West condemns Mugabe, ignores other Africa despots

LOL....for decades Mugabe used to be the posterboy for democracy and all that is good to Western powers - that is until he told the IMF & World Bank to go **** off

 

i guess they ain't got to take no **** from white folks anymore. they do what they want to do. it ain't my business.

 

"It seems Washington and European governments will accept even the most dubious election so long as the 'victor' is a strategic or commercial ally," Kenneth Roth, executive director of New York-based Human Rights Watch, said in a recent report.

Among countries he singled out as sham democracies are oil-rich Chad and Nigeria; Uganda, whose President Yoweri Museveni's friendship with President Bush has shielded him from criticism; and Ethiopia, a major U.S. ally against Islamic militants.

Other oil producers that have managed to avoid international condemnation include Angola, which hasn't held a presidential election since 1992, and Gabon, where President Omar Bongo seized power in a 1967 coup and now reigns as Africa's longest-serving leader.

"Countries that have made a point of overtly aligning themselves with U.S. narratives and policies regarding terrorism appear to have benefited not only from financial and military support but seem successfully to have diverted attention away from their internal poor governance and human rights abuse," said Akwe Amosu, senior analyst at the Open Society Institute in Washington.

This is why it was so obviously false when Bush played the love of democracy card wrt to Iraq.

 

I would hope that it's not just "white folk" condemning Mugabe. The man singlehandedly constructed, and thoroughly dismantled, one of Africa's strongest economies. Zimbabwe was once a largely self-sufficient nation but when Mugabe seized white-owned farms, which had been run for generations since the founding of Rhodesia, and staffed them with inexperienced black farmers, the economy went to hell. Couple that with drought and you have a recipe for both economic and humanitarian disaster. Add to this his crackdown on all political dissent and we see Zimbabwe as it is today; a country with an inflation rate in the millions of percents, rampant AIDS, no human rights what so ever, a country that bars foreign journalists, and a life expectancy in the thirties. And with Morgan Tsvangirai, the legitimate winner of the vote this past spring, hiding in an embassy in Harare the future for Zimbabwe looks bleak.

And Thabo Mbeki of South Africa deserves a lot blame as well. He has steadfastly supported Mugabe and, as a result, South Africa now has an influx of millions of Zimbabwean refugees which was one of the causes of the recent outbursts of violence in the Johannesburg townships. Mugabe's Zimbabwe destabilizes all of southern Africa and will continue to do so unless something is done to oust him from power.

 

from what i've heard, the man is looked as one of africa's heroes by a lot people. and countries that condemn him are led by western countries. i'm not saying what he's doing now is right, but the condemnation are not purely on his actions to his people, but more about his views that goes against western world. if you read the article, it can't be more clearer than that. and what you said about seizing farms from white farmers, why is that wrong? i assume that you are of european decent. would you let black farmers take over all farms in europe? i don't think so. those farmers shouldn't be there at first place. they are a sign of colonial era, slavery. what should have happened was, those farmers leave on them own while providing support for black farmers on how to farm. if you want to be a nice guy, that's what should have happened. instead of b****ing at the government, it would be better to provide actual food/medecine. economic sanctions are not going to do a damn thing for the people except make them in even worse situation than now. if you truly want to help, let go all the ego/politics and help the people.

 

LOL at the usual suspects, with a chip on their shoulder for other resons, making an apearence in this thread and not missing the chance to condemn the World Bank, or Europeans, or whatever their tinfoil hat boogyman.

Read some of the comments by many of the African Union members (specifically the ones that aren't ruled by a despot themselves), if you want to see what Africans really think of their 'great hero' to the African people.

[rquoter]
Mugabe can no longer hide behind imperialism
By GODWIN R. MURUNGA

The red flag one is most likely to be confronted with for criticising the thoroughly illegitimate leader of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, is imperialism and racism.

If you are an African criticising Mugabe, you are likely to be accused of being guilty of working in cahoots with racist-imperialists.

The names of George Bush, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are consequently spoken of in the same breath with those of proven and uncompromising critics of imperialism like Horace Campbell (author of Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation, 2003) run the risk of being lumped together with pro-imperialism because they dared criticise Mugabe. In other words, one is guilty of racist imperialism by the simple fact of voicing a demand for democracy in Zimbabwe, which Mugabe has avidly abrogated.

Unfortunately, the people who tend to raise the race/imperialism flag, especially on the list-serves, tend not to be Zimbabweans. Like me, most do not have a serious radical and revolutionary record and connection to the country. They are actually late entrants into the anti-racism and anti-imperialism hall of fame.

Since they hardly have any serious connection to Zimbabwe, they may not understand the plight of the average Zimbabwean who has to deal with the daily consequences of a ravaged economy and a dictatorial regime.

