a political crisis.
The assailants struck John's skull, jaw, arm, knee and leg with their clubs. The 70-year-old was also severely cut with machetes. A broken knee and leg will require extensive surgery.
"They left him for dead in the bushes," said Ralph Bromley, president of the Hope society, which is based in Kelowna. "The brutality of it is very difficult to handle."
Eloise, 66, was tied up, assaulted, and pinned under a pile of furniture.
She later managed to free herself, found John and drove him to the Hope centre. The pair were treated at a local hospital and then airlifted to Nairobi, Bromley added.
Although the locals are desperately poor, Bromley said it doesn't explain the viciousness of the assaults.
"Especially at their age, why can't the (thugs) just tie them up and take the stuff?" he asked.
Chirkoff, who spoke with Eloise by phone, said John "is not in great shape, but is going to survive."
The couple have two sons and two daughters. Son Josh, 20, is flying to Nairobi to be with his parents.
Chirkoff said the couple sold their house, vehicle and furniture before departing. They tried to buy medical insurance before leaving last March, but couldn't get any because of their ages.
They are relying on the B.C. medical plan to pay for hospital and air evacuation bills. "We don't know how much B.C. medical will pay," Chirkoff said, adding that the society has set up a process to make donations.
Chirkoff said Kenyan media report seven people have been arrested, including two security guards.
Bergen, an experienced international aid worker originally from Alberta, had retired from the construction industry.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
July 12, 2008
2 Vetoes Quash U.N. Sanctions on Zimbabwe
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
UNITED NATIONS — An American-led effort to impose sanctions against Zimbabwe failed in the Security Council on Friday, with Russia and China exercising a rare double veto to quash a resolution that they said represented excessive interference in the country’s domestic matters.
The United States, having earlier in the week mustered the nine votes needed to pass the sanctions, stalled on bringing the resolution to a vote until it became absolutely clear that Russia was determined to stop it. Once the Russians announced on Friday that they would exercise their veto, the Chinese, often leery of taking a lone stand on delicate human rights issues, followed suit.
“The key thing is that the Russians decided to vote against it,” said John Sawers, the British ambassador to the United Nations. “The assessment here is that China would not have vetoed it on its own because they have a range of conflicting interests at stake.”
Among other issues, China’s reluctance to criticize the human rights records of African governments it trades with has come under international criticism as the Olympics in Beijing draw near. The United States and its allies supported sanctions as a way of getting President Robert Mugabe to take seriously mediation efforts to bring the opposition into the government.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to the United Nations, was particularly scathing in his remarks about Russia, saying that Moscow had supported a joint statement criticizing the situation in Zimbabwe by the leaders of the Group of 8 industrialized nations meeting in Japan this week. But he also singled out President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa as a target for barbed remarks.
“The U-turn in the Russian position is particularly surprising and disturbing,” Mr. Khalilzad said in remarks to the Security Council, saying it raised questions about Russia’s reliability as a partner.
The United States proposed an arms embargo, the appointment of a United Nations mediator, and travel and financial restrictions against Mr. Mugabe and 13 top military and government officials. The Council has moved away from broad trade sanctions in recent years because they were considered too harmful to the civilian population.
The move for sanctions came after a June 23 agreement by all 15 Security Council members on a statement criticizing pre-election violence and saying that it was impossible to hold free and fair elections in Zimbabwe.
In the first round of elections, on March 29, the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, won more votes than Mr. Mugabe, nearly 48 percent compared with about 42 percent for the president, according to the official tally. But Mr. Tsvangirai withdrew from the second round after a campaign of killing and intimidation directed at his supporters.
Thomas Pickering, the United States ambassador to the United Nations from 1989 to 1992, said that convincing the Russians was usually the key to avoiding a veto on issues involving human rights.
“If you can get the Russians, you can move the Chinese to an abstention,” he said, noting that China usually only exercises its veto on issues involving Taiwan or the use of force. “They don’t want to be the odd man out on a veto.”
Russia and China do not often exercise their veto together, the last time being in January 2007 when they blocked a Council effort to criticize human rights violations in Myanmar.
Russia worked to bring the Chinese along on the veto on Friday, one senior diplomat said.
The United States and its European allies have been trying to push more issues of good governance and democracy onto the Security Council’s agenda in recent years, said Mr. Sawers, the British ambassador. They find themselves opposed by “those with an old-fashioned and literal view that the affairs of a country are a matter for itself, and the Security Council should not intervene,” he said. “The Russians and Chinese have not been comfortable with that and the vote today reflects that.”
The Security Council’s mandate specifies that it should only deal with matters that are a threat to international peace and security, and the differing sides on the resolution vote took opposite views of whether Zimbabwe constituted such a threat.
Russia had indicated all week, without committing itself, that it was willing to show some flexibility on the issue, Mr. Khalilzad said, but at noon on Friday announced that it would exercise its veto power as a permanent Council member. “They decided to make a point on this issue, to say ‘nyet,’ ” Mr. Khalilzad said. “Something happened in Moscow.”
Even though the United States knew at that point that it would lose, it decided to proceed with the vote anyway, to force the Russians and eventually the Chinese to publicly take a stand in support of Mr. Mugabe and the violence promulgated by his supporters to steal the election.
Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, argued that the sanctions exceeded the Security Council’s mandate. “We believe such practices to be illegitimate and dangerous,” he said, calling the resolution one more obvious “attempt to take the Council beyond its charter prerogatives.”
China echoed that argument but also expressed concern about whether the sanctions would impede mediation efforts by South Africa.
“We feel that the important thing is for the political parties to get together to discuss this issue seriously to sort out their differences,” the Chinese ambassador, Wang Guangya, said before rejecting the resolution. “It will interfere with the negotiating process and lead to the further deterioration of the situation.”
In the end, nine Council members voted to support the measure: the United States, Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Panama, Costa Rica, Croatia and Burkina Faso. The United States had initially been confident in getting the resolution passed because it had the support of Burkina Faso as well as other African states not on the Council, like Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Burkina Faso’s support was considered crucial. Besides the two vetoes, the other votes against the sanctions were cast by Libya, Vietnam and South Africa. Indonesia abstained.
Throughout the debate on the Zimbabwe elections, South Africa had led much of the opposition, with its ambassador, Dumisani Kumalo, saying that the Security Council should let Africa try to solve its own problems. Mr. Kumalo said the resolution went too far in criticizing only the ruling party in Zimbabwe, the ZANU-PF, while wholly supporting Mr. Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change.
That made it an unbalanced basis for mediation, Mr. Kumalo said, and on Friday he noted in his Security Council remarks that the talks between the two sides, which had started in Pretoria, South Africa, needed to be given some space without sanctions to succeed.
Critics have suggested Mr. Mbeki, the South African president, has been overly indulgent toward Mr. Mugabe because both of them came from liberation organizations and face increasingly vocal trade union movements that want to replace them.
Mr. Khalilzad accused South Africa of protecting the “horrible regime in Zimbabwe,” calling it particularly disturbing given that sanctions eventually undermined the apartheid government that had oppressed South Africa.
The American ambassador disparaged the mediation effort and Mr. Mbeki’s position. “There isn’t anything serious going on in terms of negotiations ,” Mr. Khalilzad said. “The South African effort, President Mbeki’s effort, so far has been a failure. President Mbeki’s actions appear to be protecting Mr. Mugabe, and to be working hand in glove with him at times, while he, Mugabe, uses violent means to fragment and weaken the opposition.”
Mr. Kumalo said that while some pressure was necessary, the leap to sanctions was too fast and they should be threatened before being applied.
Mr. Khalilzad said the United States had been willing to consider various options, including a longer timetable to apply sanctions, but ultimately Security Council members opposed to the resolution decided to reject it outright rather than negotiate.
2 Vetoes Quash U.N. Sanctions on Zimbabwe
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
UNITED NATIONS — An American-led effort to impose sanctions against Zimbabwe failed in the Security Council on Friday, with Russia and China exercising a rare double veto to quash a resolution that they said represented excessive interference in the country’s domestic matters.
The United States, having earlier in the week mustered the nine votes needed to pass the sanctions, stalled on bringing the resolution to a vote until it became absolutely clear that Russia was determined to stop it. Once the Russians announced on Friday that they would exercise their veto, the Chinese, often leery of taking a lone stand on delicate human rights issues, followed suit.
“The key thing is that the Russians decided to vote against it,” said John Sawers, the British ambassador to the United Nations. “The assessment here is that China would not have vetoed it on its own because they have a range of conflicting interests at stake.”
Among other issues, China’s reluctance to criticize the human rights records of African governments it trades with has come under international criticism as the Olympics in Beijing draw near. The United States and its allies supported sanctions as a way of getting President Robert Mugabe to take seriously mediation efforts to bring the opposition into the government.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to the United Nations, was particularly scathing in his remarks about Russia, saying that Moscow had supported a joint statement criticizing the situation in Zimbabwe by the leaders of the Group of 8 industrialized nations meeting in Japan this week. But he also singled out President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa as a target for barbed remarks.
