Mandela's lived long enough to see legacy tarnished
Timothy Giannuzzi
For The Calgary Herald
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Last Friday marked the 90th birthday of Nelson Mandela, a leading opponent of apartheid, South Africa's first truly democratic leader and the world's foremost African statesman. The occasion is a good opportunity to reflect on Mandela's struggling homeland, especially as his successors have failed so miserably to live up to his legacy.
Born into a junior branch of tribal royalty, Mandela became a prominent activist in the African National Congress (ANC) while still a young man. His involvement, first in peaceful protest and later in armed struggle, brought him to the attention of South Africa's apartheid regime, and in 1962, he was arrested, tried and jailed for 27 years. Mandela was released in 1990 and elected president of the ANC; in 1994, the ANC won South Africa's first free elections and Mandela served a single term as president before retiring.
His determination in the face of oppression, commitment to reconciliation and his pivotal role in building the new South Africa won Mandela the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize and made him one of the world's few universally beloved statesmen. Well, almost universally beloved.
Here in Canada, my very own MP, Rob Anders, infamously cast the sole vote against granting Mandela honorary Canadian citizenship in 2001, asserting that Mandela was a communist and a terrorist because of the ANC's close ties to the South African Communist Party (SACP) and its past use of violence in its struggle against apartheid, all of which is disingenuous.
While the SACP was a pawn of the Soviet Union, it was also one of the few organizations to support the ANC in its struggle for black equality. The ANC's violence was largely a defensive reaction stemming from the 1960 Sharpeville massacre in which police killed 69 blacks. When you're facing down barbarians, non-violence can only carry you so far. Under the circumstances, I'd say this stuff is pretty forgivable.
But I digress. At 90, Mandela has more to concern him than foreign ideologues. South Africa without him has gone badly astray. The country's unemployment rate is well over 20 per cent while black living standards lag far behind those of other groups. South Africa is also unpleasantly high in the global crime rankings, especially for rape, murder, robbery and gun-related offences. Worst of all, 12 per cent of the general population is HIV-positive and South Africa sees roughly 1,000 AIDS-related deaths a day. It did not have a national anti-AIDS program until 2003.
Efforts to fight this scourge have been hampered by Mandela's successor as president, the prickly and difficult Thabo Mbeki, who has odd views about the disease and has spent a lot of energy ascribing it to poverty rather than to sexual transmission. Mbeki has also continued to employ as health minister Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, a physician notorious for her promotion of beetroot and lemon juice, among other things, as cures for AIDS over anti-retrovirals. Critics of these failures and oddities are often labelled as racists.
On the foreign front, Mbeki has not been much of a success, either. He failed to use his considerable influence to sway Robert Mugabe -- the murderous dictator of neighbouring Zimbabwe -- from his path of destruction and has seen his efforts at fostering African growth and development through the African Union and the New Partnership for Africa's Development flounder beneath the weight of official corruption and lack of resources.
Mbeki's successor as ANC president and the likely victor of next year's general election, Jacon Zuma, seems worse. Formerly the deputy president of South Africa, he was fired from the job after being brought up on corruption charges in 2005 over the conduct of a close friend and still faces indictment on a host of charges including racketeering and fraud.
Zuma has also fought a rape allegation and although he was later cleared, the trial unearthed a swarm of disquieting facts about his personal life included his own admission -- he had unprotected sex with an HIV-positive woman and tried to ward off potential infection with a shower afterward. He also claimed to be able to tell whether a woman wanted sex based on how she was sitting and stated that he was culturally required to oblige her.
South Africa looks set to get worse before it gets better -- cold comfort for a hero who has lived long enough to see his legacy tarnished.
Timothy Giannuzzi is a Calgary writer specializing in foreign affairs. His column appears every second Thursday.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
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There is a related video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/world ... ref=slogin
July 24, 2008
Sudanese Leader Mounts Charm Offensive
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
EL FASHER, Sudan — Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the president of Sudan, who has been accused of genocide, is not especially well known for his dance moves.
But on Wednesday, in front of tens of thousands of people packed into what appeared to be a mandatory pep rally in Darfur, the portly president jumped on a desk and did a little jig. He jutted his cane. He rolled his hips. Shadows of sweat bloomed under his arms. But the crowd did not seem to care.
“Seer, seer, al-Bashir!” spectators screamed. “Go, go, Mr. Bashir!”
With an international indictment looming on charges of genocide, Mr. Bashir returned to the scene of the war crimes he is accused of committing in Darfur — this time on an uncharacteristic charm offensive.
It was here in El Fasher, on the same airport tarmac where Mr. Bashir was blessed Wednesday morning by a hundred elders leaning on canes, that rebels blew up government planes in 2003, setting off a conflict that would claim 300,000 lives and threaten to destabilize an entire region in the heart of Africa.
Sudanese forces and government-sponsored militias swept the countryside. They burned down villages, raped countless women and drove hundreds of thousands of people off their land, all part of an effort to put down the rebellion. The violence drove more than two million people off their land. The prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has accused Mr. Bashir of being the “mastermind” of this strategy, the one with “absolute control.”
But on Wednesday, Mr. Bashir did not act as if he felt guilty. He focused on peace, development and pleasing the crowds. The minute he stepped off the plane here, a white dove was thrust into his hands.
Mr. Bashir threw the bird toward the sky. It flapped its wings a few times, but did not really fly.
No bother. Mr. Bashir beamed and strutted down the runway.
The roadshow, part of a whistle-stop tour of the three biggest cities in Darfur, seems to be part of his attempt to head off an arrest warrant that the prosecution is seeking and judges in The Hague are considering.
The United Nations Security Council may suspend the case, and some Council members, like China and Russia, have already indicated that they are leaning this way, saying the allegations against Mr. Bashir are complicating peace efforts. It seems that Sudan’s government hopes that if it shows some good will the United Nations will intervene.
Mr. Bashir was not especially antagonistic at the rally on Wednesday, for instance, and did not rail about evil America. He did not mention any Zionist conspiracies. The approach was a change for a head of state who had threatened not so long ago to mount a jihad against United Nations peacekeepers and turn Darfur into a “graveyard” of blue helmets. Thousands of peacekeepers are now here and more on their way as part of a United Nations-African Union force.
Instead, Mr. Bashir visited their headquarters in El Fasher, expressing condolences for the peacekeepers who had been killed and pledging cooperation with their mission, the joint force said. “You are our guests and our partners,” the peacekeepers quoted him as saying.
Mr. Bashir’s new strategy seems to be to portray himself and his government as victims, not aggressors.
“Whenever we take one step forward toward peace, our outside enemies pull us back,” he said. He also admitted that “there had been problems in Darfur and injustices,” which was unusual for him.
“And we’re working on them,” he reassured his people.
He talked of all the wells he would drill and schools he would build and how he would reach out to rebel groups to stabilize the war-ravaged region in western Sudan.
“We are with you, Darfur!” Mr. Bashir said.
The event was carefully orchestrated, as government rallies often are in Sudan, and choreographed, down to the dances the women did for Mr. Bashir.
The heat was stupefying, maybe 110 degrees. Two elderly women fainted while Mr. Bashir, 64, was dancing. Still, it was harder to find a Bashir detractor than a patch of shade. “If Bashir is so bad, how could he have been president for 19 years?” Asia Ibrahim, a woman in the crowd, asked, offering the self-serving logic of a government widely accused of being a dictatorship.
The crowd was packed with turbaned elders, schoolgirls in camouflage uniforms, boys on donkeys, men on camels with faces wrapped against the desert dust, cracking whips in the air. Soldiers in green uniforms, red uniforms, blue uniforms, brown uniforms made sure everyone was appropriately cheerful.
Clearly, Mr. Bashir was saying the right things, though he was short on specifics and his track record is highly suspect.
“It was vaguely positive,” said a Western diplomat who traveled with Mr. Bashir. “He’s not nearly as confrontational as he has been. But the question is: where’s the substance?”
AFRICA
Dozens die after river boat sinks in Congo
Ferry strikes rock in darkness
Reuters
Saturday, July 26, 2008
KINSHASA - At least 45 people were killed and another 100 were missing after a boat sank on a remote stretch of river in Democratic Republic of Congo, a local government official said on Friday.
The boat sank on Tuesday night on the Ubangi river, which forms part of the frontier between Congo and Central African Republic.
"Forty-five bodies have been recovered so far," said Mathieu Bela, district commissioner for North Ubangi in the far north of Congo. Another 112 were missing while 25 passengers survived, he added.
"The passengers were fishermen and people living by the river," he said. "The accident happened on Tuesday night when the boat struck a rock in the dark. There are no signs or signals, which does nothing to help navigation."
Bela said local authorities had not received any help from the government of either Congo or Central African Republic due to the lack of information and inaccessibility.
The fishermen were among dozens of people who were using the motorized canoe to cross the river.
Fishermen regularly join traders on overloaded boats crossing the Ubangi river to ferry their catch and various other goods to markets in both countries.
Congo is a vast mineral-rich nation but roads are almost non-existent outside the main towns so travel is often limited to airplanes and boats plying its huge network of rivers.
Accidents are frequent due to over-loading and lack of maintenance.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Ferry strikes rock in darkness
Reuters
Saturday, July 26, 2008
KINSHASA - At least 45 people were killed and another 100 were missing after a boat sank on a remote stretch of river in Democratic Republic of Congo, a local government official said on Friday.
The boat sank on Tuesday night on the Ubangi river, which forms part of the frontier between Congo and Central African Republic.
"Forty-five bodies have been recovered so far," said Mathieu Bela, district commissioner for North Ubangi in the far north of Congo. Another 112 were missing while 25 passengers survived, he added.
"The passengers were fishermen and people living by the river," he said. "The accident happened on Tuesday night when the boat struck a rock in the dark. There are no signs or signals, which does nothing to help navigation."
Bela said local authorities had not received any help from the government of either Congo or Central African Republic due to the lack of information and inaccessibility.
The fishermen were among dozens of people who were using the motorized canoe to cross the river.
Fishermen regularly join traders on overloaded boats crossing the Ubangi river to ferry their catch and various other goods to markets in both countries.
Congo is a vast mineral-rich nation but roads are almost non-existent outside the main towns so travel is often limited to airplanes and boats plying its huge network of rivers.
Accidents are frequent due to over-loading and lack of maintenance.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
July 27, 2008
News Analysis
In Zimbabwe Talks, Who Will Get the Real Power?
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — As negotiators for President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai began power-sharing talks on Thursday in South Africa, they confronted one seemingly unbridgeable divide: which man would have the real executive power in a unity government?
Mr. Mugabe’s governing party, ZANU-PF, insisted that Mr. Mugabe, as the victor in a runoff that has been denounced internationally as a sham, would name any new government, The Herald, a state-owned newspaper, reported Friday.
But the opposition says Mr. Tsvangirai, who outpolled Mr. Mugabe in March elections and dropped out of the runoff, citing murderous violence against supporters, must be in charge. “Whatever transition we come up with, it must be led by Morgan Tsvangirai,” Thokozani Khupe, vice president of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, said in an interview on Saturday.
A collapse of the talks could lead to an accelerating implosion of Zimbabwe’s economy and the flight of millions more people from Mr. Mugabe’s increasingly repressive rule into neighboring countries, potentially destabilizing the region. The Mugabe government’s economic isolation intensified last week as the United States and the European Union tightened sanctions.
But a settlement that left Mr. Mugabe or his allies in power would be a blow to democratic aspirations on the continent after an election that independent observers from across Africa unanimously concluded was neither free nor fair.
One of the most remarkable changes to emerge from Zimbabwe’s violent election season is that leaders in Zambia and Botswana have resoundingly broken the silence of Mr. Mugabe’s peers in the region about the human rights abuses committed by his governing party.
Phandu Skelemani, the foreign minister of neighboring Botswana, which has refused to recognize Mr. Mugabe’s legitimacy, said in an interview on Wednesday that his country would not be party to what he called “the raping of democracy” in Zimbabwe.
With rumors swirling that Mr. Mugabe, 84, and Mr. Tsvangirai, 56, are close to a deal in talks that are supposed to last only two weeks, Ms. Khupe, a member of Parliament from Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city, said she had not been informed yet about the progress of the negotiations. But she noted that any agreement from the talks, which are being held at a secret location in Pretoria, would have to be approved by the party’s leadership.
Some African and Western officials worry the opposition may yet get outfoxed by Mr. Mugabe, who has kept a tight grip on power for 28 years.
Shadowing the current talks is the memory of an earlier set of unity negotiations. In 1987, after years in which historians estimated that Mr. Mugabe’s military forces killed at least 10,000 civilians in the stronghold of his rival Joshua Nkomo, Mr. Nkomo joined the government, allowing Mr. Mugabe to further solidify his hold on power.
The current talks, too, were preceded by a violent onslaught. Since April, according to doctors who treated the wounded and tallied the dead, thousands of Mr. Tsvangirai’s supporters have been assaulted by Mr. Mugabe’s enforcers and more than 100 have been killed, decimating the opposition’s grass-roots leadership.
“Tsvangirai may be lured into accepting a power-sharing arrangement which would lead to Mugabe succeeding himself through puppets from ZANU-PF,” Raila Odinga, the Kenyan prime minister, said in an interview on Thursday. “The best option for Tsvangirai is to insist that Mugabe becomes a ceremonial president with executive powers vested in the prime minister” — a position that would be held by Mr. Tsvangirai.
Mr. Odinga speaks from his own experience with unity talks. Once the Kenyan opposition leader, he became prime minister in February after a deal brokered by Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general. It followed a deeply flawed election that some observers believe had been stolen from Mr. Odinga.
Mr. Odinga, who has met with Zimbabwean opposition leaders including Mr. Tsvangirai in recent months, said he had sent a senior official from his own party to Johannesburg to advise the opposition during the talks.
Mr. Skelemani, the Botswana foreign minister, said the fundamental issue for Zimbabwe was who controlled the executive powers held by the president under the country’s Constitution. Referring to the possibility that Mr. Mugabe’s negotiators would try “to do a Nkomo” on Mr. Tsvangirai, Mr. Skelemani warned that the opposition would “risk emasculation” if it allowed Mr. Mugabe to retain the presidency. Asked about Mr. Mugabe’s stated desire to hold on to power, Mr. Skelemani replied, “What power? Power to run the country into the ground?”
Botswana’s increasingly urgent criticism of Mr. Mugabe, along with similar concerns voiced by Zambia’s president, Levy Mwanawasa, highlight what Martin Meredith, author of “The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence,” (PublicAffairs, 2005) called an unprecedented development in the 14-nation bloc of the Southern African Development Community. “This group of S.A.D.C. countries has always tried to hold on to the image of unity,” he said. “This is shattering it.”
Since Mr. Mwanawasa suffered a stroke last month, Botswana has become the leading critic in detailed public statements about the recent election violence and rigging. “The atrocities have been corroborated and constitute the necessary evidence to conclude that the credibility and integrity of the election process was compromised,” according to the report of Botswana’s election observer team.
Botswana’s statements carry moral authority: Its democratic traditions stretch back decades, as does its reputation for spending its wealth from diamonds to improve the public welfare rather than enrich the governing elite.
Botswana’s and Zambia’s public statements pose a serious challenge to the “quiet diplomacy” pursued by the region’s most powerful player, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, who is mediating the current talks. He has resisted domestic pressure here in South Africa to criticize Mr. Mugabe, repeatedly greeting him in recent months with a handshake and a smile.
Mr. Mbeki held on to control of the Zimbabwe mediation with the endorsement of the African Union on July 1. But in a meeting of African heads of state in Egypt, Mr. Mugabe listened with consternation as officials representing Liberia, Nigeria and Botswana, among others, delivered humiliating critiques of the political violence that marred the election, according to several officials who were present. He counterattacked, accusing his critics of failings of their own.
“You’re talking about somebody who’s been in power 30 years,” Liberia’s president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, said in a recent interview. “Support wears thin.” Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf, a Harvard-educated economist who became Africa’s first female elected head of state in 2005, added, “There’s a lot going on in S.A.D.C. and the A.U. behind the scenes, much more than was reflected in the open statements.”
Botswana’s vice president, Mompati S. Merafhe, sitting just two seats from Mr. Mugabe, said the Zimbabwean leader should be suspended from the African Union, Mr. Skelemani said.
Botswana seems to have been greatly affected by its ringside view of the Zimbabwe crisis. When Mr. Tsvangirai fled Zimbabwe in the middle of the night on April 8, just 10 days after the general election, citing death threats, he crossed into Botswana and was granted refuge.
That same month, Botswana’s new president, Seretse Khama Ian Khama, asked Mr. Mwanawasa, president of Zambia and the leader of the Southern African Development Community, to convene an emergency summit meeting of regional heads of state on Zimbabwe, Mr. Skelemani said. Subsequently, victims of the political violence began streaming into Botswana.
The accounts its election observers brought back from Zimbabwe deepened Botswana’s official revulsion. Ruth Seretse, the deputy director of Botswana’s directorate on corruption and economic crime, led the 50-person observer team. She said in an interview that she had seen ZANU-PF youth militia members beating people at a rally for Mr. Tsvangirai in Harare.
“People ran for their lives,” she said. “The riot police just stood there.”
For two weeks, she monitored faxes and text messages from Botswanan observers deployed across the country. Some of the most disturbing reports came from Bakwena Oitsile, a retired major general in Botswana’s army. He said in an interview that in one village in Zimbabwe’s Mashonaland West Province, he had found 14 houses, as well as grain stores, burned and reduced to ashes. Pregnant women and children there had nothing left but the clothes on their backs.
In another village in the province, he arrived just hours after an attack on June 17. In one hut, he discovered the body of a man just beaten to death and his wife, still alive, with a deep cut on her head. Another woman’s index finger had been cut off. Her hand was still raw and untreated.
“She was in great pain when we were there,” he said. “She was screaming.”
He said of what he witnessed in Zimbabwe: “I will never forget it. It’s all in my heart and head.”
News Analysis
In Zimbabwe Talks, Who Will Get the Real Power?
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — As negotiators for President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai began power-sharing talks on Thursday in South Africa, they confronted one seemingly unbridgeable divide: which man would have the real executive power in a unity government?
Mr. Mugabe’s governing party, ZANU-PF, insisted that Mr. Mugabe, as the victor in a runoff that has been denounced internationally as a sham, would name any new government, The Herald, a state-owned newspaper, reported Friday.
But the opposition says Mr. Tsvangirai, who outpolled Mr. Mugabe in March elections and dropped out of the runoff, citing murderous violence against supporters, must be in charge. “Whatever transition we come up with, it must be led by Morgan Tsvangirai,” Thokozani Khupe, vice president of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, said in an interview on Saturday.
A collapse of the talks could lead to an accelerating implosion of Zimbabwe’s economy and the flight of millions more people from Mr. Mugabe’s increasingly repressive rule into neighboring countries, potentially destabilizing the region. The Mugabe government’s economic isolation intensified last week as the United States and the European Union tightened sanctions.
But a settlement that left Mr. Mugabe or his allies in power would be a blow to democratic aspirations on the continent after an election that independent observers from across Africa unanimously concluded was neither free nor fair.
One of the most remarkable changes to emerge from Zimbabwe’s violent election season is that leaders in Zambia and Botswana have resoundingly broken the silence of Mr. Mugabe’s peers in the region about the human rights abuses committed by his governing party.
Phandu Skelemani, the foreign minister of neighboring Botswana, which has refused to recognize Mr. Mugabe’s legitimacy, said in an interview on Wednesday that his country would not be party to what he called “the raping of democracy” in Zimbabwe.
With rumors swirling that Mr. Mugabe, 84, and Mr. Tsvangirai, 56, are close to a deal in talks that are supposed to last only two weeks, Ms. Khupe, a member of Parliament from Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city, said she had not been informed yet about the progress of the negotiations. But she noted that any agreement from the talks, which are being held at a secret location in Pretoria, would have to be approved by the party’s leadership.
Some African and Western officials worry the opposition may yet get outfoxed by Mr. Mugabe, who has kept a tight grip on power for 28 years.
Shadowing the current talks is the memory of an earlier set of unity negotiations. In 1987, after years in which historians estimated that Mr. Mugabe’s military forces killed at least 10,000 civilians in the stronghold of his rival Joshua Nkomo, Mr. Nkomo joined the government, allowing Mr. Mugabe to further solidify his hold on power.
The current talks, too, were preceded by a violent onslaught. Since April, according to doctors who treated the wounded and tallied the dead, thousands of Mr. Tsvangirai’s supporters have been assaulted by Mr. Mugabe’s enforcers and more than 100 have been killed, decimating the opposition’s grass-roots leadership.
“Tsvangirai may be lured into accepting a power-sharing arrangement which would lead to Mugabe succeeding himself through puppets from ZANU-PF,” Raila Odinga, the Kenyan prime minister, said in an interview on Thursday. “The best option for Tsvangirai is to insist that Mugabe becomes a ceremonial president with executive powers vested in the prime minister” — a position that would be held by Mr. Tsvangirai.
Mr. Odinga speaks from his own experience with unity talks. Once the Kenyan opposition leader, he became prime minister in February after a deal brokered by Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general. It followed a deeply flawed election that some observers believe had been stolen from Mr. Odinga.
Mr. Odinga, who has met with Zimbabwean opposition leaders including Mr. Tsvangirai in recent months, said he had sent a senior official from his own party to Johannesburg to advise the opposition during the talks.
Mr. Skelemani, the Botswana foreign minister, said the fundamental issue for Zimbabwe was who controlled the executive powers held by the president under the country’s Constitution. Referring to the possibility that Mr. Mugabe’s negotiators would try “to do a Nkomo” on Mr. Tsvangirai, Mr. Skelemani warned that the opposition would “risk emasculation” if it allowed Mr. Mugabe to retain the presidency. Asked about Mr. Mugabe’s stated desire to hold on to power, Mr. Skelemani replied, “What power? Power to run the country into the ground?”
Botswana’s increasingly urgent criticism of Mr. Mugabe, along with similar concerns voiced by Zambia’s president, Levy Mwanawasa, highlight what Martin Meredith, author of “The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence,” (PublicAffairs, 2005) called an unprecedented development in the 14-nation bloc of the Southern African Development Community. “This group of S.A.D.C. countries has always tried to hold on to the image of unity,” he said. “This is shattering it.”
Since Mr. Mwanawasa suffered a stroke last month, Botswana has become the leading critic in detailed public statements about the recent election violence and rigging. “The atrocities have been corroborated and constitute the necessary evidence to conclude that the credibility and integrity of the election process was compromised,” according to the report of Botswana’s election observer team.
Botswana’s statements carry moral authority: Its democratic traditions stretch back decades, as does its reputation for spending its wealth from diamonds to improve the public welfare rather than enrich the governing elite.
Botswana’s and Zambia’s public statements pose a serious challenge to the “quiet diplomacy” pursued by the region’s most powerful player, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, who is mediating the current talks. He has resisted domestic pressure here in South Africa to criticize Mr. Mugabe, repeatedly greeting him in recent months with a handshake and a smile.
Mr. Mbeki held on to control of the Zimbabwe mediation with the endorsement of the African Union on July 1. But in a meeting of African heads of state in Egypt, Mr. Mugabe listened with consternation as officials representing Liberia, Nigeria and Botswana, among others, delivered humiliating critiques of the political violence that marred the election, according to several officials who were present. He counterattacked, accusing his critics of failings of their own.
“You’re talking about somebody who’s been in power 30 years,” Liberia’s president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, said in a recent interview. “Support wears thin.” Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf, a Harvard-educated economist who became Africa’s first female elected head of state in 2005, added, “There’s a lot going on in S.A.D.C. and the A.U. behind the scenes, much more than was reflected in the open statements.”
Botswana’s vice president, Mompati S. Merafhe, sitting just two seats from Mr. Mugabe, said the Zimbabwean leader should be suspended from the African Union, Mr. Skelemani said.
Botswana seems to have been greatly affected by its ringside view of the Zimbabwe crisis. When Mr. Tsvangirai fled Zimbabwe in the middle of the night on April 8, just 10 days after the general election, citing death threats, he crossed into Botswana and was granted refuge.
That same month, Botswana’s new president, Seretse Khama Ian Khama, asked Mr. Mwanawasa, president of Zambia and the leader of the Southern African Development Community, to convene an emergency summit meeting of regional heads of state on Zimbabwe, Mr. Skelemani said. Subsequently, victims of the political violence began streaming into Botswana.
The accounts its election observers brought back from Zimbabwe deepened Botswana’s official revulsion. Ruth Seretse, the deputy director of Botswana’s directorate on corruption and economic crime, led the 50-person observer team. She said in an interview that she had seen ZANU-PF youth militia members beating people at a rally for Mr. Tsvangirai in Harare.
“People ran for their lives,” she said. “The riot police just stood there.”
For two weeks, she monitored faxes and text messages from Botswanan observers deployed across the country. Some of the most disturbing reports came from Bakwena Oitsile, a retired major general in Botswana’s army. He said in an interview that in one village in Zimbabwe’s Mashonaland West Province, he had found 14 houses, as well as grain stores, burned and reduced to ashes. Pregnant women and children there had nothing left but the clothes on their backs.
In another village in the province, he arrived just hours after an attack on June 17. In one hut, he discovered the body of a man just beaten to death and his wife, still alive, with a deep cut on her head. Another woman’s index finger had been cut off. Her hand was still raw and untreated.
“She was in great pain when we were there,” he said. “She was screaming.”
He said of what he witnessed in Zimbabwe: “I will never forget it. It’s all in my heart and head.”
July 28, 2008
Sudan Rallies Behind Leader Reviled Abroad
By LYDIA POLGREEN and JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
KHARTOUM, Sudan — President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan has been accused by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court of genocide and vilified the world over as an incorrigible mass murderer bent on slaughtering his own people in Darfur.
But inside Sudan, his grip on power seems, for the moment, to be surer than ever.
In the past few weeks, one sworn political enemy after another has closed ranks behind him. A result has been a swift and radical reordering of the fractious political universe in Sudan, driven in part by national pride but also by deep-seated fears that the nation could tumble into Somalia-like chaos if Mr. Bashir were removed as president.
The Sudanese government, joined by many of its onetime foes who see the court’s looming arrest warrant as a mortal threat to the country, is scrambling to determine exactly how much it needs to concede to survive.
One previously unthinkable proposal being discussed is whether the government should arrest two men accused of orchestrating the campaign of rape, murder and pillage in Darfur that has left about 300,000 dead and scattered 2.5 million people from villages reduced to circles of ash.
The two men, Ahmad Harun, the former interior minister, and Ali Kushayb, a militia leader, face arrest warrants issued by the international court for crimes against humanity.
But the government has refused to turn them over. Sudanese officials say they hope that putting the two men on trial in Sudan might persuade the United Nations Security Council to exercise its power to suspend the case against Mr. Bashir.
“Everything short of the presidency is on the table,” said Sudan’s foreign minister, Deng Alor.
Although the West has been relentlessly focused on Darfur, here in Sudan, most people view the crisis as simply a continuation of a long chain of internal conflicts between an autocratic government and the deeply impoverished people on the periphery. The deadliest of these conflicts, between the north and south, raged for decades, killing 2.2 million people — many more than the lives lost in Darfur — and threatened to split the country along religious lines.
Sudan has been at war with itself for almost its entire post-colonial history, starting in 1956. Nearly all of the major ethnic and religious groups have fought one another, and politics continue to be dominated by mistrust, outside interference and combustible animosities. There are dozens of armed groups across the country, each with its own political agenda.
One growing concern is that without Mr. Bashir, a peace treaty signed in 2005 between Sudan’s central government and southern rebels could fall apart. The treaty, which he fought hard-liners in his own party to approve, is widely seen as the glue that is holding this unwieldy and deeply divided country together. It calls for elections next year and outlines ways to share wealth and power.
“The situation in Sudan now is so pregnant with trouble,” said Sadiq al-Mahdi, Sudan’s last elected leader, who was overthrown by Mr. Bashir in 1989 and has remained a bitter opponent ever since. Until now.
After the warrant was announced, Mr. Mahdi threw the support of the party he leads, one of Sudan’s biggest, behind Mr. Bashir, at least for the moment.
Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor of the international criminal court, or I.C.C., has described Mr. Bashir as the mastermind of a genocide in Darfur. But here on the sun-blasted streets of Sudan’s capital, Mr. Bashir is widely perceived as a relative moderate.
“He is a pigeon, not a hawk,” said Ghazi Suleiman, a human rights lawyer who has been jailed 18 times by the Bashir government. Half of Mr. Suleiman’s face is paralyzed as a result of torture at the hands of the country’s notorious security forces. Nevertheless, he opposes any attempt to charge Mr. Bashir with war crimes now.
From the perspective of many Sudanese political leaders, the I.C.C. move could not have come at a worse time. A lightning-fast attack on the capital by a Darfur rebel group in May rattled the ruling National Congress Party. Hundreds of heavily armed rebels from an Islamist Darfur rebel faction thundered into the capital’s outskirts. They were repulsed, but the assault exposed gaps in the government’s aura of military invincibility.
“It just showed how the army is stretched to the limits,” said Ghazi Salah al-Din, a top adviser to Mr. Bashir, in a rare admission of vulnerability by a senior ruling party official. A week later, new fighting between the national army and a former rebel force in the disputed oil-rich area of Abyei forced more than 50,000 to flee and sparked fears of a new round of bloodletting.
“A lot of the political entities looked into the abyss and were scared,” said a senior Western diplomat in Khartoum, speaking anonymously because he is not authorized by his government to speak publicly.
A number of nightmare scenarios — an implosion of the government that might invite Al Qaeda back into Sudan or embolden rebel groups to try to topple the government — forced political elites in Sudan to choose sides. Most have chosen, for now, to stick with Mr. Bashir.
“These are frail and critical moments in our history,” said James Morgan, a spokesman for the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, the rebel group that signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement ending the north-south war. Mr. Bashir, he said, should be given “ample time to implement these agreements.”
The international court’s announcement also came as there were signs that the country was taking its first steps toward democracy after years of autocratic rule. The National Assembly had just passed a new electoral law, which would set up rules for the country’s first free elections in more than 20 years.
“The country was preparing itself for a new phase of government,” said Mr. Salah al-Din.
Mr. Salah al-Din acknowledged that “mistakes had been made in Darfur,” and said that the coming political transformation would, through elections, deal with the roots of the crisis — political marginalization.
The north-south war had always been viewed as the biggest threat to Sudan. But in 2003, as negotiations to end that conflict dragged on, a new rebel group rose up in Darfur to demand a greater share of wealth and power for the long-neglected western region. The government responded with the same ruthless tactics it used in the south, unleashing Arab militias to chase the rebels and their supporters from Darfur’s villages. The terror they caused aroused outrage across the world; the Bush administration called the killings genocide. The crisis came to dominate Western policy toward Sudan, often at the expense of the larger struggle to keep the north-south deal alive.
But diplomats, aid workers and analysts who have traveled to the region recently say things have changed in Darfur. The conflict has become a violent free-for-all in which a bewildering cast of rebels, bandits and militias murder each other and civilians largely unchecked by government authority.
