Posted on 08/15/2002 4:53:44 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
What makes Mugabe shudder? White skin, that’s what. Fergal Keane deplores the shameful silence in response to ethnic cleansing in Zimbabwe
Naomi Raaff is leaving Africa. She was born on the continent, as were her children. But Naomi Raaff is no longer welcome in the land of her birth. Her problem is that she is white, and in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe this makes her an enemy of the state.
'Yes, I can read it all - it's a pretty basic code.'
White. Not an armed rebel or a political subversive or a hater or a killer just white. Decent, law-abiding, kind and hard-working but, alas, irredeemably white. In a few days' time she will take a plane to Britain and, with her three children, attempt to start a new life in Hampshire - that is if she can find a job and a house.
I met her in her comfortable bungalow in Harare as she packed the last boxes of her family belongings. Naomi cannot afford to transport her furniture or pay the quarantine fees for the family cat. So these are being parcelled out to friends, while the treasured essentials - old letters, copies of her children's school reports, gymkhana rosettes and photographs - are carefully packed in cardboard boxes for the journey to England.
The most cherished photograph is of Naomi and a ruggedly handsome man in his early fifties. The picture was taken at a party and both of them are beaming into the camera. He had been Naomi's best friend and lover for seven years. The man's name is Terry Ford, and I know that I have seen his photograph before.
But the photograph I saw - weeks before I met Naomi - was of a brutalised and bloody corpse. The Terry Ford in the news photographs was lying near the gate of his farm, having been battered, hacked and shot to death by Robert Mugabe's thugs. The night he was murdered Terry rang Naomi in Harare to tell her that some men had tried to break into the house. He had driven them off by firing a shot. That was the last Naomi heard from him.
The following morning a farm labourer found Terry Ford's body. A gang of 20 men had returned and murdered him. The world paid a little bit of notice to his death, only because Terry had a small terrier called Squeak, and the dog was photographed pining beside the body of his dead master. Then the world resumed its customary indifference to the terror in Zimbabwe, and Naomi Raaff decided she could take no more.
In her view there is no room left for white farmers in Zimbabwe. 'It's over,' she told me. 'The farmers who believe they can stay working are deluding themselves.' She is, of course, absolutely correct. Now, with Mugabe and his cronies threatening to expropriate white businesses, the days of white urban dwellers may also be coming to an end.
The plan is becoming clearer with every passing day: the whites are to be driven out of Zimbabwe. A despotic regime has targeted an ethnic minority and used all the powers of state to marginalise and demonise them. It has changed the law so that it can steal their property, unleashed militias to enforce its will, and turned a blind eye to murder and mayhem. (When Terry Ford called the police for help just before he was murdered, they told him their driver was asleep.)
To be white is to be a target of state hatred. It is to be told that your life and livelihood have no value. In any other context we would denounce this as racism and ethnic cleansing, but when it comes to Zimbabwe there is a curious failure to call things by their proper name.
The Western nations went to war in Kosovo proudly declaring that 'ethnic cleansing' had no place at the end of the 20th century. No more Bosnias or Rwandas, they declared. Western forces are deployed in the Balkans to ensure that minorities are not brutalised. The newly inaugurated International Criminal Court has as an implicit goal the prosecution of those who target vulnerable population groups.
So why the silence over Robert Mugabe's campaign against the whites? Let us consider the more plausible rationalisation. It is undeniably the case that black Zimbabweans are enduring far more physical suffering at Mugabe's hands. While 3,000 farmers face eviction, there are 250,000 farm workers who are being made destitute; the torture and killing of Mugabe's black enemies is on a far greater scale than anything suffered by whites; and, unlike the mass of African peasantry, the whites are not facing starvation. All of this is rightly condemned by the West.
The failure to recognise the ethnic cleansing of whites has old roots. Blame it on a noxious blend of history and bigotry. In the liberal West a white African is invariably characterised as a racist buffoon, the last vestige of a colonial past that we would much rather forget. The whites of Zimbabwe are spectacularly unfashionable. Cut off from Western society, they have not learnt the arts of obfuscation and spin. They generally tend to say what they mean. Sometimes their blunt speaking offends our more cultivated sensibilities. Most Western liberals regard them with condescension and disdain. And as for their dress sense! Men in shorts, women in 1950s-style floral dresses, those strange clipped accents ...not like us, not like us at all.
People who will happily campaign for human rights in East Timor or the Middle East start to behave like the most rabid social Darwinists when you mention Zimbabwe's whites. 'Africa is a tough place and they were on top for a long time. It's their turn to be dominated now,' a friend I'd previously regarded as a liberal told me.