“The U-turn in the Russian position is particularly surprising and disturbing,” Mr. Khalilzad said in remarks to the Security Council, saying it raised questions about Russia’s reliability as a partner.
The United States proposed an arms embargo, the appointment of a United Nations mediator, and travel and financial restrictions against Mr. Mugabe and 13 top military and government officials. The Council has moved away from broad trade sanctions in recent years because they were considered too harmful to the civilian population.
The move for sanctions came after a June 23 agreement by all 15 Security Council members on a statement criticizing pre-election violence and saying that it was impossible to hold free and fair elections in Zimbabwe.
In the first round of elections, on March 29, the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, won more votes than Mr. Mugabe, nearly 48 percent compared with about 42 percent for the president, according to the official tally. But Mr. Tsvangirai withdrew from the second round after a campaign of killing and intimidation directed at his supporters.
Thomas Pickering, the United States ambassador to the United Nations from 1989 to 1992, said that convincing the Russians was usually the key to avoiding a veto on issues involving human rights.
“If you can get the Russians, you can move the Chinese to an abstention,” he said, noting that China usually only exercises its veto on issues involving Taiwan or the use of force. “They don’t want to be the odd man out on a veto.”
Russia and China do not often exercise their veto together, the last time being in January 2007 when they blocked a Council effort to criticize human rights violations in Myanmar.
Russia worked to bring the Chinese along on the veto on Friday, one senior diplomat said.
The United States and its European allies have been trying to push more issues of good governance and democracy onto the Security Council’s agenda in recent years, said Mr. Sawers, the British ambassador. They find themselves opposed by “those with an old-fashioned and literal view that the affairs of a country are a matter for itself, and the Security Council should not intervene,” he said. “The Russians and Chinese have not been comfortable with that and the vote today reflects that.”
The Security Council’s mandate specifies that it should only deal with matters that are a threat to international peace and security, and the differing sides on the resolution vote took opposite views of whether Zimbabwe constituted such a threat.
Russia had indicated all week, without committing itself, that it was willing to show some flexibility on the issue, Mr. Khalilzad said, but at noon on Friday announced that it would exercise its veto power as a permanent Council member. “They decided to make a point on this issue, to say ‘nyet,’ ” Mr. Khalilzad said. “Something happened in Moscow.”
Even though the United States knew at that point that it would lose, it decided to proceed with the vote anyway, to force the Russians and eventually the Chinese to publicly take a stand in support of Mr. Mugabe and the violence promulgated by his supporters to steal the election.
Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, argued that the sanctions exceeded the Security Council’s mandate. “We believe such practices to be illegitimate and dangerous,” he said, calling the resolution one more obvious “attempt to take the Council beyond its charter prerogatives.”
China echoed that argument but also expressed concern about whether the sanctions would impede mediation efforts by South Africa.
“We feel that the important thing is for the political parties to get together to discuss this issue seriously to sort out their differences,” the Chinese ambassador, Wang Guangya, said before rejecting the resolution. “It will interfere with the negotiating process and lead to the further deterioration of the situation.”
In the end, nine Council members voted to support the measure: the United States, Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Panama, Costa Rica, Croatia and Burkina Faso. The United States had initially been confident in getting the resolution passed because it had the support of Burkina Faso as well as other African states not on the Council, like Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Burkina Faso’s support was considered crucial. Besides the two vetoes, the other votes against the sanctions were cast by Libya, Vietnam and South Africa. Indonesia abstained.
Throughout the debate on the Zimbabwe elections, South Africa had led much of the opposition, with its ambassador, Dumisani Kumalo, saying that the Security Council should let Africa try to solve its own problems. Mr. Kumalo said the resolution went too far in criticizing only the ruling party in Zimbabwe, the ZANU-PF, while wholly supporting Mr. Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change.
That made it an unbalanced basis for mediation, Mr. Kumalo said, and on Friday he noted in his Security Council remarks that the talks between the two sides, which had started in Pretoria, South Africa, needed to be given some space without sanctions to succeed.
Critics have suggested Mr. Mbeki, the South African president, has been overly indulgent toward Mr. Mugabe because both of them came from liberation organizations and face increasingly vocal trade union movements that want to replace them.
Mr. Khalilzad accused South Africa of protecting the “horrible regime in Zimbabwe,” calling it particularly disturbing given that sanctions eventually undermined the apartheid government that had oppressed South Africa.
The American ambassador disparaged the mediation effort and Mr. Mbeki’s position. “There isn’t anything serious going on in terms of negotiations ,” Mr. Khalilzad said. “The South African effort, President Mbeki’s effort, so far has been a failure. President Mbeki’s actions appear to be protecting Mr. Mugabe, and to be working hand in glove with him at times, while he, Mugabe, uses violent means to fragment and weaken the opposition.”
Mr. Kumalo said that while some pressure was necessary, the leap to sanctions was too fast and they should be threatened before being applied.
Mr. Khalilzad said the United States had been willing to consider various options, including a longer timetable to apply sanctions, but ultimately Security Council members opposed to the resolution decided to reject it outright rather than negotiate.
July 15, 2008
Sudan Leader Is Accused of Genocide
By MARLISE SIMONS and JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
PARIS — The prosecutor at the International Criminal Court on Monday formally requested an arrest warrant for Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity committed during the last five years of bloodshed in his country’s Darfur region.
Announcing the request, the prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, said that Mr. Bashir “masterminded and implemented” a plan to destroy the three main ethnic groups in Darfur, the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa. Using government soldiers and Arab militias, the president “specifically and purposefully targeted civilians” belonging to these groups, killing 35,000 people “outright” in attacks on towns and villages.
“His motives were largely political,” the prosecutor said. “His alibi was a ‘counterinsurgency.’ His intent was genocide.”
Mr. Moreno-Ocampo, of Argentina, said the Sudanese president had turned against civilians after failing to defeat a rebellion, and that the genocide consisted of more than direct killing. “Al-Bashir organized the destitution, insecurity and harassment of the survivors,” he said. “He did not need bullets. He used other weapons: rapes, hunger and fear. As efficient, but silent.”
At a news conference at the court in The Hague in the Netherlands, he said that he handed over his evidence on Monday morning to the three judges who will decide whether to issue an arrest warrant. An answer to the request is expected in the fall, lawyers at the court said.
But if the past is any guidance, the judges may well sign the arrest warrant. They have signed all 11 warrants the prosecutor has requested since he took office five years ago.
Genocide charges are the gravest any court can bring, and the prosecutor is expected to implicate others at the top of the Sudanese government.
The action against Mr. Bashir marks the first time the prosecutor of International Criminal Court has brought genocide charges against anyone. It is also the first time the prosecutor has brought charges against a sitting head of state since it opened its doors in 2002. Two other presidents, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Charles Taylor of Liberia, were both charged by other international war crimes courts, also while they were in office.
But the request for a warrant against Mr. Bashir, whose regime has repeatedly ignored international requests to stop attacking civilians, seemed unlikely to lead to his arrest in the short term.
Mr. Bashir has scoffed at two arrest warrants the court has already issued against two other Sudanese officials, even promoting one of them to minister of humanitarian affairs.
The government of Sudan immediately rejected the accusations and said it would fight the charges through legal means.
“We will resist this,” said Rabie A. Atti, a Sudanese government spokesman. “Everybody in Sudan — the government, the people, even the opposition parties — are against this.”
He argued that Mr. Bashir was innocent and that the international court was “a stooge” for Sudan’s enemies.
He said the government was appointing a team of African and Arab lawyers to handle the case, and made it clear that the government would not vent its outrage on the thousands of United Nations and African Union peacekeepers in Sudan or aid workers.
“Nothing will happen to the U.N. because of this,” he said. “We will handle this with our legal advocates.”
A key question is whether the United Nations Security Council will intervene in this case. The council itself in 2005 asked the court to investigate the Darfur crisis, but it has the authority to suspend an investigation or prosecution for a one-year period. Since the prosecutor notified United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon last week of his plan to bring charges against Mr. Bashir, council members have met privately, with China and Russia warning that a direct move against the Sudanese president would jeopardize any future peace talks.
In Sudan, United Nations aid workers and peacekeepers worried that seeking a warrant for the president’s arrest could hinder their work and prompt reprisals against their personnel. In response, they stepped up security in Darfur, pulling out all but the most essential civilians. Other aid organizations have temporarily evacuated some of their staff from Darfur to the capital, Khartoum. A spokesman for Doctors Without Borders said that some of their staff had been threatened, although no one had been expelled.
But others have argued the action would provide a new opening to re-start blocked peace talks.