The tragedy is that they have transformed the debate on Zimbabwe to a shouting match between pro-imperialism and anti-imperialism with little regard to what is the more crucial thing; the reality of dreams deferred for average people in Zimbabwe due largely to autocracy and mismanagement.

THIS CLAIM OF DEFERRED DRE-ams for average Zimbabweans is countered by the exaggerated and misleading assumption that the West is responsible for the collapsing economy in Zimbabwe.

Others, like the editors at New Africa, used to rely on the excuse of the drought that ravaged the region. They argued that all would be well once the drought is over.

The first argument regarding the culpability of the West is partially true and many have expended enough energy dissecting it. But the argument is only partially valid! The argument about the drought was shortsighted because it was temporary. The time for a reality check has come and gone and Mugabe has failed to acquit himself.

Let me start with a brief anecdote that recently brought home the tragedy of Zimbabwe under Mugabe. I was asked to speak at the Africa Liberation Day celebrations last month at the same venue where our Samuel Kivuitu and his Electoral Commission of Kenya commissioners bungled the Kenyan election. I spoke generally about getting the basics right in developing an African Union government.

I emphasised the need for Africans to be able to freely move across the continent. Somewhere in my argument, I mentioned the then ongoing xenophobic attacks in South Africa. I also noted how Mugabe learned from and benefited from the pan-African vision.

I was not forceful enough in taking a critical stand on xenophobia and dictatorship. In the audience were two keen observers who pointed out my rather lukewarm interest in these two issues.

One of them, a Zimbabwean, was very eloquent about the atrocious Mugabe ways. He claimed to have resisted British colonialism and was met with violent reprisals. He also claimed to have opposed Ian Smith’s white minority rule and was met with violent reprisals.

HE NOW CLAIMS TO BE OPPOSED to Mugabe’s dictatorship and has been met by violent retaliation. In both instances, he observed, the reactions to his resistance have been similar and they have included brutal police responses leading to torture, maiming and political murders. He concluded by arguing that all he would have expected was that Mugabe’s response should have been different.

I use this anecdote to re-centre the plight of Zimbabweans in the discussion on Mugabe. To my mind, a different and better way of framing the Zimbabwean problem is to ask whether anti-racism and anti-imperialism are incompatible with pro-democracy and pro-development.

In other words, is it possible to be against the machinations of George Bush, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and still expect and demand that African leaders remain democratic, ensure development and social inclusivity?

My answer to this question is affirmative. It is also my reason why Mugabe deserves to be chastised and dismissed as a first step to constructing a different future for Zimbabwe.

As of last year, I was willing to cut Mugabe some slack on the issue of anti-imperialism. As of this year, and especially following the just-ended electoral fraud of which (I think) Tsvangirai is partly responsible, I will have none of his manipulation of anti-imperialism to drive Zimbabwe down.

First, Mugabe’s big failure has been his inability to effectively use the severing of relations with the West to institute some forms of autonomous development for Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe, indeed Africa, deserves autonomy from the West.

Those who shout anti-imperialism hardly remember that sanctions constituted a golden opportunity for Mugabe to show the dreaded West that without foreign aid, Zimbabwe could still remain a shinning example in the middle of Africa of how to prosper without dependency on the West.

Instead, what we have is hyper-inflation and dictatorship of the highest order. Rather than protect citizens, Mugabe’s regime has become the chief perpetrator of human-rights abuses against citizens, in some instances hiring thugs to abuse basic citizen rights.

MANY OF THOSE WHO SHOUT IMP-erialism to critics of Mugabe will also write paying glowingly tribute to Fidel Castro. It is lost to most of them that Castro faced similar sanctions like Mugabe from the West but has acquitted himself with credit in Cuba.

He took advantage of the US-led sanctions to install a form of leadership that may not be democratic in the manner in which imperialists expect but in which all social indicators suggest that Cubans enjoy better education and medical services than many so-called developed Western countries.

Land reform was crucial for Cuba and Castro did not carry out land reform in the inequitable manner in which Mugabe has. These indicators and the social inclusivity involved have vindicated Castro and endeared him to all of us.

What does Mugabe have to show?

All he has misleadingly managed to illustrate is that dependency on the West is critical to survival of the Zimbabwean economy. This is what makes Gordon Brown feel vindicated to arrogantly lecture us on democracy. The US and others cannot evince a similar sense of vindication towards Cuba because Castro’s success has been a good lesson.

Secondly, and here I am using discussions I recently had with my colleague Jimi Adesina of Rhodes University, Zimbabwe had capacity for independent economic development in the mineral commodity boom which counter-balanced the decline of white commercial farming.

If Zimbabwe lost its foreign exchange earnings from commercial farming, it gained in mining. Less than a week ago, Anglo-American was defending investing $400 million in platinum mining in Zimbabwe.