“The government is brutal, untrustworthy and bloodthirsty, but the reality is that most of the violence in Darfur today is not caused by them,” the senior Western diplomat said. “Is there a genocide in Darfur right at this moment? No, there isn’t.”
Mr. Bashir’s tour of Darfur last week was short on proposals to jump start a peace process, but a panel led by Mr. Mahdi and other political leaders has been charged with finding a way to defuse the crisis. The government sent an official to Qatar to ask the government there, which helped negotiate a settlement to Lebanon’s most recent crisis, to contribute $500 million for the compensation of Darfur’s victims.
The government and its new allies are hoping that if they can provide evidence of progress in Darfur and persuade the international community that an arrest warrant would create more problems than it would solve, the Security Council will act to hold back the criminal court.
Not everyone agrees with this approach.
Salih Mahmoud Osman, a Darfur lawyer who has documented thousands of human rights violations in Darfur, said the court represented the only chance for victims to get justice. In a recent interview, he wept as he described the painful process of collecting testimony from rape victims. “They told us, ‘Our suffering must be documented,’ ” he said, hiding his face with his hands to cover his tears. “ ‘Our story is not forgotten. You are putting criminals on the record. If not today, tomorrow we will have justice.’ And now it has happened.”
In any case, Mr. Bashir’s newfound popularity among Sudan’s political elite is likely to be short lived. If the arrest warrant is issued, analysts and diplomats said, all bets are off. “He could end up very weak to challenges from inside and outside the ruling party,” a senior United Nations official in Khartoum said.
The government has responded so far to the court’s action with diplomacy and public relations, not violence. It has agreed to allow the delivery of hundreds of containers of United Nations supplies held up in Sudan’s port, and to make visas and permits for aid workers easier to get.
“We’ve been receiving very strong messages of cooperation” from the government, said Ameerah Haq, the top United Nations aid official in Sudan.
Mr. Alor, the foreign minister, said the threat of an arrest warrant may prove to be a blessing in disguise. “Now we are seriously talking about the resolution of the problem of Darfur,” he said, adding that the government was also considering ways to cooperate with the peacekeeping force in Darfur that it long resisted.
“If we take the I.C.C. from that angle, it can be a blessing for the whole country.”
Sudan Rallies Behind Leader Reviled Abroad
By LYDIA POLGREEN and JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
KHARTOUM, Sudan — President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan has been accused by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court of genocide and vilified the world over as an incorrigible mass murderer bent on slaughtering his own people in Darfur.
But inside Sudan, his grip on power seems, for the moment, to be surer than ever.
In the past few weeks, one sworn political enemy after another has closed ranks behind him. A result has been a swift and radical reordering of the fractious political universe in Sudan, driven in part by national pride but also by deep-seated fears that the nation could tumble into Somalia-like chaos if Mr. Bashir were removed as president.
The Sudanese government, joined by many of its onetime foes who see the court’s looming arrest warrant as a mortal threat to the country, is scrambling to determine exactly how much it needs to concede to survive.
One previously unthinkable proposal being discussed is whether the government should arrest two men accused of orchestrating the campaign of rape, murder and pillage in Darfur that has left about 300,000 dead and scattered 2.5 million people from villages reduced to circles of ash.
The two men, Ahmad Harun, the former interior minister, and Ali Kushayb, a militia leader, face arrest warrants issued by the international court for crimes against humanity.
But the government has refused to turn them over. Sudanese officials say they hope that putting the two men on trial in Sudan might persuade the United Nations Security Council to exercise its power to suspend the case against Mr. Bashir.
“Everything short of the presidency is on the table,” said Sudan’s foreign minister, Deng Alor.
Although the West has been relentlessly focused on Darfur, here in Sudan, most people view the crisis as simply a continuation of a long chain of internal conflicts between an autocratic government and the deeply impoverished people on the periphery. The deadliest of these conflicts, between the north and south, raged for decades, killing 2.2 million people — many more than the lives lost in Darfur — and threatened to split the country along religious lines.
Sudan has been at war with itself for almost its entire post-colonial history, starting in 1956. Nearly all of the major ethnic and religious groups have fought one another, and politics continue to be dominated by mistrust, outside interference and combustible animosities. There are dozens of armed groups across the country, each with its own political agenda.
One growing concern is that without Mr. Bashir, a peace treaty signed in 2005 between Sudan’s central government and southern rebels could fall apart. The treaty, which he fought hard-liners in his own party to approve, is widely seen as the glue that is holding this unwieldy and deeply divided country together. It calls for elections next year and outlines ways to share wealth and power.
“The situation in Sudan now is so pregnant with trouble,” said Sadiq al-Mahdi, Sudan’s last elected leader, who was overthrown by Mr. Bashir in 1989 and has remained a bitter opponent ever since. Until now.
After the warrant was announced, Mr. Mahdi threw the support of the party he leads, one of Sudan’s biggest, behind Mr. Bashir, at least for the moment.
Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor of the international criminal court, or I.C.C., has described Mr. Bashir as the mastermind of a genocide in Darfur. But here on the sun-blasted streets of Sudan’s capital, Mr. Bashir is widely perceived as a relative moderate.
“He is a pigeon, not a hawk,” said Ghazi Suleiman, a human rights lawyer who has been jailed 18 times by the Bashir government. Half of Mr. Suleiman’s face is paralyzed as a result of torture at the hands of the country’s notorious security forces. Nevertheless, he opposes any attempt to charge Mr. Bashir with war crimes now.
From the perspective of many Sudanese political leaders, the I.C.C. move could not have come at a worse time. A lightning-fast attack on the capital by a Darfur rebel group in May rattled the ruling National Congress Party. Hundreds of heavily armed rebels from an Islamist Darfur rebel faction thundered into the capital’s outskirts. They were repulsed, but the assault exposed gaps in the government’s aura of military invincibility.
“It just showed how the army is stretched to the limits,” said Ghazi Salah al-Din, a top adviser to Mr. Bashir, in a rare admission of vulnerability by a senior ruling party official. A week later, new fighting between the national army and a former rebel force in the disputed oil-rich area of Abyei forced more than 50,000 to flee and sparked fears of a new round of bloodletting.
“A lot of the political entities looked into the abyss and were scared,” said a senior Western diplomat in Khartoum, speaking anonymously because he is not authorized by his government to speak publicly.
A number of nightmare scenarios — an implosion of the government that might invite Al Qaeda back into Sudan or embolden rebel groups to try to topple the government — forced political elites in Sudan to choose sides. Most have chosen, for now, to stick with Mr. Bashir.
“These are frail and critical moments in our history,” said James Morgan, a spokesman for the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, the rebel group that signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement ending the north-south war. Mr. Bashir, he said, should be given “ample time to implement these agreements.”
The international court’s announcement also came as there were signs that the country was taking its first steps toward democracy after years of autocratic rule. The National Assembly had just passed a new electoral law, which would set up rules for the country’s first free elections in more than 20 years.
“The country was preparing itself for a new phase of government,” said Mr. Salah al-Din.
Mr. Salah al-Din acknowledged that “mistakes had been made in Darfur,” and said that the coming political transformation would, through elections, deal with the roots of the crisis — political marginalization.
The north-south war had always been viewed as the biggest threat to Sudan. But in 2003, as negotiations to end that conflict dragged on, a new rebel group rose up in Darfur to demand a greater share of wealth and power for the long-neglected western region. The government responded with the same ruthless tactics it used in the south, unleashing Arab militias to chase the rebels and their supporters from Darfur’s villages. The terror they caused aroused outrage across the world; the Bush administration called the killings genocide. The crisis came to dominate Western policy toward Sudan, often at the expense of the larger struggle to keep the north-south deal alive.
But diplomats, aid workers and analysts who have traveled to the region recently say things have changed in Darfur. The conflict has become a violent free-for-all in which a bewildering cast of rebels, bandits and militias murder each other and civilians largely unchecked by government authority.
“The government is brutal, untrustworthy and bloodthirsty, but the reality is that most of the violence in Darfur today is not caused by them,” the senior Western diplomat said. “Is there a genocide in Darfur right at this moment? No, there isn’t.”
Mr. Bashir’s tour of Darfur last week was short on proposals to jump start a peace process, but a panel led by Mr. Mahdi and other political leaders has been charged with finding a way to defuse the crisis. The government sent an official to Qatar to ask the government there, which helped negotiate a settlement to Lebanon’s most recent crisis, to contribute $500 million for the compensation of Darfur’s victims.
The government and its new allies are hoping that if they can provide evidence of progress in Darfur and persuade the international community that an arrest warrant would create more problems than it would solve, the Security Council will act to hold back the criminal court.
Not everyone agrees with this approach.
Salih Mahmoud Osman, a Darfur lawyer who has documented thousands of human rights violations in Darfur, said the court represented the only chance for victims to get justice. In a recent interview, he wept as he described the painful process of collecting testimony from rape victims. “They told us, ‘Our suffering must be documented,’ ” he said, hiding his face with his hands to cover his tears. “ ‘Our story is not forgotten. You are putting criminals on the record. If not today, tomorrow we will have justice.’ And now it has happened.”
In any case, Mr. Bashir’s newfound popularity among Sudan’s political elite is likely to be short lived. If the arrest warrant is issued, analysts and diplomats said, all bets are off. “He could end up very weak to challenges from inside and outside the ruling party,” a senior United Nations official in Khartoum said.
The government has responded so far to the court’s action with diplomacy and public relations, not violence. It has agreed to allow the delivery of hundreds of containers of United Nations supplies held up in Sudan’s port, and to make visas and permits for aid workers easier to get.
“We’ve been receiving very strong messages of cooperation” from the government, said Ameerah Haq, the top United Nations aid official in Sudan.
Mr. Alor, the foreign minister, said the threat of an arrest warrant may prove to be a blessing in disguise. “Now we are seriously talking about the resolution of the problem of Darfur,” he said, adding that the government was also considering ways to cooperate with the peacekeeping force in Darfur that it long resisted.
“If we take the I.C.C. from that angle, it can be a blessing for the whole country.”
There is a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/15/scien ... ?th&emc=th
August 15, 2008
Graves Found From Sahara’s Green Period
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
When Paul C. Sereno went hunting for dinosaur bones in the Sahara, his career took a sharp turn from paleontology to archaeology. The expedition found what has proved to be the largest known graveyard of Stone Age people who lived there when the desert was green.
The first traces of pottery, stone tools and human skeletons were discovered eight years ago at a site in the southern Sahara, in Niger. After preliminary research, Dr. Sereno, a University of Chicago scientist who had previously uncovered remains of the dinosaur Nigersaurus there, organized an international team of archaeologists to investigate what had been a lakeside hunting and fishing settlement for the better part of 5,000 years, originating some 10,000 years ago.
In its first comprehensive report, published Thursday, the team described finding about 200 graves belonging to two successive populations. Some burials were accompanied by pottery and ivory ornaments. A girl was buried wearing a bracelet carved from a hippo tusk. A man was seated on the carapace of a turtle.
The most poignant scene was the triple burial of a petite woman lying on her side, facing two young children. The slender arms of the children reached out to the woman in an everlasting embrace. Pollen indicated that flowers had decorated the grave.
The sun-baked dunes at the site, known as Gobero, preserve the earliest and largest Stone Age cemetery in the Sahara, Dr. Sereno’s group reported in the online journal PLoS One. The findings, they wrote, open “a new window on the funerary practices, distinctive skeletal anatomy, health and diet of early hunter-fisher-gatherers, who expanded into the Sahara when climatic conditions were favorable.”
The research was also described at a news conference on Thursday in Washington at the National Geographic Society, a supporter of the project.
The initial inhabitants at Gobero, the Kiffian culture, were tall hunters of wild game who also fished with harpoons carved from animal bone. Later, a more lightly built people, the Ténérians, lived there, hunting, fishing and herding cattle.
Other scientists said the discovery appeared to provide spectacular evidence that nothing, not even the arid expanse of the Sahara, was changeless. About 100 million years ago, this land was forested and occupied by dinosaurs and enormous crocodiles. Around 50,000 years ago, people moved in and left stone tools and mounds of shells, fish bones and other refuse. The lakes dried up in the last Ice Age.
Then the rains and lakes of a fecund Sahara returned about 12,000 years ago, and remained, except for one 1,000-year interval, until about 4,500 years ago. Geologists have long known that the region’s basins retained mineral residue of former lakes, and other explorers have found scatterings of human artifacts from that time, as Dr. Sereno did at Gobero in 2000.
“Everywhere you turned, there were bones belonging to animals that don’t live in the desert,” he said. “I realized we were in the green Sahara.”
Human skeletons were eroding from the dunes, including jawbones with nearly full sets of teeth and finger bones of a tiny hand pointing up from the sand.
From an analysis of the skeletons and pottery, scientists identified the two successive cultures that occupied the settlement. The Kiffians, some of whom stood up to six feet tall, both men and women, lived there during the Sahara’s wettest period, between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago. They were primarily hunter-gatherers who speared huge lake perch with harpoons.
Elena A. A. Garcea, an archaeologist at the University of Cassino in Italy, identified ceramics with wavy lines and zigzag patterns as Kiffian, a culture associated with northern Africa. Pots bearing a pointillistic pattern were linked to the Ténérians, a people named for the Ténéré desert, a stretch of the Sahara known to Tuareg nomads as a “desert within a desert.”
Christopher M. Stojanowski, an archaeologist at Arizona State University, said the two cultures were “biologically distinct groups.” The bones and teeth showed that in contrast to the robust Kiffians, the Ténérians were typically short and lean and apparently led less rigorous lives.
The shapes of the Ténérian skulls are puzzling, researchers said, because they resemble those of Mediterranean people, not other nearby groups.
Asked if he had adjusted to the transition from dinosaur paleontology to Stone Age archaeology, Dr. Sereno said, “It’s still weird for me to be digging up my own species.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/15/scien ... ?th&emc=th
August 15, 2008
Graves Found From Sahara’s Green Period
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
When Paul C. Sereno went hunting for dinosaur bones in the Sahara, his career took a sharp turn from paleontology to archaeology. The expedition found what has proved to be the largest known graveyard of Stone Age people who lived there when the desert was green.
The first traces of pottery, stone tools and human skeletons were discovered eight years ago at a site in the southern Sahara, in Niger. After preliminary research, Dr. Sereno, a University of Chicago scientist who had previously uncovered remains of the dinosaur Nigersaurus there, organized an international team of archaeologists to investigate what had been a lakeside hunting and fishing settlement for the better part of 5,000 years, originating some 10,000 years ago.
In its first comprehensive report, published Thursday, the team described finding about 200 graves belonging to two successive populations. Some burials were accompanied by pottery and ivory ornaments. A girl was buried wearing a bracelet carved from a hippo tusk. A man was seated on the carapace of a turtle.
The most poignant scene was the triple burial of a petite woman lying on her side, facing two young children. The slender arms of the children reached out to the woman in an everlasting embrace. Pollen indicated that flowers had decorated the grave.
The sun-baked dunes at the site, known as Gobero, preserve the earliest and largest Stone Age cemetery in the Sahara, Dr. Sereno’s group reported in the online journal PLoS One. The findings, they wrote, open “a new window on the funerary practices, distinctive skeletal anatomy, health and diet of early hunter-fisher-gatherers, who expanded into the Sahara when climatic conditions were favorable.”
The research was also described at a news conference on Thursday in Washington at the National Geographic Society, a supporter of the project.
The initial inhabitants at Gobero, the Kiffian culture, were tall hunters of wild game who also fished with harpoons carved from animal bone. Later, a more lightly built people, the Ténérians, lived there, hunting, fishing and herding cattle.
Other scientists said the discovery appeared to provide spectacular evidence that nothing, not even the arid expanse of the Sahara, was changeless. About 100 million years ago, this land was forested and occupied by dinosaurs and enormous crocodiles. Around 50,000 years ago, people moved in and left stone tools and mounds of shells, fish bones and other refuse. The lakes dried up in the last Ice Age.
Then the rains and lakes of a fecund Sahara returned about 12,000 years ago, and remained, except for one 1,000-year interval, until about 4,500 years ago. Geologists have long known that the region’s basins retained mineral residue of former lakes, and other explorers have found scatterings of human artifacts from that time, as Dr. Sereno did at Gobero in 2000.
“Everywhere you turned, there were bones belonging to animals that don’t live in the desert,” he said. “I realized we were in the green Sahara.”
Human skeletons were eroding from the dunes, including jawbones with nearly full sets of teeth and finger bones of a tiny hand pointing up from the sand.
From an analysis of the skeletons and pottery, scientists identified the two successive cultures that occupied the settlement. The Kiffians, some of whom stood up to six feet tall, both men and women, lived there during the Sahara’s wettest period, between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago. They were primarily hunter-gatherers who speared huge lake perch with harpoons.
Elena A. A. Garcea, an archaeologist at the University of Cassino in Italy, identified ceramics with wavy lines and zigzag patterns as Kiffian, a culture associated with northern Africa. Pots bearing a pointillistic pattern were linked to the Ténérians, a people named for the Ténéré desert, a stretch of the Sahara known to Tuareg nomads as a “desert within a desert.”
Christopher M. Stojanowski, an archaeologist at Arizona State University, said the two cultures were “biologically distinct groups.” The bones and teeth showed that in contrast to the robust Kiffians, the Ténérians were typically short and lean and apparently led less rigorous lives.
The shapes of the Ténérian skulls are puzzling, researchers said, because they resemble those of Mediterranean people, not other nearby groups.
Asked if he had adjusted to the transition from dinosaur paleontology to Stone Age archaeology, Dr. Sereno said, “It’s still weird for me to be digging up my own species.”
August 18, 2008
Zimbabwe Power-Sharing Deal Eludes Mugabe and Rival
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai failed to close a power-sharing deal at a conference of regional leaders here over the weekend — a deal that the mediator, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, had said was within reach.
Mr. Mbeki, who took over as chairman of the Southern African Development Community, a regional bloc of 14 nations that ended its annual conference on Sunday, said that not only would talks continue, but that the negotiators for Zimbabwe’s governing party and the opposition already had a good basis for an agreement.
“It’s a matter that really, truly must come from the Zimbabwe parties because, of all of us, they know best what is good for Zimbabwe,” Mr. Mbeki said at a news conference here.
After meeting on Zimbabwe on Sunday evening, regional leaders issued a communiqué urging the parties to “conclude the negotiations as a matter of urgency to restore political stability in Zimbabwe.”
Independent monitors from the same southern African nations had found that a presidential runoff election in June was not free or fair. Mr. Tsvangirai quit the race just days before the vote, citing widespread state-sponsored beatings and killings of his supporters. Mr. Mugabe was elected unopposed.
The statement issued by regional leaders on Sunday seemed more directed at pressing Mr. Tsvangirai to settle than at encouraging Mr. Mugabe to cede more authority to him. Mr. Tsvangirai outpolled Mr. Mugabe in a credible but inconclusive first round of voting in March.
Mr. Tsvangirai has made no secret of his dissatisfaction with the deal Mr. Mugabe’s party is proposing. He said Saturday in an interview that it did not give him enough executive power to run the government effectively and that he would prefer no deal to what he considered a bad one.
He also called for Mr. Mugabe’s government to lift restrictions on humanitarian aid by nongovernmental organizations that it imposed two months ago.
When asked about the millions of Zimbabweans who were likely to face severe hunger within months, Mr. Mbeki said their plight was evidence of the need for a prompt settlement. He did not mention the role that Mr. Mugabe’s government played in halting the provision of food and other basic assistance under the contention that aid groups were colluding with Western nations to help the opposition.
After Mr. Mbeki spoke, Tendai Biti, a negotiator in the talks for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, briefly addressed reporters, saying his party welcomed the continuation of negotiations. “We at the M.D.C. will continue fully and firmly committed to this dialogue,” he said.
But the outcome of the meeting may revive the opposition’s concern that Mr. Mbeki has favored Mr. Mugabe and disdained Mr. Tsvangirai — and that Mr. Mbeki’s need for a quick deal will override other issues. Mr. Mbeki, who has less than a year left as South Africa’s president, has faced criticism from his own governing party’s political alliance as being too soft on Mr. Mugabe.
****
August 18, 2008
In Kenya, Mobile Growth Also Benefits Ad Agencies
By ERIC PFANNER
Drive around Nairobi these days, jokes Michael Joseph, chief executive of Safaricom, a Kenyan mobile phone operator, and every building is painted in his company’s color, green, or that of one of its rivals.
That is a bit of an exaggeration. But outdoor advertising is one of the biggest marketing media in Kenya and mobile operators are already the biggest spenders.
“It’s the kind of spending that in the past has been associated only with cigarette brands or Coca-Cola,” said Michael Foley, who runs the East African operations of Essar Group of India, a company that is backing a new wireless network scheduled to begin operating in Kenya.
A boom in mobile use in the region is turning into a bonanza for advertising agencies, too.
Perhaps no country better illustrates this than Kenya. For years, the mobile business there has been dominated by Safaricom, a local company whose biggest shareholder is Vodafone, with 85 percent and most of the rest held by Zain, an operator based in Kuwait.
They will soon be joined by two newcomers. In addition to Essar, France Télécom, which recently acquired a controlling stake in Telkom Kenya, is building a new mobile network that it plans to market under the Orange brand.
Zain this month rebranded its wireless networks in 14 African countries, including Kenya, where the company was operating under the Celtel name.
Telecommunications companies are expected to spend about 4.7 billion Kenyan shillings (or about $72 million) on advertising this year, according to Business Daily, a newspaper based in Nairobi. Safaricom alone accounts for 2 billion shillings in spending, according to the paper.
Given its dominant position, Safaricom plans no new directions in its advertising, Mr. Joseph, the chief executive, said. The company’s current ads are created by RedSky, an agency based in Nairobi.
Another agency, Access Leo Burnett, also based in Nairobi, was recently appointed by France Télécom to introduce the Orange brand to Kenya. The agency plans to align the brand with the international positioning of Orange, said Annette Martyres, managing director of Access Leo Burnett, which is part of the Publicis Groupe. France Télécom recently introduced a new ad campaign, developed by another Publicis agency, Fallon, under the theme, “Together, we can do more.”
Essar, meanwhile, said it planned to introduce an entirely new brand name when Econet Wireless International, a company in which Essar holds a controlling stake, starts its new network. Mr. Foley declined to say what that name would be, but he said the company’s marketing, developed by the Ogilvy and Wunderman units of WPP Group, would be aimed at users 14 to 35.
Mobile industry executives see plenty of room for growth, given that only about 35 percent of Kenyans have mobile phones.
“There is tremendous potential,” Ms. Martyres said. “The growth of the industry has been huge. Everybody wants to own a mobile phone.”
Zimbabwe Power-Sharing Deal Eludes Mugabe and Rival
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai failed to close a power-sharing deal at a conference of regional leaders here over the weekend — a deal that the mediator, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, had said was within reach.
Mr. Mbeki, who took over as chairman of the Southern African Development Community, a regional bloc of 14 nations that ended its annual conference on Sunday, said that not only would talks continue, but that the negotiators for Zimbabwe’s governing party and the opposition already had a good basis for an agreement.
“It’s a matter that really, truly must come from the Zimbabwe parties because, of all of us, they know best what is good for Zimbabwe,” Mr. Mbeki said at a news conference here.
After meeting on Zimbabwe on Sunday evening, regional leaders issued a communiqué urging the parties to “conclude the negotiations as a matter of urgency to restore political stability in Zimbabwe.”
Independent monitors from the same southern African nations had found that a presidential runoff election in June was not free or fair. Mr. Tsvangirai quit the race just days before the vote, citing widespread state-sponsored beatings and killings of his supporters. Mr. Mugabe was elected unopposed.
The statement issued by regional leaders on Sunday seemed more directed at pressing Mr. Tsvangirai to settle than at encouraging Mr. Mugabe to cede more authority to him. Mr. Tsvangirai outpolled Mr. Mugabe in a credible but inconclusive first round of voting in March.
Mr. Tsvangirai has made no secret of his dissatisfaction with the deal Mr. Mugabe’s party is proposing. He said Saturday in an interview that it did not give him enough executive power to run the government effectively and that he would prefer no deal to what he considered a bad one.
He also called for Mr. Mugabe’s government to lift restrictions on humanitarian aid by nongovernmental organizations that it imposed two months ago.
When asked about the millions of Zimbabweans who were likely to face severe hunger within months, Mr. Mbeki said their plight was evidence of the need for a prompt settlement. He did not mention the role that Mr. Mugabe’s government played in halting the provision of food and other basic assistance under the contention that aid groups were colluding with Western nations to help the opposition.
After Mr. Mbeki spoke, Tendai Biti, a negotiator in the talks for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, briefly addressed reporters, saying his party welcomed the continuation of negotiations. “We at the M.D.C. will continue fully and firmly committed to this dialogue,” he said.
But the outcome of the meeting may revive the opposition’s concern that Mr. Mbeki has favored Mr. Mugabe and disdained Mr. Tsvangirai — and that Mr. Mbeki’s need for a quick deal will override other issues. Mr. Mbeki, who has less than a year left as South Africa’s president, has faced criticism from his own governing party’s political alliance as being too soft on Mr. Mugabe.
****
August 18, 2008
In Kenya, Mobile Growth Also Benefits Ad Agencies
By ERIC PFANNER
Drive around Nairobi these days, jokes Michael Joseph, chief executive of Safaricom, a Kenyan mobile phone operator, and every building is painted in his company’s color, green, or that of one of its rivals.
That is a bit of an exaggeration. But outdoor advertising is one of the biggest marketing media in Kenya and mobile operators are already the biggest spenders.
“It’s the kind of spending that in the past has been associated only with cigarette brands or Coca-Cola,” said Michael Foley, who runs the East African operations of Essar Group of India, a company that is backing a new wireless network scheduled to begin operating in Kenya.
A boom in mobile use in the region is turning into a bonanza for advertising agencies, too.
Perhaps no country better illustrates this than Kenya. For years, the mobile business there has been dominated by Safaricom, a local company whose biggest shareholder is Vodafone, with 85 percent and most of the rest held by Zain, an operator based in Kuwait.
They will soon be joined by two newcomers. In addition to Essar, France Télécom, which recently acquired a controlling stake in Telkom Kenya, is building a new mobile network that it plans to market under the Orange brand.
Zain this month rebranded its wireless networks in 14 African countries, including Kenya, where the company was operating under the Celtel name.
Telecommunications companies are expected to spend about 4.7 billion Kenyan shillings (or about $72 million) on advertising this year, according to Business Daily, a newspaper based in Nairobi. Safaricom alone accounts for 2 billion shillings in spending, according to the paper.
Given its dominant position, Safaricom plans no new directions in its advertising, Mr. Joseph, the chief executive, said. The company’s current ads are created by RedSky, an agency based in Nairobi.
Another agency, Access Leo Burnett, also based in Nairobi, was recently appointed by France Télécom to introduce the Orange brand to Kenya. The agency plans to align the brand with the international positioning of Orange, said Annette Martyres, managing director of Access Leo Burnett, which is part of the Publicis Groupe. France Télécom recently introduced a new ad campaign, developed by another Publicis agency, Fallon, under the theme, “Together, we can do more.”
Essar, meanwhile, said it planned to introduce an entirely new brand name when Econet Wireless International, a company in which Essar holds a controlling stake, starts its new network. Mr. Foley declined to say what that name would be, but he said the company’s marketing, developed by the Ogilvy and Wunderman units of WPP Group, would be aimed at users 14 to 35.
Mobile industry executives see plenty of room for growth, given that only about 35 percent of Kenyans have mobile phones.
“There is tremendous potential,” Ms. Martyres said. “The growth of the industry has been huge. Everybody wants to own a mobile phone.”
August 21, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
News Good Enough to Bury
By ROGER COHEN
I got an e-mail the other day from a friend at the New America Foundation, a Washington public policy institute, inviting me to participate in a panel on “whether the media can handle good news — whether it’s on Iraq” or whatever.
I accepted, although there’s not much to discuss: the news media are lousy at good news (a virtual oxymoron).
In my lifetime, conditions have grown immeasurably better, freer and more prosperous for a majority of humanity, yet hand-wringing about the miserable remains the reflex mode for most coverage of planet earth.
Nowhere more so than in Africa, from which I’d just returned when the e-mail landed. During a short stay in Ghana, which will hold free elections in December, Vodafone had bought a majority stake in Ghana Telecom for $900 million (entering a fiercely competitive mobile-phone market) and I’d heard much about 6 percent annual growth, spreading broadband and new high-end cacao ventures.
Accra, the capital, is buzzing. Russian hedge funds are investing. New construction abounds. Technology enables people in the capital to text money transfers via mobile phone to poor relatives in the bush.
I don’t think that picture is exceptional these days for Africa, where growth averaged close to 6 percent last year and I sense a fundamental change in attitudes to governance, trade, the private sector and political accountability.
Sure, corruption is still rampant; Omar Bongo has been ruling Gabon for 41 years; Robert Mugabe wants to emulate Bongo; and a commodity boom has helped the numbers. But if averages meant anything, Africa would be a good-news story these days.
Not least, because Africans care about democracy. They know tyranny too well to be tempted by the so-called new authoritarianism.
We’ve heard much — what with the Russian incursion into Georgia and China’s Olympics — of authoritarianism resurgent. It sure doesn’t look that way from Africa.
In fact, I don’t buy the new authoritarianism, any more than I buy a new cold war. Technology-driven opening, interconnection and sociability are the fundamental currents of our age.
But a new cold war has a ring, as does agonizing Africa. So the Africa debate is stuck with Darfur, AIDS, hunger, disease, violence. An alternative view would be that Africa is going to be the big success story of the next half-century. Just watch its agriculture, which is about to boom.
As it happened, the e-mail was followed by one from Dexter Filkins, my New York Times colleague whose brilliant book on Iraq, “The Forever War,” will be published next month. Filkins had just arrived back in Baghdad after a long break.
“It’s extraordinary,” Filkins wrote, “a changed world. Not recognizable. I just went for a run in the park in front of the house, the dead, dying place that you probably remember. At sundown, there were no less than 3,000 Iraqis walking around.”
I must have been distracted because I’ve not clocked that startling image of hope in all the words devoted to whether a “surge” in American troops and shift in their strategy brought decisive change over the past year.
But then the American Iraq debate has never really been about Iraqis. Most people with a strong opinion about the place never bothered to take a look at it.
After all, seeing Iraq might raise too many questions or even provoke the thought that velvet ends to murderous despotism are the exception rather than the rule.
Yes, I remember that park. On my first Iraq visit in 2003, a kid smiled at me. By 2006, all smiles had vanished. In between, I’d watched the United States military spend a lot of money landscaping the park. Only for it to become a “dead, dying place” that was a monument, like much else in Iraq, to the bungled American effort.
Now, it seems, the tide has turned, at least enough for Iraqi families to meander down the Tigris. That’s cause for — unequivocal — celebration.
While I was in Ghana, I read a paper called The Daily Graphic. One day, it had two ads on successive pages, the first about broadband Internet becoming available in the central city of Sunyani from a company called Care 4U, the second about the “high incidence of open defecation in Ghana.”
“Most affordable! Feel the speed!” said the first ad. The second, from a Ghana sanitation monitoring agency, estimated that “more than four million people in Ghana defecate in the bush, open drains, water bodies, or fields” and suggested means to stop the practice.