Certainly many, but by no means all, white landowners are the descendants of colonialists who stole African land. Some of them undoubtedly harbour racist attitudes and, yes, there was a failure to integrate with black Zimbabwe after independence. But set against this the enormous contribution made to the prosperity of post-independence Zimbabwe by the white farming community, and consider the example of people like Sir Garfield Todd, who fought the racism of Ian Smith and now finds himself stripped of his citizenship; or a farmer like Chris Shepard from Karoi, who ferried black torture victims to and from hospital during the election campaign. I could cite numerous more examples of whites who have been putting themselves in the frontline to protect the human rights of black Zimbabweans. These are not racists but proud citizens of Zimbabwe.
Let us compare the situation to what happened in a country to the north of Zimbabwe. When the ruling Hutu clique in Rwanda decided to destroy the Tutsi minority, they first denounced them as foreigners and invaders (the comparison with the language used by Mugabe's cronies about whites is chilling). The Tutsis had once been feudal overlords and had worked fist in glove with the colonial administration; but did anybody in the West, or even in the rest of Africa, suggest that the Hutu were justified in targeting the Tutsis because of history?
Like the Tutsis in Rwanda, the whites in Zimbabwe are being vilified because of their ethnic origin. Only whites are being told that they no longer have a place in their own country. A white who was once close to Mugabe told a Zimbabwean friend of mine recently that Mugabe 'positively shudders' with revulsion in the presence of pale skins.
He will go on shuddering until he has rid Zimbabwe of its white population. But you won't hear Africa's leaders speak up for a threatened minority, nor will the African secretary-general of the UN, Kofi Annan, rally the international community to support the beleaguered farmers of Matabeleland. And I would bet anything you like that we won't hear any of our Western leaders use the phrase 'ethnic cleansing'. That would create an obligation to intervene to protect the vulnerable, and, for all the fine rhetoric, this simply will not happen.
The whites of Zimbabwe have been abandoned. Some will try to hang on and hope that Mugabe dies of old age or is eventually overthrown; but most will eventually be driven out, the victims of Robert Mugabe's racism and our indifference. As Naomi Raaff said, it's over.
Fergal Keane has reported from Zimbabwe for the BBC's Ten O'Clock News.
He said that he had been repeatedly told that the High Commission in Harare was refusing citizenship to anyone who had renounced it more than once, and that it was charging for passport renewals and extensions at black market exchange rates. Speaking at a press conference held with members of the Zimbabwean opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, and farmers who had fled Zimbabwe, Mr Ancram said that the Home Secretary had the discretion to re-register former nationals as British citizens.
He called for an assurance that this would happen with Zimbabweans who had been forced to give up their British nationality and said he had written to the Prime Minister, asking him to investigate the claims made about the High Commission in Harare as a matter of urgency.***
This is the caption on the article's graphic.
Can you say...H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-S-Y? That's good boys and girls. Good grief!
America has prided itself on being the first non-imperial superpower, but the viability of that strategy was demolished on September 11th. For its own security, it needs to do what it did to Japan and Germany after the war: civilize them. It needs to take up (in Kipling's words), "the white man's burden," a phrase that will have to be modified in the age of Colin Powell and Condi Rice but whose spirit is generous and admirable.***
The Perils of Designer Tribalism***Part of what makes The Tears of the White Man such an important book is Bruckner's sensitivity to the aerodynamics of liberal guilt. He understands what launches it, what keeps it aloft, and how we might lure it safely back to earth. He understands that the entire phenomenon of Third Worldism is fueled by the moral ecstasy of overbred guilt. Bruckner is an articulate anatomist of such guilt and its attendant deceptions and mystifications. "An overblown conscience," he points out, "is an empty conscience."
Compassion ceases if there is nothing but compassion, and revulsion turns to insensitivity. Our "soft pity," as Stefan Zweig calls it, is stimulated, because guilt is a convenient substitute for action where action is impossible. Without the power to do anything, sensitivity becomes our main aim, the aim is not so much to do anything, as to be judged. Salvation lies in the verdict that declares us to be wrong.
The universalization-which is to say the utter trivialization-of compassion is one side of Third Worldism. Another side is the inversion of traditional moral and intellectual values. Europe once sought to bring enlightenment-literacy, civil society, modern technology-to benighted parts of the world. It did so in the name of progress and civilization. The ethic of Third Worldism dictates that yesterday's enlightenment be rebaptized as today's imperialistic oppression. For the committed Third Worldist, Bruckner points out,
salvation consists not only in a futile exchange of influences, but in the recognition of the superiority of foreign thought, in the study of their doctrines, and in conversion to their dogma. We must take on our former slaves as our models. . . . It is the duty and in the interest of the West to be made prisoner by its own barbarians.
Whatever the current object of adulation- the wisdom of the East, tribal Africa, Aboriginal Australia, pre-Columbian America -the message is the same: the absolute superiority of Otherness. The Third Worldist looks to the orient, to the tribal, to the primitive not for what they really are but for their evocative distance from the reality of modern European society and values.
