Respond to Zimbabwe crisis -- JIMMY CARTER

As president, I worked actively with African leaders and the British to change the apartheid regime of Rhodesia into a democratic Zimbabwe in 1980. Eight years later, The Carter Center established one of our first agriculture projects in Zimbabwe, at that time known as a breadbasket for the region and setting an example in economic stability, education and health care.

Now, after almost three decades of governmental corruption, mismanagement and oppression, Zimbabwe has become a basket case and an international embarrassment. A group of leaders known as the Elders, to which I belong, have monitored this crisis, while realizing that its resolution must come from within Africa. Time for action is now running out, a reality forcefully conveyed to me on a recent five-day fact-finding trip to the region.

There is great aversion among even the most enlightened African leaders to “interference” from former colonial powers and their allies, including the United States. However, these same leaders have been reluctant to assume responsibility for resolving the political stalemate and the escalating humanitarian catastrophe.

I joined former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Graça Machel, women’s activist and wife of Nelson Mandela, in South Africa on Nov. 21 with the intention of traveling on to Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. However, when we met with former South African president Thabo Mbeki, the facilitator designated by other African leaders to mediate the political dispute in Zimbabwe, he delivered a message from Harare that our visas were denied and we could not proceed.

We had anticipated this possibility and held a series of comprehensive discussions in Johannesburg with delegations that came from Zimbabwe to meet us, including executives of international nonprofit and governmental agencies and a wide range of other stakeholders including leaders of Zimbabwe’s civil society. What we learned of the situation was even worse than our expectations. We also met with Botswana President Ian Khama, South African President Kgalema Motlanthe, ANC Party President (and prospective South African President) Jacob Zuma, and Zimbabwe’s opposition party leaders Morgan Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara.

The current political and humanitarian crisis originated with a fraudulent presidential election in March 2008, with Tsvangirai probably winning an actual majority against President Robert Mugabe. Orchestrated violence and brutal persecution of Tsvangirai and his supporters forced him to withdraw from the forced runoff and leave the country. Mugabe then declared himself president. African political leaders largely ignored reports of fraud by their own election observers, and eventually negotiated a power-sharing agreement that Mugabe and Tsvangirai signed on Sept. 15. Unfortunately, Mugabe has not ceded any real power to his opponent and the trend toward a national tragedy has accelerated.

The official inflation rate is now 231 million percent, and actually 2,000 times greater. Thousands of people stand in line daily to receive a tiny allowance from their own bank accounts — approximately 2 cents — an amount that is insufficient to buy even half a loaf of bread. Meanwhile, top government officials and other privileged people can exchange Zimbabwe money at a favorable rate and profit greatly from these transactions. They shop in special stores.

Schoolteachers receive only one U.S. dollar a month, and cannot afford transportation to work. Attendance has dropped from 85 to 20 percent, with attending students mostly wanting to obtain a morsel of food. All universities are closed.

A planting shortage of seed and fertilizer will result in a failed harvest, and the World Food Program estimates that 50 percent of the population will need food assistance before April 2009. Relief agencies report that available food supplies are channeled to ruling party loyalists, deliberately starving opposition party leaders.

All major hospitals and most emergency clinics no longer operate, and police have clashed with doctors and nurses who insist on treating their patients. Uncontrolled sewage and lack of clean water has resulted in cholera outbreaks in all 10 provinces.

Zimbabwe is battling a nationwide cholera epidemic that has killed 425 people since late August and infected more than 11,000, according to government statistics.

As many as 4 million people have left Zimbabwe, seeking food, medical care and freedom from abuse, and the cholera outbreak has made neighboring nations increasingly wary of accepting immigrants. There are courageous people in Johannesburg who with limited means are helping alleviate the immense suffering. We visited Central Methodist church, where Bishop Paul Verryn feeds and houses 2,000 refugees in the church’s rooms and corridors each night.

Without a political solution, the economic and social fabric of society will continue its free-fall. When Mugabe cannot pay his army and enormous civil service, the result may be a resort to internecine violence and a failed state, similar to Somalia.

African leaders, especially in the neighboring Southern African Development Community, must confront Mugabe and force him to comply with negotiated political agreements and share real governing authority with Tsvangirai and the opposition party. If action by these leaders continues to be ineffective, the African Union and the United Nations must take action. A first step, short of intercession, could be to send independent fact-finding teams to Zimbabwe to obtain information directly from major donors, international relief agencies, medical doctors, teachers, farmers and other citizens who have described their experiences to us.