Two images of an African nation — modernizing or primitive: I know which comforts the continent’s stubborn stereotypes. Africa Ascendant is not yet a slogan that sells. It will be.
And, oh, by the way, the cold war’s over, dead, buried and unlamented. Europe is free, and Georgia will be part of it.
Blog: www.iht.com/passages
Op-Ed Columnist
News Good Enough to Bury
By ROGER COHEN
I got an e-mail the other day from a friend at the New America Foundation, a Washington public policy institute, inviting me to participate in a panel on “whether the media can handle good news — whether it’s on Iraq” or whatever.
I accepted, although there’s not much to discuss: the news media are lousy at good news (a virtual oxymoron).
In my lifetime, conditions have grown immeasurably better, freer and more prosperous for a majority of humanity, yet hand-wringing about the miserable remains the reflex mode for most coverage of planet earth.
Nowhere more so than in Africa, from which I’d just returned when the e-mail landed. During a short stay in Ghana, which will hold free elections in December, Vodafone had bought a majority stake in Ghana Telecom for $900 million (entering a fiercely competitive mobile-phone market) and I’d heard much about 6 percent annual growth, spreading broadband and new high-end cacao ventures.
Accra, the capital, is buzzing. Russian hedge funds are investing. New construction abounds. Technology enables people in the capital to text money transfers via mobile phone to poor relatives in the bush.
I don’t think that picture is exceptional these days for Africa, where growth averaged close to 6 percent last year and I sense a fundamental change in attitudes to governance, trade, the private sector and political accountability.
Sure, corruption is still rampant; Omar Bongo has been ruling Gabon for 41 years; Robert Mugabe wants to emulate Bongo; and a commodity boom has helped the numbers. But if averages meant anything, Africa would be a good-news story these days.
Not least, because Africans care about democracy. They know tyranny too well to be tempted by the so-called new authoritarianism.
We’ve heard much — what with the Russian incursion into Georgia and China’s Olympics — of authoritarianism resurgent. It sure doesn’t look that way from Africa.
In fact, I don’t buy the new authoritarianism, any more than I buy a new cold war. Technology-driven opening, interconnection and sociability are the fundamental currents of our age.
But a new cold war has a ring, as does agonizing Africa. So the Africa debate is stuck with Darfur, AIDS, hunger, disease, violence. An alternative view would be that Africa is going to be the big success story of the next half-century. Just watch its agriculture, which is about to boom.
As it happened, the e-mail was followed by one from Dexter Filkins, my New York Times colleague whose brilliant book on Iraq, “The Forever War,” will be published next month. Filkins had just arrived back in Baghdad after a long break.
“It’s extraordinary,” Filkins wrote, “a changed world. Not recognizable. I just went for a run in the park in front of the house, the dead, dying place that you probably remember. At sundown, there were no less than 3,000 Iraqis walking around.”
I must have been distracted because I’ve not clocked that startling image of hope in all the words devoted to whether a “surge” in American troops and shift in their strategy brought decisive change over the past year.
But then the American Iraq debate has never really been about Iraqis. Most people with a strong opinion about the place never bothered to take a look at it.
After all, seeing Iraq might raise too many questions or even provoke the thought that velvet ends to murderous despotism are the exception rather than the rule.
Yes, I remember that park. On my first Iraq visit in 2003, a kid smiled at me. By 2006, all smiles had vanished. In between, I’d watched the United States military spend a lot of money landscaping the park. Only for it to become a “dead, dying place” that was a monument, like much else in Iraq, to the bungled American effort.
Now, it seems, the tide has turned, at least enough for Iraqi families to meander down the Tigris. That’s cause for — unequivocal — celebration.
While I was in Ghana, I read a paper called The Daily Graphic. One day, it had two ads on successive pages, the first about broadband Internet becoming available in the central city of Sunyani from a company called Care 4U, the second about the “high incidence of open defecation in Ghana.”
“Most affordable! Feel the speed!” said the first ad. The second, from a Ghana sanitation monitoring agency, estimated that “more than four million people in Ghana defecate in the bush, open drains, water bodies, or fields” and suggested means to stop the practice.
Two images of an African nation — modernizing or primitive: I know which comforts the continent’s stubborn stereotypes. Africa Ascendant is not yet a slogan that sells. It will be.
And, oh, by the way, the cold war’s over, dead, buried and unlamented. Europe is free, and Georgia will be part of it.
Blog: www.iht.com/passages
August 25, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Out of Africa
By ROGER COHEN
ELMINA, Ghana
In the castle here, slaves force-marched from the African interior were held in dungeons until their passage through the “Door of No Return” onto the ships that would carry them to the New World.
For centuries, the trade continued, overseen by pious European men of commerce, who prayed to their consoling God as they trafficked in black serfs for whom the Americas held no promise, but servitude.
I walked through Elmina with a handful of tourists. A guide made neither too much nor too little of the construction by the Dutch of a church above the slave depots. He said he did not want to reopen old wounds, merely safeguard memory.
It was not easy to tie this remote fort and other slave-trading centers along the coast, departure points for millions of enslaved Africans, to the plantations of Louisiana or to America’s “original sin,” as Barack Obama has put it, of slavery.
Yet the link must be made. More American kids should be wrested from their computer screens and ushered at an impressionable age to this faraway shore, where they might gaze through that one-way exit at a heaving sea.
They might then better understand acts and their consequences, not least a bloody civil war; they might better see the world’s interconnectedness; and they might better grasp the distance between words and deeds, as in how far the founding fathers were in 1787 from securing “the blessings of liberty” for one and all.
Spreading those blessings took struggle: that civil war, court fights, civil disobedience. No wonder then that, around the world, the first question about the U.S. election is always: “Is America really ready to elect a black man?”
That blunt inquiry, which I’ve heard from Indonesia to Latin America, is a reminder on the eve of the Democratic Party’s convention in Denver of the historic nature of the Obama candidacy.
But the question also suggests the barriers, spoken and unspoken, that he and his running mate, Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, must still overcome to reach the, so-named, White House.
It’s been a long campaign already. We’ve seen Obama at the glittering top of his game, we’ve seen how introspective remoteness can dull that electricity. We know the main Republican lines of attack against him: untested, aloof, radical and, yes, different.
That’s politics. It’s about winning and damn the means. Power, as an Italian observed, wears out those who do not have it. But none of the above can obscure how this campaign’s moments of upliftment have come from Obama.
Often those moments have emerged from his experience of race even as he has sought to downplay it. It was he who said, in a Father’s Day speech noting that more than half of black children live in single-parent households, that “what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child, it’s the courage to raise one.”
It was he who said he had chosen to run “because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together — unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes.”
And it has been Obama who, since his speech at the last Democratic convention, has painted the starkest picture of an America polarized by the underperforming schools and health care of a rich-takes-all culture at odds with the country’s founding promise to “promote the general welfare.”
Contrary to all the talk of radicalism, he has repeatedly identified the center as the place to tackle these ills.
Race, in other words, as lived by Obama, is a means to talk about reconciliation: of America with its past, of America with its ideals, and of America with the world. All three are necessary after the Bush years. Obama should keep saying so. Race hushed is race as quiet poison for him.
There’s a plaque at Elmina which reads in part: “In everlasting memory of the anguish of our ancestors/ May those who died rest in peace/ May those who return find their roots/ May humanity never again perpetrate/ Such injustice against humanity.”
Amen.
Obama returned to a different corner of this continent to find his roots, pursue a lost father and build his identity. That took courage, as it has taken courage to rise above politics as usual to summon the “better angels” of a divided, debt-ridden America at war.
When I’m asked that question — “Is America really ready to elect a black man?” — I say yes. That readiness exists in this close election of uncertain outcome. Elmina was built in 1482. Over a half-millennium attitudes do change, not least in a land hard-wired since 1787 to perfectibility and hope.
Blog: www.iht.com/passages
Op-Ed Columnist
Out of Africa
By ROGER COHEN
ELMINA, Ghana
In the castle here, slaves force-marched from the African interior were held in dungeons until their passage through the “Door of No Return” onto the ships that would carry them to the New World.
For centuries, the trade continued, overseen by pious European men of commerce, who prayed to their consoling God as they trafficked in black serfs for whom the Americas held no promise, but servitude.
I walked through Elmina with a handful of tourists. A guide made neither too much nor too little of the construction by the Dutch of a church above the slave depots. He said he did not want to reopen old wounds, merely safeguard memory.
It was not easy to tie this remote fort and other slave-trading centers along the coast, departure points for millions of enslaved Africans, to the plantations of Louisiana or to America’s “original sin,” as Barack Obama has put it, of slavery.
Yet the link must be made. More American kids should be wrested from their computer screens and ushered at an impressionable age to this faraway shore, where they might gaze through that one-way exit at a heaving sea.
They might then better understand acts and their consequences, not least a bloody civil war; they might better see the world’s interconnectedness; and they might better grasp the distance between words and deeds, as in how far the founding fathers were in 1787 from securing “the blessings of liberty” for one and all.
Spreading those blessings took struggle: that civil war, court fights, civil disobedience. No wonder then that, around the world, the first question about the U.S. election is always: “Is America really ready to elect a black man?”
That blunt inquiry, which I’ve heard from Indonesia to Latin America, is a reminder on the eve of the Democratic Party’s convention in Denver of the historic nature of the Obama candidacy.
But the question also suggests the barriers, spoken and unspoken, that he and his running mate, Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, must still overcome to reach the, so-named, White House.
It’s been a long campaign already. We’ve seen Obama at the glittering top of his game, we’ve seen how introspective remoteness can dull that electricity. We know the main Republican lines of attack against him: untested, aloof, radical and, yes, different.
That’s politics. It’s about winning and damn the means. Power, as an Italian observed, wears out those who do not have it. But none of the above can obscure how this campaign’s moments of upliftment have come from Obama.
Often those moments have emerged from his experience of race even as he has sought to downplay it. It was he who said, in a Father’s Day speech noting that more than half of black children live in single-parent households, that “what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child, it’s the courage to raise one.”
It was he who said he had chosen to run “because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together — unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes.”
And it has been Obama who, since his speech at the last Democratic convention, has painted the starkest picture of an America polarized by the underperforming schools and health care of a rich-takes-all culture at odds with the country’s founding promise to “promote the general welfare.”
Contrary to all the talk of radicalism, he has repeatedly identified the center as the place to tackle these ills.
Race, in other words, as lived by Obama, is a means to talk about reconciliation: of America with its past, of America with its ideals, and of America with the world. All three are necessary after the Bush years. Obama should keep saying so. Race hushed is race as quiet poison for him.
There’s a plaque at Elmina which reads in part: “In everlasting memory of the anguish of our ancestors/ May those who died rest in peace/ May those who return find their roots/ May humanity never again perpetrate/ Such injustice against humanity.”
Amen.
Obama returned to a different corner of this continent to find his roots, pursue a lost father and build his identity. That took courage, as it has taken courage to rise above politics as usual to summon the “better angels” of a divided, debt-ridden America at war.
When I’m asked that question — “Is America really ready to elect a black man?” — I say yes. That readiness exists in this close election of uncertain outcome. Elmina was built in 1482. Over a half-millennium attitudes do change, not least in a land hard-wired since 1787 to perfectibility and hope.
Blog: www.iht.com/passages
August 27, 2008
Zimbabwe Parliament Opens to Jeers and Arrests
By CELIA W. DUGGER and ALAN COWELL
JOHANNESBURG — President Robert Mugabe opened Zimbabwe’s Parliament on Tuesday to rambunctious heckling from opposition lawmakers, just hours after the police arrested three more of them, bringing the total to five.
Mr. Mugabe, who has ruled the country for 28 increasingly repressive years, declared that he had “every expectation” of striking a power-sharing deal with the opposition, but his government seemed to be further embittering its rivals and complicating prospects for a settlement by locking them up.
The police had sought to arrest eight members of Parliament before they could vote Monday for the powerful position of speaker of the lower house, opposition officials said, but backed off when legislators summoned reporters. The opposition’s candidate for speaker won on Monday by a margin of 12 votes. For the first time since the country became independent in 1980, the opposition gained a majority in Parliament.
But between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. on Tuesday, legislators wanted by the police heard a knock on the doors of their hotel rooms. Their lawyer, Alec Muchadehama, who said he feared for their lives, counseled them not to let anyone in until he arrived. Later Tuesday morning, they were taken into custody. More than 100 opposition supporters have been killed since Zimbabwe’s disputed elections in March, human rights groups say.
The government said in The Herald, the state-run newspaper, that the legislators were being sought on charges including rape, kidnapping and incitement of political violence.
The opposition countered that the real motive for the arrests was to try to regain control of Parliament. The governing party, ZANU-PF, has 99 seats, the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, has 100, and 10 additional seats are held by another opposition faction. “It looks like they’re slowly cutting us down,” said Thabitha Khumalo, deputy spokeswoman for the Movement for Democratic Change.
The party challenged Mr. Mugabe’s right to rule after a violent electoral season. Its members tried to shout him down in the lower house on Tuesday, chanting, “ZANU is rotten.”
“People should fear there will be more violence, more unlawful arrests, more disappearances, more harassment,” Mr. Muchadehama said. “That is where we are heading.”
The opposition leaders charged with wrongdoing will face a justice system in which independence is compromised, civic groups said. The Herald reported Monday that the government was defending the decision by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe to give judges in the impoverished country new vehicles, generators, television sets and satellite dishes. Gideon Gono, the bank governor, is part of Mr. Mugabe’s inner circle of advisers.
“The central bank is thoroughly commended for its very good efforts, which are aimed at not only improving our judges’ well-being, but also at ensuring that members of the judiciary devote more of their time and attention to their work than to their welfare,” David Mangota, secretary for justice, legal and parliamentary affairs, told the newspaper.
Zimbabwe’s long political crisis came to a head with presidential elections in March and a runoff in June. The opposition contended that it had won outright in the first vote, but Mr. Mugabe’s government insisted that a runoff was needed. The Movement for Democratic Change boycotted it, protesting violence against its supporters. Since then, the two sides have held inconclusive power-sharing talks.
Mr. Mugabe, 84, told Parliament on Tuesday, “Landmark agreements have been concluded with every expectation that everyone will sign up.”
The opposition has a majority in the lower house, but Mr. Mugabe’s party controls the Senate, which can block legislation approved by the lower house.
Celia W. Dugger reported from Johannesburg, and Alan Cowell from Paris.
Zimbabwe Parliament Opens to Jeers and Arrests
By CELIA W. DUGGER and ALAN COWELL
JOHANNESBURG — President Robert Mugabe opened Zimbabwe’s Parliament on Tuesday to rambunctious heckling from opposition lawmakers, just hours after the police arrested three more of them, bringing the total to five.
Mr. Mugabe, who has ruled the country for 28 increasingly repressive years, declared that he had “every expectation” of striking a power-sharing deal with the opposition, but his government seemed to be further embittering its rivals and complicating prospects for a settlement by locking them up.
The police had sought to arrest eight members of Parliament before they could vote Monday for the powerful position of speaker of the lower house, opposition officials said, but backed off when legislators summoned reporters. The opposition’s candidate for speaker won on Monday by a margin of 12 votes. For the first time since the country became independent in 1980, the opposition gained a majority in Parliament.
But between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. on Tuesday, legislators wanted by the police heard a knock on the doors of their hotel rooms. Their lawyer, Alec Muchadehama, who said he feared for their lives, counseled them not to let anyone in until he arrived. Later Tuesday morning, they were taken into custody. More than 100 opposition supporters have been killed since Zimbabwe’s disputed elections in March, human rights groups say.
The government said in The Herald, the state-run newspaper, that the legislators were being sought on charges including rape, kidnapping and incitement of political violence.
The opposition countered that the real motive for the arrests was to try to regain control of Parliament. The governing party, ZANU-PF, has 99 seats, the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, has 100, and 10 additional seats are held by another opposition faction. “It looks like they’re slowly cutting us down,” said Thabitha Khumalo, deputy spokeswoman for the Movement for Democratic Change.
The party challenged Mr. Mugabe’s right to rule after a violent electoral season. Its members tried to shout him down in the lower house on Tuesday, chanting, “ZANU is rotten.”
“People should fear there will be more violence, more unlawful arrests, more disappearances, more harassment,” Mr. Muchadehama said. “That is where we are heading.”
The opposition leaders charged with wrongdoing will face a justice system in which independence is compromised, civic groups said. The Herald reported Monday that the government was defending the decision by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe to give judges in the impoverished country new vehicles, generators, television sets and satellite dishes. Gideon Gono, the bank governor, is part of Mr. Mugabe’s inner circle of advisers.
“The central bank is thoroughly commended for its very good efforts, which are aimed at not only improving our judges’ well-being, but also at ensuring that members of the judiciary devote more of their time and attention to their work than to their welfare,” David Mangota, secretary for justice, legal and parliamentary affairs, told the newspaper.
Zimbabwe’s long political crisis came to a head with presidential elections in March and a runoff in June. The opposition contended that it had won outright in the first vote, but Mr. Mugabe’s government insisted that a runoff was needed. The Movement for Democratic Change boycotted it, protesting violence against its supporters. Since then, the two sides have held inconclusive power-sharing talks.
Mr. Mugabe, 84, told Parliament on Tuesday, “Landmark agreements have been concluded with every expectation that everyone will sign up.”
The opposition has a majority in the lower house, but Mr. Mugabe’s party controls the Senate, which can block legislation approved by the lower house.
Celia W. Dugger reported from Johannesburg, and Alan Cowell from Paris.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/world ... ?th&emc=th
photo:
A 17-year-old H.I.V. patient in a rural Zimbabwe hospital. The suspension of aid operations deprived more than a million people of assistance, aid donors said.
By CELIA W. DUGGER
Published: August 29, 2008
August 30, 2008
Zimbabwe Lifts Ban on Aid Groups, but Its Effects Linger
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — Zimbabwe lifted an almost three-month-old ban on the work of aid groups on Friday. The government had imposed the ban because it claimed some of the groups had been backing the opposition during a bitter election season in which President Robert Mugabe was fighting for his political survival.
The suspension of the groups’ field operations deprived more than a million orphans, schoolchildren, the elderly and other impoverished Zimbabweans of food and other basic assistance, according to the nations that donated the aid.
The effects of the aid restrictions will linger. The United Nations World Food Program had planned to feed 1.7 million Zimbabweans next month, but was unable to deploy its partners on the ground, the suspended aid groups, to identify and register the needy this month.
“We will not be able to reach most of those 1.7 million people,” said Richard Lee, a spokesman for the World Food Program. “We will try to reach as many as possible, but we haven’t even begun to do the essential preparatory work.”
The groups have long said they provide aid based solely on need, not politics. But Zimbabwe’s minister of information, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, on Friday reiterated the government’s charge that some of the international aid groups had backed the opposition against Mr. Mugabe, providing food only to opposition supporters and funneling aid money into the coffers of the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change.
“During the elections they were monsters,” he said. But now, he added, “since there are no elections, we hope they will now go back to their core business.”
“I hope some have now repented,” he said.
The aid groups have challenged the government to prove its case. Asked which nongovernmental organizations had used food for political purposes, Mr. Ndlovu declined Friday to name any. “They know themselves,” he said.
The United States, which last year provided $171 million in food aid to Zimbabwe, said that it was Mr. Mugabe’s government that used food for political ends. This week, the American ambassador to Zimbabwe, James D. McGee, wrote to the social welfare minister, Nicholas Goche, demanding that the United States government be reimbursed for the theft of 20 metric tons of American-donated food. The aid had been meant for schoolchildren, but was instead confiscated by the authorities and handed out at a ruling party political rally.
In the letter, Mr. McGee also said that 170,000 schoolchildren had been denied food donated by the United States because of the ban, while 455,000 people had missed out on water, sanitation and public health programs. Mr. McGee said the government must immediately lift the restrictions and stop harassing aid workers.
“However, if you choose not to act, we will hold you personally responsible for the inhumane suffering caused by this ban,” Mr. McGee wrote.
Mr. McGee said in an interview Friday that the government’s restrictions on aid groups were a crime against Zimbabwe’s people. “This is purely politically motivated,” he said. “To talk about NGOs being politicized to get support for the opposition, it’s garbage.”
Aid officials had expected the government to end the ban after the June 27 presidential runoff, which was widely denounced as a sham. The opposition candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, dropped out days before it was held, citing state-sponsored violence against his supporters. Zimbabwean political analysts said they believed that the government instituted the ban to clear the rural areas of aid workers who could have witnessed the worst of the state-sponsored violence against the opposition.
But the ban dragged on for two more months after the runoff, prompting a plea from Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the United Nations, for restrictions to be lifted to avert what he called “a catastrophic humanitarian crisis.”
There was much speculation about why the government kept the ban in place for so long. Aid groups have been able to creep back to work in some parts of the country, but most of their field work remained suspended.
Some aid officials suspected that the aid restrictions had become a bargaining chip in power-sharing negotiations between Mr. Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF, in office since 1980, and the opposition. Mr. Tsvangirai, has repeatedly demanded that restrictions on aid be lifted. His party wanted help for its supporters displaced by the political violence.
Mr. Mugabe’s deep suspicion of the United States and Britain, both harshly critical of him, may also have rubbed off on aid groups financed by the two nations and made him more resistant to lifting the restrictions.
What is indisputable is the suffering of Zimbabwe’s people. Unemployment stands at more than 80 percent. Inflation is running at more than 11 million percent. And the United Nations forecasts that 45 percent of Zimbabwe’s population, some 5 million people, will need food aid by the hungry season, from January to March.
Already, the United Nations has collected anecdotal accounts of people’s desperate strategies for survival. Beyond eating fewer meals, they are foraging for wild seeds and fruits. They are selling off their belongings — cows, bicycles, pots and pans — for money to buy scarce and ever more expensive food.
And their coping abilities are stretched thin, especially since this is the sixth year in which millions of them have needed food aid in a country that used to be southern Africa’s bread basket.
“We’re hearing these anecdotes widely and early in the year, and that indicates the situation in many areas is already serious,” said Mr. Lee of the World Food Program.
Economists say the government’s policies are to blame, while the government claims that Western sanctions on the country’s elite have ravaged the economy.
photo:
A 17-year-old H.I.V. patient in a rural Zimbabwe hospital. The suspension of aid operations deprived more than a million people of assistance, aid donors said.
By CELIA W. DUGGER
Published: August 29, 2008
August 30, 2008
Zimbabwe Lifts Ban on Aid Groups, but Its Effects Linger
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — Zimbabwe lifted an almost three-month-old ban on the work of aid groups on Friday. The government had imposed the ban because it claimed some of the groups had been backing the opposition during a bitter election season in which President Robert Mugabe was fighting for his political survival.
The suspension of the groups’ field operations deprived more than a million orphans, schoolchildren, the elderly and other impoverished Zimbabweans of food and other basic assistance, according to the nations that donated the aid.
The effects of the aid restrictions will linger. The United Nations World Food Program had planned to feed 1.7 million Zimbabweans next month, but was unable to deploy its partners on the ground, the suspended aid groups, to identify and register the needy this month.
“We will not be able to reach most of those 1.7 million people,” said Richard Lee, a spokesman for the World Food Program. “We will try to reach as many as possible, but we haven’t even begun to do the essential preparatory work.”
The groups have long said they provide aid based solely on need, not politics. But Zimbabwe’s minister of information, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, on Friday reiterated the government’s charge that some of the international aid groups had backed the opposition against Mr. Mugabe, providing food only to opposition supporters and funneling aid money into the coffers of the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change.
“During the elections they were monsters,” he said. But now, he added, “since there are no elections, we hope they will now go back to their core business.”
“I hope some have now repented,” he said.
The aid groups have challenged the government to prove its case. Asked which nongovernmental organizations had used food for political purposes, Mr. Ndlovu declined Friday to name any. “They know themselves,” he said.
The United States, which last year provided $171 million in food aid to Zimbabwe, said that it was Mr. Mugabe’s government that used food for political ends. This week, the American ambassador to Zimbabwe, James D. McGee, wrote to the social welfare minister, Nicholas Goche, demanding that the United States government be reimbursed for the theft of 20 metric tons of American-donated food. The aid had been meant for schoolchildren, but was instead confiscated by the authorities and handed out at a ruling party political rally.
In the letter, Mr. McGee also said that 170,000 schoolchildren had been denied food donated by the United States because of the ban, while 455,000 people had missed out on water, sanitation and public health programs. Mr. McGee said the government must immediately lift the restrictions and stop harassing aid workers.
“However, if you choose not to act, we will hold you personally responsible for the inhumane suffering caused by this ban,” Mr. McGee wrote.
Mr. McGee said in an interview Friday that the government’s restrictions on aid groups were a crime against Zimbabwe’s people. “This is purely politically motivated,” he said. “To talk about NGOs being politicized to get support for the opposition, it’s garbage.”
Aid officials had expected the government to end the ban after the June 27 presidential runoff, which was widely denounced as a sham. The opposition candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, dropped out days before it was held, citing state-sponsored violence against his supporters. Zimbabwean political analysts said they believed that the government instituted the ban to clear the rural areas of aid workers who could have witnessed the worst of the state-sponsored violence against the opposition.
But the ban dragged on for two more months after the runoff, prompting a plea from Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the United Nations, for restrictions to be lifted to avert what he called “a catastrophic humanitarian crisis.”
There was much speculation about why the government kept the ban in place for so long. Aid groups have been able to creep back to work in some parts of the country, but most of their field work remained suspended.
Some aid officials suspected that the aid restrictions had become a bargaining chip in power-sharing negotiations between Mr. Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF, in office since 1980, and the opposition. Mr. Tsvangirai, has repeatedly demanded that restrictions on aid be lifted. His party wanted help for its supporters displaced by the political violence.
Mr. Mugabe’s deep suspicion of the United States and Britain, both harshly critical of him, may also have rubbed off on aid groups financed by the two nations and made him more resistant to lifting the restrictions.
What is indisputable is the suffering of Zimbabwe’s people. Unemployment stands at more than 80 percent. Inflation is running at more than 11 million percent. And the United Nations forecasts that 45 percent of Zimbabwe’s population, some 5 million people, will need food aid by the hungry season, from January to March.
Already, the United Nations has collected anecdotal accounts of people’s desperate strategies for survival. Beyond eating fewer meals, they are foraging for wild seeds and fruits. They are selling off their belongings — cows, bicycles, pots and pans — for money to buy scarce and ever more expensive food.
And their coping abilities are stretched thin, especially since this is the sixth year in which millions of them have needed food aid in a country that used to be southern Africa’s bread basket.
“We’re hearing these anecdotes widely and early in the year, and that indicates the situation in many areas is already serious,” said Mr. Lee of the World Food Program.
Economists say the government’s policies are to blame, while the government claims that Western sanctions on the country’s elite have ravaged the economy.
August 31, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Tortured, but Not Silenced
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
An early test of the next president’s moral courage will come as he decides how to engage two Sudanese people named Bashir.
One is President Omar al-Bashir, who faces indictment for genocide by the International Criminal Court. The other is Dr. Halima Bashir, a young Darfuri woman whom the Sudanese authorities have tried to silence by beatings and gang-rape.
In 10 days, Halima’s extraordinary memoir will be published in the United States, at considerable risk to herself. She writes in “Tears of the Desert” of growing up in a placid village in rural Darfur, of her wonder at seeing white people for the first time, of her brilliant performance in school.
Eventually Halima became a doctor, just as the genocide against black African tribes like her own began in 2003. Halima soon found herself treating heartbreaking cases, like that of a 6-year-old boy who suffered horrendous burns when the state-sponsored janjaweed militia threw him into a burning hut.
One day she gave an interview in which she delicately hinted that the Darfur reality was more complicated than the Sudanese government version. The authorities detained her, threatened her, warned her to keep silent and transferred her to a remote clinic where there were no journalists around to interview her.
Then the janjaweed attacked a girls’ school near Halima’s new clinic and raped dozens of the girls, aged 7 to 13. The first patient Halima tended to was 8 years old. Her face was bashed in and her insides torn apart. The girl was emitting a haunting sound: “a keening, empty wail kept coming from somewhere deep within her throat — over and over again,” she recalls in the book.
Sudan’s government dispatches rapists the way other governments dispatch the police, the better to terrorize black African tribes and break their spirit. What sometimes isn’t noted is that many young Darfuri girls undergo an extreme form of genital cutting called infibulation, in which the vagina is stitched closed until marriage; that makes such rapes of schoolgirls particularly violent and bloody, increasing the risk of AIDS transmission.
Halima found herself treating the girls with tears streaming down her own face. All she had to offer the girls for their pain was half a pill each of acetaminophen: “At no stage in my years of study had I been taught how to deal with 8-year-old victims of gang rape in a rural clinic without enough sutures to go around.”
Soon afterward, two United Nations officials showed up at the clinic to gather information about the attack. Halima told them the truth.
A few days later, the secret police kidnapped her. “You speak to the foreigners!” one man screamed at her. They told her that she had talked of rape but knew nothing about it — yet. For days they beat her, gang-raped her, cut her with knives, burned her with cigarettes, mocked her with racial epithets. One told her, “Now you know what rape is, you black dog.”
Upon her release, a shattered Halima fled back to her native village, but it was soon attacked and burned — and her beloved father killed. Halima still doesn’t know what happened to her mother or brothers. Eventually she made her way to Britain, where she is seeking asylum, and even there Sudanese agents are trying to track her whereabouts.
It is difficult to verify some of Halima’s story, and she has modified her own name and some place names to protect family members from retribution. But what can be checked out does check out and suggests no exaggeration.
For example, Halima says in her book that she does not know how many girls were raped at the school but that 40 were brought to the clinic. I’ve found independent accounts of the same attack that describe as many as 110 girls and teachers raped and dozens more kidnapped; the United Nations also has photos of the school after the attack.
I asked Halima if she regrets telling the U.N. officials about the rape of the schoolgirls, considering what it cost her. She sighed and said no.
“What happened to me happened to so many other Darfur women,” she said. “If I didn’t tell, all the other people don’t get the chance — and I have the chance. I am a well-educated woman, so I can speak up and send a message to the world.”
Halima’s bravery contrasts with the world’s fecklessness and failures on Darfur. She is applying for a travel document and a visa to come to the United States to talk about her book, but it seems unlikely that they will arrive in time for its release. I hope President Bush accelerates the process and invites her to the White House, to show the world which of the two Bashirs America stands behind.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.
Op-Ed Columnist
Tortured, but Not Silenced
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
An early test of the next president’s moral courage will come as he decides how to engage two Sudanese people named Bashir.
One is President Omar al-Bashir, who faces indictment for genocide by the International Criminal Court. The other is Dr. Halima Bashir, a young Darfuri woman whom the Sudanese authorities have tried to silence by beatings and gang-rape.
In 10 days, Halima’s extraordinary memoir will be published in the United States, at considerable risk to herself. She writes in “Tears of the Desert” of growing up in a placid village in rural Darfur, of her wonder at seeing white people for the first time, of her brilliant performance in school.
Eventually Halima became a doctor, just as the genocide against black African tribes like her own began in 2003. Halima soon found herself treating heartbreaking cases, like that of a 6-year-old boy who suffered horrendous burns when the state-sponsored janjaweed militia threw him into a burning hut.