John Prendergast, a former Clinton administration official who co-founded Enough, a group that seeks to end genocide, dismissed the argument that indicting Mr. Bashir would torpedo the chances for peace in Darfur.
“The peace process is dead,” he said. “There is no process, and even more importantly, there is no leverage. Suddenly, a new variable has entered the equation in the form of the request for an arrest warrant,” he said. “While the I.C.C. judges consider this request over the next two months, there is a new point of major leverage over Bashir.”
He added: “Everyone knows what the issues are that need to be addressed. What has been missing is leadership and leverage. Suddenly, we have one of the two. Let’s see if Washington and Beijing can work together to provide the other.”
The prosecutor, in a interview before his announcement, said he was aware that some diplomats and commentators wanted him to delay his action, arguing that peace was more important at this point than justice. But he seemed undeterred.
“Some people have said that for me to intervene at this point is shocking,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “I say what is going on now is shocking. Genocide is going on now and it is endangering the lives of many more people.”
At first, the prosecutor said, the government attacked from the air, and used militia on the ground to destroy villages. “They kill men, children, elderly, women; they subject women and girls to massive rapes,” the prosecution says. “They burn and loot the villages.”
Such violence has displaced “almost the entire population” of the targeted ethnic groups, the prosecution contends.
“Now the attacks are on the refugee camps,” Mr. Moreno-Ocampo said in the interview. “And the government is hindering humanitarian aid as part of its plan.”
In a ten-page summary provided Monday, the prosecutor laid out the case, drawing a tough portrait of Mr. Bashir’s actions and seeking to show his personal responsibility for crimes committed in Darfur since 2003 until today. The prosecution says it has tracked all the known attacks between 2003 and 2008, outlining the government’s genocidal strategy to attack the towns and villages of the people from the tribes, while sparing those from other tribes considered aligned with the government.
The prosecutor’s charges include three counts of genocide for killing members of the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups; five counts of crimes against humanity for murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture and rape; and two counts of war crimes for attacks on civilian populations in Darfur and for pillaging towns and villages.
To obtain an arrest order, the prosecutor must provide credible information, but not prove the crimes as he would have in order to obtain a conviction at trial.
But Mr. Moreno-Ocampo said he had “very strong evidence that al-Bashir controlled everything, the generals, the intelligence, the ministers, the media. The janjaweed militia called him directly for instructions.”
Lawyers close to the court said that Western governments, under the continuing pressure of public opinion, may have assisted with the investigation — providing intelligence such as aerial surveys and electronic eavesdropping. “It is obvious that something must be done, the peace process has stalled and the humanitarian disaster only keeps growing,” a European diplomat said.
Peacekeepers in the region, there as part of a hybrid United Nations and African Union force, are particularly vulnerable to government retaliation, diplomats and analysts say. For months before their deployment, the Sudanese government had resisted merging a weak and under-equipped African Union mission with a United Nations force, arguing that United Nations troops would simply be used to execute arrest warrants for the international court.
Seven peacekeepers were killed in an ambush last week, and the force has been struggling to simply protect itself.
In the vast, restive camps of displaced people in Darfur, there has been support for the international court. But Julie Flint, an independent researcher who has written extensively about Darfur, said that protests within the camps would likely provoke a harsh response from Sudanese security forces.
“The camps are my biggest worry,” Ms. Flint said. “They could explode into violence.”
Even if the government of Sudan did not retaliate violently against to the announcement, it could make life harder for the displaced people of Darfur and the people trying to help them “in a thousand ways,” Ms. Flint said. “They can slow down permits. Make visas impossible to get. They can make an already difficult job impossible.”
The government has made no secret of its desire to see displaced people in Darfur leave the sprawling camps that are home to 2 million of people whose villages were attacked in the conflict.
“There is a great deal of concern that the camps will be vulnerable in this period,” said one senior aid official in Sudan, speaking anonymously to avoid retribution. “The government has been looking for a reason to shut them down.”
Marlise Simons reported from Paris and Jeffrey Gettleman from Nairobi. Lydia Polgreen contributed reporting from Dakar and Alan Cowell from London.
Sudan Leader Is Accused of Genocide
By MARLISE SIMONS and JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
PARIS — The prosecutor at the International Criminal Court on Monday formally requested an arrest warrant for Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity committed during the last five years of bloodshed in his country’s Darfur region.
Announcing the request, the prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, said that Mr. Bashir “masterminded and implemented” a plan to destroy the three main ethnic groups in Darfur, the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa. Using government soldiers and Arab militias, the president “specifically and purposefully targeted civilians” belonging to these groups, killing 35,000 people “outright” in attacks on towns and villages.
“His motives were largely political,” the prosecutor said. “His alibi was a ‘counterinsurgency.’ His intent was genocide.”
Mr. Moreno-Ocampo, of Argentina, said the Sudanese president had turned against civilians after failing to defeat a rebellion, and that the genocide consisted of more than direct killing. “Al-Bashir organized the destitution, insecurity and harassment of the survivors,” he said. “He did not need bullets. He used other weapons: rapes, hunger and fear. As efficient, but silent.”
At a news conference at the court in The Hague in the Netherlands, he said that he handed over his evidence on Monday morning to the three judges who will decide whether to issue an arrest warrant. An answer to the request is expected in the fall, lawyers at the court said.
But if the past is any guidance, the judges may well sign the arrest warrant. They have signed all 11 warrants the prosecutor has requested since he took office five years ago.
Genocide charges are the gravest any court can bring, and the prosecutor is expected to implicate others at the top of the Sudanese government.
The action against Mr. Bashir marks the first time the prosecutor of International Criminal Court has brought genocide charges against anyone. It is also the first time the prosecutor has brought charges against a sitting head of state since it opened its doors in 2002. Two other presidents, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Charles Taylor of Liberia, were both charged by other international war crimes courts, also while they were in office.
But the request for a warrant against Mr. Bashir, whose regime has repeatedly ignored international requests to stop attacking civilians, seemed unlikely to lead to his arrest in the short term.
Mr. Bashir has scoffed at two arrest warrants the court has already issued against two other Sudanese officials, even promoting one of them to minister of humanitarian affairs.
The government of Sudan immediately rejected the accusations and said it would fight the charges through legal means.
“We will resist this,” said Rabie A. Atti, a Sudanese government spokesman. “Everybody in Sudan — the government, the people, even the opposition parties — are against this.”
He argued that Mr. Bashir was innocent and that the international court was “a stooge” for Sudan’s enemies.
He said the government was appointing a team of African and Arab lawyers to handle the case, and made it clear that the government would not vent its outrage on the thousands of United Nations and African Union peacekeepers in Sudan or aid workers.
“Nothing will happen to the U.N. because of this,” he said. “We will handle this with our legal advocates.”
A key question is whether the United Nations Security Council will intervene in this case. The council itself in 2005 asked the court to investigate the Darfur crisis, but it has the authority to suspend an investigation or prosecution for a one-year period. Since the prosecutor notified United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon last week of his plan to bring charges against Mr. Bashir, council members have met privately, with China and Russia warning that a direct move against the Sudanese president would jeopardize any future peace talks.
In Sudan, United Nations aid workers and peacekeepers worried that seeking a warrant for the president’s arrest could hinder their work and prompt reprisals against their personnel. In response, they stepped up security in Darfur, pulling out all but the most essential civilians. Other aid organizations have temporarily evacuated some of their staff from Darfur to the capital, Khartoum. A spokesman for Doctors Without Borders said that some of their staff had been threatened, although no one had been expelled.
But others have argued the action would provide a new opening to re-start blocked peace talks.
John Prendergast, a former Clinton administration official who co-founded Enough, a group that seeks to end genocide, dismissed the argument that indicting Mr. Bashir would torpedo the chances for peace in Darfur.
“The peace process is dead,” he said. “There is no process, and even more importantly, there is no leverage. Suddenly, a new variable has entered the equation in the form of the request for an arrest warrant,” he said. “While the I.C.C. judges consider this request over the next two months, there is a new point of major leverage over Bashir.”
He added: “Everyone knows what the issues are that need to be addressed. What has been missing is leadership and leverage. Suddenly, we have one of the two. Let’s see if Washington and Beijing can work together to provide the other.”
The prosecutor, in a interview before his announcement, said he was aware that some diplomats and commentators wanted him to delay his action, arguing that peace was more important at this point than justice. But he seemed undeterred.
“Some people have said that for me to intervene at this point is shocking,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “I say what is going on now is shocking. Genocide is going on now and it is endangering the lives of many more people.”
At first, the prosecutor said, the government attacked from the air, and used militia on the ground to destroy villages. “They kill men, children, elderly, women; they subject women and girls to massive rapes,” the prosecution says. “They burn and loot the villages.”
Such violence has displaced “almost the entire population” of the targeted ethnic groups, the prosecution contends.
