Zimbabwe Intervention Calls Mount as Church Fears Genocide
HARARE - Calls for international intervention to defuse Zimbabwe’s post-election crisis mounted on Tuesday as the US urged China to call back a ship loaded with weapons for President Robert Mugabe’s regime.
As church leaders in the troubled southern African nation warned rising violence could reach genocidal levels, the government in Beijing defended its sales of arms but hinted the cargo might not be delivered.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon meanwhile described the continued delay in announcing results for the March 29 presidential election as unacceptable while Australia called an ongoing recount a ploy by Mugabe to steal victory.
Reports of violence have been steadily increasing since polling day with the opposition claiming 10 of its followers have been killed by pro-Mugabe militias and thousands have been forced to flee their homes.
In a joint statement, signed by the Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe, the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops’ Conference and the Zimbabwe Council of Churches, church leaders all called for outside help to end unrest.
“Organised violence perpetrated against individuals, families and communities who are accused of campaigning or voting for the ‘wrong political party … has been unleashed throughout the country,” the statement said.
“We warn the world that if nothing is done to help the people of Zimbabwe from their predicament, we shall soon be witnessing genocide similar to that experienced in Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi and other hot spots in Africa.”
It urged the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the African Union and the United Nations to work towards “arresting” the deteriorating political and security situation.
The 14-nation SADC and the African Union have both come under fire for their muted response so far to the crisis.
Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who appealed for UN intervention on Monday when he met Ban, has grown so frustrated with the SADC that he has called for its pointman on Zimbabwe, South African President Thabo Mbeki, to be axed as a mediator.
In comments to reporters on Tuesday, Ban said: “It is unacceptable that the results of the presidential election in Zimbabwe are not being officially announced even after three weeks after the election.”
Mugabe’s regime insists other countries stay out of its internal affairs and has dismissed talk of genocide by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change as “lies”.
Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa also defended Zimbabwe’s “sovereign right” to buy arms amid the ongoing row over the Chinese ship, the An Yue Jiang, which is understood to be carrying millions of rounds of AK-47 ammunition and 1,500 rocket-propelled grenades ordered by Mugabe.
An attempt to offload the cargo in the South African port of Durban had to be abandoned last Friday when activists won a court order effectively preventing the cargo being transported overland to the Zimbabwe border.
There were signs that China — already under fire over its supply of weaponry to Sudan for use in Darfur — was getting ready to scrap the delivery.
“As Zimbabwe could not receive the cargo as scheduled, China Ocean Shipping Corp had to give up the Durban port and is now considering carrying back this cargo,” Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Tom Casey said the Bush administration had asked Beijing “to refrain from making additional shipments and, if possible, to bring this one back.”
“We don’t think that under the present circumstances given the current political crisis in Zimbabwe that now is the time for anyone to be increasing the number of weapons and armaments available in that country.”
A US embassy spokeswoman in Pretoria said the top US envoy for Africa, Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer was due to begin a tour of the region from Wednesday.
Meanwhile Australia, which has applied sanctions against the Mugabe regime for the last six years, said that an ongoing partial recount of votes from the presidential and simultaneous legislative polls was “nothing but a sham”.
“It is now absolutely apparent that Mr Mugabe will do anything to steal this election,” said Foreign Minister Stephen Smith.
The recount, which began on Saturday, was initially due to finish in midweek but the electoral commission now says it will likely continue until the weekend.
© 2008 Agence France Presse
Maybe you could wait for those people to show up before you start spouting your own nonsense, power_slave.
Mugabe is a murderous thug–so is Bush.
The good news is the shipment of weapons (including 3 million rounds of AK-47 ammo) that China was trying to deliver appears to have been stopped at the docks of Durban, South Africa. Reports are that the ship has actually turned around and headed back to China. Robert Mugabe can only stay in power by sitting on bayonets, and he doesn’t have as many now as he might.
It’s good to see that the South African dock workers are showing greater leadership than their president Thabo Mbeki, who’s leadership choices to this latest crises is revealing classic signs of some kind of back-room gentlemen’s agreement with Mugabe.
This crises is also revealing th general fact of what happens to almost all revolutionary leaders, like Mugabe, for instance. It all ends up being about their holding onto supreme power. Whatever, you may think about Chavez’s reforms, if he can not step aside and allow the reforms to persist with new administrations, then these reforms are not permanent because they depend upon him holding the power. Thus, it will become about him, just him, sitting upon a new throne in South America, and his dictatorial ego, like Mugabe’s, will erase whatever it was he stood and fought for.
What is Mbeki supposed to do? If he were to tell Mugabe the truth, Mugabe would immediately turn on him too, and that would be the end of dialogue, or such as there is.
Perhaps a little “Shock and Awe”? Or what does anyone suggest?