One day she gave an interview in which she delicately hinted that the Darfur reality was more complicated than the Sudanese government version. The authorities detained her, threatened her, warned her to keep silent and transferred her to a remote clinic where there were no journalists around to interview her.
Then the janjaweed attacked a girls’ school near Halima’s new clinic and raped dozens of the girls, aged 7 to 13. The first patient Halima tended to was 8 years old. Her face was bashed in and her insides torn apart. The girl was emitting a haunting sound: “a keening, empty wail kept coming from somewhere deep within her throat — over and over again,” she recalls in the book.
Sudan’s government dispatches rapists the way other governments dispatch the police, the better to terrorize black African tribes and break their spirit. What sometimes isn’t noted is that many young Darfuri girls undergo an extreme form of genital cutting called infibulation, in which the vagina is stitched closed until marriage; that makes such rapes of schoolgirls particularly violent and bloody, increasing the risk of AIDS transmission.
Halima found herself treating the girls with tears streaming down her own face. All she had to offer the girls for their pain was half a pill each of acetaminophen: “At no stage in my years of study had I been taught how to deal with 8-year-old victims of gang rape in a rural clinic without enough sutures to go around.”
Soon afterward, two United Nations officials showed up at the clinic to gather information about the attack. Halima told them the truth.
A few days later, the secret police kidnapped her. “You speak to the foreigners!” one man screamed at her. They told her that she had talked of rape but knew nothing about it — yet. For days they beat her, gang-raped her, cut her with knives, burned her with cigarettes, mocked her with racial epithets. One told her, “Now you know what rape is, you black dog.”
Upon her release, a shattered Halima fled back to her native village, but it was soon attacked and burned — and her beloved father killed. Halima still doesn’t know what happened to her mother or brothers. Eventually she made her way to Britain, where she is seeking asylum, and even there Sudanese agents are trying to track her whereabouts.
It is difficult to verify some of Halima’s story, and she has modified her own name and some place names to protect family members from retribution. But what can be checked out does check out and suggests no exaggeration.
For example, Halima says in her book that she does not know how many girls were raped at the school but that 40 were brought to the clinic. I’ve found independent accounts of the same attack that describe as many as 110 girls and teachers raped and dozens more kidnapped; the United Nations also has photos of the school after the attack.
I asked Halima if she regrets telling the U.N. officials about the rape of the schoolgirls, considering what it cost her. She sighed and said no.
“What happened to me happened to so many other Darfur women,” she said. “If I didn’t tell, all the other people don’t get the chance — and I have the chance. I am a well-educated woman, so I can speak up and send a message to the world.”
Halima’s bravery contrasts with the world’s fecklessness and failures on Darfur. She is applying for a travel document and a visa to come to the United States to talk about her book, but it seems unlikely that they will arrive in time for its release. I hope President Bush accelerates the process and invites her to the White House, to show the world which of the two Bashirs America stands behind.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.
September 5, 2008
Angolans Heading to Polls for First Vote in 16 Years
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — More than eight million people — nearly half of the population — have registered to vote in war-ravaged Angola, a country with an abundance of oil, diamonds and grinding poverty that is holding its first election in 16 years on Friday.
The last election, in 1992, degenerated into another decade of the civil war that uprooted millions of Angolans. In contrast, Friday’s legislative vote follows six years of peace and is expected to go fairly smoothly.
Jardo Muekalia, representative for electoral issues in the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, or Unita, the rebel movement turned opposition party, said the campaign had been an imperfect but positive development in Angola’s fratricidal history.
“Democracy is a process, not a destination, and this is part of that process,” Mr. Muekalia said.
Western diplomats and election observers are heralding Friday’s vote as a potentially important step toward democracy. But civic and human rights groups, as well as opposition officials, contend that the governing party, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, known as the MPLA, has compromised the fairness of the election by abusing its control of state resources, especially with propaganda on the national radio and television networks.
The real test of the party’s commitment to democracy is likely to come next year, when Angola is expected to elect a president, who is the dominant power center in the government. José Eduardo dos Santos, who has held the office for 29 years, is expected to run again.
Unlike the violent election season in nearby Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe was fighting for his political survival after 28 years in power, Mr. dos Santos’s public remarks during the campaign display his confidence that his party will increase its majority in Parliament this year.
With Angola’s economy booming, its leadership’s desire for greater international legitimacy probably influenced the decision to go ahead with the long-delayed balloting and to welcome Western election observers who were shunned in Zimbabwe, analysts said. The party is campaigning on a platform of restoring peace and rebuilding the shattered country. “We have increased the creation of jobs and economic growth,” said Manuel Fragata de Morais, information secretary for the party in Luanda, the capital. “And we are working very hard at a just partition of income.”
Angola is pumping almost two million barrels of oil a day, rivaling Nigeria as Africa’s largest producer. China and the United States are its biggest oil customers. It is the world’s fourth largest producer of diamonds. But its bad reputation is hard to shake.
Angola’s elite has long been criticized for enriching itself at the expense of the country’s impoverished citizens, a perception reflected in Angola’s consistent ranking among the world’s most corrupt nations. And after four decades of conflict — first against the colonial power, Portugal, followed by civil war — malnutrition, poverty and illiteracy are still common.
“These elections are very important for Angola because they want international credibility,” said Francisco Ribeiro Telles, Portugal’s ambassador to Angola, who called Friday’s vote a turning point for the country. “They want to be legitimized by the popular vote. Angola is thinking that they can play in the region an important role in economic and political fields.”
And, indeed, Angola seems to be getting some recognition. The American ambassador to Angola, Dan Mozena, issued a statement last week thanking the government for inviting the United States to observe its election, which he said was expected to be “peaceful and credible.”
Luisa Morgantini, who leads the European Union’s mission of 120 election observers, offered a generally positive assessment. “There is room for many political parties to run for election,” she said. “They can make their own propaganda freely and their own campaigns.”
Researchers and economists are also giving the government some credit for reducing inflation in one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, and for rebuilding roads and removing land mines so that more than three million people displaced by war could go home. In recent years, China has provided billions of dollars in concessionary, oil-backed loans that have fueled a construction boom in schools, hospitals, roads, bridges and other infrastructure.
“They want to be treated as a stable, high-growth, emerging economy, not as a nasty, oil-rich place that steals large sums of money and represses its people,” said J. Stephen Morrison, director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Some critics of the government worry that it is getting too much credit. Human Rights Watch issued a report last month saying that the intimidation of opposition parties and journalists and sporadic assaults by MPLA supporters in rural areas against Unita members, among other factors, threatened prospects for a free and fair vote.
And Fernando Macedo, president of the Association for Justice, Peace and Democracy, an Angolan civic group, said he worried that Western countries cared more about whether Angola was stable enough to keep the oil flowing than whether it became a real democracy, which he said required much more than an uneventful day of voting.
The governing party has violated laws requiring equal access to the state media, which control what information people in rural areas receive, he said. He said he had seen bicycles, televisions and radios handed out at MPLA political rallies shown on television. The election observers must witness the problems as well as the progress, he said.
“There are people here who want democracy, the rule of law and a government that is accountable to the people,” he said.
Angolans Heading to Polls for First Vote in 16 Years
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — More than eight million people — nearly half of the population — have registered to vote in war-ravaged Angola, a country with an abundance of oil, diamonds and grinding poverty that is holding its first election in 16 years on Friday.
The last election, in 1992, degenerated into another decade of the civil war that uprooted millions of Angolans. In contrast, Friday’s legislative vote follows six years of peace and is expected to go fairly smoothly.
Jardo Muekalia, representative for electoral issues in the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, or Unita, the rebel movement turned opposition party, said the campaign had been an imperfect but positive development in Angola’s fratricidal history.
“Democracy is a process, not a destination, and this is part of that process,” Mr. Muekalia said.
Western diplomats and election observers are heralding Friday’s vote as a potentially important step toward democracy. But civic and human rights groups, as well as opposition officials, contend that the governing party, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, known as the MPLA, has compromised the fairness of the election by abusing its control of state resources, especially with propaganda on the national radio and television networks.
The real test of the party’s commitment to democracy is likely to come next year, when Angola is expected to elect a president, who is the dominant power center in the government. José Eduardo dos Santos, who has held the office for 29 years, is expected to run again.
Unlike the violent election season in nearby Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe was fighting for his political survival after 28 years in power, Mr. dos Santos’s public remarks during the campaign display his confidence that his party will increase its majority in Parliament this year.
With Angola’s economy booming, its leadership’s desire for greater international legitimacy probably influenced the decision to go ahead with the long-delayed balloting and to welcome Western election observers who were shunned in Zimbabwe, analysts said. The party is campaigning on a platform of restoring peace and rebuilding the shattered country. “We have increased the creation of jobs and economic growth,” said Manuel Fragata de Morais, information secretary for the party in Luanda, the capital. “And we are working very hard at a just partition of income.”
Angola is pumping almost two million barrels of oil a day, rivaling Nigeria as Africa’s largest producer. China and the United States are its biggest oil customers. It is the world’s fourth largest producer of diamonds. But its bad reputation is hard to shake.
Angola’s elite has long been criticized for enriching itself at the expense of the country’s impoverished citizens, a perception reflected in Angola’s consistent ranking among the world’s most corrupt nations. And after four decades of conflict — first against the colonial power, Portugal, followed by civil war — malnutrition, poverty and illiteracy are still common.
“These elections are very important for Angola because they want international credibility,” said Francisco Ribeiro Telles, Portugal’s ambassador to Angola, who called Friday’s vote a turning point for the country. “They want to be legitimized by the popular vote. Angola is thinking that they can play in the region an important role in economic and political fields.”
And, indeed, Angola seems to be getting some recognition. The American ambassador to Angola, Dan Mozena, issued a statement last week thanking the government for inviting the United States to observe its election, which he said was expected to be “peaceful and credible.”
Luisa Morgantini, who leads the European Union’s mission of 120 election observers, offered a generally positive assessment. “There is room for many political parties to run for election,” she said. “They can make their own propaganda freely and their own campaigns.”
Researchers and economists are also giving the government some credit for reducing inflation in one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, and for rebuilding roads and removing land mines so that more than three million people displaced by war could go home. In recent years, China has provided billions of dollars in concessionary, oil-backed loans that have fueled a construction boom in schools, hospitals, roads, bridges and other infrastructure.
“They want to be treated as a stable, high-growth, emerging economy, not as a nasty, oil-rich place that steals large sums of money and represses its people,” said J. Stephen Morrison, director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Some critics of the government worry that it is getting too much credit. Human Rights Watch issued a report last month saying that the intimidation of opposition parties and journalists and sporadic assaults by MPLA supporters in rural areas against Unita members, among other factors, threatened prospects for a free and fair vote.
And Fernando Macedo, president of the Association for Justice, Peace and Democracy, an Angolan civic group, said he worried that Western countries cared more about whether Angola was stable enough to keep the oil flowing than whether it became a real democracy, which he said required much more than an uneventful day of voting.
The governing party has violated laws requiring equal access to the state media, which control what information people in rural areas receive, he said. He said he had seen bicycles, televisions and radios handed out at MPLA political rallies shown on television. The election observers must witness the problems as well as the progress, he said.
“There are people here who want democracy, the rule of law and a government that is accountable to the people,” he said.
Can we all just not get along?
-Rodney King
In Kenya, Some Fear That Fissures Remain
Political Deal Is Superficial, Critics Say
By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 7, 2008; A17
NAIROBI -- In Kenya these days, tourists are slowly returning to
safari camps across the Masai Mara game reserve. The economy is
hobbling back to life, and the country's once-feuding political
leaders often shake hands and exchange conciliatory words in public.
Nearly eight months after a wave of post-election violence brought
one of East Africa's most stable democracies to the brink of
collapse, it is almost as if there had been no crisis. And that is
what troubles some Kenyans the most.
"My biggest worry is that it's business as usual," said Bethuel
Kiplagat, a retired diplomat who helped form the group Concerned
Citizens for Peace during the violence. "My fear is that the deeper
causes are not being addressed."
A power-sharing deal signed in February ended the immediate crisis,
which was triggered by allegations that President Mwai Kibaki stole
the presidential election from opposition leader Raila Odinga. The
agreement created a prime minister post for Odinga and set up
commissions to investigate the election and causes of the violence,
which left at least 1,000 people dead and displaced an estimated
350,000, most of them from Kibaki's tribe, the Kikuyu.
But some observers say the compromise has played out only
superficially, as members of the political elite have returned to
petty backroom machinations at the expense of a country still
divided by the crisis.
Although urging Kenyans to forget the past, Kibaki and Odinga have
rewarded supporters with high-salary positions as ministers and
assistant ministers, resulting in a 94-member cabinet that is the
biggest and most expensive in Kenyan history. Parliament members,
the highest paid on the continent, were sworn in and soon got down
to the business of trying to resist an attempt to tax their pay of
$120,000 a year.
Meanwhile, Odinga and Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka have tussled
over protocol issues such as who should speak first and their
relative position in motorcades. A more recent spat involved who
would qualify to use a proposed VIP lane alongside Nairobi's main
thoroughfares.
"There has been a lot of childishness," said Gitau Warigi, a
political columnist with the Daily Nation newspaper. "But underneath
there are major structural problems with how the top offices are
relating to each other."
For example, Odinga was tasked with "coordinating and supervising"
government ministries. But the head of Kenya's civil service -- a
presidential appointee who effectively did the job before -- has
dismissed his authority. The two have issued competing orders, to
the confusion of government workers.
"The heart of executive power remains with the president, and it's
in the president's interest to keep things chaotic," Warigi
said. "That tells me that one side of the divide is not keen on this
arrangement lasting."
But David Murathe, a former legislator allied with Kibaki, said the
president and Odinga were sobered by the violence and have no desire
to see more fighting. Although human rights groups have accused
politicians connected to both sides of orchestrating the violence,
Murathe said Kibaki and Odinga became concerned that the situation
was beyond their control.
But Kenyans are growing restless as they await dividends from the
political settlement, Murathe said.
"At some point, there will be a revolt against them all," he
said. "They've conned everyone, I'm sorry to say. Even I did it. I
was one of them."
The discontent is especially palpable around the white-tented camps
for displaced people that still dot the rolling, green Rift Valley
where much of the violence took place. Although most of the largest
camps have been dismantled, the majority of those who lived there
have been shifted to smaller camps closer to their burned-out homes
and farms, where they are living face to face with the neighbors who
chased them away.
With the help of international donors, including the United States,
the government has provided food rations and begun handing out seeds
and tools to help people rebuild their farms, but the assistance has
not reached everyone.
"They promised they would come and build our houses, give us $100
for starting life, yet we have not gotten anything," said Josephat
Ndura, 26, who, with 200 or so other families, moved his tent to a
scrap of land near their farms in the Molo district of the Rift
Valley. "We cannot farm, because we don't have tools. And the people
who attacked, they are still around."
About 3 p.m. last Sunday, the families who would normally have been
tending to their farms were idle, sitting outside leaky tents.
Margaret Wangari, who is Kikuyu, said that not one of her old
neighbors -- who come from the Kalenjin tribe that backed Odinga and
supported the militias that chased the Kikuyu away -- has welcomed
her home. She recently spotted a man herding a calf she said was
stolen from her farm.
"There is no conversation," she said, referring to her
neighbors. "They just look at us."
Things are also uncomfortable in the Kalenjin towns along the roads
that wind through the Rift Valley. People there voted for Odinga
because they felt ignored by Kibaki's government, and many took part
in chasing away their Kikuyu neighbors, which helped Odinga get his
position as prime minister. Now, they say, they're waiting to see
some sort of reward in the form of jobs and development.
"We haven't seen any change," said Albert Kirui, a spare-parts
salesman who was sitting on the porch of the Silent Hotel in
Kericho, a trading town amid the tea farms in the valley. "You only
see a change in Nairobi."
Hundreds of young men who allegedly took part in the violence remain
in jails, Kirui added, a sore point for many of Odinga's backers,
who are pressing him to secure an amnesty deal. The attorney
general, a Kibaki appointee, is pushing for full prosecution of
those involved in the violence.
Despite the icy relations between the Kalenjin and the Kikuyu,
officials are painting a different picture of the situation. "Only a
few months back, the nation was bleeding," said Ali Dawood, who is
in charge of resettlement issues for the government. "Today, the
same people are dancing and merrymaking."
Kiplagat, the former diplomat, said that although grass-roots
efforts have begun the reconciliation process, more attention needs
to be paid to changing the ethnically based political system that
sparked the crisis. That includes adopting a new constitution,
possibly one that redraws the electoral map to break some of the
largest ethnic voting blocs and devolve power to a more local level,
he said.
Kibaki and Odinga have pledged to work on revising the constitution,
which critics say concentrates too much power in the presidency.
But Kenya's leaders must also face up to the reality of ethnic
hatreds, Kiplagat said.
"We've got to go deeper and deal with it squarely and not run away
from it," he said, adding that his group is working on a plan to
avert a crisis ahead of the next presidential election, in 2012. "I
can't tell you we shall not go back the same way. I cannot."
-Rodney King
In Kenya, Some Fear That Fissures Remain
Political Deal Is Superficial, Critics Say
By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 7, 2008; A17
NAIROBI -- In Kenya these days, tourists are slowly returning to
safari camps across the Masai Mara game reserve. The economy is
hobbling back to life, and the country's once-feuding political
leaders often shake hands and exchange conciliatory words in public.
Nearly eight months after a wave of post-election violence brought
one of East Africa's most stable democracies to the brink of
collapse, it is almost as if there had been no crisis. And that is
what troubles some Kenyans the most.
"My biggest worry is that it's business as usual," said Bethuel
Kiplagat, a retired diplomat who helped form the group Concerned
Citizens for Peace during the violence. "My fear is that the deeper
causes are not being addressed."
A power-sharing deal signed in February ended the immediate crisis,
which was triggered by allegations that President Mwai Kibaki stole
the presidential election from opposition leader Raila Odinga. The
agreement created a prime minister post for Odinga and set up
commissions to investigate the election and causes of the violence,
which left at least 1,000 people dead and displaced an estimated
350,000, most of them from Kibaki's tribe, the Kikuyu.
But some observers say the compromise has played out only
superficially, as members of the political elite have returned to
petty backroom machinations at the expense of a country still
divided by the crisis.
Although urging Kenyans to forget the past, Kibaki and Odinga have
rewarded supporters with high-salary positions as ministers and
assistant ministers, resulting in a 94-member cabinet that is the
biggest and most expensive in Kenyan history. Parliament members,
the highest paid on the continent, were sworn in and soon got down
to the business of trying to resist an attempt to tax their pay of
$120,000 a year.
Meanwhile, Odinga and Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka have tussled
over protocol issues such as who should speak first and their
relative position in motorcades. A more recent spat involved who
would qualify to use a proposed VIP lane alongside Nairobi's main
thoroughfares.
"There has been a lot of childishness," said Gitau Warigi, a
political columnist with the Daily Nation newspaper. "But underneath
there are major structural problems with how the top offices are
relating to each other."
For example, Odinga was tasked with "coordinating and supervising"
government ministries. But the head of Kenya's civil service -- a
presidential appointee who effectively did the job before -- has
dismissed his authority. The two have issued competing orders, to
the confusion of government workers.
"The heart of executive power remains with the president, and it's
in the president's interest to keep things chaotic," Warigi
said. "That tells me that one side of the divide is not keen on this
arrangement lasting."
But David Murathe, a former legislator allied with Kibaki, said the
president and Odinga were sobered by the violence and have no desire
to see more fighting. Although human rights groups have accused
politicians connected to both sides of orchestrating the violence,
Murathe said Kibaki and Odinga became concerned that the situation
was beyond their control.
But Kenyans are growing restless as they await dividends from the
political settlement, Murathe said.
"At some point, there will be a revolt against them all," he
said. "They've conned everyone, I'm sorry to say. Even I did it. I
was one of them."
The discontent is especially palpable around the white-tented camps
for displaced people that still dot the rolling, green Rift Valley
where much of the violence took place. Although most of the largest
camps have been dismantled, the majority of those who lived there
have been shifted to smaller camps closer to their burned-out homes
and farms, where they are living face to face with the neighbors who
chased them away.
With the help of international donors, including the United States,
the government has provided food rations and begun handing out seeds
and tools to help people rebuild their farms, but the assistance has
not reached everyone.
"They promised they would come and build our houses, give us $100
for starting life, yet we have not gotten anything," said Josephat
Ndura, 26, who, with 200 or so other families, moved his tent to a
scrap of land near their farms in the Molo district of the Rift
Valley. "We cannot farm, because we don't have tools. And the people
who attacked, they are still around."
About 3 p.m. last Sunday, the families who would normally have been
tending to their farms were idle, sitting outside leaky tents.
Margaret Wangari, who is Kikuyu, said that not one of her old
neighbors -- who come from the Kalenjin tribe that backed Odinga and
supported the militias that chased the Kikuyu away -- has welcomed
her home. She recently spotted a man herding a calf she said was
stolen from her farm.
"There is no conversation," she said, referring to her
neighbors. "They just look at us."
Things are also uncomfortable in the Kalenjin towns along the roads
that wind through the Rift Valley. People there voted for Odinga
because they felt ignored by Kibaki's government, and many took part
in chasing away their Kikuyu neighbors, which helped Odinga get his
position as prime minister. Now, they say, they're waiting to see
some sort of reward in the form of jobs and development.
"We haven't seen any change," said Albert Kirui, a spare-parts
salesman who was sitting on the porch of the Silent Hotel in
Kericho, a trading town amid the tea farms in the valley. "You only
see a change in Nairobi."
Hundreds of young men who allegedly took part in the violence remain
in jails, Kirui added, a sore point for many of Odinga's backers,
who are pressing him to secure an amnesty deal. The attorney
general, a Kibaki appointee, is pushing for full prosecution of
those involved in the violence.
Despite the icy relations between the Kalenjin and the Kikuyu,
officials are painting a different picture of the situation. "Only a
few months back, the nation was bleeding," said Ali Dawood, who is
in charge of resettlement issues for the government. "Today, the
same people are dancing and merrymaking."
Kiplagat, the former diplomat, said that although grass-roots
efforts have begun the reconciliation process, more attention needs
to be paid to changing the ethnically based political system that
sparked the crisis. That includes adopting a new constitution,
possibly one that redraws the electoral map to break some of the
largest ethnic voting blocs and devolve power to a more local level,
he said.
Kibaki and Odinga have pledged to work on revising the constitution,
which critics say concentrates too much power in the presidency.
But Kenya's leaders must also face up to the reality of ethnic
hatreds, Kiplagat said.
"We've got to go deeper and deal with it squarely and not run away
from it," he said, adding that his group is working on a plan to
avert a crisis ahead of the next presidential election, in 2012. "I
can't tell you we shall not go back the same way. I cannot."
September 10, 2008
Governing Party in Angola Wins Election in a Landslide, Official Results Show
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — The governing party in oil-rich Angola won a landslide victory in the country’s first elections in 16 years, official results show, prompting a remarkable concession of defeat by the leading opposition party, which just six years ago was the government’s enemy in a brutal 27-year civil war.
The decisive win for the governing Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, known as the M.P.L.A., in last week’s legislative elections will give it the two-thirds majority in Parliament needed to change the Constitution and further entrench its dominance of Angolan politics, senior officials in both parties said Tuesday.
It will also confer a measure of legitimacy on a government that has been in power since Angola gained its independence from Portugal in 1975. While American and European election observers concluded that the political playing field was hardly level given the M.P.L.A.’s control of state media, they also said the election itself was evidence of democratic progress.
“Again, we congratulate the people of Angola on their participation in this important step in strengthening their democracy,” the United States Embassy’s election observation team said in a statement on Tuesday.
The tranquillity that prevailed as millions of Angolans went to the polls last week and the acceptance of the outcome by the opposition party, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, or Unita, set this election apart from Angola’s calamitous last vote, in 1992.
At that time, Unita’s guerrilla leader, Jonas Savimbi, refused to accept his second-place finish and the civil war that had already killed hundreds of thousands of people resumed for another decade, ending only when Mr. Savimbi was killed in a firefight in 2002.
Shadowed by that woeful history, Unita accepted its defeat this time despite what observers said were flaws in the voting process in Luanda, the capital.
“We don’t want to create a situation where this drags on for weeks and weeks,” Jardo Muekalia, Unita’s representative for electoral issues, said in an interview on Tuesday. “We want to make sure for peace and stability’s sake we end this on a high note.”
Provisional final results released Wednesday show the M.P.L.A. with about 82 percent of the vote to Unita’s 10 percent. The rest of the votes were divided among a dozen other parties and coalitions. Officials in both the main parties agreed the M.P.L.A. would have a two-thirds legislative majority.
The European Union’s election observer mission found that Angola’s elections fell short of international standards because the state-controlled radio, television and daily newspaper were biased in favor of the government and because of flaws in some election procedures.
Voter lists were distributed too late to be posted in most areas, making it impossible to check who had voted, though the use of indelible ink on voters’ fingers helped guard against double voting, the European Union mission found. There were also widespread delays in the opening of many polling places in Luanda and a failure to deliver sufficient ballots to them. The election authorities also did not accredit hundreds of trained election observers in Luanda, the mission said.
Still, the European Union’s report said, the elections had been peaceful and showed the Angolan people’s “clear commitment to the country’s democratic process and desire to leave behind a past marked by decades of war and civil conflict.”
The M.P.L.A.’s margin of victory leaves Unita even more marginalized — a situation that some analysts worried could weaken the much-needed development of an effective political opposition. The public money each party receives is based on its number of Parliament seats, and Unita will have fewer now. It could regain a foothold if the government follows through on plans to hold local elections in a couple of years.
Even with this election win, Angola’s governing elite will still be stuck with a reputation for self-dealing and corruption that shows up in studies by Transparency International and the World Bank Institute.
“There’s a risk they will become more arrogant,” said Indira Campos, a researcher for Chatham House, a London policy research organization.
Or as Isabel Emerson, Angola country director for the National Democratic Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit group, said: “The fact that they won such a vast majority will translate into a one party state practically. I hope they see it as a wake-up call.”
Manuel Fragata de Morais, the M.P.L.A.’s information secretary in Luanda, said Tuesday that the party felt the weight on its shoulders.
“If Angola’s a one-party state, it would be for the first time by popular vote,” he exclaimed. “So we’re not worried by that. But seriously, we have to be very humble, serene and serious or otherwise we could pay seriously in public support.”
Governing Party in Angola Wins Election in a Landslide, Official Results Show
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — The governing party in oil-rich Angola won a landslide victory in the country’s first elections in 16 years, official results show, prompting a remarkable concession of defeat by the leading opposition party, which just six years ago was the government’s enemy in a brutal 27-year civil war.
The decisive win for the governing Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, known as the M.P.L.A., in last week’s legislative elections will give it the two-thirds majority in Parliament needed to change the Constitution and further entrench its dominance of Angolan politics, senior officials in both parties said Tuesday.
It will also confer a measure of legitimacy on a government that has been in power since Angola gained its independence from Portugal in 1975. While American and European election observers concluded that the political playing field was hardly level given the M.P.L.A.’s control of state media, they also said the election itself was evidence of democratic progress.
“Again, we congratulate the people of Angola on their participation in this important step in strengthening their democracy,” the United States Embassy’s election observation team said in a statement on Tuesday.
The tranquillity that prevailed as millions of Angolans went to the polls last week and the acceptance of the outcome by the opposition party, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, or Unita, set this election apart from Angola’s calamitous last vote, in 1992.
At that time, Unita’s guerrilla leader, Jonas Savimbi, refused to accept his second-place finish and the civil war that had already killed hundreds of thousands of people resumed for another decade, ending only when Mr. Savimbi was killed in a firefight in 2002.
Shadowed by that woeful history, Unita accepted its defeat this time despite what observers said were flaws in the voting process in Luanda, the capital.
“We don’t want to create a situation where this drags on for weeks and weeks,” Jardo Muekalia, Unita’s representative for electoral issues, said in an interview on Tuesday. “We want to make sure for peace and stability’s sake we end this on a high note.”
Provisional final results released Wednesday show the M.P.L.A. with about 82 percent of the vote to Unita’s 10 percent. The rest of the votes were divided among a dozen other parties and coalitions. Officials in both the main parties agreed the M.P.L.A. would have a two-thirds legislative majority.
The European Union’s election observer mission found that Angola’s elections fell short of international standards because the state-controlled radio, television and daily newspaper were biased in favor of the government and because of flaws in some election procedures.
Voter lists were distributed too late to be posted in most areas, making it impossible to check who had voted, though the use of indelible ink on voters’ fingers helped guard against double voting, the European Union mission found. There were also widespread delays in the opening of many polling places in Luanda and a failure to deliver sufficient ballots to them. The election authorities also did not accredit hundreds of trained election observers in Luanda, the mission said.
Still, the European Union’s report said, the elections had been peaceful and showed the Angolan people’s “clear commitment to the country’s democratic process and desire to leave behind a past marked by decades of war and civil conflict.”
The M.P.L.A.’s margin of victory leaves Unita even more marginalized — a situation that some analysts worried could weaken the much-needed development of an effective political opposition. The public money each party receives is based on its number of Parliament seats, and Unita will have fewer now. It could regain a foothold if the government follows through on plans to hold local elections in a couple of years.
Even with this election win, Angola’s governing elite will still be stuck with a reputation for self-dealing and corruption that shows up in studies by Transparency International and the World Bank Institute.
“There’s a risk they will become more arrogant,” said Indira Campos, a researcher for Chatham House, a London policy research organization.
Or as Isabel Emerson, Angola country director for the National Democratic Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit group, said: “The fact that they won such a vast majority will translate into a one party state practically. I hope they see it as a wake-up call.”
Manuel Fragata de Morais, the M.P.L.A.’s information secretary in Luanda, said Tuesday that the party felt the weight on its shoulders.
“If Angola’s a one-party state, it would be for the first time by popular vote,” he exclaimed. “So we’re not worried by that. But seriously, we have to be very humble, serene and serious or otherwise we could pay seriously in public support.”
September 12, 2008
Zimbabwe Rivals Strike a Bargain to Share Power
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai struck a power-sharing deal on Thursday after more than a month of wrangling, but it was still far from clear how the bitter foes would divide the authority to govern.
The agreement, brokered by President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, signals that Mr. Mugabe may be willing to cede some authority to Mr. Tsvangirai, loosening the tight grip on power he has maintained for nearly three decades and easing the political crisis that has engulfed Zimbabwe for months.
They did not spell out how the deal would work, but Mr. Mbeki said the details of the agreement would be released Monday at a signing ceremony. Officials in both the governing and opposition parties described an arrangement that seemed to leave neither man clearly in charge. That may reduce the chances that the accord will bring stability and attract the foreign aid needed to rebuild the country’s ruined economy.
Under the agreement, officials said, Mr. Tsvangirai would become prime minister and oversee a council of ministers that would formulate and carry out policies. Mr. Mugabe would retain his title of president and would lead a cabinet of the ministers that would supervise the council. That arrangement appears to give both men the power to oversee the same group of ministers.