“Now the attacks are on the refugee camps,” Mr. Moreno-Ocampo said in the interview. “And the government is hindering humanitarian aid as part of its plan.”
In a ten-page summary provided Monday, the prosecutor laid out the case, drawing a tough portrait of Mr. Bashir’s actions and seeking to show his personal responsibility for crimes committed in Darfur since 2003 until today. The prosecution says it has tracked all the known attacks between 2003 and 2008, outlining the government’s genocidal strategy to attack the towns and villages of the people from the tribes, while sparing those from other tribes considered aligned with the government.
The prosecutor’s charges include three counts of genocide for killing members of the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups; five counts of crimes against humanity for murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture and rape; and two counts of war crimes for attacks on civilian populations in Darfur and for pillaging towns and villages.
To obtain an arrest order, the prosecutor must provide credible information, but not prove the crimes as he would have in order to obtain a conviction at trial.
But Mr. Moreno-Ocampo said he had “very strong evidence that al-Bashir controlled everything, the generals, the intelligence, the ministers, the media. The janjaweed militia called him directly for instructions.”
Lawyers close to the court said that Western governments, under the continuing pressure of public opinion, may have assisted with the investigation — providing intelligence such as aerial surveys and electronic eavesdropping. “It is obvious that something must be done, the peace process has stalled and the humanitarian disaster only keeps growing,” a European diplomat said.
Peacekeepers in the region, there as part of a hybrid United Nations and African Union force, are particularly vulnerable to government retaliation, diplomats and analysts say. For months before their deployment, the Sudanese government had resisted merging a weak and under-equipped African Union mission with a United Nations force, arguing that United Nations troops would simply be used to execute arrest warrants for the international court.
Seven peacekeepers were killed in an ambush last week, and the force has been struggling to simply protect itself.
In the vast, restive camps of displaced people in Darfur, there has been support for the international court. But Julie Flint, an independent researcher who has written extensively about Darfur, said that protests within the camps would likely provoke a harsh response from Sudanese security forces.
“The camps are my biggest worry,” Ms. Flint said. “They could explode into violence.”
Even if the government of Sudan did not retaliate violently against to the announcement, it could make life harder for the displaced people of Darfur and the people trying to help them “in a thousand ways,” Ms. Flint said. “They can slow down permits. Make visas impossible to get. They can make an already difficult job impossible.”
The government has made no secret of its desire to see displaced people in Darfur leave the sprawling camps that are home to 2 million of people whose villages were attacked in the conflict.
“There is a great deal of concern that the camps will be vulnerable in this period,” said one senior aid official in Sudan, speaking anonymously to avoid retribution. “The government has been looking for a reason to shut them down.”
Marlise Simons reported from Paris and Jeffrey Gettleman from Nairobi. Lydia Polgreen contributed reporting from Dakar and Alan Cowell from London.
July 16, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
So Popular and So Spineless
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Much ink has been spilled lately decrying the decline in American popularity around the world under President Bush. Polls tell us how China is now more popular in Asia than America and how few Europeans say they identify with the United States. I am sure there is truth to these polls. We should have done better in Iraq. An America that presides over Abu Ghraib, torture and Guantánamo Bay deserves a thumbs-down.
But America is not and never has been just about those things, which is why I also find some of these poll results self-indulgent, knee-jerk and borderline silly. Friday’s vote at the U.N. on Zimbabwe reminded me why.
Maybe Asians, Europeans, Latin Americans and Africans don’t like a world of too much American power — “Mr. Big” got a little too big for them. But how would they like a world of too little American power? With America’s overextended military and overextended banks, that is the world into which we may be heading.
Welcome to a world of too much Russian and Chinese power.
I am neither a Russia-basher nor a China-basher. But there was something truly filthy about Russia’s and China’s vetoes of the American-led U.N. Security Council effort to impose targeted sanctions on Robert Mugabe’s ruling clique in Zimbabwe.
The U.S. put forward a simple Security Council resolution, calling for an arms embargo on Zimbabwe, the appointment of a U.N. mediator, plus travel and financial restrictions on the dictator Mugabe and 13 top military and government officials for stealing the Zimbabwe election and essentially mugging an entire country in broad daylight.
In the first round of Zimbabwe’s elections, on March 29, the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, won nearly 48 percent of the vote compared with 42 percent for Mugabe. This prompted Mugabe and his henchmen to begin a campaign of killing and intimidation against Tsvangirai supporters that eventually forced the opposition to pull out of the second-round runoff vote just to stay alive.
Even before the runoff, Mugabe declared that he would disregard the results if his ZANU-PF party lost. Or as he put it: “We are not going to give up our country because of a mere X” on some paper ballot.
And so, of course, Mugabe “won” in one of the most blatantly stolen elections ever — in a country already mired in misrule, unemployment, hunger and inflation. Some 25 percent of Zimbabwe’s people have now taken refuge in neighboring states. (I have close friends from Zimbabwe, and one of my daughters worked there in an H.I.V.-AIDS community center in January.) The Associated Press reported in May from Zimbabwe “that annual inflation rose this month to 1,063,572 percent, based on prices of a basket of basic foodstuffs.” Zimbabwe’s currency has become so devalued, the A.P. explained, that “a loaf of bread now costs what 12 new cars did a decade ago.”
No matter. Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s U.N. ambassador, argued that the targeted sanctions that the U.S. and others wanted to impose on Mugabe’s clique exceeded the Security Council’s mandate. “We believe such practices to be illegitimate and dangerous,” he said, describing the resolution as one more obvious “attempt to take the Council beyond its charter prerogatives.” Veto!
Mugabe’s campaign of murder and intimidation didn’t strike Churkin as “illegitimate and dangerous” — only the U.N. resolution to bring a halt to it was “illegitimate and dangerous.” Shameful. Meanwhile, China is hosting the Olympics, a celebration of the human spirit, while defending Mugabe’s right to crush his own people’s spirit.
But when it comes to pure, rancid moral corruption, no one can top South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, and his stooge at the U.N., Dumisani Kumalo. They have done everything they can to prevent any meaningful U.N. pressure on the Mugabe dictatorship.
As The Times reported, America’s U.N. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, “accused South Africa of protecting the ‘horrible regime in Zimbabwe,’ ” calling this particularly disturbing given that it was precisely international economic sanctions that brought down South Africa’s apartheid government, which had long oppressed that country’s blacks.
So let us now coin the Mbeki Rule: When whites persecute blacks, no amount of U.N. sanctions is too much. And when blacks persecute blacks, any amount of U.N. sanctions is too much.
Which brings me back to America. Perfect we are not, but America still has some moral backbone. There are travesties we will not tolerate. The U.N. vote on Zimbabwe demonstrates that this is not true for these “popular” countries — called Russia or China or South Africa — that have no problem siding with a man who is pulverizing his own people.
So, yes, we’re not so popular in Europe and Asia anymore. I guess they would prefer a world in which America was weaker, where leaders with the values of Vladimir Putin and Thabo Mbeki had a greater say, and where the desperate voices for change in Zimbabwe would, well, just shut up.
Op-Ed Columnist
So Popular and So Spineless
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Much ink has been spilled lately decrying the decline in American popularity around the world under President Bush. Polls tell us how China is now more popular in Asia than America and how few Europeans say they identify with the United States. I am sure there is truth to these polls. We should have done better in Iraq. An America that presides over Abu Ghraib, torture and Guantánamo Bay deserves a thumbs-down.
But America is not and never has been just about those things, which is why I also find some of these poll results self-indulgent, knee-jerk and borderline silly. Friday’s vote at the U.N. on Zimbabwe reminded me why.
Maybe Asians, Europeans, Latin Americans and Africans don’t like a world of too much American power — “Mr. Big” got a little too big for them. But how would they like a world of too little American power? With America’s overextended military and overextended banks, that is the world into which we may be heading.
Welcome to a world of too much Russian and Chinese power.
I am neither a Russia-basher nor a China-basher. But there was something truly filthy about Russia’s and China’s vetoes of the American-led U.N. Security Council effort to impose targeted sanctions on Robert Mugabe’s ruling clique in Zimbabwe.
The U.S. put forward a simple Security Council resolution, calling for an arms embargo on Zimbabwe, the appointment of a U.N. mediator, plus travel and financial restrictions on the dictator Mugabe and 13 top military and government officials for stealing the Zimbabwe election and essentially mugging an entire country in broad daylight.
In the first round of Zimbabwe’s elections, on March 29, the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, won nearly 48 percent of the vote compared with 42 percent for Mugabe. This prompted Mugabe and his henchmen to begin a campaign of killing and intimidation against Tsvangirai supporters that eventually forced the opposition to pull out of the second-round runoff vote just to stay alive.