In the meantime, there is a desperate need for food, medicine and cash contributions to established humanitarian agencies including CARE, World Vision and Save the Children — or to Bishop Verryn. It is counterproductive to contribute money that can be confiscated by the Zimbabwe government.

• Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, leads The Carter Center.

Jimmy Carter - you boot licking idiot.

Zimbabwe is your fault.

How Tyranny Came to Zimbabwe
Jimmy Carter still has a lot to answer for.
by James Kirchick
06/18/2007, Volume 012, Issue 38

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/746zsgtg.asp

(excerpt)

The Carter administration had declared that though the 1979 election of Muzorewa had been conducted in a “reasonably fair way,” it did not merit the United States’ support because Mugabe was not involved.

The 1980 election, on the other hand, which Mugabe won largely by threatening violence, the Carter administration declared to be “free and fair,” leading to the lifting of sanctions. Mugabe, it seems, would have liked to return the favor. In 1980, mere months before Carter would resoundingly lose his reelection bid to Ronald Reagan, Zimbabwe’s new prime minister told African-American leaders at a White House ceremony that if Carter “were running in our territory, he would be assured of victory.”

Tyranny sets in

The Carter administration’s victory in Rhodesia was a hollow one. It is true that not every fearsome forecast was immediately borne out: Mugabe did not turn out to be the Soviet or Chinese agent many thought him, and the conflagration raging in Angola did not spread into Zimbabwe. But fatal damage was done. As early as August 1981, just over a year after taking power, Mugabe called for a referendum on whether Zimbabwe should be a one-party state. In 1982 he proclaimed, “ZANU-PF will rule forever,” just as he had promised throughout the Bush war. And writing in the New Republic in early 1983, Xan Smiley, an editorial writer for the London Times, reported that Mugabe’s “rhetoric of egalitarianism and the demands of traditional authoritarianism mean that individuals are going to get crushed.” Not just individuals, but whole groups of people would be crushed. From 1983 until 1987, Mugabe unleashed his North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade troops against supposed Ndebele plotters in the Matabeleland massacres, slaughtering an estimated 25,000 people.

The country’s black leaders who dared to oppose Mugabe received the treatment inevitably meted out by a paranoid tyrant. In 1983 Mugabe jailed Muzorewa for 10 months, accusing him of plotting with South Africa and Israel to overthrow the regime. He now lives quietly in Zimbabwe, ignored by the world that spurned him nearly 30 years ago. The same year Nkomo, Mugabe’s erstwhile ally, fled the country fearing assassination. Mugabe persuaded his old comrade to return and in 1987 forced him to agree to a virtual one-party state, in which ZANU absorbed ZAPU and took 147 out of 150 seats in parliament. Nkomo spent the next 12 years of his life in obscurity. Also in 1987, rightly fearing for his safety, Sithole sought political asylum in the United States. He later returned to Zimbabwe and was elected to parliament. But in 1997, Sithole was convicted of attempting to assassinate Mugabe and was barred from returning to office. Other political opponents either fell into line or have been imprisoned or killed.

For some years, Mugabe kept his promise to leave the whites alone. But in 2000 he instigated the forcible seizure of private farmland, which has brought Zimbabwe economic collapse, famine, and a massive refugee crisis. One-third of the country’s population is estimated to have fled in the past seven years. The dictator, now 83, having brought his country to its knees, is hanging on only by the support of his armed forces and his fellow African leaders, who share a residual admiration for this hero of African “liberation.”

Carter is unrepentant about his administration’s support for Mugabe. At a Carter Center event in Boston on June 8, he said that he, Young, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had “spent more time on Rhodesia than on the Middle East.” Carter admitted that “we supported two revolutionaries in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo.” He adopts the “good leader gone bad” hindsight of Mugabe’s early backers, stating that “at first [Mugabe] was a very enlightened president.” While conceding that Mugabe is now “oppressive,” Carter stressed that this murderer of tens of thousands “needs to be treated with respect and assured that if he does deal with those issues [democratization and human rights], he won’t be punished or prosecuted for his crimes.” Though it has supervised elections in over 60 countries, the 25-year-old Carter Center has no projects in Zimbabwe, nor has Carter (who demonstrates no compunction about lecturing others) attempted to atone for the ruin that his policies as president wreaked.

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