Asked who would lead the government, Nelson Chamisa, a spokesman for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, did not name one man or the other, but instead replied, “This is an inclusive government.” He said executive power would be shared by the president, the prime minister and the cabinet.
Zimbabwe has faced political stalemate since Mr. Mugabe, 84, held onto the presidency in a June runoff that was widely denounced as a sham. The country is now crippled by an almost unfathomable inflation rate and traumatized by an election season in which thousands of opposition supporters were beaten by state-sponsored enforcers, human rights groups say.
If the agreement does produce a functional power-sharing arrangement, it will be a significant turning point for Zimbabwe, which has become increasingly poverty stricken and isolated in recent years under Mr. Mugabe’s authoritarian rule.
But it will be no small task for Mr. Mugabe, a liberation hero, and Mr. Tsvangirai, a 56-year-old former trade union leader and a persistent rival, to work together harmoniously after the enmity that has accumulated in recent months.
Even on Wednesday, as the talks neared their conclusion, the opposition released a statement denouncing a “plot” by the governing party, ZANU-PF, to topple its newly elected leader of Parliament. And on Monday, as the talks were getting under way again, the political editor of the state-run newspaper, a mouthpiece for Mr. Mugabe, accused the opposition of “a cancerous connection with Britain and other Western countries.”
And there are also crucial questions not yet resolved in this deal. Mr. Mugabe, Mr. Tsvangirai and a third, lesser player, Arthur Mutambara, leader of a small breakaway opposition faction, have still not decided how to divide the ministries, Mr. Chamisa said. They are supposed to turn to that task on Friday.
Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai have been testing each other, with Mr. Mugabe threatening to appoint a cabinet of ministers unilaterally and Mr. Tsvangirai saying he would prefer no deal to a bad deal.
President Mbeki of South Africa, the mediator in the conflict whose own reputation as a peacemaker has become entwined with the violent, intractable conflict in Zimbabwe, spent the past four days making a last-ditch push for a settlement at a hotel in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital.
As he came out of the hotel, Mr. Tsvangirai told reporters, “President Mbeki will address you, but I just want to tell you, we have a deal.”
Mr. Mbeki emerged from the talks after Mr. Tsvangirai, but offered no details of the deal, either. He said that African leaders would gather on Monday in Harare to witness its signing and that only then would a document laying out its terms be released.
“We hope the rest of the world will respect the decision of the leadership of Zimbabwe,” Mr. Mbeki said.
Under Mr. Mbeki, whom Zimbabwe’s opposition has viewed as an ally of Mr. Mugabe’s, South Africa has fiercely resisted Western efforts in the United Nations to impose international sanctions on Mr. Mugabe’s government and insisted that Africans will solve this crisis on their own.
Jendayi E. Frazer, the American assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said Thursday that neither American nor United Nations officials had been briefed on the contents of the final deal — a situation she said was unlike any other mediation in Africa, including those involving Congo, Liberia and Kenya.
“We don’t know what’s on the table, and it’s hard to rally for an agreement when no one knows the details or even the broad outlines,” she said.
She reiterated the American position that Zimbabwe voted to change its government in March and that any settlement should reflect that reality.
Much hangs on the shape of the deal. Zimbabwe’s economy is in an ever-accelerating implosion. Hyperinflation has rendered the salaries of teachers, doctors and working people virtually worthless, and the widespread scarcity of basic goods, from food to medicines, has led to terrible hardships. The country’s international credibility is in tatters, and the United States, Britain and other European countries have said they are willing to provide billions in aid only if Mr. Tsvangirai, who outpolled Mr. Mugabe in the last credible election in March, is in charge of the government.
Mr. Tsvangirai had resisted pressure from leaders in southern Africa, including Mr. Mbeki, to accept an earlier deal that would have made Mr. Mugabe chairman of the cabinet of ministers and commander in chief of the armed forces, leaving Mr. Tsvangirai as prime minister and a deputy head of the cabinet, answerable to Mr. Mugabe, opposition officials said.
Mr. Tsvangirai won a presidential election in March, but not by a wide enough margin to avoid a runoff. Mr. Mugabe won the June runoff only after Mr. Tsvangirai boycotted it, citing brutal, state-sponsored violence against his supporters. Independent monitors from across Africa concluded that the runoff was neither free nor fair.
In an interview last month, Mr. Tsvangirai said he would not consent to a deal that did not give him the authority to govern the country. To do so, he said, would be to commit political suicide. His supporters expected more for their suffering, he said, after thousands were beaten during the election season and more than 100 were killed.
Mr. Chamisa, the opposition spokesman, said the party believed that Mr. Tsvangirai would have “sufficient authority” to carry out policies to deliver progress on the bread-and-butter issues of jobs, hunger and peace.
“It’s not the best, but it’s the most attainable,” he said of the deal. “The focus now is to rebuild our country.”
Another person close to the opposition, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he had been told about the deal in confidence, acknowledged that the lines of authority were murky.
“There’s a lot of fudging going on there,” he said. “I’m worried it may be muddled. But Morgan has been adamant that he have the power to implement measures that address the problems facing Zimbabwe. Without that, he’s dead in the water. I have confidence that if he’s signed it, he believes he can deliver on health care, humanitarian assistance and jobs.”
A reporter in Harare, Zimbabwe, contributed reporting.
Zimbabwe Rivals Strike a Bargain to Share Power
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai struck a power-sharing deal on Thursday after more than a month of wrangling, but it was still far from clear how the bitter foes would divide the authority to govern.
The agreement, brokered by President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, signals that Mr. Mugabe may be willing to cede some authority to Mr. Tsvangirai, loosening the tight grip on power he has maintained for nearly three decades and easing the political crisis that has engulfed Zimbabwe for months.
They did not spell out how the deal would work, but Mr. Mbeki said the details of the agreement would be released Monday at a signing ceremony. Officials in both the governing and opposition parties described an arrangement that seemed to leave neither man clearly in charge. That may reduce the chances that the accord will bring stability and attract the foreign aid needed to rebuild the country’s ruined economy.
Under the agreement, officials said, Mr. Tsvangirai would become prime minister and oversee a council of ministers that would formulate and carry out policies. Mr. Mugabe would retain his title of president and would lead a cabinet of the ministers that would supervise the council. That arrangement appears to give both men the power to oversee the same group of ministers.
Asked who would lead the government, Nelson Chamisa, a spokesman for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, did not name one man or the other, but instead replied, “This is an inclusive government.” He said executive power would be shared by the president, the prime minister and the cabinet.
Zimbabwe has faced political stalemate since Mr. Mugabe, 84, held onto the presidency in a June runoff that was widely denounced as a sham. The country is now crippled by an almost unfathomable inflation rate and traumatized by an election season in which thousands of opposition supporters were beaten by state-sponsored enforcers, human rights groups say.
If the agreement does produce a functional power-sharing arrangement, it will be a significant turning point for Zimbabwe, which has become increasingly poverty stricken and isolated in recent years under Mr. Mugabe’s authoritarian rule.
But it will be no small task for Mr. Mugabe, a liberation hero, and Mr. Tsvangirai, a 56-year-old former trade union leader and a persistent rival, to work together harmoniously after the enmity that has accumulated in recent months.
Even on Wednesday, as the talks neared their conclusion, the opposition released a statement denouncing a “plot” by the governing party, ZANU-PF, to topple its newly elected leader of Parliament. And on Monday, as the talks were getting under way again, the political editor of the state-run newspaper, a mouthpiece for Mr. Mugabe, accused the opposition of “a cancerous connection with Britain and other Western countries.”
And there are also crucial questions not yet resolved in this deal. Mr. Mugabe, Mr. Tsvangirai and a third, lesser player, Arthur Mutambara, leader of a small breakaway opposition faction, have still not decided how to divide the ministries, Mr. Chamisa said. They are supposed to turn to that task on Friday.
Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai have been testing each other, with Mr. Mugabe threatening to appoint a cabinet of ministers unilaterally and Mr. Tsvangirai saying he would prefer no deal to a bad deal.
President Mbeki of South Africa, the mediator in the conflict whose own reputation as a peacemaker has become entwined with the violent, intractable conflict in Zimbabwe, spent the past four days making a last-ditch push for a settlement at a hotel in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital.
As he came out of the hotel, Mr. Tsvangirai told reporters, “President Mbeki will address you, but I just want to tell you, we have a deal.”
Mr. Mbeki emerged from the talks after Mr. Tsvangirai, but offered no details of the deal, either. He said that African leaders would gather on Monday in Harare to witness its signing and that only then would a document laying out its terms be released.
“We hope the rest of the world will respect the decision of the leadership of Zimbabwe,” Mr. Mbeki said.
Under Mr. Mbeki, whom Zimbabwe’s opposition has viewed as an ally of Mr. Mugabe’s, South Africa has fiercely resisted Western efforts in the United Nations to impose international sanctions on Mr. Mugabe’s government and insisted that Africans will solve this crisis on their own.
Jendayi E. Frazer, the American assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said Thursday that neither American nor United Nations officials had been briefed on the contents of the final deal — a situation she said was unlike any other mediation in Africa, including those involving Congo, Liberia and Kenya.
“We don’t know what’s on the table, and it’s hard to rally for an agreement when no one knows the details or even the broad outlines,” she said.
She reiterated the American position that Zimbabwe voted to change its government in March and that any settlement should reflect that reality.
Much hangs on the shape of the deal. Zimbabwe’s economy is in an ever-accelerating implosion. Hyperinflation has rendered the salaries of teachers, doctors and working people virtually worthless, and the widespread scarcity of basic goods, from food to medicines, has led to terrible hardships. The country’s international credibility is in tatters, and the United States, Britain and other European countries have said they are willing to provide billions in aid only if Mr. Tsvangirai, who outpolled Mr. Mugabe in the last credible election in March, is in charge of the government.
Mr. Tsvangirai had resisted pressure from leaders in southern Africa, including Mr. Mbeki, to accept an earlier deal that would have made Mr. Mugabe chairman of the cabinet of ministers and commander in chief of the armed forces, leaving Mr. Tsvangirai as prime minister and a deputy head of the cabinet, answerable to Mr. Mugabe, opposition officials said.
Mr. Tsvangirai won a presidential election in March, but not by a wide enough margin to avoid a runoff. Mr. Mugabe won the June runoff only after Mr. Tsvangirai boycotted it, citing brutal, state-sponsored violence against his supporters. Independent monitors from across Africa concluded that the runoff was neither free nor fair.
In an interview last month, Mr. Tsvangirai said he would not consent to a deal that did not give him the authority to govern the country. To do so, he said, would be to commit political suicide. His supporters expected more for their suffering, he said, after thousands were beaten during the election season and more than 100 were killed.
Mr. Chamisa, the opposition spokesman, said the party believed that Mr. Tsvangirai would have “sufficient authority” to carry out policies to deliver progress on the bread-and-butter issues of jobs, hunger and peace.
“It’s not the best, but it’s the most attainable,” he said of the deal. “The focus now is to rebuild our country.”
Another person close to the opposition, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he had been told about the deal in confidence, acknowledged that the lines of authority were murky.
“There’s a lot of fudging going on there,” he said. “I’m worried it may be muddled. But Morgan has been adamant that he have the power to implement measures that address the problems facing Zimbabwe. Without that, he’s dead in the water. I have confidence that if he’s signed it, he believes he can deliver on health care, humanitarian assistance and jobs.”
A reporter in Harare, Zimbabwe, contributed reporting.
September 15, 2008
Zimbabwe Power-Sharing Deal Signed
By REUTERS
Filed at 9:36 a.m. ET
HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe signed a power-sharing agreement with opposition rival Morgan Tsvangirai on Monday, relinquishing some of his powers for the first time in nearly three decades of iron rule.
The deal followed weeks of tense negotiations to end a deep political crisis compounded by the veteran leader's disputed and unopposed re-election in a widely condemned vote in June. Under the agreement, Tsvangirai will become prime minister.
"This agreement sees the return of hope to all our lives. It is this hope that provides the foundation of this agreement that we sign today, that will provide us with the belief that we can achieve a new Zimbabwe," Tsvangirai said after the signing ceremony.
Zimbabweans hope the agreement will be a first step in helping to rescue the once prosperous nation from economic collapse. Inflation has rocketed to over 11 million percent and millions have fled to neighboring southern African countries.
Cheers greeted the signing of the deal at a Harare hotel by Mugabe, Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara, who leads a breakaway faction of the MDC, the main opposition party.
But the ceremony was marred by supporters of the MDC and ruling ZANU-PF taunting each other and throwing rocks at opponents outside the venue where the signing took place.
Part of the fence around the hotel was trampled flat and police brought in two water cannons and a truckload of riot police. Police did not take any action.
The three smiling Zimbabwean leaders exchanged copies of the agreement and shook hands in front of South African President Thabo Mbeki, who brokered the deal, and other African leaders.
Mugabe, 84, made clear he would not tone down his attacks on Western countries such as former colonial power Britain. He accuses them of backing the opposition to drive him from power.
"African problems must be solved by Africans ... The problem we have had is a problem that has been created by former colonial powers," Mugabe said after the signing ceremony, as Tsvangirai looked uncomfortable.
But Mugabe added: "We are committed to the deal. We will do our best."
WESTERN COUNTRIES WATCHFUL
Western countries are still keen to see how the deal works in practice, but the European Union said on Monday it stood ready to bring aid to Zimbabwe if the new government took measures to restore democracy and the rule of law.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband welcomed the agreement but said its details would be studied carefully.
"The new government needs to start to rebuild the country. If it does so, Britain and the rest of the international community will be quick to support them," he said in a statement.
Under the deal agreed last week, Tsvangirai will become prime minister and chair a council of ministers supervising the cabinet. Mugabe, who has ruled since independence from Britain in 1980, will remain president and head the cabinet.
The deal is expected to split control of the powerful security forces that have been key backers of Mugabe.
The president, a former guerrilla commander, is likely to keep command of Zimbabwe's strong army, but the MDC wants to run the police force. Mugabe's ZANU-PF will have 15 cabinet seats, Tsvangirai's MDC 13 and Mutambara's splinter MDC faction three seats.
Analysts say the power-sharing deal is fragile and will require former enemies to put aside their differences and work closely to overcome skepticism, especially from Western powers whose financial support will be vital for recovery.
To gain the confidence of Zimbabweans, the new leadership must present a formula for knocking down prices and easing severe food, fuel and foreign currency shortages.
"While it might be too early to predict the first policy steps of the new government, we think tackling inflationary pressures by reducing the money supply should be one of the top priorities in addressing the country's worsening structural economic imbalances," said Samir Gadio of investment bank Renaissance Capital.
"We expect changes at the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe which was the chief architect of hyper-inflation through its persistent money printing."
ZANU-PF and MDC negotiators met early on Monday to allocate the 31 ministries. Names of the ministers are likely to be announced later in the week, a government official said.
There would also be a national security council, replacing a joint operations command of security service chiefs. The opposition says the security forces were instrumental in organizing a campaign that intimidated the opposition into standing down for the presidential run-off, allowing Mugabe to retain power.
(Additional reporting by Nelson Banya in Harare; Ingrid Melander in Brussels; Adrian Croft in London; Writing by Marius Bosch)
(For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: http://africa.reuters.com/)
Zimbabwe Power-Sharing Deal Signed
By REUTERS
Filed at 9:36 a.m. ET
HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe signed a power-sharing agreement with opposition rival Morgan Tsvangirai on Monday, relinquishing some of his powers for the first time in nearly three decades of iron rule.
The deal followed weeks of tense negotiations to end a deep political crisis compounded by the veteran leader's disputed and unopposed re-election in a widely condemned vote in June. Under the agreement, Tsvangirai will become prime minister.
"This agreement sees the return of hope to all our lives. It is this hope that provides the foundation of this agreement that we sign today, that will provide us with the belief that we can achieve a new Zimbabwe," Tsvangirai said after the signing ceremony.
Zimbabweans hope the agreement will be a first step in helping to rescue the once prosperous nation from economic collapse. Inflation has rocketed to over 11 million percent and millions have fled to neighboring southern African countries.
Cheers greeted the signing of the deal at a Harare hotel by Mugabe, Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara, who leads a breakaway faction of the MDC, the main opposition party.
But the ceremony was marred by supporters of the MDC and ruling ZANU-PF taunting each other and throwing rocks at opponents outside the venue where the signing took place.
Part of the fence around the hotel was trampled flat and police brought in two water cannons and a truckload of riot police. Police did not take any action.
The three smiling Zimbabwean leaders exchanged copies of the agreement and shook hands in front of South African President Thabo Mbeki, who brokered the deal, and other African leaders.
Mugabe, 84, made clear he would not tone down his attacks on Western countries such as former colonial power Britain. He accuses them of backing the opposition to drive him from power.
"African problems must be solved by Africans ... The problem we have had is a problem that has been created by former colonial powers," Mugabe said after the signing ceremony, as Tsvangirai looked uncomfortable.
But Mugabe added: "We are committed to the deal. We will do our best."
WESTERN COUNTRIES WATCHFUL
Western countries are still keen to see how the deal works in practice, but the European Union said on Monday it stood ready to bring aid to Zimbabwe if the new government took measures to restore democracy and the rule of law.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband welcomed the agreement but said its details would be studied carefully.
"The new government needs to start to rebuild the country. If it does so, Britain and the rest of the international community will be quick to support them," he said in a statement.
Under the deal agreed last week, Tsvangirai will become prime minister and chair a council of ministers supervising the cabinet. Mugabe, who has ruled since independence from Britain in 1980, will remain president and head the cabinet.
The deal is expected to split control of the powerful security forces that have been key backers of Mugabe.
The president, a former guerrilla commander, is likely to keep command of Zimbabwe's strong army, but the MDC wants to run the police force. Mugabe's ZANU-PF will have 15 cabinet seats, Tsvangirai's MDC 13 and Mutambara's splinter MDC faction three seats.
Analysts say the power-sharing deal is fragile and will require former enemies to put aside their differences and work closely to overcome skepticism, especially from Western powers whose financial support will be vital for recovery.
To gain the confidence of Zimbabweans, the new leadership must present a formula for knocking down prices and easing severe food, fuel and foreign currency shortages.
"While it might be too early to predict the first policy steps of the new government, we think tackling inflationary pressures by reducing the money supply should be one of the top priorities in addressing the country's worsening structural economic imbalances," said Samir Gadio of investment bank Renaissance Capital.
"We expect changes at the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe which was the chief architect of hyper-inflation through its persistent money printing."
ZANU-PF and MDC negotiators met early on Monday to allocate the 31 ministries. Names of the ministers are likely to be announced later in the week, a government official said.
There would also be a national security council, replacing a joint operations command of security service chiefs. The opposition says the security forces were instrumental in organizing a campaign that intimidated the opposition into standing down for the presidential run-off, allowing Mugabe to retain power.
(Additional reporting by Nelson Banya in Harare; Ingrid Melander in Brussels; Adrian Croft in London; Writing by Marius Bosch)
(For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: http://africa.reuters.com/)
September 21, 2008
South Africa’s President to Quit Under Pressure
By BARRY BEARAK
JOHANNESBURG — President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, the loser in a prolonged power struggle with his rival, Jacob Zuma, agreed Saturday to resign after the top leaders of his party, the African National Congress, asked him to step down.
The party’s fateful decision is a harsh rebuke to Mr. Mbeki, the aloof and scholarly man who succeeded Nelson Mandela, leading the nation to an unprecedented run of economic growth and yet unable to restrain an ever-widening gap between the rich and poor.
Mr. Mbeki had first served the party as an acolyte in the nation’s freedom struggle and later for two decades as one of its guiding lights. The power — though not yet the presidency — now shifts to Mr. Zuma, an economic populist who has promised to loosen the manacles of poverty from the millions still living in shanties.
Gwede Mantashe, the party’s secretary general, announced the ouster at a news conference. Mr. Mbeki had been informed earlier. “He did not display any shock or any depression,” Mr. Mantashe said. “He welcomed the news and agreed that he is going to participate in the process and the formalities.”
Within hours, Mr. Mbeki’s office confirmed that he would leave the presidency “after all constitutional requirements are met.”
An acting president will be appointed from Parliament, probably within days, Mr. Mantashe said. Mr. Zuma is not eligible to be that replacement because he is not yet a member of that body, where the A.N.C. enjoys a huge majority. But he is expected to run in parliamentary elections next year and to take over as president after that. The elections are likely to occur some time between February and June.
Saturday’s events bring to a close a nine-year presidency during which Mr. Mbeki accrued both celebration and disrepute.
He became internationally notorious for his views about AIDS, joining maverick scientists in questioning whether a virus was the cause of the illness. He led the resistance to antiretroviral treatment, acting as if the AIDS epidemic were a defamatory plot against Africans and a con job by avaricious pharmaceutical companies. This intransigence, critics say, sent countless thousands to needless deaths.
While Saturday’s action by the African National Congress’s 86-member national executive committee required a day and a half of deliberations, it was actually the culmination of seven years of discontent between South Africa’s most powerful politicians: Mr. Mbeki and Mr. Zuma, the man he fired in 2005 as his deputy.
Last December, Mr. Zuma defeated his former boss for the party’s leadership in a vote that showed the party deeply split. With that victory, and with the African National Congress dominant in national elections, Mr. Zuma was in line to become president in 2009 when Mr. Mbeki’s second term in office expired.
But many of Mr. Zuma’s supporters, openly despising the president, wanted him gone sooner rather than later. A majority of the party hierarchy seemed to resist that view until a week ago when a judge’s ruling in a corruption case that has long dogged Mr. Zuma tipped the balance. In that decision, the judge not only set aside the case against Mr. Zuma on procedural grounds but also pointed toward what seemed to be a pattern of political meddling by Mr. Mbeki’s government.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/world ... ?th&emc=th
South Africa’s President to Quit Under Pressure
By BARRY BEARAK
JOHANNESBURG — President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, the loser in a prolonged power struggle with his rival, Jacob Zuma, agreed Saturday to resign after the top leaders of his party, the African National Congress, asked him to step down.
The party’s fateful decision is a harsh rebuke to Mr. Mbeki, the aloof and scholarly man who succeeded Nelson Mandela, leading the nation to an unprecedented run of economic growth and yet unable to restrain an ever-widening gap between the rich and poor.
Mr. Mbeki had first served the party as an acolyte in the nation’s freedom struggle and later for two decades as one of its guiding lights. The power — though not yet the presidency — now shifts to Mr. Zuma, an economic populist who has promised to loosen the manacles of poverty from the millions still living in shanties.
Gwede Mantashe, the party’s secretary general, announced the ouster at a news conference. Mr. Mbeki had been informed earlier. “He did not display any shock or any depression,” Mr. Mantashe said. “He welcomed the news and agreed that he is going to participate in the process and the formalities.”
Within hours, Mr. Mbeki’s office confirmed that he would leave the presidency “after all constitutional requirements are met.”
An acting president will be appointed from Parliament, probably within days, Mr. Mantashe said. Mr. Zuma is not eligible to be that replacement because he is not yet a member of that body, where the A.N.C. enjoys a huge majority. But he is expected to run in parliamentary elections next year and to take over as president after that. The elections are likely to occur some time between February and June.
Saturday’s events bring to a close a nine-year presidency during which Mr. Mbeki accrued both celebration and disrepute.
He became internationally notorious for his views about AIDS, joining maverick scientists in questioning whether a virus was the cause of the illness. He led the resistance to antiretroviral treatment, acting as if the AIDS epidemic were a defamatory plot against Africans and a con job by avaricious pharmaceutical companies. This intransigence, critics say, sent countless thousands to needless deaths.
While Saturday’s action by the African National Congress’s 86-member national executive committee required a day and a half of deliberations, it was actually the culmination of seven years of discontent between South Africa’s most powerful politicians: Mr. Mbeki and Mr. Zuma, the man he fired in 2005 as his deputy.
Last December, Mr. Zuma defeated his former boss for the party’s leadership in a vote that showed the party deeply split. With that victory, and with the African National Congress dominant in national elections, Mr. Zuma was in line to become president in 2009 when Mr. Mbeki’s second term in office expired.
But many of Mr. Zuma’s supporters, openly despising the president, wanted him gone sooner rather than later. A majority of the party hierarchy seemed to resist that view until a week ago when a judge’s ruling in a corruption case that has long dogged Mr. Zuma tipped the balance. In that decision, the judge not only set aside the case against Mr. Zuma on procedural grounds but also pointed toward what seemed to be a pattern of political meddling by Mr. Mbeki’s government.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/world ... ?th&emc=th
September 23, 2008
Risks for Zimbabwe Deal in Mbeki’s Resignation
By CELIA W. DUGGER
HARARE, Zimbabwe — Thabo Mbeki’s resignation as president of South Africa could hardly have come at a worse time for Zimbabwe, where he had just brokered a power-sharing deal that has now reached a pivotal — and perilous — moment, analysts say.
Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of Zimbabwe’s opposition and the prime minister-designate, said Monday that the fall of Mr. Mbeki, the region’s most influential politician, was a blow to Zimbabwe.
But he also said it was now incumbent on the African leaders who named Mr. Mbeki the mediator for Zimbabwe to ensure that the promise of the deal was fulfilled, despite the uncertainty about whether Mr. Mbeki would continue in the role.
“I think they’re aware of their responsibility to complete the negotiations,” said Mr. Tsvangirai, who spoke with serious understatement during an interview in the private study of his home here in the capital. The interview was Mr. Tsvangirai’s first since Mr. Mbeki was effectively fired by his own party just days after triumphantly concluding the Zimbabwe agreement.
Mr. Tsvangirai, 56, and Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, 84, are at an impasse in the first crucial test of Mr. Mugabe’s willingness to relinquish some of the complete control he has exercised during 28 years in power. Mr. Mugabe did not enter negotiations until July, after African election monitors concluded that a June runoff was not free or fair and African leaders insisted on talks. He said at the signing ceremony for the agreement that he was committed to it.
When Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai met on Thursday, Mr. Tsvangirai said, he proposed that their parties, the governing ZANU-PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, equally divide the most critical ministries, with, for example, Mr. Mugabe’s party retaining the army and the opposition taking the police. Given the broken economy, Mr. Tsvangirai said he believed that the opposition should pick the head of the Finance Ministry, but Mr. Mugabe did not agree.
“They wanted everything, all the key ministries,” Mr. Tsvangirai said.
There are signs that Mr. Mugabe, known as a canny, ruthless survivor of challenges to his authority, may be resisting genuine power-sharing. The question is whether he is still guided by the slogan he used during this year’s disputed election, still visible on posters: “This is the final battle for total control.”
Mr. Mugabe left Harare on Friday to attend the United Nations General Assembly in New York with an entourage that included his wife and son, but not Mr. Tsvangirai, who is supposed to become his partner in governing. Mr. Tsvangirai acknowledged that the authorities had yet to provide him with a passport some three months after he ran out of pages for new visa stamps, though he hopes they will soon.
When informed that the American ambassador, James D. McGee, had said the United States had issued visas for 54 people in Mr. Mugabe’s entourage, Mr. Tsvangirai let out a long whistle of amazement.
In a country where about a third of the people will be hungry and in need of food aid by next month, Eddie Cross, an official in the opposition party, was less circumspect. In a letter posted on a Zimbabwe blog, Mr. Cross wrote that Mr. Mugabe, oblivious to his people’s suffering, had simply packed his bags and departed with his entourage, “taking with them a pile of U.S. dollars to spend on 10 days of luxury and completely unproductive personal extravagance.”
More worrisome to analysts here was a vituperative column on Saturday in the state-owned newspaper, The Herald. Journalists and politicians here widely assume that the author, who used the pen name Nathaniel Manheru, was George Charamba, Mr. Mugabe’s spokesman.
The column said the power-sharing agreement had no legal force and might “collapse any day.” It said the deal gave the president the power to appoint ministers after consulting the prime minister and others. “He does not have to adopt their views,” the columnist wrote.
But Mr. Tsvangirai said that what most disturbed him was language in the column that he said promoted hatred. It described his celebratory supporters gathering as their leaders “were further swelling their already distended stomachs.” The writer mocked the opposition for its euphoria over the prospect that Mr. Tsvangirai might become prime minister as the agreement itself specified.
After an election season in which thousands of opposition supporters were beaten in state-sponsored attacks and more than 100 killed, opposition officials said they found another comment chilling. The columnist wrote that the deal’s provision for an independent audit of farms given out in an often violent land reform program “is sure to draw blood redder than the setting sun.”
Mr. Tsvangirai was careful to say that he did not believe that the author spoke for Mr. Mugabe.
Nonetheless, he added: “If what he has printed in the paper is the attitude of ZANU-PF, we might as well review our position. If that is the spirit in which we go into this marriage, it has finished before it has started.”
Mr. Tsvangirai said he regretted that ministries were not divided between the parties before he and Mr. Mugabe signed their deal, but he said he had Mr. Mbeki’s assurances that the matter would be quickly resolved.
Mr. Mbeki, however, may not be around to finish the job. Tomaz A. Salomao, executive secretary of the Southern African Development Community, which named Mr. Mbeki mediator, said Monday that the organization would not know if he would continue in that role until it was formally informed by South Africa.
The opposition has long mistrusted Mr. Mbeki, believing he was an ally of Mr. Mugabe’s and hoping his likely successor, Jacob Zuma, backed by trade unions that have rallied behind Mr. Tsvangirai, might be more effective in pushing its cause.
But in the end it was Mr. Mbeki who fashioned the deal that Mr. Tsvangirai signed. And it was Mr. Mbeki, attacked at home for a flawed legacy, who had much to gain by bringing Zimbabwe’s crisis to a peaceful end. But now with the political turmoil in South Africa, the question is whether it will be too distracted to attend to Zimbabwe’s problems.
“There is no one within S.A.D.C. of Mbeki’s stature to engage the issues and knock heads together,” said Iden Wetherell, senior editor at The Independent, a newspaper in Harare. “I can’t see Zuma, with his complete absence of diplomatic experience and lack of familiarity with Zimbabwe’s crisis, playing the same role.”
Mr. Tsvangirai said he believed that Mr. Mugabe would ultimately agree to a fair division of ministries and that regional leaders would help make that happen. “I’m very hopeful that the deal will come through and that we can start the process of rebuilding the country,” he said.
A large card displayed in Mr. Tsvangirai’s study said, “I wish a long life to my enemies so they may see all my successes.” Mr. Mugabe has certainly had a long life, but whether he will live to see Mr. Tsvangirai wield real power has yet to be settled.
Risks for Zimbabwe Deal in Mbeki’s Resignation
By CELIA W. DUGGER
HARARE, Zimbabwe — Thabo Mbeki’s resignation as president of South Africa could hardly have come at a worse time for Zimbabwe, where he had just brokered a power-sharing deal that has now reached a pivotal — and perilous — moment, analysts say.
Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of Zimbabwe’s opposition and the prime minister-designate, said Monday that the fall of Mr. Mbeki, the region’s most influential politician, was a blow to Zimbabwe.
But he also said it was now incumbent on the African leaders who named Mr. Mbeki the mediator for Zimbabwe to ensure that the promise of the deal was fulfilled, despite the uncertainty about whether Mr. Mbeki would continue in the role.