Even before the runoff, Mugabe declared that he would disregard the results if his ZANU-PF party lost. Or as he put it: “We are not going to give up our country because of a mere X” on some paper ballot.
And so, of course, Mugabe “won” in one of the most blatantly stolen elections ever — in a country already mired in misrule, unemployment, hunger and inflation. Some 25 percent of Zimbabwe’s people have now taken refuge in neighboring states. (I have close friends from Zimbabwe, and one of my daughters worked there in an H.I.V.-AIDS community center in January.) The Associated Press reported in May from Zimbabwe “that annual inflation rose this month to 1,063,572 percent, based on prices of a basket of basic foodstuffs.” Zimbabwe’s currency has become so devalued, the A.P. explained, that “a loaf of bread now costs what 12 new cars did a decade ago.”
No matter. Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s U.N. ambassador, argued that the targeted sanctions that the U.S. and others wanted to impose on Mugabe’s clique exceeded the Security Council’s mandate. “We believe such practices to be illegitimate and dangerous,” he said, describing the resolution as one more obvious “attempt to take the Council beyond its charter prerogatives.” Veto!
Mugabe’s campaign of murder and intimidation didn’t strike Churkin as “illegitimate and dangerous” — only the U.N. resolution to bring a halt to it was “illegitimate and dangerous.” Shameful. Meanwhile, China is hosting the Olympics, a celebration of the human spirit, while defending Mugabe’s right to crush his own people’s spirit.
But when it comes to pure, rancid moral corruption, no one can top South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, and his stooge at the U.N., Dumisani Kumalo. They have done everything they can to prevent any meaningful U.N. pressure on the Mugabe dictatorship.
As The Times reported, America’s U.N. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, “accused South Africa of protecting the ‘horrible regime in Zimbabwe,’ ” calling this particularly disturbing given that it was precisely international economic sanctions that brought down South Africa’s apartheid government, which had long oppressed that country’s blacks.
So let us now coin the Mbeki Rule: When whites persecute blacks, no amount of U.N. sanctions is too much. And when blacks persecute blacks, any amount of U.N. sanctions is too much.
Which brings me back to America. Perfect we are not, but America still has some moral backbone. There are travesties we will not tolerate. The U.N. vote on Zimbabwe demonstrates that this is not true for these “popular” countries — called Russia or China or South Africa — that have no problem siding with a man who is pulverizing his own people.
So, yes, we’re not so popular in Europe and Asia anymore. I guess they would prefer a world in which America was weaker, where leaders with the values of Vladimir Putin and Thabo Mbeki had a greater say, and where the desperate voices for change in Zimbabwe would, well, just shut up.
July 17, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Prosecuting Genocide
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Many aid workers and diplomats suffered a panic attack when the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court sought an arrest warrant this week for the president of Sudan, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, for committing genocide. They feared that Mr. Bashir would retaliate by attacking peacekeepers and humanitarian workers.
But instead of wringing our hands, we should be applauding. The prosecution for genocide is a historic step that also creates an opportunity in Sudan, particularly if China can now be induced and shamed into suspending the transfer of weapons used to slaughter civilians in Darfur.
If China continues — it is the main supplier of arms used in the genocide — then it may itself be in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. Article III of the convention declares that one of the punishable crimes is “complicity in genocide”; that’s the crime that China may be committing if it goes on supplying arms used for genocide, even after the I.C.C. has begun criminal proceedings against the purchaser of those weapons.
Beijing seems unabashed. Incredibly, China and Russia are acting as Mr. Bashir’s lawyers, quietly urging the United Nations Security Council to intervene to delay criminal proceedings against him. Such a delay is a bad idea, unless Mr. Bashir agrees to go into exile.
Still, China does care about its image. Beijing supplied arms to Pol Pot’s genocidal regime in Cambodia but later distanced itself from the Khmer Rouge as international criticism grew. China also supported Slobodan Milosevic until he was indicted, but then almost immediately let him hang out to dry.
One test of China’s attitudes will be whether President Bashir is welcomed at the Olympic Games’ opening ceremony next month. (If President Bush is not careful, he may find himself seated at the ceremony between Mr. Bashir and Robert Mugabe.)
If Beijing reacts to Mr. Bashir the same way it did to its other war criminal pals and suspends arms transfers, then there is real hope for Sudan. If Mr. Bashir feared losing his weapons and spare parts, he would be willing to make significant concessions that would make a peace deal more likely — and ultimately an enforceable peace agreement is the only way that Darfur can recover.
According to United Nations data, 88 percent of Sudan’s imported small arms come from China — and those Chinese sales of small arms increased 137-fold between 2001 and 2006. China has also sold military aircraft to Sudan, and the BBC reported this week that two Chinese-made A-5 Fantan fighter aircraft were spotted on a Darfur runway last month. The BBC also said that China is training Sudanese military pilots in Sudan.
Likewise, Human Rights First, in a report on Chinese weapons sales to Sudan, suggests that Chinese engineers supervise arms production at the Giad industrial complex outside Khartoum. Chinese military companies have also helped set up arms factories outside Khartoum at Kalakla, Chojeri and Bageer.
Instead of lashing out in reaction to the prospect of an arrest warrant, Mr. Bashir may be forced to take the opposite tack: He may become more cooperative.
Mr. Bashir first used brutal methods — militias and a proxy invasion of a neighboring country — in his long war against South Sudan. He didn’t pay a steep price, so he adopted the same scorched-earth policy in the Nuba Mountains. When he again went unpunished, he quite rationally adopted the same measures to suppress insurgency in Darfur.
Now, finally, we have a stick that has Mr. Bashir alarmed, and that gives us leverage. So far, Mr. Bashir is responding by trying to win support from the African Union and the Arab League, and that may restrain him from killing and raping too many aid workers and peacekeepers in the coming months. It may even induce him to cooperate with the U.N. in permitting more peacekeepers.
Unfortunately, the Arab League’s secretary general, Amr Moussa, who quite properly denounces abuses when suffered by Palestinians, has chosen to side with Mr. Bashir rather than the hundreds of thousands of Muslims killed in Darfur. If Israel bombed some desert in Darfur, Arab leaders might muster some indignation about violence there.
A final thought: this prosecution for genocide offers a hint of historical progress.
Throughout most of history, genocide was simply what happened to losers in a conflict. In the Bible, if we are to take it literally, there are cases when God gives a nod to genocide (“Now go and completely destroy the entire Amalekite nation — men, women, children, babies”). Such divinely sanctioned ethnic cleansing reflected the norms of war for much of history, finally beginning to yield in the last couple of centuries.
Now this prosecutor’s pursuit of a head of state suggests that human standards truly are changing — and that is a prerequisite for ending genocide itself.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.
Op-Ed Columnist
Prosecuting Genocide
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Many aid workers and diplomats suffered a panic attack when the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court sought an arrest warrant this week for the president of Sudan, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, for committing genocide. They feared that Mr. Bashir would retaliate by attacking peacekeepers and humanitarian workers.
But instead of wringing our hands, we should be applauding. The prosecution for genocide is a historic step that also creates an opportunity in Sudan, particularly if China can now be induced and shamed into suspending the transfer of weapons used to slaughter civilians in Darfur.
If China continues — it is the main supplier of arms used in the genocide — then it may itself be in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. Article III of the convention declares that one of the punishable crimes is “complicity in genocide”; that’s the crime that China may be committing if it goes on supplying arms used for genocide, even after the I.C.C. has begun criminal proceedings against the purchaser of those weapons.
Beijing seems unabashed. Incredibly, China and Russia are acting as Mr. Bashir’s lawyers, quietly urging the United Nations Security Council to intervene to delay criminal proceedings against him. Such a delay is a bad idea, unless Mr. Bashir agrees to go into exile.
Still, China does care about its image. Beijing supplied arms to Pol Pot’s genocidal regime in Cambodia but later distanced itself from the Khmer Rouge as international criticism grew. China also supported Slobodan Milosevic until he was indicted, but then almost immediately let him hang out to dry.
One test of China’s attitudes will be whether President Bashir is welcomed at the Olympic Games’ opening ceremony next month. (If President Bush is not careful, he may find himself seated at the ceremony between Mr. Bashir and Robert Mugabe.)
If Beijing reacts to Mr. Bashir the same way it did to its other war criminal pals and suspends arms transfers, then there is real hope for Sudan. If Mr. Bashir feared losing his weapons and spare parts, he would be willing to make significant concessions that would make a peace deal more likely — and ultimately an enforceable peace agreement is the only way that Darfur can recover.
According to United Nations data, 88 percent of Sudan’s imported small arms come from China — and those Chinese sales of small arms increased 137-fold between 2001 and 2006. China has also sold military aircraft to Sudan, and the BBC reported this week that two Chinese-made A-5 Fantan fighter aircraft were spotted on a Darfur runway last month. The BBC also said that China is training Sudanese military pilots in Sudan.