WHAT CAN MUGABE SHOW FOR the mineral wealth? Consistency is part of the deal and Mugabe should not just be anti-imperialist when talking about Blair and Brown and not when dealing with a London-based miner like Anglo American!

Other than counter-balancing foreign exchange loss from commercial farming, shouldn’t earnings from the mining boom have been used to significantly improve food security in Zimbabwe? After all, commercial farming has never sufficiently supplied Zimbabwe with subsistence needs.

The country has historically depended on small-scale African cultivators for food. As Adesina notes, “while agricultural tradables depended on the white commercial farmers, food production in Zimbabwe had always depended on small-scale African cultivators or agriculturalists.

The claim of drought does not explain why Malawi, in the same geographical zone, is fully back with food surplus and Zimbabwe is not. The claim of sanction also does not help, since these are small-scale cultivators rather than combine harvester cultivators.

And the re-appropriation of land is from white settlers cannot explain the crisis of food production.” It is about mismanagement and the excessive avarice of the elite around Mugabe.

Adesina’s argument is by far more solid than a thousand red flags by newfound anti-imperialists who do not seem to appreciate how demeaning and dehumanizing life has become for Zimbabweans forced to cross borders into neighbouring countries that are unwilling to host them.

In such places, they are derogatorily referred to as “the Zimbabweans” and, in other instances, have become targets of xenophobia in many Southern African states. When the name of your country is reduced to a derogatory reference and your self-confidence demeaned, that is obviously very dehumanizing experience.

THE SAME PEOPLE WHO WAX lyrical about racist imperialism come from countries where foreigner from Somalia, Uganda, Sudan and DRC have historically been haunted and repatriated into refugee camps and where few of us are willing to stand up and be counted for this basic denials of human rights.

The late Archie Mafeje reminded all who cared to listen that it was never the intention of African nationalism to replace imperialism with dictatorships and mediocrity. African nationalism aspired for higher goals.

Pan-Africanism was never about defending mediocre leaders just because they were black. Nationalist African leaders needed to be better, not the same or worse, than the imperialist. They needed to guarantee freedom based on democracy, economic growth and social inclusivity. Robert Mugabe has failed on all these tests.

[/rquoter]



source

 

That.....and basically starving his own people and slaughtering his political opposition.

But hey . . . he's aces otherwise.

 

With the exception of his own people, who tried to vote him out, except for him killing and murdering them.


PS ... Please, try to fulfill my wildest dreams, and DO try to make this thread a stronghold of PRC nationalism....nothing would be more appropriate and...more simple to embarrrass you with.

 

oh sure thing sammy. btw, where did i mention anything about prc?

 

Actually, Mugabe's own people voted him out of power this past election, but due to the results being released a month after the fact, Zanu-PF was able to doctor them enough to not give Morgan Tsvangirai an outright majority. To Mugabe, this gave a semblance of a fair election, which allowed him to conduct the run-off massacre that recently occurred. Zimbabweans have been trying to vote him out of office for years, but there is no shred of democratic freedom in Zimbabwe that would allow them to do so.

Robert Mugabe certainly was a hero of Zimbabwe and pan-Africanism in the 1980s when he helped turn white-ruled Rhodesia into black-ruled Zimbabwe. He even oversaw economic prosperity and was made an honorary knight by the Queen of England. All of this in spite of his massacring of the Ndebele peoples in the 1980s in order to solidify his rule. However, his current legacy is one of violence and despotism. It can not be defended.

Why was the seizing of the white-owned farms wrong? Seriously? Nobody is going to argue that Africa benefited from colonialism. Europeans raping the continent and subverting the people are blights that remain to this day. It was a miracle that Zimbabwe was able to sustain itself like it did. To return to your question, it was a matter of the white man running the farm and what should have been done instead. Colonialism should have never happened. But it did. Revisionist history does not work here. The white-owned farms, for better or for worse, had been in the possession of whites for generations. They were highly productive and helped make Zimbabwe the "breadbasket of Africa." However, the violent land seizures of Mugabe and Zanu-PF destroyed that. You make the case for training the black farmers. That was not done. They were simply given the land that the whites held and knew how to harvest and subsequently failed at sustaining them. Not only that, whites were driven from the country. All of this in the span of a few years. Coupled with drought, it brought about the total collapse of Zimbabwe's agricultural sector which was rather large. Now many Zimbabweans rely on donations from other countries simply to stave of starvation. But hey, I guess you can still look at Mugabe as a hero if you want to.

You mention sanctions. You're right, they probably won't do anything. But, that's because there is no economy to speak of in Zimbabwe! It supposedly resembles post-WWI Germany with people carrying wheelbarrows full of money to buy groceries when they're even available.