“I think they’re aware of their responsibility to complete the negotiations,” said Mr. Tsvangirai, who spoke with serious understatement during an interview in the private study of his home here in the capital. The interview was Mr. Tsvangirai’s first since Mr. Mbeki was effectively fired by his own party just days after triumphantly concluding the Zimbabwe agreement.
Mr. Tsvangirai, 56, and Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, 84, are at an impasse in the first crucial test of Mr. Mugabe’s willingness to relinquish some of the complete control he has exercised during 28 years in power. Mr. Mugabe did not enter negotiations until July, after African election monitors concluded that a June runoff was not free or fair and African leaders insisted on talks. He said at the signing ceremony for the agreement that he was committed to it.
When Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai met on Thursday, Mr. Tsvangirai said, he proposed that their parties, the governing ZANU-PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, equally divide the most critical ministries, with, for example, Mr. Mugabe’s party retaining the army and the opposition taking the police. Given the broken economy, Mr. Tsvangirai said he believed that the opposition should pick the head of the Finance Ministry, but Mr. Mugabe did not agree.
“They wanted everything, all the key ministries,” Mr. Tsvangirai said.
There are signs that Mr. Mugabe, known as a canny, ruthless survivor of challenges to his authority, may be resisting genuine power-sharing. The question is whether he is still guided by the slogan he used during this year’s disputed election, still visible on posters: “This is the final battle for total control.”
Mr. Mugabe left Harare on Friday to attend the United Nations General Assembly in New York with an entourage that included his wife and son, but not Mr. Tsvangirai, who is supposed to become his partner in governing. Mr. Tsvangirai acknowledged that the authorities had yet to provide him with a passport some three months after he ran out of pages for new visa stamps, though he hopes they will soon.
When informed that the American ambassador, James D. McGee, had said the United States had issued visas for 54 people in Mr. Mugabe’s entourage, Mr. Tsvangirai let out a long whistle of amazement.
In a country where about a third of the people will be hungry and in need of food aid by next month, Eddie Cross, an official in the opposition party, was less circumspect. In a letter posted on a Zimbabwe blog, Mr. Cross wrote that Mr. Mugabe, oblivious to his people’s suffering, had simply packed his bags and departed with his entourage, “taking with them a pile of U.S. dollars to spend on 10 days of luxury and completely unproductive personal extravagance.”
More worrisome to analysts here was a vituperative column on Saturday in the state-owned newspaper, The Herald. Journalists and politicians here widely assume that the author, who used the pen name Nathaniel Manheru, was George Charamba, Mr. Mugabe’s spokesman.
The column said the power-sharing agreement had no legal force and might “collapse any day.” It said the deal gave the president the power to appoint ministers after consulting the prime minister and others. “He does not have to adopt their views,” the columnist wrote.
But Mr. Tsvangirai said that what most disturbed him was language in the column that he said promoted hatred. It described his celebratory supporters gathering as their leaders “were further swelling their already distended stomachs.” The writer mocked the opposition for its euphoria over the prospect that Mr. Tsvangirai might become prime minister as the agreement itself specified.
After an election season in which thousands of opposition supporters were beaten in state-sponsored attacks and more than 100 killed, opposition officials said they found another comment chilling. The columnist wrote that the deal’s provision for an independent audit of farms given out in an often violent land reform program “is sure to draw blood redder than the setting sun.”
Mr. Tsvangirai was careful to say that he did not believe that the author spoke for Mr. Mugabe.
Nonetheless, he added: “If what he has printed in the paper is the attitude of ZANU-PF, we might as well review our position. If that is the spirit in which we go into this marriage, it has finished before it has started.”
Mr. Tsvangirai said he regretted that ministries were not divided between the parties before he and Mr. Mugabe signed their deal, but he said he had Mr. Mbeki’s assurances that the matter would be quickly resolved.
Mr. Mbeki, however, may not be around to finish the job. Tomaz A. Salomao, executive secretary of the Southern African Development Community, which named Mr. Mbeki mediator, said Monday that the organization would not know if he would continue in that role until it was formally informed by South Africa.
The opposition has long mistrusted Mr. Mbeki, believing he was an ally of Mr. Mugabe’s and hoping his likely successor, Jacob Zuma, backed by trade unions that have rallied behind Mr. Tsvangirai, might be more effective in pushing its cause.
But in the end it was Mr. Mbeki who fashioned the deal that Mr. Tsvangirai signed. And it was Mr. Mbeki, attacked at home for a flawed legacy, who had much to gain by bringing Zimbabwe’s crisis to a peaceful end. But now with the political turmoil in South Africa, the question is whether it will be too distracted to attend to Zimbabwe’s problems.
“There is no one within S.A.D.C. of Mbeki’s stature to engage the issues and knock heads together,” said Iden Wetherell, senior editor at The Independent, a newspaper in Harare. “I can’t see Zuma, with his complete absence of diplomatic experience and lack of familiarity with Zimbabwe’s crisis, playing the same role.”
Mr. Tsvangirai said he believed that Mr. Mugabe would ultimately agree to a fair division of ministries and that regional leaders would help make that happen. “I’m very hopeful that the deal will come through and that we can start the process of rebuilding the country,” he said.
A large card displayed in Mr. Tsvangirai’s study said, “I wish a long life to my enemies so they may see all my successes.” Mr. Mugabe has certainly had a long life, but whether he will live to see Mr. Tsvangirai wield real power has yet to be settled.
http://www.newvision.co.ug/detail.php?m ... sId=650810
Museveni, Uganda's PM meets Asian in UK‏
By Cyprian Musoke
and Raymond Baguma
HE left for the UK at the age of 14, when Idi Amin expelled Asians from
Uganda in September 1972. Today, 36 years later, Khalid Shiek is the
chairman of Clifton Packaging, a £500 million packaging company in
Leicester, UK.
The Ugandan Asian, whose mother had died before their departure to UK and is buried in Jinja, scrubbed floors until he saved enough money to buy an old printing press from a scrap yard.
'The business went from strength to strength. Now he has a £500m packaging company and a boardroom whose walls are literally covered in awards for innovation and business, as well as photos of him and his family with senior politicians and members of the British Royal Family,' his website says.
President Yoweri Museveni, accompanied by his wife Janet, on Saturday
toured the factory, which was decorated with strips of Ugandan flag.
The President took the occasion to re-assure foreign investors willing to
do business in Uganda that no one will ever again expel them from the country because they are protected by the Constitution. He further assured them of Government incentives, like 10-year tax holidays, and said the infrastructure and energy would be adequate in 20 months time.
Khalid, who keeps following events in Uganda, told the President that processing, preserving and packaging of fruit had an enormous potential for wealth creation in Africa.
He explained that Ugandan farmers receive £1,000 for a tonne of pineapples. However, when dried and packaged attractively, it becomes worth £10,000. He offered to come and train Ugandan farmers on how to process and package their produce such as bananas, mangoes, pineapples and coffee for value addition.
The President visited Leicester en-route to the United Nations headquarters in New York, where he will defend Uganda's candidature to become a non-permanent member of the Security Council.
Khalid has been invited to deliver an address to the UN General Assembly, where he will talk about his ideas under the slogan 'BABA' (Buy African, Build Africa). While in Leicester, the President had some success in attracting investors to Uganda.
The directors of Group LPC, Britain's largest independent manufacturer of specialist paper products, told the Ugandan team they were ready to invest in areas of fruit and coffee processing, as well as manufacturing of active ingredient Lactullos drug that requires 4 million litres of milk daily and pulp production.
Touring their factory, Museveni assured the directors of the availability of raw materials, explaining that the Government is encouraging families to engage in commercial farming through the Prosperity for All programme.
The President, who lauded the expelled Asians for being resilient and having succeeded in the UK, added that farmers in Uganda are yearning for a market for their products. He encouraged the group to set up a coffee processing factory in Mbale and a fruit processing plant in Soroti.
On pulp production, the President told them that trees would be planted on hill tops, which would help in environment protection as well as provide
employment to Ugandans.
He also cited opportunities in pharmaceutical production, rail transport to the sea, and air transport with international runways in Entebbe, Gulu and Kasese.
Present were State Minister for Investment, Semakula Kiwanuka, and of International Affairs, Okello Oryem, as well as the executive director of
the Uganda Investment Authority, Maggie Kigozi and MP Mike Mabikke.
Museveni, Uganda's PM meets Asian in UK‏
By Cyprian Musoke
and Raymond Baguma
HE left for the UK at the age of 14, when Idi Amin expelled Asians from
Uganda in September 1972. Today, 36 years later, Khalid Shiek is the
chairman of Clifton Packaging, a £500 million packaging company in
Leicester, UK.
The Ugandan Asian, whose mother had died before their departure to UK and is buried in Jinja, scrubbed floors until he saved enough money to buy an old printing press from a scrap yard.
'The business went from strength to strength. Now he has a £500m packaging company and a boardroom whose walls are literally covered in awards for innovation and business, as well as photos of him and his family with senior politicians and members of the British Royal Family,' his website says.
President Yoweri Museveni, accompanied by his wife Janet, on Saturday
toured the factory, which was decorated with strips of Ugandan flag.
The President took the occasion to re-assure foreign investors willing to
do business in Uganda that no one will ever again expel them from the country because they are protected by the Constitution. He further assured them of Government incentives, like 10-year tax holidays, and said the infrastructure and energy would be adequate in 20 months time.
Khalid, who keeps following events in Uganda, told the President that processing, preserving and packaging of fruit had an enormous potential for wealth creation in Africa.
He explained that Ugandan farmers receive £1,000 for a tonne of pineapples. However, when dried and packaged attractively, it becomes worth £10,000. He offered to come and train Ugandan farmers on how to process and package their produce such as bananas, mangoes, pineapples and coffee for value addition.
The President visited Leicester en-route to the United Nations headquarters in New York, where he will defend Uganda's candidature to become a non-permanent member of the Security Council.
Khalid has been invited to deliver an address to the UN General Assembly, where he will talk about his ideas under the slogan 'BABA' (Buy African, Build Africa). While in Leicester, the President had some success in attracting investors to Uganda.
The directors of Group LPC, Britain's largest independent manufacturer of specialist paper products, told the Ugandan team they were ready to invest in areas of fruit and coffee processing, as well as manufacturing of active ingredient Lactullos drug that requires 4 million litres of milk daily and pulp production.
Touring their factory, Museveni assured the directors of the availability of raw materials, explaining that the Government is encouraging families to engage in commercial farming through the Prosperity for All programme.
The President, who lauded the expelled Asians for being resilient and having succeeded in the UK, added that farmers in Uganda are yearning for a market for their products. He encouraged the group to set up a coffee processing factory in Mbale and a fruit processing plant in Soroti.
On pulp production, the President told them that trees would be planted on hill tops, which would help in environment protection as well as provide
employment to Ugandans.
He also cited opportunities in pharmaceutical production, rail transport to the sea, and air transport with international runways in Entebbe, Gulu and Kasese.
Present were State Minister for Investment, Semakula Kiwanuka, and of International Affairs, Okello Oryem, as well as the executive director of
the Uganda Investment Authority, Maggie Kigozi and MP Mike Mabikke.
September 27, 2008
Editorial
Thabo Mbeki’s Fall
Thabo Mbeki’s resignation this week as South Africa’s president was swift and humbling. Once called the most powerful man in Africa, he was pushed out by his party after protracted internal squabbling, and he leaves a legacy of squandered potential and significant failures.
Mr. Mbeki’s party, the African National Congress, fought hard and nobly to liberate South Africa from apartheid. But it has turned the country essentially into a one-party state. So far, South Africa’s new political leaders show no more appetite for robust political competition than the old team.
Mr. Mbeki’s rival, Jacob Zuma, who is the A.N.C.’s current leader, will now be running the show — but from behind the scenes. He is not a member of Parliament, so he will have to wait until after next year’s elections before assuming the presidency. In the interim, Kgalema Motlanthe, a longtime Zuma ally, will hold the seat.
South Africans are clearly worried about the upheaval. On Tuesday, panic shook South Africa’s financial markets when 14 cabinet ministers including Trevor Manuel, the well-regarded finance minister, resigned. Mr. Manuel and others later said that their resignations were only a courtesy to the next president, but the market reaction betrayed a deep anxiety.
We have frequently criticized Mr. Mbeki for his crackpot and dangerous theories on AIDS and his enabling of Zimbabwe’s dictatorial Robert Mugabe. We have considerable doubts about Mr. Zuma as well.
He has professed his own crackpot theories on AIDS and outrageous attitudes toward women, which were revealed in a 2006 rape trial that ended in his acquittal. He has long been fighting corruption charges that may or may not be politically motivated.
Now that he and his allies have the power, they must use it to improve the lives of South Africa’s poor who suffered under white rule and still live without adequate housing, jobs and health care. South Africa’s economy has grown under Mr. Mbeki, but far too much of the wealth has ended up in the hands of A.N.C. officials. Mr. Zuma has strong support among South Africa’s poor, but he has yet to offer many ideas for improving their lives.
There was one encouraging sign. Mr. Motlanthe replaced Mr. Mbeki’s health minister, who promoted garlic and beet root as a treatment for the five million South Africans infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. The new minister favors antiretroviral medications.
Any South African president is destined to live in the shadow of Nelson Mandela, one of the 20th century’s greatest heroes. Mr. Mbeki did not make the grade. Mr. Zuma must do better.
Editorial
Thabo Mbeki’s Fall
Thabo Mbeki’s resignation this week as South Africa’s president was swift and humbling. Once called the most powerful man in Africa, he was pushed out by his party after protracted internal squabbling, and he leaves a legacy of squandered potential and significant failures.
Mr. Mbeki’s party, the African National Congress, fought hard and nobly to liberate South Africa from apartheid. But it has turned the country essentially into a one-party state. So far, South Africa’s new political leaders show no more appetite for robust political competition than the old team.
Mr. Mbeki’s rival, Jacob Zuma, who is the A.N.C.’s current leader, will now be running the show — but from behind the scenes. He is not a member of Parliament, so he will have to wait until after next year’s elections before assuming the presidency. In the interim, Kgalema Motlanthe, a longtime Zuma ally, will hold the seat.
South Africans are clearly worried about the upheaval. On Tuesday, panic shook South Africa’s financial markets when 14 cabinet ministers including Trevor Manuel, the well-regarded finance minister, resigned. Mr. Manuel and others later said that their resignations were only a courtesy to the next president, but the market reaction betrayed a deep anxiety.
We have frequently criticized Mr. Mbeki for his crackpot and dangerous theories on AIDS and his enabling of Zimbabwe’s dictatorial Robert Mugabe. We have considerable doubts about Mr. Zuma as well.
He has professed his own crackpot theories on AIDS and outrageous attitudes toward women, which were revealed in a 2006 rape trial that ended in his acquittal. He has long been fighting corruption charges that may or may not be politically motivated.
Now that he and his allies have the power, they must use it to improve the lives of South Africa’s poor who suffered under white rule and still live without adequate housing, jobs and health care. South Africa’s economy has grown under Mr. Mbeki, but far too much of the wealth has ended up in the hands of A.N.C. officials. Mr. Zuma has strong support among South Africa’s poor, but he has yet to offer many ideas for improving their lives.
There was one encouraging sign. Mr. Motlanthe replaced Mr. Mbeki’s health minister, who promoted garlic and beet root as a treatment for the five million South Africans infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. The new minister favors antiretroviral medications.
Any South African president is destined to live in the shadow of Nelson Mandela, one of the 20th century’s greatest heroes. Mr. Mbeki did not make the grade. Mr. Zuma must do better.
AFRICA'S WINDS OF CHANGE
Memoirs of an International Tanzanian
Al Noor Kassum
Availability: Now In Stock
From I. B. Tauris
Pub date: Oct 2007
288 pages
10 b/w illus.
Size 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
$35.00 - Hardcover (1-84511-583-X)
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Description
The 1960s were a tumultuous period in the history of Africa as one country after another won independence from the colonial powers. This was particularly true of Tanzania as it sought to carve out a role for itself between conflicting European and inter-African interests.
It was in these extraordinary times that Al Noor Kassum rose to become a prominent political figure in newly independent Tanzania. Hand-picked by Julius Nyerere – later to become the country’s first President – to run for elections on a Tanganyika African National Union ticket, he embarked on a career that brought him to prominence nationally and internationally.
Africa’s Winds of Change documents the changes that have taken place in Tanzania from the middle of the 20th century to the present day, through the prism of an East African Asian experience. The author sheds new light on the character and legacy of Julius Nyerere, who emerges as radically different from the stereotypical anti-Western firebrand which became his image in the West.
Africa’s Winds of Change offers a fascinating personal history of a unique African nation at a critical stage in its development.
Author Bio
Educated in Tanzania and the UK, where he was called to the Bar at the Inns of Court in London, Al Noor Kassum was a prominent figure in Tanzanian politics and the Ismaili Muslim community after the country’s independence. He held several ministerial positions within the Tanzanian government and was also the East African Community’s Minister of Finance and Administration. He has also held senior positions in Unesco and at the UN Headquarters in New York. Currently, he is Vice-Chancellor of Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania.
Table of contents
Foreword * Preface * Early Years in Tanganyika and Abroad * From Lincoln’s Inn to Legislative Council * Wind of Change in Africa * Arusha Declaration * Diamonds * Towards the East African Community * Developing Tanzania’s Natural Resources * Reflections
Copyright © 2008
Palgrave Macmillan Ltd
New York, NY 10010
Privacy Policy | UK and Rest of the world site | Contact us
You're surfing with IE6 [IE (6.0)] on WinXP
http://www.palgrave-usa.com/catalog/pro ... 184511583X
Memoirs of an International Tanzanian
Al Noor Kassum
Availability: Now In Stock
From I. B. Tauris
Pub date: Oct 2007
288 pages
10 b/w illus.
Size 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
$35.00 - Hardcover (1-84511-583-X)
More Shopping Options
Description
The 1960s were a tumultuous period in the history of Africa as one country after another won independence from the colonial powers. This was particularly true of Tanzania as it sought to carve out a role for itself between conflicting European and inter-African interests.
It was in these extraordinary times that Al Noor Kassum rose to become a prominent political figure in newly independent Tanzania. Hand-picked by Julius Nyerere – later to become the country’s first President – to run for elections on a Tanganyika African National Union ticket, he embarked on a career that brought him to prominence nationally and internationally.
Africa’s Winds of Change documents the changes that have taken place in Tanzania from the middle of the 20th century to the present day, through the prism of an East African Asian experience. The author sheds new light on the character and legacy of Julius Nyerere, who emerges as radically different from the stereotypical anti-Western firebrand which became his image in the West.
Africa’s Winds of Change offers a fascinating personal history of a unique African nation at a critical stage in its development.
Author Bio
Educated in Tanzania and the UK, where he was called to the Bar at the Inns of Court in London, Al Noor Kassum was a prominent figure in Tanzanian politics and the Ismaili Muslim community after the country’s independence. He held several ministerial positions within the Tanzanian government and was also the East African Community’s Minister of Finance and Administration. He has also held senior positions in Unesco and at the UN Headquarters in New York. Currently, he is Vice-Chancellor of Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania.
Table of contents
Foreword * Preface * Early Years in Tanganyika and Abroad * From Lincoln’s Inn to Legislative Council * Wind of Change in Africa * Arusha Declaration * Diamonds * Towards the East African Community * Developing Tanzania’s Natural Resources * Reflections
Copyright © 2008
Palgrave Macmillan Ltd
New York, NY 10010
Privacy Policy | UK and Rest of the world site | Contact us
You're surfing with IE6 [IE (6.0)] on WinXP
http://www.palgrave-usa.com/catalog/pro ... 184511583X
There are photos and a related article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/02/world ... ?th&emc=th
October 2, 2008
Life in Zimbabwe: Wait for Useless Money
By CELIA W. DUGGER
HARARE, Zimbabwe — Long before the rooster in their dirt yard crowed, Rose Moyo and her husband rolled out of bed. “It is time to get up,” intoned the robotic voice of her cellphone. Its glowing face displayed the time: 2:20 a.m.
They crept past their children sleeping on the floor of the one-room house — Cinderella, 9, and Chrissie, 10 — and took their daily moonlit stroll to the bank. The guard on the graveyard shift gave them a number. They were the 29th to arrive, all hoping for a chance to withdraw the maximum amount of Zimbabwean currency the government allowed last month — the equivalent of just a dollar or two.
Zimbabwe is in the grip of one of the great hyperinflations in world history. The people of this once proud capital have been plunged into a Darwinian struggle to get by. Many have been reduced to peddlers and paupers, hawkers and black-market hustlers, eating just a meal or two a day, their hollowed cheeks a testament to their hunger.
Like countless Zimbabweans, Mrs. Moyo has calculated the price of goods by the number of days she had to spend in line at the bank to withdraw cash to buy them: a day for a bar of soap; another for a bag of salt; and four for a sack of cornmeal.
The withdrawal limit rose on Monday, but with inflation surpassing what independent economists say is an almost unimaginable 40 million percent, she said the value of the new amount would quickly be a pittance, too.
“It’s survival of the fittest,” said Mrs. Moyo, 29, a hair braider who sells the greens she grows in her yard for a dime a bunch. “If you’re not fit, you will starve.”
Economists here and abroad say Zimbabwe’s economic collapse is gaining velocity, radiating instability into the heart of southern Africa. As the bankrupt government prints ever more money, inflation has gone wild, rising from 1,000 percent in 2006 to 12,000 percent in 2007 to a figure so high the government had to lop 10 zeros off the currency in August to keep the nation’s calculators from being overwhelmed. (Had it left the currency alone, $1 would now be worth about 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars.)
In fact, Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation is probably among the five worst of all time, said Jeffrey D. Sachs, a Columbia University economics professor, along with Germany in the 1920s, Greece and Hungary in the 1940s and Yugoslavia in 1993.
Making matters worse, cash itself has become scarce. Business executives and diplomats say Zimbabwe’s central bank governor, Gideon Gono, desperate for foreign currency to stoke the governing party’s patronage machine, sends runners into the streets with suitcases of the nation’s currency to buy up American dollars and South African rand on the black market — drying up Zimbabwean dollars that would otherwise go to the banks.
Because of the cash shortage, the government strictly limits the amount people can withdraw. Even so, Zimbabweans say they often wait in vain for hours at banks that send their customers away empty-handed.
Mr. Gono, who blames Western sanctions for the nation’s troubles, did not respond to requests for an interview. But he was quoted in the state media this week as saying, “I am going to print and print and sign the money until sanctions are removed.”
Political Solution Needed
Economists say that the only thing that can halt Zimbabwe’s inflationary spiral is a political solution that takes control over the country’s economy out of the hands of Robert Mugabe, the 84-year-old president who still maintains a viselike hold on power after 28 years in office.
“This is the end of the endgame,” Professor Sachs said.
Mr. Mugabe, who lives in splendor here in a mansion hidden behind high walls, returned to Harare on Monday from the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York. He and the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, signed a power-sharing agreement, but they are still deadlocked over the division of the ministries. So far, Mr. Mugabe has refused to give up control of the crucial Finance and Home Ministries.
Basic public services, already devastated by an exodus of professionals in recent years, are breaking down on an ever larger scale as tens of thousands of teachers, nurses, garbage collectors and janitors have simply stopped reporting to their jobs because their salaries, more worthless literally by the hour, no longer cover the cost of taking the bus to work.
“It’s scary and it’s pathetic,” said Tendai Chikowore, president of the Zimbabwe Teachers Association, the largest and least radical of the teacher unions. She said a teacher’s monthly pay was not even enough to buy two bottles of cooking oil. “This is a collapse of the system, and it’s not only for teachers,” she said. “At the hospitals, there are no nurses, no drugs.”
Those who continue to show up often make a little extra on the job. Teachers sell their students candy and cookies, for example, or accept payment from parents in cornmeal or cooking oil, said Raymond Majongwe, secretary general of the Progressive Teachers Union.
Zimbabweans have a legendary ability to make do despite extraordinary hardship, and the money sent home by millions of their compatriots who have fled abroad to escape political repression and economic deprivation continues to sustain many of them. But the deteriorating conditions are creating pressures for a renewed exodus, even as people employ all their entrepreneurial creativity to stay alive.
Among those thinking of leaving is Fortunate Nyabinde, whose salary of $3,600 Zimbabwean dollars a month (or $36 trillion before the government rejiggered the currency in August) does not even pay for four days of bus fare to her job at Parirenyatwa Hospital, one of Zimbabwe’s leading public institutions.
Yet, for now, she keeps going to work, wheeling a trolley of cornmeal porridge from ward to ward, mostly because she can eke out an extra 20 cents a day by selling basic necessities to patients that the hospital usually does not have in stock: toilet paper, toothpaste, soap.
“If they come to the hospital without anything, they will have to buy from us,” Ms. Nyabinde said.
Signs of a Calamity
Clues to the calamitous state of the country can be found even in recent articles tucked into Mr. Mugabe’s mouthpiece, The Herald, the only daily newspaper he has allowed to keep publishing.
The bodies of paupers in advanced states of decay were stacking up in the mortuary at Beitbridge District Hospital because not even government authorities were seeing to their burial.
Harare Central Hospital slashed admissions by almost half because so much of its cleaning staff could no longer afford to get to work.
Most of the capital, though lovely beneath its springtime canopy of lavender jacaranda blooms, was without water because the authorities had stopped paying the bills to transport the treatment chemicals. Garbage is piling up uncollected. Sixteen people have died in an outbreak of cholera in nearby Chitungwiza, spread by contaminated water and sewage.
Vigilantes in Kwekwe killed a man suspected of stealing two chickens, eggs and a bucket of corn.
And traditional chiefs complained about corrupt politicians and army officers who sold grain needed for the hungry to the politically connected instead.
Zimbabweans standing in bank lines across the capital offer their own stratagems for survival. At the Avondale shopping center, a strip mall with a cafe serving cappuccinos and a multiplex showing “Sex and the City,” more than 200 sweaty, grumpy people lined up one recent morning to withdraw whatever they could from the bank.
Mrs. Moyo, the early riser, had her usual sought-after, low number — 26 — while Mrs. Nyabinde, the hospital worker on the overnight shift, was far back at No. 148 because she had arrived late — about 5:15 a.m.
No. 132 was Stanford Mafumera, 35, a security guard who spends most of his time at his job or in line at the bank; he is so poor that he sleeps beneath the overhang at the mall rather than pay for bus fare home to his family. His clothes hung loose on his gaunt body, and his dusty shoes were coming apart.
“Since Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, there was no cash here,” he said. “We started getting cash only yesterday.”
Most days, he said, he eats only a bag of corn nuts to conserve his monthly pay — worth $10 a week and a half ago, but only $5 now because of inflation.
Each day, he buys a pack of cigarettes and sells them one by one, making an extra 20 to 30 cents. But he was unable to afford the cost of taking his 5-year-old daughter to the doctor recently when she got diarrhea after drinking dirty water from an unprotected well.
Mr. Mafumera blamed the government’s land reform program for Zimbabwe’s woes. It chased away the white commercial farmers who had made the country a breadbasket, he said, as well as donors from Britain and other European countries and the United States who sustained Zimbabwe’s starving millions for years.
“A lot of people got farms, but they can’t produce anything and this is what is causing the poverty and hunger,” he said. “There’s no food.”
Chaotic Land Reform
Zimbabwe’s economic unraveling has, indeed, accelerated since the chaotic, often violent invasions of thousands of white-owned farms by Mr. Mugabe’s supporters began in 2000. The big farms now produce less than a tenth the corn — the main staple food crop here — of what they did in the 1990s, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reported in June.
In the years since, the country has suffered extreme food scarcity, rampant inflation, a shrinking economy and collapsing public services. In Mrs. Nyabinde’s neighborhood, every spare spot of ground sprouts the greens people eat with cornmeal porridge, evidence of the scramble for food.
And in a country that used to have an education system that was the pride of the continent, the schools that Mrs. Nyabinde’s children — Chenai, 10, and Darlington, 6 — attend are now empty of teachers. So she sends them to Stella Muponda, a teacher who quit her public school job last year, for a couple of hours of instruction a day. The money Mrs. Nyabinde pays Mrs. Muponda for the children’s lessons is now worth only about 40 cents, enough for a single bread roll.
Mrs. Muponda, a widow with twin, 14-year-old boys, said she and her sons grew thinner, weaker and more sickly last year, unable to eat enough on her meager pay. When she no longer had the strength for the five-mile walk to and from school, she quit.
Gaunt and exhausted, she kept saying, “I only wish I could get a decent job.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/02/world ... ?th&emc=th
October 2, 2008
Life in Zimbabwe: Wait for Useless Money
By CELIA W. DUGGER
HARARE, Zimbabwe — Long before the rooster in their dirt yard crowed, Rose Moyo and her husband rolled out of bed. “It is time to get up,” intoned the robotic voice of her cellphone. Its glowing face displayed the time: 2:20 a.m.
They crept past their children sleeping on the floor of the one-room house — Cinderella, 9, and Chrissie, 10 — and took their daily moonlit stroll to the bank. The guard on the graveyard shift gave them a number. They were the 29th to arrive, all hoping for a chance to withdraw the maximum amount of Zimbabwean currency the government allowed last month — the equivalent of just a dollar or two.
Zimbabwe is in the grip of one of the great hyperinflations in world history. The people of this once proud capital have been plunged into a Darwinian struggle to get by. Many have been reduced to peddlers and paupers, hawkers and black-market hustlers, eating just a meal or two a day, their hollowed cheeks a testament to their hunger.
Like countless Zimbabweans, Mrs. Moyo has calculated the price of goods by the number of days she had to spend in line at the bank to withdraw cash to buy them: a day for a bar of soap; another for a bag of salt; and four for a sack of cornmeal.
The withdrawal limit rose on Monday, but with inflation surpassing what independent economists say is an almost unimaginable 40 million percent, she said the value of the new amount would quickly be a pittance, too.
“It’s survival of the fittest,” said Mrs. Moyo, 29, a hair braider who sells the greens she grows in her yard for a dime a bunch. “If you’re not fit, you will starve.”
Economists here and abroad say Zimbabwe’s economic collapse is gaining velocity, radiating instability into the heart of southern Africa. As the bankrupt government prints ever more money, inflation has gone wild, rising from 1,000 percent in 2006 to 12,000 percent in 2007 to a figure so high the government had to lop 10 zeros off the currency in August to keep the nation’s calculators from being overwhelmed. (Had it left the currency alone, $1 would now be worth about 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars.)
In fact, Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation is probably among the five worst of all time, said Jeffrey D. Sachs, a Columbia University economics professor, along with Germany in the 1920s, Greece and Hungary in the 1940s and Yugoslavia in 1993.
Making matters worse, cash itself has become scarce. Business executives and diplomats say Zimbabwe’s central bank governor, Gideon Gono, desperate for foreign currency to stoke the governing party’s patronage machine, sends runners into the streets with suitcases of the nation’s currency to buy up American dollars and South African rand on the black market — drying up Zimbabwean dollars that would otherwise go to the banks.
Because of the cash shortage, the government strictly limits the amount people can withdraw. Even so, Zimbabweans say they often wait in vain for hours at banks that send their customers away empty-handed.
Mr. Gono, who blames Western sanctions for the nation’s troubles, did not respond to requests for an interview. But he was quoted in the state media this week as saying, “I am going to print and print and sign the money until sanctions are removed.”