Likewise, Human Rights First, in a report on Chinese weapons sales to Sudan, suggests that Chinese engineers supervise arms production at the Giad industrial complex outside Khartoum. Chinese military companies have also helped set up arms factories outside Khartoum at Kalakla, Chojeri and Bageer.
Instead of lashing out in reaction to the prospect of an arrest warrant, Mr. Bashir may be forced to take the opposite tack: He may become more cooperative.
Mr. Bashir first used brutal methods — militias and a proxy invasion of a neighboring country — in his long war against South Sudan. He didn’t pay a steep price, so he adopted the same scorched-earth policy in the Nuba Mountains. When he again went unpunished, he quite rationally adopted the same measures to suppress insurgency in Darfur.
Now, finally, we have a stick that has Mr. Bashir alarmed, and that gives us leverage. So far, Mr. Bashir is responding by trying to win support from the African Union and the Arab League, and that may restrain him from killing and raping too many aid workers and peacekeepers in the coming months. It may even induce him to cooperate with the U.N. in permitting more peacekeepers.
Unfortunately, the Arab League’s secretary general, Amr Moussa, who quite properly denounces abuses when suffered by Palestinians, has chosen to side with Mr. Bashir rather than the hundreds of thousands of Muslims killed in Darfur. If Israel bombed some desert in Darfur, Arab leaders might muster some indignation about violence there.
A final thought: this prosecution for genocide offers a hint of historical progress.
Throughout most of history, genocide was simply what happened to losers in a conflict. In the Bible, if we are to take it literally, there are cases when God gives a nod to genocide (“Now go and completely destroy the entire Amalekite nation — men, women, children, babies”). Such divinely sanctioned ethnic cleansing reflected the norms of war for much of history, finally beginning to yield in the last couple of centuries.
Now this prosecutor’s pursuit of a head of state suggests that human standards truly are changing — and that is a prerequisite for ending genocide itself.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.
July 20, 2008
Somali Killings of Aid Workers Imperil Relief
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — At a time of drought, skyrocketing food prices, crippling inflation and intensifying street fighting, many of the aid workers whom millions of Somalis depend on for survival are fleeing their posts — or in some cases the country.
They are being driven out by what appears to be an organized terror campaign. Ominous leaflets recently surfaced on the bullet-pocked streets of Mogadishu, Somalia’s ruin of a capital, calling aid workers “infidels” and warning them that they will be methodically hunted down. Since January, at least 20 aid workers have been killed, more than in any year in recent memory. Still others have been abducted.
The deliberate assault on aid workers is a chilling new dimension to the crisis in Somalia that has unfolded over the past 17 years but has grown increasingly violent as outside forces, including the United States military, have turned a civil war into a more international conflict.
United Nations officials are especially worried by the recent attacks because they say Somalia is heading toward another full-blown famine. Without professional workers to distribute food or tend to the sick, the country could sink into a catastrophe reminiscent of the early 1990s, when hundreds of thousands of people starved.
“This couldn’t be happening at a worse time,” said Peter Smerdon, a spokesman for the United Nations World Food Program.
The attacks on aid workers — including Westerners, Somalis working for Western organizations and Somalis working for local groups — have escalated this month. Two weeks ago a high-ranking United Nations official was shot as he stepped out of a mosque. Last Sunday, a trucking agent in charge of transporting emergency rations was killed. On Thursday, three elders who were helping local aid workers distribute food at a displaced persons camp were shot to death while drinking tea.
In response, the United Nations is pulling some employees out of dangerous urban areas and cutting back on operations across the country. Somalia needs hundreds of millions of dollars of emergency aid, but donors are getting skittish because the attacks on aid workers threaten to make relief projects untenable.
A plane with at least a dozen Somali aid workers left Mogadishu on Friday. Several workers said it was the leaflets that scared them away.
“These people are serious,” said one Somali aid professional who is now hiding with her family outside Mogadishu.
The leaflets were tacked onto walls and scattered on streets in Mogadishu about 10 days ago. “We know all the so-called aid workers,” they read. “We promise to kill them, wherever they are.”
Abductions are also increasing. Seventeen aid workers have been kidnapped this year, with 13 still in captivity.
It is not clear who is behind the terror campaign or if it is connected to previous assassinations of journalists and intellectuals. The leaflets and accompanying e-mail messages sent to several aid organizations seem to signify a new degree of organization.
Some of the warnings were signed by a little-known group called the Martyrs of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which takes its name from the notorious Jordanian terrorist killed by American forces in Iraq in 2006. The group said the aid workers were conspiring with “infidels,” and Western diplomats said the killings might be intended to make Somalia seem so chaotic that Western countries would abandon it.
But several factions of Somalia’s Islamist movement, which is fighting an intense guerrilla war against the government, have condemned the attacks.
Sheik Muktar Robow Abu Monsur, a leader of the Shebab insurgent group, said Islamic militants were actually guarding food convoys. United Nations officials have mixed feelings about the Shebab, saying that some factions are violently anti-Western while others recently helped free two kidnapped aid workers.
Some Western security analysts theorize that in the violent murkiness that has overtaken the country, unsavory elements within the Somali government may be killing aid workers to discredit Islamist opposition groups and draw in United Nations peacekeepers, who may be the government’s last hope for survival.
The government admits that it desperately needs peacekeepers. But it denies that it is attacking aid workers to get them.
“It’s obvious who’s doing this,” said Abdi Awaleh Jama, a Somali ambassador at large. “It’s hard-liner Islamists who hate the West. They are forces of darkness, not forces of light.”
Whoever the culprit is, the ramifications are huge. Somalia is perennially needy, with some of the highest malnutrition rates in the world. Aid work has never been easy, because of security issues, and Western aid workers have mostly stayed out of Somalia for years, entrusting emergency relief and development work to local staff members.
Even before the death threats and assassinations, Somali aid professionals were struggling to reach the 2.6 million people who need assistance. But that number could soon swell to 3.5 million, nearly half the population. Rainfall has been scant this year. The fall harvest is expected to be disastrous. And some United Nations officials are predicting a major famine within weeks.
“There’s going to be deaths,” Mr. Smerdon of the World Food Program said. “It’s just a question of how wide-scale.”
Somalia’s ills are part of a bigger crisis sweeping the drought-prone, war-prone Horn of Africa. With global food prices rising faster than they have in decades, millions of people who were just getting by can no longer afford rice, wheat or other basics.
Among the hardest hit are those in Somalia’s dilapidated cities, like Mogadishu, where prices have shot up by as much as 500 percent and where people depend on buying food instead of growing it. But Mogadishu has become a nightmare for aid workers — and just about everyone else. Suicide bombs, roadside bombs, mortar attacks and wild street battles are the norm. Even traveling the few miles from the airport to the main hospital is a life-and-death gamble because the road is so heavily mined.
“Nobody knows where is safe,” said Mark Bowden, the coordinator of United Nations humanitarian operations for Somalia.
He said that the United Nations was trying to talk to insurgents. “But the people you can talk to,” he said, “are not the people you need to talk to.”
Somalia has been a killing field since 1991, when clan militias brought down the central government and carved the country into fiefs. Warlords fought over every port, fishing pier and telephone pole that could turn a profit.
In the summer of 2006 an Islamist movement ran the warlords out of Mogadishu and established control over much of the country. Mogadishu was peaceful for the first time in years. But the United States and Ethiopia accused the Islamists of being connected to Al Qaeda.
In December 2006, Ethiopian troops invaded. The Ethiopians, backed up by American intelligence and airstrikes, pushed out the Islamist forces and installed Somalia’s weak transitional government in the capital.
But the Islamists have regrouped. They have received help from foreign jihadists, Western diplomats say, and embraced hit-and-run tactics.
The American military has continued to hunt down terrorist suspects and has launched several airstrikes in Somalia, stoking more anti-Western feelings, including against aid workers.
Meanwhile, Mogadishu has been consumed by urban warfare that in the past 18 months has killed thousands of civilians, displaced more than a million and leveled entire city blocks.
United Nations officials are trying to broker a truce. In June, one Islamist faction agreed to a cease-fire. But it does not seem to mean much, because the violence continues to rage.
At first, the killings of the aid workers seemed to be a mistake, a case of wrong place, wrong time. In January, three staff members of Doctors Without Borders were killed by a roadside bomb in southern Somalia. Some Western security analysts initially thought the bomb had been intended for someone else.
But as the weeks passed and more aid workers were cut down, including four drivers hauling emergency rations for the World Food Program, it was clear there was a pattern — and a message.
“It’s unprecedented,” Mr. Smerdon said.
There is no exact figure for the number of aid workers in Somalia. The United Nations employs about 800 for projects in Somalia, and the International Committee of the Red Cross several hundred. Counting local groups, there are probably several thousand people involved in health, food, education and other aid work.
