Also recommended, if you can find it, is a book called "Against These Three". It has comparative biographies of Shaka Zulu, Hans Krueger and Cecil Rhodes which gives a good overview of the hisotry of Southern Africa.
Posted on 03/26/2003 7:01:20 AM PST by Valin
"You have the jewel of Africa in your hands," said President Samora Machel of Mozambique and President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania to Robert Mugabe, at the moment of independence, in 1980. "Now look after it."
Twenty-three years later, the "jewel" is ruined, dishonored, disgraced.
Southern Rhodesia had fine and functioning railways, good roads; its towns were policed and clean. It could grow anything, tropical fruit like pineapples, mangoes, bananas, plantains, pawpaws, passion fruit, temperate fruits like apples, peaches, plums. The staple food, maize, grew like a weed and fed surrounding countries as well. Peanuts, sunflowers, cotton, the millets and small grains that used to be staple foods before maize, flourished. Minerals: gold, chromium, asbestos, platinum, and rich coalfields. The dammed Zambezi River created the Kariba Lake, which fed electricity north and south. A paradise, and not only for the whites. The blacks did well, too, at least physically. Not politically: it was a police state and a harsh one. When the blacks rebelled and won their war in 1979 they looked forward to a plenty and competence that existed nowhere else in Africa, not even in South Africa, which was bedeviled by its many mutually hostile tribes and its vast shantytowns. But paradise has to have a superstructure, an infrastructure, and by now it is going, going— almost gone.
One man is associated with the calamity, Robert Mugabe. For a while I wondered if the word "tragedy" could be applied here, greatness brought low, but Mugabe, despite his early reputation, was never great; he was always a frightened little man. There is a tragedy, all right, but it is Zimbabwe's.
Mugabe is now widely execrated, and rightly, but blame for him began late. Nothing is more astonishing than the silence about him for so many years among liberals and well-wishers—the politically correct. What crimes have been committed in the name of political correctness. A man may get away with murder, if he is black. Mugabe did, for many years.
Early in his regime, we might have seen what he was when the infamous Fifth Brigade, thugs from North Korea, hated by blacks and whites alike, became Mugabe's bodyguards, and did his dirty work, notably when he attempted what was virtually genocide of thousands of the Ndebele people (the second-largest tribe) in Matabeleland. Hindsight gives us a clear picture of his depredations: at the time mendacity ruled, all was confusion. But the fact was, we knew the Fifth Brigade: it had already murdered and raped.
It was confusion, too, because Mugabe seemed to begin well. He was a Marxist, true, but like other politicians before and since he said the right things, for instance, that blacks and whites must flourish together. And he passed a law against corruption, forbidding the top echelons of officials from owning more than one property. When his officials only laughed, and bought farm after farm, hotels, businesses, anything they could grab, he did nothing. It was at that point that everyone should have said, "This is no strongman, he is a weakling."
From the start Mugabe has been afraid to show his face out of doors without outriders, guards, motorcades —all the defenses of paranoia. When Queen Elizabeth visited, refused to ride with him in an armored car, and insisted on an open one, people jeered as the frightened man clung to the sides of the car while the insouciant sovereign smiled and waved.
(Excerpt) Read more at nybooks.com ...
Also recommended, if you can find it, is a book called "Against These Three". It has comparative biographies of Shaka Zulu, Hans Krueger and Cecil Rhodes which gives a good overview of the hisotry of Southern Africa.
Mugabe came to power as a result of elections, supervised by international observers, held in 1980, as a result of the Lancaster House negotiations between Ian Smith's Rhodesian Front government, and the two major black parties, ZANU and ZAPU, which fought a bush war against the Rhodesian government.
It was a negotiated end to this war, allowing for elections afterward, which brought Mugabe into power.
Since then, the country has become ever more totalitarian, with fraudulent elections maintaining Mugabe and his party in power.
The land seizures were instigated, as this article indicates, for a variety of reasons, mostly centering around Mugabe's pathologies.
Mugabe has turned to several other strong men to aid his disolving economy; Gaddhafi was one of them.
On the whole, I found this article by Doris Lessing, who grew up in Rhodesia, was a communist in her youth and sympathetic to the longing of blacks for self-rule, to be an accurate depiction of the situation in Zimbabwe. I have lived there myself, and am in contact with those still living there.
This is a frighteningly true statement. There have been several postings in the last year regarding the efforts of Islamics to strengthen their position in Southern Africa. CW, perhaps you could provide a link some of these.
There have been Muslims in both South Africa and Zimbabwe (from India and Pakistan, mostly) for generations. islamiscists have been in contact and establishing cells in both South Africa and Zimbabwe recently. They have been responsible for bombings in South Africa, and reports are that the mosque in Harare was planning an operation against the American Embassy there.
This is part of the effort by Gaddhafi, as well, to extend his influence, and that of Isalm throughout black Africa.
The coming depopulation as a result of Aids will only serve to create more of a vacuum.
P.S. Thanks for the book recommendations.