Political Solution Needed
Economists say that the only thing that can halt Zimbabwe’s inflationary spiral is a political solution that takes control over the country’s economy out of the hands of Robert Mugabe, the 84-year-old president who still maintains a viselike hold on power after 28 years in office.
“This is the end of the endgame,” Professor Sachs said.
Mr. Mugabe, who lives in splendor here in a mansion hidden behind high walls, returned to Harare on Monday from the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York. He and the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, signed a power-sharing agreement, but they are still deadlocked over the division of the ministries. So far, Mr. Mugabe has refused to give up control of the crucial Finance and Home Ministries.
Basic public services, already devastated by an exodus of professionals in recent years, are breaking down on an ever larger scale as tens of thousands of teachers, nurses, garbage collectors and janitors have simply stopped reporting to their jobs because their salaries, more worthless literally by the hour, no longer cover the cost of taking the bus to work.
“It’s scary and it’s pathetic,” said Tendai Chikowore, president of the Zimbabwe Teachers Association, the largest and least radical of the teacher unions. She said a teacher’s monthly pay was not even enough to buy two bottles of cooking oil. “This is a collapse of the system, and it’s not only for teachers,” she said. “At the hospitals, there are no nurses, no drugs.”
Those who continue to show up often make a little extra on the job. Teachers sell their students candy and cookies, for example, or accept payment from parents in cornmeal or cooking oil, said Raymond Majongwe, secretary general of the Progressive Teachers Union.
Zimbabweans have a legendary ability to make do despite extraordinary hardship, and the money sent home by millions of their compatriots who have fled abroad to escape political repression and economic deprivation continues to sustain many of them. But the deteriorating conditions are creating pressures for a renewed exodus, even as people employ all their entrepreneurial creativity to stay alive.
Among those thinking of leaving is Fortunate Nyabinde, whose salary of $3,600 Zimbabwean dollars a month (or $36 trillion before the government rejiggered the currency in August) does not even pay for four days of bus fare to her job at Parirenyatwa Hospital, one of Zimbabwe’s leading public institutions.
Yet, for now, she keeps going to work, wheeling a trolley of cornmeal porridge from ward to ward, mostly because she can eke out an extra 20 cents a day by selling basic necessities to patients that the hospital usually does not have in stock: toilet paper, toothpaste, soap.
“If they come to the hospital without anything, they will have to buy from us,” Ms. Nyabinde said.
Signs of a Calamity
Clues to the calamitous state of the country can be found even in recent articles tucked into Mr. Mugabe’s mouthpiece, The Herald, the only daily newspaper he has allowed to keep publishing.
The bodies of paupers in advanced states of decay were stacking up in the mortuary at Beitbridge District Hospital because not even government authorities were seeing to their burial.
Harare Central Hospital slashed admissions by almost half because so much of its cleaning staff could no longer afford to get to work.
Most of the capital, though lovely beneath its springtime canopy of lavender jacaranda blooms, was without water because the authorities had stopped paying the bills to transport the treatment chemicals. Garbage is piling up uncollected. Sixteen people have died in an outbreak of cholera in nearby Chitungwiza, spread by contaminated water and sewage.
Vigilantes in Kwekwe killed a man suspected of stealing two chickens, eggs and a bucket of corn.
And traditional chiefs complained about corrupt politicians and army officers who sold grain needed for the hungry to the politically connected instead.
Zimbabweans standing in bank lines across the capital offer their own stratagems for survival. At the Avondale shopping center, a strip mall with a cafe serving cappuccinos and a multiplex showing “Sex and the City,” more than 200 sweaty, grumpy people lined up one recent morning to withdraw whatever they could from the bank.
Mrs. Moyo, the early riser, had her usual sought-after, low number — 26 — while Mrs. Nyabinde, the hospital worker on the overnight shift, was far back at No. 148 because she had arrived late — about 5:15 a.m.
No. 132 was Stanford Mafumera, 35, a security guard who spends most of his time at his job or in line at the bank; he is so poor that he sleeps beneath the overhang at the mall rather than pay for bus fare home to his family. His clothes hung loose on his gaunt body, and his dusty shoes were coming apart.
“Since Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, there was no cash here,” he said. “We started getting cash only yesterday.”
Most days, he said, he eats only a bag of corn nuts to conserve his monthly pay — worth $10 a week and a half ago, but only $5 now because of inflation.
Each day, he buys a pack of cigarettes and sells them one by one, making an extra 20 to 30 cents. But he was unable to afford the cost of taking his 5-year-old daughter to the doctor recently when she got diarrhea after drinking dirty water from an unprotected well.
Mr. Mafumera blamed the government’s land reform program for Zimbabwe’s woes. It chased away the white commercial farmers who had made the country a breadbasket, he said, as well as donors from Britain and other European countries and the United States who sustained Zimbabwe’s starving millions for years.
“A lot of people got farms, but they can’t produce anything and this is what is causing the poverty and hunger,” he said. “There’s no food.”
Chaotic Land Reform
Zimbabwe’s economic unraveling has, indeed, accelerated since the chaotic, often violent invasions of thousands of white-owned farms by Mr. Mugabe’s supporters began in 2000. The big farms now produce less than a tenth the corn — the main staple food crop here — of what they did in the 1990s, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reported in June.
In the years since, the country has suffered extreme food scarcity, rampant inflation, a shrinking economy and collapsing public services. In Mrs. Nyabinde’s neighborhood, every spare spot of ground sprouts the greens people eat with cornmeal porridge, evidence of the scramble for food.
And in a country that used to have an education system that was the pride of the continent, the schools that Mrs. Nyabinde’s children — Chenai, 10, and Darlington, 6 — attend are now empty of teachers. So she sends them to Stella Muponda, a teacher who quit her public school job last year, for a couple of hours of instruction a day. The money Mrs. Nyabinde pays Mrs. Muponda for the children’s lessons is now worth only about 40 cents, enough for a single bread roll.
Mrs. Muponda, a widow with twin, 14-year-old boys, said she and her sons grew thinner, weaker and more sickly last year, unable to eat enough on her meager pay. When she no longer had the strength for the five-mile walk to and from school, she quit.
Gaunt and exhausted, she kept saying, “I only wish I could get a decent job.”
October 5, 2008
Command for Africa Is Established by Pentagon
By THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON — For decades, Africa was rarely more than an afterthought for the Pentagon.
Responsibilities for American military affairs across the vast African continent were divided clumsily among three regional combat headquarters, those for Europe, the Pacific and the Middle East. Commanders set priorities against obvious threats, whether the old Soviet Union and then a resurgent Russia, a rising China or a nuclear North Korea, or adversaries along the Persian Gulf.
If deployment of fighting forces is an indicator, that historic focus north of the equator endures. But since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a new view has gained acceptance among senior Pentagon officials and military commanders: that ungoverned spaces and ill-governed states, whose impoverished citizens are vulnerable to the ideology of violent extremism, pose a growing risk to American security.
Last week, in a small Pentagon conference hall, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, inaugurated the newest regional headquarters, Africa Command, which is responsible for coordinating American military affairs on the continent.
There are barely 2,000 American combat troops and combat support personnel based in Africa, and the new top officer, Gen. William E. Ward of the Army, pledges that Africa Command has no designs on creating vast, permanent concentrations of forces on the continent.
“Bases? Garrisons? It’s not about that,” General Ward said in an interview. “We are trying to prevent conflict, as opposed to having to react to a conflict.”
Already, though, analysts at policy advocacy organizations and research institutes are warning of a militarization of American foreign policy across Africa.
Mr. Gates said the new command was an example of the Pentagon’s evolving strategy of forging what he called “civilian-military partnerships,” in which the Defense Department works alongside and supports the State Department and the Agency for International Development, as well as host nations’ security and development agencies.
“In this respect, Africom represents yet another important step in modernizing our defense arrangements in light of 21st-century realities,” Mr. Gates said. “It is, at its heart, a different kind of command with a different orientation, one that we hope and expect will institutionalize a lasting security relationship with Africa, a vast region of growing importance in the globe.”
Mr. Gates and General Ward said that this work to complement and support American security and development policies would include missions like deploying military trainers to improve the abilities of local counterterrorism forces, assigning military engineers to help dig wells and build sewers, and sending in military doctors to inoculate the local population against diseases.
While that thinking has influenced the work of all of the military’s regional war-fighting commands, it is the central focus of Africa Command.
And over the past two years, it has quietly become the central focus of the military’s Southern Command, once better known for the invasions of Grenada and Panama, but now converting itself to a headquarters that supports efforts across the United States government and within host nations to improve security and economic development in Latin America.
A number of specialists in African and Latin American politics at nongovernmental organizations express apprehension, however, that the new emphasis of both these commands represents an undesirable injection of the military into American foreign policy, a change driven by fears of terrorists or desires for natural resources.
Officials at one leading relief organization, Refugees International, warned of the risk that Africom “will take over many humanitarian and development activities that soldiers aren’t trained to perform.”
In a statement, Kenneth H. Bacon, the president of Refugees International, said that the creation of Africa Command was “a sign of increased U.S. attention to Africa.” But he also said that it was “important that Africom focus on training peacekeepers and helping African countries build militaries responsive to civilian control and democratic government.”
Mr. Bacon, a Pentagon spokesman in the Clinton administration, added, “The military should stick to military tasks and let diplomats and development experts direct other aspects of U.S. policy in Africa.”
Refugees International released statistics showing that the percentage of development assistance controlled by the Defense Department had grown to nearly 22 percent from 3.5 percent over the past 10 years, while the percentage controlled by the Agency for International Development dropped to 40 percent from 65 percent.
General Ward rejected criticisms that Africa Command would result in a militarization of foreign policy, and he said it was specifically structured for cooperative efforts across the agencies of the United States government.
For example, a deputy commander at Africom is Ambassador Mary Carlin Yates, a career Foreign Service officer. And General Ward himself previously served in a combined diplomatic and military role, as director of efforts to help reform the Palestinian security services.
But concerns remain that whatever arena the Pentagon enters, it has more money, more personnel and more power than any other government organization, American or foreign.
“If we can bring a capability that can be an assist to one of our interagency partners, then I think we ought to do that,” General Ward said. “But I draw a distinction between leading that effort and supporting that effort. We don’t create policy. This is not the job of a unified command. We implement those aspects of policy that have military implications. And we support others.”
Planners abandoned early intentions to base Africa Command in Africa, perhaps with a major headquarters and regional satellite offices. Owing to local sensitivities, security concerns and simple logistics of moving around the vast continent, which often requires routing through Europe, the command will for now have its headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany.
General Ward said that in creating the Africa Command, he had been in close contact with his counterpart atop the military’s Southern Command, Adm. James G. Stavridis, who has received high marks from Pentagon leaders for converting the military presence in Central and South America. Where previously Southern Command emphasized direct military action, it now focuses on programs to train and support local forces, and assist economic development, health services and counternarcotics efforts.
“The more I look at this region over the two years I have been at Southcom,” Admiral Stavridis said in an interview, “the more convinced I am that the approach we need to take for U.S. national security in the region is really an interagency approach.
“Think of the problems that afflict this region — natural disasters, poverty, the narcotics trade, lack of medical care,” he said. “Our thought at Southcom is, How can we be supportive of an interagency approach? How can we partner with other interagency actors, and then tie that together with our international partners?”
Admiral Stavridis said Southern Command was “very directly and consciously not taking the lead.”
“We are trying to be part of the team, to be a facilitator,” he added.
But George Withers, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America, a nonprofit research and human-rights advocacy organization, said in a statement that “while improved delivery of U.S. assistance is certainly an admirable goal,” putting Southern Command into a coordinating role on issues like corruption, crime or poverty “drains authority from the State Department and resources from the Defense Department.”
Command for Africa Is Established by Pentagon
By THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON — For decades, Africa was rarely more than an afterthought for the Pentagon.
Responsibilities for American military affairs across the vast African continent were divided clumsily among three regional combat headquarters, those for Europe, the Pacific and the Middle East. Commanders set priorities against obvious threats, whether the old Soviet Union and then a resurgent Russia, a rising China or a nuclear North Korea, or adversaries along the Persian Gulf.
If deployment of fighting forces is an indicator, that historic focus north of the equator endures. But since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a new view has gained acceptance among senior Pentagon officials and military commanders: that ungoverned spaces and ill-governed states, whose impoverished citizens are vulnerable to the ideology of violent extremism, pose a growing risk to American security.
Last week, in a small Pentagon conference hall, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, inaugurated the newest regional headquarters, Africa Command, which is responsible for coordinating American military affairs on the continent.
There are barely 2,000 American combat troops and combat support personnel based in Africa, and the new top officer, Gen. William E. Ward of the Army, pledges that Africa Command has no designs on creating vast, permanent concentrations of forces on the continent.
“Bases? Garrisons? It’s not about that,” General Ward said in an interview. “We are trying to prevent conflict, as opposed to having to react to a conflict.”
Already, though, analysts at policy advocacy organizations and research institutes are warning of a militarization of American foreign policy across Africa.
Mr. Gates said the new command was an example of the Pentagon’s evolving strategy of forging what he called “civilian-military partnerships,” in which the Defense Department works alongside and supports the State Department and the Agency for International Development, as well as host nations’ security and development agencies.
“In this respect, Africom represents yet another important step in modernizing our defense arrangements in light of 21st-century realities,” Mr. Gates said. “It is, at its heart, a different kind of command with a different orientation, one that we hope and expect will institutionalize a lasting security relationship with Africa, a vast region of growing importance in the globe.”
Mr. Gates and General Ward said that this work to complement and support American security and development policies would include missions like deploying military trainers to improve the abilities of local counterterrorism forces, assigning military engineers to help dig wells and build sewers, and sending in military doctors to inoculate the local population against diseases.
While that thinking has influenced the work of all of the military’s regional war-fighting commands, it is the central focus of Africa Command.
And over the past two years, it has quietly become the central focus of the military’s Southern Command, once better known for the invasions of Grenada and Panama, but now converting itself to a headquarters that supports efforts across the United States government and within host nations to improve security and economic development in Latin America.
A number of specialists in African and Latin American politics at nongovernmental organizations express apprehension, however, that the new emphasis of both these commands represents an undesirable injection of the military into American foreign policy, a change driven by fears of terrorists or desires for natural resources.
Officials at one leading relief organization, Refugees International, warned of the risk that Africom “will take over many humanitarian and development activities that soldiers aren’t trained to perform.”
In a statement, Kenneth H. Bacon, the president of Refugees International, said that the creation of Africa Command was “a sign of increased U.S. attention to Africa.” But he also said that it was “important that Africom focus on training peacekeepers and helping African countries build militaries responsive to civilian control and democratic government.”
Mr. Bacon, a Pentagon spokesman in the Clinton administration, added, “The military should stick to military tasks and let diplomats and development experts direct other aspects of U.S. policy in Africa.”
Refugees International released statistics showing that the percentage of development assistance controlled by the Defense Department had grown to nearly 22 percent from 3.5 percent over the past 10 years, while the percentage controlled by the Agency for International Development dropped to 40 percent from 65 percent.
General Ward rejected criticisms that Africa Command would result in a militarization of foreign policy, and he said it was specifically structured for cooperative efforts across the agencies of the United States government.
For example, a deputy commander at Africom is Ambassador Mary Carlin Yates, a career Foreign Service officer. And General Ward himself previously served in a combined diplomatic and military role, as director of efforts to help reform the Palestinian security services.
But concerns remain that whatever arena the Pentagon enters, it has more money, more personnel and more power than any other government organization, American or foreign.
“If we can bring a capability that can be an assist to one of our interagency partners, then I think we ought to do that,” General Ward said. “But I draw a distinction between leading that effort and supporting that effort. We don’t create policy. This is not the job of a unified command. We implement those aspects of policy that have military implications. And we support others.”
Planners abandoned early intentions to base Africa Command in Africa, perhaps with a major headquarters and regional satellite offices. Owing to local sensitivities, security concerns and simple logistics of moving around the vast continent, which often requires routing through Europe, the command will for now have its headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany.
General Ward said that in creating the Africa Command, he had been in close contact with his counterpart atop the military’s Southern Command, Adm. James G. Stavridis, who has received high marks from Pentagon leaders for converting the military presence in Central and South America. Where previously Southern Command emphasized direct military action, it now focuses on programs to train and support local forces, and assist economic development, health services and counternarcotics efforts.
“The more I look at this region over the two years I have been at Southcom,” Admiral Stavridis said in an interview, “the more convinced I am that the approach we need to take for U.S. national security in the region is really an interagency approach.
“Think of the problems that afflict this region — natural disasters, poverty, the narcotics trade, lack of medical care,” he said. “Our thought at Southcom is, How can we be supportive of an interagency approach? How can we partner with other interagency actors, and then tie that together with our international partners?”
Admiral Stavridis said Southern Command was “very directly and consciously not taking the lead.”
“We are trying to be part of the team, to be a facilitator,” he added.
But George Withers, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America, a nonprofit research and human-rights advocacy organization, said in a statement that “while improved delivery of U.S. assistance is certainly an admirable goal,” putting Southern Command into a coordinating role on issues like corruption, crime or poverty “drains authority from the State Department and resources from the Defense Department.”
There is a photo linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/world ... &th&emc=th
October 6, 2008
Post-Apartheid South Africa Enters Anxious Era
By BARRY BEARAK
DIEPSLOOT, South Africa — A dusty maze of concrete, sheet metal and scrap wood, Diepsloot is like so many of the enormous settlements around Johannesburg, mile after mile of feebly assembled shacks, the impromptu patchwork of the poor, the extremely poor and the hopelessly poor.
Monica Xangathi, 40, lives here in a shanty she shares with her brother’s family. “This is not the way I thought my life would turn out,” she said.
Her disappointment is not only with herself; she is heartsick about her country. Fourteen years after the end of apartheid, South Africa — the global pariah that became a global inspiration — has lapsed into gloom and anxiety about its future, surely not the harmonious “rainbow nation” so celebrated by Nelson Mandela on his inauguration day.
“If only I could make Nelson Mandela come back,” Ms. Xangathi said. “If only I could feed him a potion and make him young again.”
This longing to propel the past into the present is rooted in more than fond reminiscence. Two weeks ago, a vicious power struggle culminated in something like regicide, with the governing African National Congress deposing one of its own, President Thabo Mbeki, and replacing him with a stand-in for Mr. Mbeki’s archrival, Jacob Zuma.
The actual changing of the guard was orderly enough, but months of behind-the-scenes back-stabbing have made many South Africans long for days more abundant with moral clarity, including those fretful about a figure as polarizing as Mr. Zuma.
The past year has been especially unnerving, with one bleak event after another, and it is more than acidic politics that have soured the national mood. Economic growth slowed; prices shot up. Xenophobic riots broke out in several cities, with mobs killing dozens of impoverished foreigners and chasing thousands more from their tumbledown homes.
The country’s power company unfathomably ran out of electricity and rationed supply. Gone was the conceit that South Africa was the one place on the continent immune to such incompetence. The rich purchased generators; the poor muddled through with kerosene and paraffin.
Other grievances were ruefully familiar. South Africa has one of the worst crime rates. But more alarming than the quantity of lawbreaking is the cruelty. Robberies are often accompanied by appalling violence, and people here one-up each other with tales of scalding and shooting and slicing and garroting.
The poor apply padlocks in defense. The rich surround their homes with concrete and barbed wire — and there are suggestions that more are simply fleeing the country.
“On our street alone, just that one small street, three of the husbands in families were killed in carjackings or robberies,” said Antony McKechnie, an electrical engineer who a month ago moved to New Zealand. “If we had stayed and something had happened to any of our three children, we would never be able to forgive ourselves.”
Rich and poor, black, white and mixed race: their complaints may differ, but the discontent is shared. Polls show a pervasive distrust of government, political parties and the police.
In great measure, the tough realities of South Africa’s long haul after apartheid have simply replaced the halo of liberation’s first days. Likewise, while Mr. Mandela seemed a saintly figure to many, his successors seem all too human.
“We are not the world’s greatest fairy tale, but rather a young, messy and not-always-predictable democracy,” said Mark Gevisser, a journalist and the author of “Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred.”
Messy and unpredictable, yes. Scandalous, too.
Mr. Mbeki was president for nine years, and his image slowly warped from someone aloof but well intentioned to someone secretive and conniving. During the past year, he went to extraordinary lengths to protect his police commissioner, accused of shopping with mobsters in an expensive haberdashery and permitting them to pick up the tab.
Mr. Mbeki’s political nemesis is Mr. Zuma, whom he once fired as deputy president and who has image problems of his own. In 2006, he was tried on rape charges and acquitted, testifying that his accuser had encouraged him by wearing a short skirt and sitting provocatively. As a Zulu man, he said, he was duty-bound to oblige her. He then showered, as he described it, to “minimize the risk” of contracting the virus that causes AIDS.
Last December, Mr. Zuma won control of the African National Congress, clearing the way for him to assume the presidency after the 2009 elections. Only lingering corruption charges could frustrate his ambitions, and some of his more prominent followers have declared they will “kill” if Mr. Zuma is thwarted. On Sept. 20, party leaders called an early end to the Mbeki years, installing a caretaker, Kgalema Motlanthe. Mr. Zuma remains the president-in-waiting.
The onslaught of unsettling news has proved too much for some with the means to flee. No reliable numbers are kept on emigration, but “packing for Perth” — a phrase used to describe white flight, not necessarily to the Australian city — is believed to be on the increase.
Since 1996, the black population has risen to a projected 38.5 million from 31.8 million, according to government statistics. The white population has dropped to a projected 4.5 million from 4.8 million.
John Loos, an economist at First National Bank of South Africa, who tracks the reasons given by people who sell homes in white suburban markets, said 9 percent cited emigration in the last quarter of 2007. In the first quarter of 2008, the number rose to 12 percent; in the second quarter it reached 18 percent.
Minority groups — which include whites, Asians and people of mixed race — “are prone to overreacting about anything,” Mr. Loos said. “We have people with the mind-set that this country is just another Zimbabwe in the making.”
Far fewer blacks emigrate out of such despair, but that does not mean they are more cheerful.
“Things are quite scary here, especially during the Zuma court cases with people talking about war and killing,” said Rodney Muzuli, a community development worker. “You wonder if we’re going the path of Rwanda.”
Hlengiwe Dladla, a mother at home with her 1-year-old in Diepsloot, said: “I don’t trust Jacob Zuma. Did you hear what he said at his rape trial? Well, I am also a Zulu, and I can tell you that if he was truly a cultural man, he would respect a woman, short skirt or not.”
Louis Manjanja, 26, a TV installer, blames the African National Congress, which led the liberation struggle, for the troubles. “The A.N.C. is a bunch of greedy guys fighting for positions and ignoring what needs to be done,” he said. “I voted for them before, but not again.”
It is easy to tap into such naysaying. But there is a case to be made that pessimistic South Africans are looking at a glass that is actually more than half full yet describe it as near empty. Not so long ago, people feared that the end of apartheid would set off civil war and a blood bath.
Adam Habib, a political analyst, finds it understandable that the marginalized complain, and he invokes the term “relative deprivation.” The gap between the rich and the poor may be widening, but the lot of the poor is improving, he said: the unemployment rate, however horrendous, is in decline; the incomes of the poor, however meager, are on the rise.
While some critics have likened Mr. Mbeki’s exit to a Stalinist purge, Mr. Habib, a deputy vice chancellor at the University of Johannesburg, pointed out that the transition was smooth and nonviolent, something rare in Africa. “Our democracy is only 14 years old,” he said. “Rather than calling this a crisis, people ought to ask how our institutions came together so well in so short a time.”
Mr. Zuma fares badly in national opinion polls, but there is no denying an allure. A personable man, he seems to win over every audience he meets. He talks tough on crime, and despite his notorious postcoital shower, he seems to address the topic of H.I.V. and AIDS in a reasoned manner. For nearly a year, Mr. Zuma and Mr. Mbeki represented two competing centers of power. Some businessmen are relieved to see the combat decisively at an end.
Indeed, South African pessimism has spawned a countervailing industry of reassurance. Louis Fourie, a noted financial adviser, travels the country delivering a speech called “South Africa, How Are You?” Yes, he confesses, the public education system is deplorable. Yes, crime is horrendous. Yes, 20 million impoverished South Africans are “living in hell, no other way to describe it.”
But, Mr. Fourie reminds people that the country has 1,533 miles of gorgeous coastline, 10 international airports, a robust stock exchange and an open society with a free press. He fondly repeats the phrase that South Africa is “the most unsung success story in modern history.”
Since May, one of the nation’s best-selling books has been a pep talk titled “Don’t Panic!” by a businessman, Alan Knott-Craig. Aimed primarily at downhearted white people, the book laments the “tsunami of negativity” and discourages those packing for Perth.
Mr. Knott-Craig, 31, said in an interview that 67 of his 72 classmates in an accounting course had emigrated. “People are being bombarded by bad news, and at every water cooler it gets reinforced,” he said. “People thank me for helping them snap out of their negativity.”
And yet perhaps even Mr. Knott-Craig is susceptible to gloom.
In the preface to “Don’t Panic!” he seems to praise South Africa with faint damnation. “Will we still have a viable country in 2020?” he asks himself rhetorically, cautiously concluding, “I think we’ve got a better than 50-50 chance.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/world ... &th&emc=th
October 6, 2008
Post-Apartheid South Africa Enters Anxious Era
By BARRY BEARAK
DIEPSLOOT, South Africa — A dusty maze of concrete, sheet metal and scrap wood, Diepsloot is like so many of the enormous settlements around Johannesburg, mile after mile of feebly assembled shacks, the impromptu patchwork of the poor, the extremely poor and the hopelessly poor.
Monica Xangathi, 40, lives here in a shanty she shares with her brother’s family. “This is not the way I thought my life would turn out,” she said.
Her disappointment is not only with herself; she is heartsick about her country. Fourteen years after the end of apartheid, South Africa — the global pariah that became a global inspiration — has lapsed into gloom and anxiety about its future, surely not the harmonious “rainbow nation” so celebrated by Nelson Mandela on his inauguration day.
“If only I could make Nelson Mandela come back,” Ms. Xangathi said. “If only I could feed him a potion and make him young again.”
This longing to propel the past into the present is rooted in more than fond reminiscence. Two weeks ago, a vicious power struggle culminated in something like regicide, with the governing African National Congress deposing one of its own, President Thabo Mbeki, and replacing him with a stand-in for Mr. Mbeki’s archrival, Jacob Zuma.
The actual changing of the guard was orderly enough, but months of behind-the-scenes back-stabbing have made many South Africans long for days more abundant with moral clarity, including those fretful about a figure as polarizing as Mr. Zuma.
The past year has been especially unnerving, with one bleak event after another, and it is more than acidic politics that have soured the national mood. Economic growth slowed; prices shot up. Xenophobic riots broke out in several cities, with mobs killing dozens of impoverished foreigners and chasing thousands more from their tumbledown homes.
The country’s power company unfathomably ran out of electricity and rationed supply. Gone was the conceit that South Africa was the one place on the continent immune to such incompetence. The rich purchased generators; the poor muddled through with kerosene and paraffin.
Other grievances were ruefully familiar. South Africa has one of the worst crime rates. But more alarming than the quantity of lawbreaking is the cruelty. Robberies are often accompanied by appalling violence, and people here one-up each other with tales of scalding and shooting and slicing and garroting.
The poor apply padlocks in defense. The rich surround their homes with concrete and barbed wire — and there are suggestions that more are simply fleeing the country.
“On our street alone, just that one small street, three of the husbands in families were killed in carjackings or robberies,” said Antony McKechnie, an electrical engineer who a month ago moved to New Zealand. “If we had stayed and something had happened to any of our three children, we would never be able to forgive ourselves.”
Rich and poor, black, white and mixed race: their complaints may differ, but the discontent is shared. Polls show a pervasive distrust of government, political parties and the police.
In great measure, the tough realities of South Africa’s long haul after apartheid have simply replaced the halo of liberation’s first days. Likewise, while Mr. Mandela seemed a saintly figure to many, his successors seem all too human.
“We are not the world’s greatest fairy tale, but rather a young, messy and not-always-predictable democracy,” said Mark Gevisser, a journalist and the author of “Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred.”
Messy and unpredictable, yes. Scandalous, too.
Mr. Mbeki was president for nine years, and his image slowly warped from someone aloof but well intentioned to someone secretive and conniving. During the past year, he went to extraordinary lengths to protect his police commissioner, accused of shopping with mobsters in an expensive haberdashery and permitting them to pick up the tab.
Mr. Mbeki’s political nemesis is Mr. Zuma, whom he once fired as deputy president and who has image problems of his own. In 2006, he was tried on rape charges and acquitted, testifying that his accuser had encouraged him by wearing a short skirt and sitting provocatively. As a Zulu man, he said, he was duty-bound to oblige her. He then showered, as he described it, to “minimize the risk” of contracting the virus that causes AIDS.
Last December, Mr. Zuma won control of the African National Congress, clearing the way for him to assume the presidency after the 2009 elections. Only lingering corruption charges could frustrate his ambitions, and some of his more prominent followers have declared they will “kill” if Mr. Zuma is thwarted. On Sept. 20, party leaders called an early end to the Mbeki years, installing a caretaker, Kgalema Motlanthe. Mr. Zuma remains the president-in-waiting.
The onslaught of unsettling news has proved too much for some with the means to flee. No reliable numbers are kept on emigration, but “packing for Perth” — a phrase used to describe white flight, not necessarily to the Australian city — is believed to be on the increase.
Since 1996, the black population has risen to a projected 38.5 million from 31.8 million, according to government statistics. The white population has dropped to a projected 4.5 million from 4.8 million.
John Loos, an economist at First National Bank of South Africa, who tracks the reasons given by people who sell homes in white suburban markets, said 9 percent cited emigration in the last quarter of 2007. In the first quarter of 2008, the number rose to 12 percent; in the second quarter it reached 18 percent.
Minority groups — which include whites, Asians and people of mixed race — “are prone to overreacting about anything,” Mr. Loos said. “We have people with the mind-set that this country is just another Zimbabwe in the making.”
Far fewer blacks emigrate out of such despair, but that does not mean they are more cheerful.
“Things are quite scary here, especially during the Zuma court cases with people talking about war and killing,” said Rodney Muzuli, a community development worker. “You wonder if we’re going the path of Rwanda.”
Hlengiwe Dladla, a mother at home with her 1-year-old in Diepsloot, said: “I don’t trust Jacob Zuma. Did you hear what he said at his rape trial? Well, I am also a Zulu, and I can tell you that if he was truly a cultural man, he would respect a woman, short skirt or not.”
Louis Manjanja, 26, a TV installer, blames the African National Congress, which led the liberation struggle, for the troubles. “The A.N.C. is a bunch of greedy guys fighting for positions and ignoring what needs to be done,” he said. “I voted for them before, but not again.”
It is easy to tap into such naysaying. But there is a case to be made that pessimistic South Africans are looking at a glass that is actually more than half full yet describe it as near empty. Not so long ago, people feared that the end of apartheid would set off civil war and a blood bath.