To better protect the aid community, United Nations officials are scrambling to raise money for more planes, more radios and more security guards.
But Jurg Montani, who leads the Red Cross delegation to Somalia, said donors were becoming more reluctant to contribute.
“They’re asking how long can we go on if humanitarian workers are getting kidnapped and killed?” he said.
Mr. Montani said that the country had always been one of the hardest places in the world to work. In Somalia, he said, “you don’t do what you need to do; you do what you can.”
Two Somali journalists contributed reporting from Mogadishu, Somalia.
Somali Killings of Aid Workers Imperil Relief
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — At a time of drought, skyrocketing food prices, crippling inflation and intensifying street fighting, many of the aid workers whom millions of Somalis depend on for survival are fleeing their posts — or in some cases the country.
They are being driven out by what appears to be an organized terror campaign. Ominous leaflets recently surfaced on the bullet-pocked streets of Mogadishu, Somalia’s ruin of a capital, calling aid workers “infidels” and warning them that they will be methodically hunted down. Since January, at least 20 aid workers have been killed, more than in any year in recent memory. Still others have been abducted.
The deliberate assault on aid workers is a chilling new dimension to the crisis in Somalia that has unfolded over the past 17 years but has grown increasingly violent as outside forces, including the United States military, have turned a civil war into a more international conflict.
United Nations officials are especially worried by the recent attacks because they say Somalia is heading toward another full-blown famine. Without professional workers to distribute food or tend to the sick, the country could sink into a catastrophe reminiscent of the early 1990s, when hundreds of thousands of people starved.
“This couldn’t be happening at a worse time,” said Peter Smerdon, a spokesman for the United Nations World Food Program.
The attacks on aid workers — including Westerners, Somalis working for Western organizations and Somalis working for local groups — have escalated this month. Two weeks ago a high-ranking United Nations official was shot as he stepped out of a mosque. Last Sunday, a trucking agent in charge of transporting emergency rations was killed. On Thursday, three elders who were helping local aid workers distribute food at a displaced persons camp were shot to death while drinking tea.
In response, the United Nations is pulling some employees out of dangerous urban areas and cutting back on operations across the country. Somalia needs hundreds of millions of dollars of emergency aid, but donors are getting skittish because the attacks on aid workers threaten to make relief projects untenable.
A plane with at least a dozen Somali aid workers left Mogadishu on Friday. Several workers said it was the leaflets that scared them away.
“These people are serious,” said one Somali aid professional who is now hiding with her family outside Mogadishu.
The leaflets were tacked onto walls and scattered on streets in Mogadishu about 10 days ago. “We know all the so-called aid workers,” they read. “We promise to kill them, wherever they are.”
Abductions are also increasing. Seventeen aid workers have been kidnapped this year, with 13 still in captivity.
It is not clear who is behind the terror campaign or if it is connected to previous assassinations of journalists and intellectuals. The leaflets and accompanying e-mail messages sent to several aid organizations seem to signify a new degree of organization.
Some of the warnings were signed by a little-known group called the Martyrs of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which takes its name from the notorious Jordanian terrorist killed by American forces in Iraq in 2006. The group said the aid workers were conspiring with “infidels,” and Western diplomats said the killings might be intended to make Somalia seem so chaotic that Western countries would abandon it.
But several factions of Somalia’s Islamist movement, which is fighting an intense guerrilla war against the government, have condemned the attacks.
Sheik Muktar Robow Abu Monsur, a leader of the Shebab insurgent group, said Islamic militants were actually guarding food convoys. United Nations officials have mixed feelings about the Shebab, saying that some factions are violently anti-Western while others recently helped free two kidnapped aid workers.
Some Western security analysts theorize that in the violent murkiness that has overtaken the country, unsavory elements within the Somali government may be killing aid workers to discredit Islamist opposition groups and draw in United Nations peacekeepers, who may be the government’s last hope for survival.
The government admits that it desperately needs peacekeepers. But it denies that it is attacking aid workers to get them.
“It’s obvious who’s doing this,” said Abdi Awaleh Jama, a Somali ambassador at large. “It’s hard-liner Islamists who hate the West. They are forces of darkness, not forces of light.”
Whoever the culprit is, the ramifications are huge. Somalia is perennially needy, with some of the highest malnutrition rates in the world. Aid work has never been easy, because of security issues, and Western aid workers have mostly stayed out of Somalia for years, entrusting emergency relief and development work to local staff members.
Even before the death threats and assassinations, Somali aid professionals were struggling to reach the 2.6 million people who need assistance. But that number could soon swell to 3.5 million, nearly half the population. Rainfall has been scant this year. The fall harvest is expected to be disastrous. And some United Nations officials are predicting a major famine within weeks.
“There’s going to be deaths,” Mr. Smerdon of the World Food Program said. “It’s just a question of how wide-scale.”
Somalia’s ills are part of a bigger crisis sweeping the drought-prone, war-prone Horn of Africa. With global food prices rising faster than they have in decades, millions of people who were just getting by can no longer afford rice, wheat or other basics.
Among the hardest hit are those in Somalia’s dilapidated cities, like Mogadishu, where prices have shot up by as much as 500 percent and where people depend on buying food instead of growing it. But Mogadishu has become a nightmare for aid workers — and just about everyone else. Suicide bombs, roadside bombs, mortar attacks and wild street battles are the norm. Even traveling the few miles from the airport to the main hospital is a life-and-death gamble because the road is so heavily mined.
“Nobody knows where is safe,” said Mark Bowden, the coordinator of United Nations humanitarian operations for Somalia.
He said that the United Nations was trying to talk to insurgents. “But the people you can talk to,” he said, “are not the people you need to talk to.”
Somalia has been a killing field since 1991, when clan militias brought down the central government and carved the country into fiefs. Warlords fought over every port, fishing pier and telephone pole that could turn a profit.
In the summer of 2006 an Islamist movement ran the warlords out of Mogadishu and established control over much of the country. Mogadishu was peaceful for the first time in years. But the United States and Ethiopia accused the Islamists of being connected to Al Qaeda.
In December 2006, Ethiopian troops invaded. The Ethiopians, backed up by American intelligence and airstrikes, pushed out the Islamist forces and installed Somalia’s weak transitional government in the capital.
But the Islamists have regrouped. They have received help from foreign jihadists, Western diplomats say, and embraced hit-and-run tactics.
The American military has continued to hunt down terrorist suspects and has launched several airstrikes in Somalia, stoking more anti-Western feelings, including against aid workers.
Meanwhile, Mogadishu has been consumed by urban warfare that in the past 18 months has killed thousands of civilians, displaced more than a million and leveled entire city blocks.
United Nations officials are trying to broker a truce. In June, one Islamist faction agreed to a cease-fire. But it does not seem to mean much, because the violence continues to rage.
At first, the killings of the aid workers seemed to be a mistake, a case of wrong place, wrong time. In January, three staff members of Doctors Without Borders were killed by a roadside bomb in southern Somalia. Some Western security analysts initially thought the bomb had been intended for someone else.
But as the weeks passed and more aid workers were cut down, including four drivers hauling emergency rations for the World Food Program, it was clear there was a pattern — and a message.
“It’s unprecedented,” Mr. Smerdon said.
There is no exact figure for the number of aid workers in Somalia. The United Nations employs about 800 for projects in Somalia, and the International Committee of the Red Cross several hundred. Counting local groups, there are probably several thousand people involved in health, food, education and other aid work.
To better protect the aid community, United Nations officials are scrambling to raise money for more planes, more radios and more security guards.
But Jurg Montani, who leads the Red Cross delegation to Somalia, said donors were becoming more reluctant to contribute.
“They’re asking how long can we go on if humanitarian workers are getting kidnapped and killed?” he said.
Mr. Montani said that the country had always been one of the hardest places in the world to work. In Somalia, he said, “you don’t do what you need to do; you do what you can.”
Two Somali journalists contributed reporting from Mogadishu, Somalia.
There are photos linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/world ... ref=slogin
July 22, 2008
Zimbabwe Rivals Meet in Bid to End Crisis
By GRAHAM BOWLEY and ALAN COWELL
After a bloody election season marked by beatings and assassinations of opposition supporters, Zimbabwe’s feuding political leaders met face to face on Monday to sign an agreement laying out terms for negotiations to wrest their land out of political chaos.
While the accord itself was a modest step in light of Zimbabwe’s collapse and the many hurdles to a final resolution, the sight of President Robert Mugabe in the same room as his nemesis, Morgan Tsvangirai, was a striking departure from the political bloodletting of recent months and the deep antipathy between the two men. They even shook hands.
“You can all imagine what an occasion it is for the leader of the ruling party and the leader of the winning party to be sitting to discuss” a settlement, said a smiling Mr. Tsvangirai, who has survived three assassination attempts and says the government stole the presidential elections from him in March.