You’re wrong vinlander, Mugabe doesn’t need bayonets to stay in power. Like the slow, drawn out massacre occurring in Sudan, all Mugabe needs is a fence long enough for the other African leaders to sit upon.
Ah, CJM, you hit on the head. How can any of these crisis that happen so regularly be handled in the near term?
How are corrupt police chiefs and commissioners encouraged to step aside or move on? By building many corners around them, and leaving one way out which involves a payoff or some sweetheart deal “advising” a commission somewhere with enough salaried compensation to make the bad news go down smoother.
Can that work here? I don’t know if there is enough political and social infrastructure to serve as a receiving basin for crooked despots and politicians, thereby, making it easier to convince them to shuffle off and not turn everything into endless war fought with child armies. In the U.S., the most corrupt and degenerate Presidents and Senators walk away millionaires and enough contacts to wither away in old age like an aristocrat.
It would make so many people horribly angry, including his victims of state violence, but a secretive deal to eventually allow him sanctuary with non-extradition promises somewhere, all off the books, might make stepping aside more palatable. Its bitter medicine.
Tsvangirai….the man behind the democracy mask:
‘The Movement for Democratic Change leader told 20,000 supprters at a rally on Saturday that if Mr Mugabe did not want to step down before the next elections scheduled for 2002 “we will remove you violently”. ‘
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/952796.stm
DOINT BE FOOLED. n any fair election, Tsvangirai oculd never win. He has to use hysteria and foreign govt sanctions to terrorise the people into supprting him. The demonisation of Mugabe is an essential feature.
‘Mugabe Gets the Milosevic Treatment
Filed under: Zimbabwe — gowans @ 11:27 pm
By Stephen Gowans
Arthur Mutambara, the leader of one faction of Zimbabwe’s main opposition party, the MDC, and one of the principals in the Save Zimbabwe Campaign that’s at the centre of a storm of controversy over the Mugabe government’s crackdown on opposition, boasted a year ago that he was “going to remove Robert Mugabe, I promise you, with every tool at my disposal.” (1)
Educated at Oxford, the former management consultant with McKinsey & Co. was asked in early 2006 whether “his plans might include a Ukrainian-style mass mobilization of opponents of Mugabe’s regime.” (2)
“We’re going to use every tool we can get to dislodge this regime,” he replied. “We’re not going to rule out or in anything – the sky’s the limit.” (3)
etc
http://gowans.wordpress.com/2007/03/22/mugabe-gets-the-milosevic-treatment/
Yes, brianct, and Mugabe brought prosperity to a country that was once dirt poor. Or was it the other way round? Mugabe has NEVER won a fair election.
Bush hates Mugabe,power slave…but its probably not personal. Its just that americans and english neocolonials cant abide seeing an african country ruled by an independent principalled african leader. They prefer fawning lackeys.
‘Yes, brianct, and Mugabe brought prosperity to a country that was once dirt poor. Or was it the other way round? Mugabe has NEVER won a fair election’
No surprise that you are woefully misinformed, CJM.
‘Zimbabwe elections free and fair, says Tonchi
CHRISTOF MALETSKY
THE head of the Electoral Commission Forum of Southern African Development Countries’ observer mission to Zimbabwe, Victor Tonchi, has given his blessing to that country’s elections, declaring them free and fair.
Tonchi led an 11-country observer mission to Zimbabwe and said the mission was encouraged by the “peaceful environment” in which the election took place.
“The mission hereby records its satisfaction with the high level of compliance with regulations and election rules which was displayed by the electoral staff at all stations visited,” said Tonchi, who is also Chairman of the Electoral Commission of Namibia.
Tonchi’s teams observed the opening procedures and voting and counting at 65 polling stations in 28 constituencies.
He described the media as a “critical component” of the electoral process and, in this respect, said there was a need in Zimbabwe for equitable coverage of all political contestants, particularly in the state media.
etc
http://www.namibian.com.na/2005/April/national/05A5C48A88.html
Try no to be an obvious neocolonial patsy. Zimbabwe will NOT be remote controlled again by US or UK.
It always amazes at how easy it is for western counties to get away with lying about African countries. The hypocrisy is outstanding. Why is there no balanced news stories from Zimbabwe? Why is their no mention that the reason the economy is collapsing is a good part caused by the machinations of the Western Anglophone capitalist scum nations. All you have to do is read the press, the USA is boasting that they are destabilizing the country.
THIS ARTICLE SHOULD BE READ BY EVERYONE
How come Zimbabwe and Tibet get all the attention?
If a government wants to abuse human rights and rig elections, it needs to have the support of - or be - the western powers
Seumas Milne The Guardian, Thursday April 17 2008
There is no question that the struggle over land and power in Zimbabwe has brought the country to a grim pass. Nearly a decade after the takeover of white-owned farms and the rupture with the west, economic breakdown, hyperinflation, sanctions and Aids have taken a heavy toll. With the expectation now that a second round of elections, mired in claims of fraud, may after all keep President Mugabe in power, the prospect must be of continued economic punishment and crisis.