It is all part of what Bruckner calls "the enchanting music of departure." Its siren call is seductive but also supremely mendacious. Indeed, the messy reality of the primitive world-its squalor and poverty, its penchant for cannibalism, slavery, gratuitous cruelty, and superstition-are carefully edited out of the picture. In their place we find a species of Rousseauvian sentimentality. Rousseau is the patron saint of Third Worldism. "Ignoring the real human race entirely," Rousseau wrote in a passage Bruckner quotes from the Confessions, "I imagined perfect beings, with heavenly virtue and beauty, so sure in their friendship, so tender and faithful, that I could never find anyone like them in the real world." The beings with whom Rousseau populated his fantasy life are exported to exotic lands by the Third Worldist. As Rousseau discovered, the unreality of the scenario, far from being an impediment to moral smugness, was an invaluable asset. Reality, after all, has a way of impinging upon fantasy, clipping its wings, limiting its exuberance. So much the worse, then, for reality. As Bruckner notes, in this romance adepts "were not looking for a real world but the negation of their own. . . . An eternal vision is projected on these nations that has nothing to do with their real history." ***
Unless it was an economically and politically boring place and Big Oil was not at risk. Infuriating.
Is there any organized effort nationally or internationally to persuade the US or other countries to intervene? The US is just plain short-sighted, imo, when they are trying to track down somebody like Osama bin Laden AFTER the fact, and they have a terrorist in Zimbabwe in plain sight and do nothing.
That should be our contribution to the world. We have the best way of life, the most freedoms and we should spread our ideas around the world so that others can live better too. Many areas of the world benefitted from being English colonies and learning of certain ideals. Hong Kong people don't seem to mind being a former British colony, the parts of India that have English influence are more affluent than others. The British seemed to bring more than they took from their colonies.
Hugo Chavez plans to be the anti-U.S. catalyst in the Western Hemisphere and Gaddafi is setting up to be Africa's. We all know there's plenty of anti-American sentiment in the Middle East, in Asia, etc. Gaddafi pratically owns Zimbabwe and has just made a $500 Million bridge loan to Hugo, so I guess Venezuela is on his shopping list too.
Aligned with Castro and Gaddafi - Mugabe Vows to Defend Zimbabwe from Western 'Bullies'
Fidel, Saddam and Hugo --An improbable but growing friendship of three military revolutionaries
The Southern Threat*** U.S. Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill recently drew attention to the economic risks inherent in Brazil's more than $250 billion dollar international debt and caused great concern in the financial community when he said that "throwing the U.S. taxpayer's money at a political uncertainty in Brazil doesn't seem brilliant to me. . . . The situation there is driven by politics, . . . not . . . by economic conditions." A da Silva presidency would likely mean Brazil's default on its debts, which, combined with the crisis in Argentina, could cause immense economic problems in all of Latin America. But worse than the economic downturn would be the effect on the Brazilian people of a radical regime moving toward dictatorship and the risk of destabilization in the region from a Castro-da Silva-Chavez axis.
A da Silva regime in Brazil could soon be followed by the success of the Communist guerrillas in Colombia and the establishment of anti-American regimes in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador (where in January 2000 radicals toppled the government in a few days, with help from military officers recruited by Chavez, though their success was short-lived). Thus, by the end of 2003, the United States might be faced with anti-American regimes in most of South America.
If those regimes recruited only one tenth of one percent of military-aged males for terrorist attacks on the United States, this could mean 30,000 terrorists coming from the south. In addition, many Middle Eastern terrorist organizations, including the PLO, have long collaborated with Castro against the United States and its allies; they and the Iranian-backed terrorists of Hezbollah have hidden among the sizable Middle Eastern communities in Brazil and Venezuela.***
Communists rising in Pretoria? Said to be manipulating ruling ANC from behind scenes*** Since 1994, South Africa has moved away from the West and embraced Libya, Cuba, China, Iraq, the PLO and other anti-Western regimes. ………"To the face of the international community, they fly the flag of so-called 'democracy' to attract foreign investment, tourism, NEPAD dollars and politically-correct sympathy," Snow said. "But when Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan come to South Africa and meet with the Marxists here, do you think they are only having a cup of tea? They are formulating their international strategy."
Last week, SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande said that there is a possibility that the SACP will take over the ANC "from within," and that the "working class must dominate ANC policy." "The African nationalism of the ANC has always been revolutionary, but it doesn't mean you don't find backwards elements," Nzimande said. He also believes that a coming crisis in the capitalist West will provide an opportunity to further the communist cause.
"A new type of global robber baron is emerging - look at what has been happening with all these companies in the United States," Nzimande told the South African media. "For us [the SACP] this is not a deviation - it's inherent in the system," he said. "The relevance of communist parties worldwide is that they represent an alternative society, an alternative to capitalism. When the Soviet Union collapsed there was a neo-liberal triumphalism that said: it's the end of history, there is one route for countries to develop. But poverty is widening. At our congress we are going to reflect on how we link up with this mass creative expression of anti-capitalist sentiment."***
That would require the American government's bureaucratic fat-asses depart from their long term demographic plan for America. Face it - these people are not welcome here.
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