That's exactly what the world is trying to do since they can not help themselves. One need only look at Mugabe's forceful eviction of poor Zimbabweans from Harare in 2005. Many of these people lived in shantytowns and were supporters of Tsvangirai's party, the Movement for Democratic Change. Mugabe and the Zanu-PF-led army drove these people from their homes, creating mass homelessness and affecting hundreds of thousands of people. Mugabe has turned against his own people (which should be a crime in your eyes) and has subsequently, affected millions of people in southern Africa. With AIDS rampant in Zimbabwe and life expectancy in the thirties, Zimbabwe is growing even more hellish. South Africa now has millions of Zimbabwean refugees living within it's borders. As I mentioned in my first post, native South Africans resent this fact as Zimbabweans will work for much less out of shear desperation and are easy targets for scapegoating. The violence that erupted in Johannesburg townships was aided, in part, by this. Mugabe has turned his domestic problem into an international one. Unfortunately, Thabo Mbeki of South Africa admires the old Robert Mugabe, the general who helped return Rhodesia to native blacks and who built a model nation. The present Mugabe is a shadow of that former self who is now intent on retaining power at the expense of his own people. All the while, people like you preach his brand of pan-Africanism and expect others to sympathize.

You called me out for being white. You're right. However, I have no ties to either Rhodesia or Zimbabwe. My family was never involved with colonial exploits or the maintenance of Zimbabwean farms. However, that does not make see this as a racial issue, which you are all too eager to turn it into. As we should all know, skin color does not give somebody greater aptitude to run a farm. It does not give anybody a greater aptitude to run a country. The point is this: Mugabe is a beacon of what I hope is an old Africa; a despotic leader who rose from the shambles of colonialism and who was given a free pass to run his country just as despotically and maniacally as the whites before him. A man who supposedly sympathizes with his own people, but who has allowed millions of them - black and white - to die and be displaced due to starvation, disease, violence, and economic disaster.

Go ahead, try to refute me. I'm looking forward to it.

 

first of all, i wasn't trying to attack you personally. if you felt that way, i apologize. i was trying to say, that Mugabe then led people to gain power from white in that area. obviously, most people(natives) supported his action. i'm pretty sure they looked at it in a racial way at the time. i'm neither white/black, so i'm not trying to turn this into a racial debate. how would you feel if black farmers owned all the farms in europe? don't they want the control of food in their own hand, not in the hands of people who exploited them in the past? of course, they mis-managed it and it turned on them. but you can't blame them for trying. as for current vote, it's not like the opposition leader won overwhelmingly. i have yet to see a real result. i doubt we'll ever see a real result. besides, how old is the guy? he'll be out of power soon enough. i doubt anyone else can hold the power. there are other african countries supporting him, so i'm sure he's got a big support base too. i just don't believe in messing with other countries, unless there is an overwhelming international support for it (according to the article, it's not there yet).

 

Pretty much his only support comes from Mbeki and....CHINA...surprise! Which is why you are getting royally tooled on in this thread.

 

Nigeria. Rwanda. Uganda. Ethiopia. Gabon...

i could care less what china does with them. do really really think all the african countries support sanction against them?

 

I agree and I wouldn't support invading Zimbabwe to overthrow Mugabe but I won't defend him either. Just because he is standing up to the West doesn't mean what he is doing is good for his people or right.

 

countries need to start doing is to begin placing the bush administration on their terrorist watch list to send a message.
It's pathetic for a particular side of the government, that has a history of starting wars and supporting dictators, to condemn anyone.

Has everyone forgotten about bill stewart's murder at the hands of somoza nationalists? These were the same goons that reagan and bush supported all over latin america. And people wonder why Iraq is a failure. The 80's were not that long ago.

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for every bill stewart, there were photographers, musicians, jesuits, and innocent civilians who would suffer the same fate.

 

I used to think the free world could band together to overthrow murderous dictators and it would really change things for the better.

Mugabe is in the news this week, Kim Jong-il last week, someone else next week.

 

i'm not supporting him at all. i just feel like he's being picked on. it's like school ground, getting bullied. some of these poor folks have nothing left, all they have is pride. and people do get stubborn. i don't think he is blind to see what's happening in his country. the older you get, the more stubborn you get and keep doing what you are doing. i personally don't think he is evil and doing all these on purpose. power can blind people. you just gotta find a method of improvement that both sides would agree to.

 

The people being picked on are his political opposition. By him. through beatings and torture and intimidation and murder. And his country, which is being turned into a sh-thole. That's really simple.

 

You are a tool to try to link everything to do PRC. No one was talking about the PRC until you moronically bring up the topic. You have selfishly been trying to derail every thread because of your severe hate to people from that region.