Even Mr. Mugabe, who has sworn that “only God” could remove him as president and ridiculed the opposition leader as a lackey of Zimbabwe’s former colonial masters, spoke in unusually conciliatory tones. “We sit here in order for us to chart a new way, a new way of political interaction,” he said.
The ceremony, in a Harare hotel, was a diplomatic coup for Thabo Mbeki, the president of neighboring South Africa, who has labored for months as a mediator, rejecting international criticism that he favored Mr. Mugabe and stood by as the opposition endured a broad campaign of violence against it.
But whether the opening of negotiations was a staged showing of cooperation under international pressure, a sign of the opposition’s weakness or a real path toward peace remained unclear. The opposition said it got much of what it demanded before engaging in substantive talks: a commitment to end political violence and the participation of international bodies in the mediation process.
But given Mr. Mugabe’s unbridled exercise of power during the election season, he enters the negotiations with the overwhelming upper hand, analysts said. Few expected him to yield any significant ground now.
“I think this is an incredibly cynical maneuver by him,” said Robert Rotberg, an expert on conflict resolution at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He added, “Mugabe is playing for keeps,” possibly using the negotiations to preserve his legitimacy in Africa and guard against punitive measures from the United States and the European Union.
Even the opposition was skeptical.
“We are dealing with a rogue leader who does not respect his own rules, nor does he even respect his own signature,” said Thabitha Khumalo, deputy spokesperson for the opposition.
In the agreement, which was also signed by a separate opposition faction, the sides pledged to seek a new government of national unity and a new constitution. In the meantime, they agreed “to eliminate all forms of political violence.” Finally, the sides agreed on a tight timeline for the discussions: two weeks.
But the thorniest questions remain. The framework says nothing about who would lead the new government, or how power would be divided.
Mr. Mbeki has insisted on steering the negotiations himself — resisting international calls for more fervent intervention — out of a longstanding suspicion of Western interference, his political tensions with the trade union movement from which Mr. Tsvangirai emerged and an abiding conviction that only his special bond with Mr. Mugabe can resolve the crisis, his colleagues and chroniclers say.
But Mr. Tsvangirai had grown increasingly hostile to Mr. Mbeki’s mediation, and repeatedly demanded that he be replaced. The mood shifted last week when Mr. Mbeki agreed to open up the process somewhat, allowing the African Union, the United Nations and a 14-nation group of southern African nations to participate. Analysts said Mr. Tsvangirai probably agreed to sit at the negotiating table because he saw it as his only chance of ending the political violence and of gaining a role in a new government.
The analysts said Mr. Mugabe was also probably under pressure from Mr. Mbeki to at least be seen as moving the negotiating process forward, especially after South African diplomats helped to scuttle an American-led effort at the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions against Zimbabwe this month.
“It may be that Mugabe merely used this to deflate the momentum for sanctions,” said Sebastian Spio-Garbrah, an Africa and Middle East analyst at the Eurasia Group in New York. After the Security Council effort failed, for example, European Union officials said they would try to widen their own sanctions against Zimbabwe.
“It is an historic agreement, the fact that Tsvangirai and Mugabe are in the same room and appended their signatures to the same document,” Mr. Spio-Garbrah added. “But it may unravel under pressure as the two sides jockey for position in the unity government.”
Of the two opponents, most analysts said that Mr. Tsvangirai was taking the greater risk by appearing with Mr. Mugabe to sign the agreement, and that Mr. Mugabe might now try to draw out the negotiations until international attention moved away.
Mr. Tsvangirai “is going to be quite vulnerable,” said Stephen Morrison, director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
“It is a very risky strategy for him within the M.D.C. and among the voting public at large who went out on a limb for him back in March,” he said, referring to the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change.
Mark Ashurst, director of the Africa Research Institute in London, argued that Mr. Mugabe was sending only marginal actors to the negotiations and not officials from his inner circle, a further sign that the talks were precarious. But South African officials argue that negotiations have delivered results between the two sides in the past, and have the capacity to work again.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/world ... ref=slogin
July 22, 2008
Zimbabwe Rivals Meet in Bid to End Crisis
By GRAHAM BOWLEY and ALAN COWELL
After a bloody election season marked by beatings and assassinations of opposition supporters, Zimbabwe’s feuding political leaders met face to face on Monday to sign an agreement laying out terms for negotiations to wrest their land out of political chaos.
While the accord itself was a modest step in light of Zimbabwe’s collapse and the many hurdles to a final resolution, the sight of President Robert Mugabe in the same room as his nemesis, Morgan Tsvangirai, was a striking departure from the political bloodletting of recent months and the deep antipathy between the two men. They even shook hands.
“You can all imagine what an occasion it is for the leader of the ruling party and the leader of the winning party to be sitting to discuss” a settlement, said a smiling Mr. Tsvangirai, who has survived three assassination attempts and says the government stole the presidential elections from him in March.
Even Mr. Mugabe, who has sworn that “only God” could remove him as president and ridiculed the opposition leader as a lackey of Zimbabwe’s former colonial masters, spoke in unusually conciliatory tones. “We sit here in order for us to chart a new way, a new way of political interaction,” he said.
The ceremony, in a Harare hotel, was a diplomatic coup for Thabo Mbeki, the president of neighboring South Africa, who has labored for months as a mediator, rejecting international criticism that he favored Mr. Mugabe and stood by as the opposition endured a broad campaign of violence against it.
But whether the opening of negotiations was a staged showing of cooperation under international pressure, a sign of the opposition’s weakness or a real path toward peace remained unclear. The opposition said it got much of what it demanded before engaging in substantive talks: a commitment to end political violence and the participation of international bodies in the mediation process.
But given Mr. Mugabe’s unbridled exercise of power during the election season, he enters the negotiations with the overwhelming upper hand, analysts said. Few expected him to yield any significant ground now.
“I think this is an incredibly cynical maneuver by him,” said Robert Rotberg, an expert on conflict resolution at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He added, “Mugabe is playing for keeps,” possibly using the negotiations to preserve his legitimacy in Africa and guard against punitive measures from the United States and the European Union.
Even the opposition was skeptical.
“We are dealing with a rogue leader who does not respect his own rules, nor does he even respect his own signature,” said Thabitha Khumalo, deputy spokesperson for the opposition.
In the agreement, which was also signed by a separate opposition faction, the sides pledged to seek a new government of national unity and a new constitution. In the meantime, they agreed “to eliminate all forms of political violence.” Finally, the sides agreed on a tight timeline for the discussions: two weeks.
But the thorniest questions remain. The framework says nothing about who would lead the new government, or how power would be divided.
Mr. Mbeki has insisted on steering the negotiations himself — resisting international calls for more fervent intervention — out of a longstanding suspicion of Western interference, his political tensions with the trade union movement from which Mr. Tsvangirai emerged and an abiding conviction that only his special bond with Mr. Mugabe can resolve the crisis, his colleagues and chroniclers say.
But Mr. Tsvangirai had grown increasingly hostile to Mr. Mbeki’s mediation, and repeatedly demanded that he be replaced. The mood shifted last week when Mr. Mbeki agreed to open up the process somewhat, allowing the African Union, the United Nations and a 14-nation group of southern African nations to participate. Analysts said Mr. Tsvangirai probably agreed to sit at the negotiating table because he saw it as his only chance of ending the political violence and of gaining a role in a new government.
The analysts said Mr. Mugabe was also probably under pressure from Mr. Mbeki to at least be seen as moving the negotiating process forward, especially after South African diplomats helped to scuttle an American-led effort at the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions against Zimbabwe this month.
“It may be that Mugabe merely used this to deflate the momentum for sanctions,” said Sebastian Spio-Garbrah, an Africa and Middle East analyst at the Eurasia Group in New York. After the Security Council effort failed, for example, European Union officials said they would try to widen their own sanctions against Zimbabwe.
“It is an historic agreement, the fact that Tsvangirai and Mugabe are in the same room and appended their signatures to the same document,” Mr. Spio-Garbrah added. “But it may unravel under pressure as the two sides jockey for position in the unity government.”
Of the two opponents, most analysts said that Mr. Tsvangirai was taking the greater risk by appearing with Mr. Mugabe to sign the agreement, and that Mr. Mugabe might now try to draw out the negotiations until international attention moved away.
Mr. Tsvangirai “is going to be quite vulnerable,” said Stephen Morrison, director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
“It is a very risky strategy for him within the M.D.C. and among the voting public at large who went out on a limb for him back in March,” he said, referring to the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change.
Mark Ashurst, director of the Africa Research Institute in London, argued that Mr. Mugabe was sending only marginal actors to the negotiations and not officials from his inner circle, a further sign that the talks were precarious. But South African officials argue that negotiations have delivered results between the two sides in the past, and have the capacity to work again.