On a different scale, there’s also no doubt that in Tibet - the other central international focus of western concern in the past month - deep-seated popular discontent fuelled last month’s anti-government protests and attacks on Han Chinese, which were met with a violent crackdown by the Chinese authorities. Certainly, given the intensity of the US and European response, from chancellors and foreign ministers to Hollywood stars and blanket media coverage, you’d be left in little doubt that these two confrontations were the most serious facing their continents, if not the world.
The US ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad, said as much this week when he declared Zimbabwe the “most important and urgent issue” in Africa. Gordon Brown and George Bush both denounced the delay in releasing election results, the prime minister declaring that the “international community’s patience with the regime is wearing thin”. The British media have long since largely abandoned any attempt at impartiality in its reporting of Zimbabwe, the common assumption being that Mugabe is a murderous dictator at the head of a uniquely wicked regime.
China’s growing economic muscle means western leaders prefer to tread more carefully around its human rights record, but Angela Merkel and the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, were not shy about steaming in, along with the US presidential candidates and the House of Representatives, which demanded unconditional talks with the exiled Dalai Lama. Meanwhile, any official restraint was more than made up for by a string of Dalai Lama-dazzled celebs from Richard Gere to Ab Fab’s Joanna Lumley, who proudly recalled that her father had once helped Tibet against China on behalf of the British Raj.
But, on the basis of the scale of violence, repression and election rigging alone, you would be hard put to explain why these conflicts have been singled out for such special attention. In the violence surrounding Zimbabwe’s elections, two people are currently reported to have died; in Tibet, numbers estimated to have been killed by protesters and Chinese forces range from 22 to 140. By contrast, in Somalia, where US-backed Ethiopian and Somali troops are fighting forces loyal to the ousted government, several thousand have been killed since the beginning of the year and half the population of the capital, Mogadishu, has been forced to flee the city in what UN officials describe as Africa’s worst humanitarian crisis.
When it comes to rigging elections, countries like Jordan and Egypt have been happy to oblige in recent months - in the Egyptian case, jailing hundreds of opposition activists into the bargain - and almost nobody in the west has batted an eyelid. In Saudi Arabia there are no national elections at all, let alone the opposition MPs and newspapers that exist in Zimbabwe. In Africa, Togo has been a more flagrant rigger, while in Cameroon last week the president was given the job for life. And when it comes to separatist and independence movements, the Turkish Kurds have faced far more violence and a tighter cultural clampdown than the Tibetans.
The crucial difference, of course, and the reason why these conflicts and violations don’t get the deluxe media and political treatment offered to the Zimbabwean opposition or Tibetan separatists is that the governments involved are all backed by the west, compounded in the Zimbabwean case by a transparently racist agenda. But it’s not just an issue of hypocrisy and double standards, egregious though they are. It’s also that British and US involvement and interference have been crucial to both the Zimbabwean and Tibetan conflicts.
That’s most obviously true in Zimbabwe, which was not just a British colony, but where Britain refused to act against a white racist coup, triggering a bloody 15-year liberation war, and then imposed racial parliamentary quotas and a 10-year moratorium on land reform at independence. The subsequent failure by Britain and the US to finance land buyouts as expected, along with the impact of IMF programmes, laid the ground for the current impasse.
As for Tibet, Britain’s role in the former serf-based system (helpfully recalled by Lumley) was assumed after the communist takeover by the CIA, which bankrolled the Dalai Lama’s operations for many years. Such arrangements have in recent years passed to other US agencies and western NGOs, as with the Zimbabwean opposition. And even if there is no prospect of Tibetan independence, for a US administration that has designated China as the main threat to its global dominance, its minorities are still a stick that can be used to poke the dragon.
What has made human rights edicts by the US and Britain since the launch of the “war on terror” even more preposterous is that not only are they themselves supporting governments with similar or worse records, but they are directly responsible for these outrages themselves: from illegal invasions and occupations to large-scale killing and torture - along with phoney elections - in Iraq and Afghanistan. The UN estimates that more than 700 people were killed in the recent US and British-backed attacks on the Mahdi army in Iraq - a central motive for which was to stop them taking part in elections.
The current focus on China is of course linked to the Olympics, and Britain must face the likelihood of large-scale protests over its own record in 2012. Meanwhile, the best chance both of settling the Zimbabwean crisis and of meeting Tibetan aspirations is without the interference of western powers, which would do better improving the human rights records of their allies and themselves. The days of colonial dictat are over and where attempts are made to revive them, they will be resisted. China is now an emerging global power - and, as the Zimbabwean ambassador to the UN said yesterday, Zimbabwe “is no longer a British colony”.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/17/zimbabwe.tibet