Mugabe Engages Libyan Special Unit*** A CRACK unit of Libyan intelligence officers is in the country to beef up President Robert Mugabe's security and intelligence system as the nation lurches towards the 2002 presidential election, now only five months away, the Zimbabwe Independent has learnt. Intelligence sources told the Independent this week that over 20 Libyan nationals were booked at a local hotel and could be seen driving around in government vehicles. They are understood to be re-training intelligence personnel and President Mugabe's close security unit.***
It looks like Gadaafi already has his foot in the door--[Excerpt] Harare: Zimbabwe- Libya's President Muammar Gadaafi has bought up 20 houses in Zimbabwe which seem likely to be used as safe-houses for death squads supplied by the Libyan dictator as part of his plan to assist the man he sees as his embattled comrade in arms, President Robert Mugabe. In addition Gadaafi has bought Gracelands, the gigantic Harare mansion belonging to Grace Mugabe, the President's young wife. The house is now to become the Libyan Embassy, making it by far the biggest embassy building in Zimbabwe, dwarfing the British and American missions.
In effect Gadaafi seems to be making a bid to save Mugabe which, if successful, would create a virtual Libyan client state at the far end of Africa. Already there is evidence of direct Libyan involvement in the violence which racked Zimbabwean farms in the last ten days.
Relations between Mugabe and Gadaafi have been warm for some time but it is only in the last year, as Zimbabwe's shortage of foreign exchange has caused repeated fuel cut-offs that Mugabe has several times flown to Tripoli to plead with Gadaafi for deliveries on credit. Gadaafi, who has despaired of his efforts to play a leadership role in the Arab world, has begun to use his financial muscle to make interventions right across black Africa where he has made Zimbabwe a special case, advancing Mugabe a loan of $100 million. [End Excerpt]
GADDAFI-- DRIVE ALL WHITES FROM AFRICA --*** Tunis - Libya's leader, Muammar Gaddafi, has urged Africans to drive white people out of the continent and make them pay compensation for their exploitation of it. "The white colonialists have no place in Africa and their presence is unlawful," said Gaddafi on Sunday, addressing a gathering of African women activists in Tripoli. Gaddafi, whose remarks were reported by the official Libyan news agency Jana monitored in Tunis, also urged Africans to rid themselves of the white person's cultural legacy, including language. ***
NOW KHADAFY CLOSING IN ON NUKE CAPABILITY: SHARON [Full Text] JERUSALEM - LIBYA'S Colonel Moammar Khadafy has been secretly developing nuclear-weapons capability and may acquire it before Iraq. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon disclosed this less-than-heartwarming news in interviews before last week's Rosh Hashanah holiday weekend. But he added, "Israel may be the best-prepared country in the world against the danger of a chemical or biological offensive." This was his message to Israeli citizens, who are already discussing on a daily basis the possibility that Saddam Hussein may launch warheads containing smallpox or anthrax at them as a last resort once the Bush administration moves to dethrone him.
But the threat of Libya is not well known - in part because Khadafy has tried hard to clean up his act. After being forced, by U.S.-led sanctions, to indirectly admit complicity in the Lockerbie airliner sabotage, the dictator in Tripoli denounced terrorism. He tried to hire a Washington lawyer to get Libya removed from the U.S. list of terror-sponsoring nations. He nearly succeeded - since the State Department during the Clinton administration conveyed discreet messages to then-Israeli-prime-minister Ehud Barak's government that Khadafy had "endorsed Yasser Arafat's peace process."
Khadafy tried so hard to convince the world he had stepped away from the axis of evil, 10 years ago, a Libyan chemical-weapons plant, operating with the illegal help of German firms and scientists, was shown blazing in flames. Intelligence reports indicated, however, that Khadafy removed the weapons and equipment before staging the fire. But in the last month, Western intelligence agencies gained details of Khadafy's latest adventure - his bid to join the Nuclear Club. At first, intelligence analysts suspected that Egypt was helping him in this project. But now it is certain that Iraqi scientists and engineers, who developed their expertise in the last 25 years under Khadafy, are leading the underground Libyan effort. Sharon said a secret weapons effort "is taking place in Iraq, and a similar process is going on in Libya - which probably will turn out to be the first Arab state with weapons of mass destruction." Other countries are helping Khadafy, but the extent of the assistance is not clear, Sharon said. "It may be that there is assistance from Pakistan, as Iran had [in nuclear weapons development]," the prime minister warned. "But for sure, there is assistance from North Korea." [End]
February 2, 2003 - South Africa Helps Libya Gain U.N. Human Rights Seat*** Libya's election to the chairmanship of the United Nations Human Rights Commission this week raised eyebrows across the world. The oppressive nature of Libya's government and disregard for human rights are well known and thoroughly documented. The European countries, including France, Germany and Great Britain, which abstained during the vote and thus assured Libya's victory, are partly to blame for Libya's election. Incapacitated by colonial guilt, political correctness, and hypersensitivity to criticism emanating from the developing countries, the Europeans have continuously ignored human rights abuses by some of the world's most unsavory regimes. In fact, they made the situation in the developing world worse by subsidizing African dictators through foreign aid.
But it was the South African government that actively promoted Libya's candidacy. Yes, South Africa, the nation whose leaders today fought so hard to end apartheid, now endorses Libya as a "human rights" monitor. South African diplomats nominated Libya for the chairmanship and then mustered the necessary votes from among the African and Arab blocs. When the United States broke with the tradition of electing the chair of the commission by acclamation and forced a vote on the issue, the South African ambassador to the UNHRC called the American action "regrettable."***
South Africa Helps Libya Gain U.N. Human Rights Seat
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