Adam Habib, a political analyst, finds it understandable that the marginalized complain, and he invokes the term “relative deprivation.” The gap between the rich and the poor may be widening, but the lot of the poor is improving, he said: the unemployment rate, however horrendous, is in decline; the incomes of the poor, however meager, are on the rise.
While some critics have likened Mr. Mbeki’s exit to a Stalinist purge, Mr. Habib, a deputy vice chancellor at the University of Johannesburg, pointed out that the transition was smooth and nonviolent, something rare in Africa. “Our democracy is only 14 years old,” he said. “Rather than calling this a crisis, people ought to ask how our institutions came together so well in so short a time.”
Mr. Zuma fares badly in national opinion polls, but there is no denying an allure. A personable man, he seems to win over every audience he meets. He talks tough on crime, and despite his notorious postcoital shower, he seems to address the topic of H.I.V. and AIDS in a reasoned manner. For nearly a year, Mr. Zuma and Mr. Mbeki represented two competing centers of power. Some businessmen are relieved to see the combat decisively at an end.
Indeed, South African pessimism has spawned a countervailing industry of reassurance. Louis Fourie, a noted financial adviser, travels the country delivering a speech called “South Africa, How Are You?” Yes, he confesses, the public education system is deplorable. Yes, crime is horrendous. Yes, 20 million impoverished South Africans are “living in hell, no other way to describe it.”
But, Mr. Fourie reminds people that the country has 1,533 miles of gorgeous coastline, 10 international airports, a robust stock exchange and an open society with a free press. He fondly repeats the phrase that South Africa is “the most unsung success story in modern history.”
Since May, one of the nation’s best-selling books has been a pep talk titled “Don’t Panic!” by a businessman, Alan Knott-Craig. Aimed primarily at downhearted white people, the book laments the “tsunami of negativity” and discourages those packing for Perth.
Mr. Knott-Craig, 31, said in an interview that 67 of his 72 classmates in an accounting course had emigrated. “People are being bombarded by bad news, and at every water cooler it gets reinforced,” he said. “People thank me for helping them snap out of their negativity.”
And yet perhaps even Mr. Knott-Craig is susceptible to gloom.
In the preface to “Don’t Panic!” he seems to praise South Africa with faint damnation. “Will we still have a viable country in 2020?” he asks himself rhetorically, cautiously concluding, “I think we’ve got a better than 50-50 chance.”
October 9, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Can This Be Pro-Life?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The Bush administration this month is quietly cutting off birth control supplies to some of the world’s poorest women in Africa.
Thus the paradox of a “pro-life” administration adopting a policy whose result will be tens of thousands of additional abortions each year — along with more women dying in childbirth.
The saga also spotlights a clear difference between Barack Obama and John McCain. Senator Obama supports U.N.-led efforts to promote family planning; Senator McCain stands with President Bush in opposing certain crucial efforts to help women reduce unwanted pregnancies in Africa and Asia.
There is something about reproductive health — maybe the sex part — that makes some Americans froth and go crazy. We see it in the opposition to condoms to curb AIDS in Africa and in the insistence on abstinence-only sex education in American classrooms (one reason American teenage pregnancy rates are more than double those in Canada). And we see it in the decision of some towns — like Wasilla, Alaska, when Sarah Palin was mayor there — to bill rape victims for the kits used to gather evidence of sex crimes. In most places, police departments pay for rape kits, which cost hundreds of dollars, but while Ms. Palin was mayor of Wasilla, the town decided to save money by billing rape victims.
The latest bout of reproductive-health madness came in the last couple of weeks when the U.S. Agency for International Development ordered six African countries to ensure that no U.S.-financed condoms, birth control pills, I.U.D.’s or other contraceptives are furnished to Marie Stopes International, a British-based aid group that operates clinics in poor countries.
The Bush administration says it took this action because Marie Stopes International works with the U.N. Population Fund in China. President Bush has cut all financing for the population fund on the — false — basis that it supports China’s family-planning program.
It’s true that China’s one-child policy sometimes includes forced abortion, and when traveling in rural China, I still come across peasants whose homes have been knocked down as punishment for an unauthorized child. But the U.N. fund has been the most powerful force in moderating China’s policy, and a State Department team itself found no evidence of any U.N. involvement in the coercion.
Mr. Bush’s defunding of the U.N. Population Fund — backed by Senator McCain — has persisted since 2002. What is new is the extension of that policy to a leading private family-planning organization like Marie Stopes International.
“The irony and hypocrisy of it is that this is a bone to the self-described ‘pro-life’ movement, but it will result in deaths to women who just want to space their births,” said Dana Hovig, the chief executive of Marie Stopes International. The organization estimates that the result will be at least 157,000 additional unwanted pregnancies per year, leading to 62,000 additional abortions and 660 women dying in childbirth.
That may overstate the impact. Kent Hill, an official of the U.S. aid agency, insists that there will be no increase in pregnancies because the American contraceptives will simply be routed to other aid groups in Africa.
That will work to some degree in big cities. But it’s a fantasy in rural Africa. Over the years, I’ve dropped in on a half-dozen Marie Stopes clinics, and in rural areas there’s typically nothing else for many miles around. Women in the villages simply have no other source of family planning.
“This nearsighted maneuver will have direct and dire consequences,” a group of prominent public health experts in America declared in an open letter, adding that the action “will translate almost immediately into increased maternal death and disability.”
Proponents of the cut-off are not misogynists. They are honestly outraged by forced abortions in China. But why take it out on the most impoverished and voiceless people on earth? Mr. McCain seems to have supported Mr. Bush, mostly out of instinct, and when a reporter asked him this spring whether American aid should finance contraceptives to fight AIDS in Africa, he initially said, “I haven’t thought about it,” and later added, “You’ve stumped me.”
Retrograde decisions on reproductive health are reached in conference rooms in Washington, but I’ve seen how they play out in African villages. A young woman lies in a hut, bleeding to death or swollen by infection, as untrained midwives offer her water or herbs. Her husband and children wait anxiously outside the hut, their faces frozen and perspiring as her groans weaken.
When she dies, her body is bundled in an old blanket and buried in a shallow hole, with brush piled on top to keep wild animals away. Her children sob and shriek and in the ensuing months they often endure neglect and are far more likely to die of hunger or disease.
In some parts of Africa, a woman now has a 1-in-10 risk of dying in childbirth. The idea that U.S. policy may increase that toll is infuriating.
I invite you to visit my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.
Op-Ed Columnist
Can This Be Pro-Life?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The Bush administration this month is quietly cutting off birth control supplies to some of the world’s poorest women in Africa.
Thus the paradox of a “pro-life” administration adopting a policy whose result will be tens of thousands of additional abortions each year — along with more women dying in childbirth.
The saga also spotlights a clear difference between Barack Obama and John McCain. Senator Obama supports U.N.-led efforts to promote family planning; Senator McCain stands with President Bush in opposing certain crucial efforts to help women reduce unwanted pregnancies in Africa and Asia.
There is something about reproductive health — maybe the sex part — that makes some Americans froth and go crazy. We see it in the opposition to condoms to curb AIDS in Africa and in the insistence on abstinence-only sex education in American classrooms (one reason American teenage pregnancy rates are more than double those in Canada). And we see it in the decision of some towns — like Wasilla, Alaska, when Sarah Palin was mayor there — to bill rape victims for the kits used to gather evidence of sex crimes. In most places, police departments pay for rape kits, which cost hundreds of dollars, but while Ms. Palin was mayor of Wasilla, the town decided to save money by billing rape victims.
The latest bout of reproductive-health madness came in the last couple of weeks when the U.S. Agency for International Development ordered six African countries to ensure that no U.S.-financed condoms, birth control pills, I.U.D.’s or other contraceptives are furnished to Marie Stopes International, a British-based aid group that operates clinics in poor countries.
The Bush administration says it took this action because Marie Stopes International works with the U.N. Population Fund in China. President Bush has cut all financing for the population fund on the — false — basis that it supports China’s family-planning program.
It’s true that China’s one-child policy sometimes includes forced abortion, and when traveling in rural China, I still come across peasants whose homes have been knocked down as punishment for an unauthorized child. But the U.N. fund has been the most powerful force in moderating China’s policy, and a State Department team itself found no evidence of any U.N. involvement in the coercion.
Mr. Bush’s defunding of the U.N. Population Fund — backed by Senator McCain — has persisted since 2002. What is new is the extension of that policy to a leading private family-planning organization like Marie Stopes International.
“The irony and hypocrisy of it is that this is a bone to the self-described ‘pro-life’ movement, but it will result in deaths to women who just want to space their births,” said Dana Hovig, the chief executive of Marie Stopes International. The organization estimates that the result will be at least 157,000 additional unwanted pregnancies per year, leading to 62,000 additional abortions and 660 women dying in childbirth.
That may overstate the impact. Kent Hill, an official of the U.S. aid agency, insists that there will be no increase in pregnancies because the American contraceptives will simply be routed to other aid groups in Africa.
That will work to some degree in big cities. But it’s a fantasy in rural Africa. Over the years, I’ve dropped in on a half-dozen Marie Stopes clinics, and in rural areas there’s typically nothing else for many miles around. Women in the villages simply have no other source of family planning.
“This nearsighted maneuver will have direct and dire consequences,” a group of prominent public health experts in America declared in an open letter, adding that the action “will translate almost immediately into increased maternal death and disability.”
Proponents of the cut-off are not misogynists. They are honestly outraged by forced abortions in China. But why take it out on the most impoverished and voiceless people on earth? Mr. McCain seems to have supported Mr. Bush, mostly out of instinct, and when a reporter asked him this spring whether American aid should finance contraceptives to fight AIDS in Africa, he initially said, “I haven’t thought about it,” and later added, “You’ve stumped me.”
Retrograde decisions on reproductive health are reached in conference rooms in Washington, but I’ve seen how they play out in African villages. A young woman lies in a hut, bleeding to death or swollen by infection, as untrained midwives offer her water or herbs. Her husband and children wait anxiously outside the hut, their faces frozen and perspiring as her groans weaken.
When she dies, her body is bundled in an old blanket and buried in a shallow hole, with brush piled on top to keep wild animals away. Her children sob and shriek and in the ensuing months they often endure neglect and are far more likely to die of hunger or disease.
In some parts of Africa, a woman now has a 1-in-10 risk of dying in childbirth. The idea that U.S. policy may increase that toll is infuriating.
I invite you to visit my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.
Do not cut aid to Africa, Kikwete pleads to world
10 Oct 2008
By Lusekelo Philemon and Agencies
The chairman of the African Union (AU), Jakaya Kikwete has urged the world not to row back on aid to the world`s poorest continent due to the financial crisis.
``Our appeal to our development partners is that they should not cut aid to the developing countries,`` Kikwete, who is also president of Tanzania, told reporters.
``Our expectation is that the financial crisis in Europe and America, and now the huge sums of money that are being spent to bail out the banks, would not impact negatively on development assistance to Africa.``
Experts say that while Africa is relatively insulated from the global credit crisis, there could well be a negative effect on investment, remittances and aid flows from abroad.
The United States and Europe have pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into their markets to save banks from collapse and cushion their economies. Those amounts dwarf the annual budgets of many developing countries, such as Tanzania.
Kikwete, speaking at the end of a three-day state visit by Madagascar`s president, Marc Ravalomanana, said his east African nation was analysing how best to respond if it is eventually affected by the financial turmoil.
According to the President, the government had been monitoring the global economic trends very closely so as to take precautionary measures.
The skyrocketing oil and food prices across the world was an important signal that developing countries need to intensify agriculture production.
He urged development partners to continue fulfilling their pledges on aid.
For his part, Madagascar President Ravalomanana asked funding partners not to cut their promised aid to African countries.
He said African countries should think of ways to face the challenge of the imminent economic depression.
``I urge African countries to stick to agricultural development because of its importance to economic development,`` he said.
Ravalomanana thanked Tanzania for the hospitality extended to him and his delegation, stressing the need to strengthen the existing bilateral relations between the two countries.
* SOURCE: Guardian
10 Oct 2008
By Lusekelo Philemon and Agencies
The chairman of the African Union (AU), Jakaya Kikwete has urged the world not to row back on aid to the world`s poorest continent due to the financial crisis.
``Our appeal to our development partners is that they should not cut aid to the developing countries,`` Kikwete, who is also president of Tanzania, told reporters.
``Our expectation is that the financial crisis in Europe and America, and now the huge sums of money that are being spent to bail out the banks, would not impact negatively on development assistance to Africa.``
Experts say that while Africa is relatively insulated from the global credit crisis, there could well be a negative effect on investment, remittances and aid flows from abroad.
The United States and Europe have pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into their markets to save banks from collapse and cushion their economies. Those amounts dwarf the annual budgets of many developing countries, such as Tanzania.
Kikwete, speaking at the end of a three-day state visit by Madagascar`s president, Marc Ravalomanana, said his east African nation was analysing how best to respond if it is eventually affected by the financial turmoil.
According to the President, the government had been monitoring the global economic trends very closely so as to take precautionary measures.
The skyrocketing oil and food prices across the world was an important signal that developing countries need to intensify agriculture production.
He urged development partners to continue fulfilling their pledges on aid.
For his part, Madagascar President Ravalomanana asked funding partners not to cut their promised aid to African countries.
He said African countries should think of ways to face the challenge of the imminent economic depression.
``I urge African countries to stick to agricultural development because of its importance to economic development,`` he said.
Ravalomanana thanked Tanzania for the hospitality extended to him and his delegation, stressing the need to strengthen the existing bilateral relations between the two countries.
* SOURCE: Guardian
October 12, 2008
Mugabe Claims Security Ministries, Jeopardizing Deal
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — In a step that could jeopardize a painstakingly negotiated power-sharing deal in Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe has declared that his party will retain ministries that control the military and the police, state media reported Saturday. The crucial Finance Ministry was still in dispute.
Opposition officials condemned his decision and said their party, the Movement for Democratic Change, would not join a government in which the most important ministries were occupied by officials of ZANU-PF, the governing party.
Since the power-sharing agreement was signed more than three weeks ago, Mr. Mugabe and the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, who was to serve as prime minister under the deal, have been deadlocked over the division of ministries.
The two men agreed after meeting on Friday to request the intervention of Thabo Mbeki, who was recently ousted as president of South Africa by his own party but remains the official mediator in the Zimbabwe crisis. Mr. Mbeki is scheduled to fly into Harare on Monday, his spokesman, Mukoni Ratshitanga, said.
An opposition spokesman, Nelson Chamisa, said Mr. Mugabe’s allocation of ministries was a strategy meant to pre-empt Mr. Mbeki’s mediation and called on African leaders and the international community to intervene. In a statement, he called Mr. Mugabe’s division of the ministries “a giant act of madness which puts the whole deal into jeopardy.”
“The M.D.C. did not append its signature to a ZANU-PF power-grabbing deal but to a power-sharing deal,” he said.
Mr. Tsvangirai outpolled Mr. Mugabe, who has been in office for 28 years, in an election in March, but did not win a majority. Mr. Mugabe remained in office through what human rights groups and witnesses said was a military-led campaign of violence against the opposition before the run-off in June, which was denounced by independent, African election monitors as a sham.
Mr. Tsvangirai had dropped out of the runoff days before it was held, citing the killing and beating of many of his party’s workers and supporters.
The Herald, the state-owned newspaper, reported Saturday that Mr. Mugabe had allocated to his own party the ministries of Defense, Home Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Justice and Media, among others. It left open the possibility of further negotiation on the Finance Ministry, which it described as being still in dispute although the president has provisionally assigned it to his party.
Mr. Tsvangirai’s party was given ministries that oversee Constitutional Affairs, Energy, Health, Labor and Social Welfare, among others.
Mr. Mugabe’s control of both the military and police forces would cement his continued ability to use the country’s vast security services to enforce his party’s political power. Dominance of the Finance Ministry would sustain his ability to shape economic policy.
Mr. Tsvangirai had been willing to concede the military to Mr. Mugabe but had insisted on naming the home minister, who oversees the police force, to restore the rule of law.
He had also insisted on naming the minister of finance, to end the severe mismanagement of an economy in which agriculture and manufacturing production have collapsed, and the minister of foreign affairs, which he said was necessary for Zimbabwe to once again become “part of the family of nations.”
Most of Zimbabwe’s 12 million people are now living in dire and worsening poverty as inflation has soared to 231 million percent, according to official statistics. The United Nations estimates that about one-third of the population is now hungry and in need of food aid, which is overwhelmingly provided by the United States, Britain and other Western countries often denounced by Mr. Mugabe.
In recent days, Mr. Mugabe’s party has been making the case that he is still in charge of the government and, in statements and columns in The Herald, has continued to suggest that Mr. Tsvangirai and his party are pawns of the West, particularly the United States and Britain.
Mr. Mugabe’s wife, Grace, was quoted Friday as saying that some had falsely claimed the opposition had taken over the country’s political leadership. She declared, “President Mugabe remains head of state and government.”
On Thursday, the newspaper ran an article headlined, “I play golf with Tsvangirai: McGee.” James McGee, the American ambassador, who is a golfer and an outspoken critic of Mr. Mugabe, was quoted as telling an internet radio station: “I played golf with Morgan Tsvangirai? That is not an allegation but an absolute fact. I did play golf with Morgan Tsvangirai and I have played golf with Morgan Tsvangirai before and I will continue to play golf with Morgan Tsvangirai.”
Mr. McGee added that he had also golfed with senior ZANU-PF officials who would, he was sure, prefer not to be named.
****
Zimbabwe alliance on verge of collapse
Herald News Services
Monday, October 13, 2008
Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai threatened Sunday to pull out of a power-sharing deal with Robert Mugabe after the president handed key ministries to his own party.
The government announced Saturday that Mugabe had given his ZANU-PF party 14 ministries, including defence, home and foreign affairs, justice, local government and state media.
In power since Zimbabwe's 1980 independence from Britain, Mugabe's announcement also meant he would effectively retain control of the army, police and the rest of the state security apparatus.
"If they (ZANU-PF) do it that way, we have no right to be part of such an arrangement," Tsvangirai told a rally of 8,000 supporters in Harare.
Tsvangirai, who defeated Mugabe in the first round of a presidential vote in March but pulled out of a June run-off because of violence against his supporters, said he was prepared to renegotiate the deal if his rival followed through with his stated allocation of ministries. "The people have suffered. But if it means suffering the more in order for them to get what is at stake, then so be it," he said.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Mugabe Claims Security Ministries, Jeopardizing Deal
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — In a step that could jeopardize a painstakingly negotiated power-sharing deal in Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe has declared that his party will retain ministries that control the military and the police, state media reported Saturday. The crucial Finance Ministry was still in dispute.
Opposition officials condemned his decision and said their party, the Movement for Democratic Change, would not join a government in which the most important ministries were occupied by officials of ZANU-PF, the governing party.
Since the power-sharing agreement was signed more than three weeks ago, Mr. Mugabe and the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, who was to serve as prime minister under the deal, have been deadlocked over the division of ministries.
The two men agreed after meeting on Friday to request the intervention of Thabo Mbeki, who was recently ousted as president of South Africa by his own party but remains the official mediator in the Zimbabwe crisis. Mr. Mbeki is scheduled to fly into Harare on Monday, his spokesman, Mukoni Ratshitanga, said.
An opposition spokesman, Nelson Chamisa, said Mr. Mugabe’s allocation of ministries was a strategy meant to pre-empt Mr. Mbeki’s mediation and called on African leaders and the international community to intervene. In a statement, he called Mr. Mugabe’s division of the ministries “a giant act of madness which puts the whole deal into jeopardy.”
“The M.D.C. did not append its signature to a ZANU-PF power-grabbing deal but to a power-sharing deal,” he said.
Mr. Tsvangirai outpolled Mr. Mugabe, who has been in office for 28 years, in an election in March, but did not win a majority. Mr. Mugabe remained in office through what human rights groups and witnesses said was a military-led campaign of violence against the opposition before the run-off in June, which was denounced by independent, African election monitors as a sham.
Mr. Tsvangirai had dropped out of the runoff days before it was held, citing the killing and beating of many of his party’s workers and supporters.
The Herald, the state-owned newspaper, reported Saturday that Mr. Mugabe had allocated to his own party the ministries of Defense, Home Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Justice and Media, among others. It left open the possibility of further negotiation on the Finance Ministry, which it described as being still in dispute although the president has provisionally assigned it to his party.
Mr. Tsvangirai’s party was given ministries that oversee Constitutional Affairs, Energy, Health, Labor and Social Welfare, among others.
Mr. Mugabe’s control of both the military and police forces would cement his continued ability to use the country’s vast security services to enforce his party’s political power. Dominance of the Finance Ministry would sustain his ability to shape economic policy.
Mr. Tsvangirai had been willing to concede the military to Mr. Mugabe but had insisted on naming the home minister, who oversees the police force, to restore the rule of law.
He had also insisted on naming the minister of finance, to end the severe mismanagement of an economy in which agriculture and manufacturing production have collapsed, and the minister of foreign affairs, which he said was necessary for Zimbabwe to once again become “part of the family of nations.”
Most of Zimbabwe’s 12 million people are now living in dire and worsening poverty as inflation has soared to 231 million percent, according to official statistics. The United Nations estimates that about one-third of the population is now hungry and in need of food aid, which is overwhelmingly provided by the United States, Britain and other Western countries often denounced by Mr. Mugabe.
In recent days, Mr. Mugabe’s party has been making the case that he is still in charge of the government and, in statements and columns in The Herald, has continued to suggest that Mr. Tsvangirai and his party are pawns of the West, particularly the United States and Britain.
Mr. Mugabe’s wife, Grace, was quoted Friday as saying that some had falsely claimed the opposition had taken over the country’s political leadership. She declared, “President Mugabe remains head of state and government.”
On Thursday, the newspaper ran an article headlined, “I play golf with Tsvangirai: McGee.” James McGee, the American ambassador, who is a golfer and an outspoken critic of Mr. Mugabe, was quoted as telling an internet radio station: “I played golf with Morgan Tsvangirai? That is not an allegation but an absolute fact. I did play golf with Morgan Tsvangirai and I have played golf with Morgan Tsvangirai before and I will continue to play golf with Morgan Tsvangirai.”
Mr. McGee added that he had also golfed with senior ZANU-PF officials who would, he was sure, prefer not to be named.
****
Zimbabwe alliance on verge of collapse
Herald News Services
Monday, October 13, 2008
Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai threatened Sunday to pull out of a power-sharing deal with Robert Mugabe after the president handed key ministries to his own party.
The government announced Saturday that Mugabe had given his ZANU-PF party 14 ministries, including defence, home and foreign affairs, justice, local government and state media.
In power since Zimbabwe's 1980 independence from Britain, Mugabe's announcement also meant he would effectively retain control of the army, police and the rest of the state security apparatus.
"If they (ZANU-PF) do it that way, we have no right to be part of such an arrangement," Tsvangirai told a rally of 8,000 supporters in Harare.
Tsvangirai, who defeated Mugabe in the first round of a presidential vote in March but pulled out of a June run-off because of violence against his supporters, said he was prepared to renegotiate the deal if his rival followed through with his stated allocation of ministries. "The people have suffered. But if it means suffering the more in order for them to get what is at stake, then so be it," he said.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
October 15, 2008
Zimbabwe Generals’ Fears of Prosecution Threaten Deal
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — Zimbabwe’s military commanders have pressed President Robert Mugabe to shield them from prosecution for the violent crackdown on his political foes this year, senior government officials say, and his response is threatening to derail a power-sharing deal that was supposed to halt the country’s dizzying downward economic spiral.
Mr. Mugabe’s efforts to placate his generals, as well as senior politicians in his party who are disgruntled about their loss of clout, culminated in his decision last week to unilaterally claim control of ministries that have been pivotal to his 28 years of unbroken political dominance and are seen as critical to protecting his senior generals from the risk of being charged with crimes.
Mr. Mugabe, 84, signed an agreement on Sept. 15 to share power with the political opposition, after an election season in which more than 100 opposition supporters were killed and thousands were beaten — a campaign of violence that senior officials in Mr. Mugabe’s party said was organized by the military.
A collapse of the deal would probably intensify Zimbabwe’s status as an international pariah, deepen hunger and poverty, and set off a fresh exodus of refugees to neighboring countries. Yet since the agreement was signed, the country’s three senior military commanders have worried about their fate under a unity government that includes the main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, as prime minister — a man they deeply distrust, who was himself viciously beaten by the police last year — three officials close to Mr. Mugabe said in recent interviews.
In addition to his retention of control of the armed forces, Mr. Mugabe’s insistence on retaining the Home Affairs Ministry, which oversees a police force that could potentially investigate and arrest those responsible for political violence, threatens to destroy the deal.
Mr. Tsvangirai told thousands of wildly cheering supporters in Harare on Sunday that he would not be part of a deal that did not give his party control of the Home and Finance Ministries — and he denounced what he termed Mr. Mugabe’s power grab.
Thabo Mbeki, the ousted president of South Africa, who brokered the power-sharing deal, met on Tuesday with Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai to try to rescue the accord. But Mr. Mbeki’s own clout is now greatly diminished by his precipitous fall from power last month as leader of South Africa, the regional superpower.
Zimbabwe’s information minister, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, disputed the idea that the military commanders feared prosecution. “President Mugabe is commander in chief of the armed forces and head of the security ministries,” he said. “There is no one guilty here. No one is talking about arrests of anyone. The army is apolitical.”
According to other senior officials in the government, however, three days after Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai signed their deal, Mr. Mugabe huddled with the inner circle of generals and politicians who run the country with him, known as the Joint Operations Command.
Even without the pressure from his top generals and officials, Mr. Mugabe may well have been unwilling to relinquish control of core ministries. But on that day, he asked them what they thought of the deal. His military commanders told him they feared it would leave them vulnerable to prosecution for their role in organizing the crackdown before the June runoff election — a crackdown so sweeping that it prompted Mr. Tsvangirai to quit the race days before it was held, saying none of his supporters should have to die to vote for him.
“They said it was too risky to leave the repercussions of such an apparently brutal operation to chance,” said a Mugabe confidant; that person and two others who attended the meeting described what happened on condition that they not be named, because the deliberations were secret.
Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai, a 56-year-old former trade union leader, have developed a surprisingly comfortable relationship over months of negotiations, and in the days after the deal was signed, Mr. Tsvangirai said the octogenarian leader had complained that he was getting a lot of resistance to the deal from within his own party.
“But if he’s getting pressure from his own party, so are we,” Mr. Tsvangirai said in an interview.
Many of Mr. Tsvangirai’s workers and supporters paid a terrible price for their political views, in burned homes, broken bones and flayed bodies. At a minimum, opposition officials say, the party’s rank and file want a police force that will protect them from abuse — and many also want justice for the wrongs done to them.
The passions within Mr. Tsvangirai’s own party were on display Aug. 26 when Mr. Mugabe inaugurated Parliament, where, for the first time since Zimbabwe gained independence from white minority rule in 1980, the opposition had a majority. Some opposition members cried out over and over, “You are a murderer!” Mr. Mugabe’s hands trembled.
At the rally on Sunday, Mr. Tsvangirai sought to reassure Mr. Mugabe’s party that the Movement for Democratic Change, the opposition party, would not seek retribution. “The guilty are afraid,” he said, “but the M.D.C. means well.”
Still, as the generals are said to have noted, the 30-page agreement signed a month ago with great fanfare before heads of state from across southern Africa includes no explicit promise of immunity for political crimes.
The seeds of the current impasse were planted on the day the deal was signed. Mr. Tsvangirai put his name to the document, though he had not yet reached an understanding about how he and Mr. Mugabe would divide the ministries, said an opposition official close to the confidential talks.
Mr. Mbeki, the mediator, convinced Mr. Tsvangirai that agreeing to a framework for governing would build confidence. “It was to tie Morgan’s and Mugabe’s hands together and their feet together until they realized they have to cohabitate,” the opposition official said.
The next day, at a meeting of his party’s politburo, Mr. Mugabe came under withering fire for surrendering too much authority, politburo members said. The deal was unpopular with both of the main factions in the party: one led by Emmerson Mnangagwa, 62, a former security chief who ran Mr. Mugabe’s campaign for the election runoff; the other led by Joice Mujuru, 53, one of Mr. Mugabe’s two vice presidents, and her husband, Solomon Mujuru, 59, a former army commander. The Mujuru camp complained that Mrs. Mujuru had been reduced to a figurehead in the deal.
Both factions saw the agreement as threatening their control over patronage that they need to win elections, according to a senior official close to Mr. Mugabe. And both were angling for the most powerful jobs from a shrinking pie of ministerial appointments. Under the deal, ZANU-PF, Mr. Mugabe’s party, was entitled to only 15 of the 31 ministries. Politburo members loyal to Mr. Mujuru accused the president of planning to give Mr. Mnangagwa the best portfolios, as a reward for leading the warlike campaign for Mr. Mugabe’s re-election in the June 27 runoff.
Mr. Mugabe, in turn, blamed factionalism within the party, and the failure of party leaders to campaign vigorously for him, for Mr. Tsvangirai’s having won more votes than he did in the March general election — sentiments he repeated a day later, Sept. 17, at a meeting of the party’s Central Committee.
“If only we had not blundered in the harmonized election, we would not be facing all this humiliation,” the state-owned newspaper, The Herald, quoted Mr. Mugabe as saying, even as he insisted, “We remain in the driving seat.”
Mr. Mugabe got another earful when he met on Sept. 18 with the Joint Operations Command, the inner circle.
Opinion within the command was divided on the deal.
The commissioners of the police and of prisons, Augustine Chihuri and Paradzai Zimondi, and the director general of the Central Intelligence Organization, Happyton Bonyongwe, said the opposition would not want to violate the spirit of the deal by seeking prosecutions, according to officials who were present. A senior official close to Mr. Mugabe who attended the meeting explained that the police were not so worried about prosecution because their vulnerability stemmed more from negligence — that they did not stop the violence or arrest its perpetrators. Nor had the prison services participated directly in the violence. And the intelligence agents, because they dress in plain clothes, are less recognizable.
“The C.I.O. agents are faceless,” the official said. “The problem is with the uniformed forces, because their names are out there with the people.”
But Gen. Constantine Chiwenga, the commander of the Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Philip Sibanda, the army commander; and Air Marshal Perence Shiri, the air force commander, said they worried because there had been no explicit guarantee of immunity, according to participants in the meeting.
Spokesmen for the military did not return calls left at their offices on Tuesday. Col. Ben Ncube, spokesman for the Zimbabwe Defense Forces, was reached on his cellphone, but the line went dead when he was asked about General Chiwenga’s views on the power-sharing agreement.
Officials at the military meeting said the military leaders had reason to be concerned that there was simply too much evidence of their role. A list of 200 officers they had deployed across the country to oversee the intimidation and beating of opposition supporters — complete with names, ranks and districts where each one was posted — had been leaked to journalists and civic groups.
“The real fear is with the army generals, because their people ran the runoff campaign,” one official said.
Two journalists contributed reporting from Harare, Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe Generals’ Fears of Prosecution Threaten Deal
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — Zimbabwe’s military commanders have pressed President Robert Mugabe to shield them from prosecution for the violent crackdown on his political foes this year, senior government officials say, and his response is threatening to derail a power-sharing deal that was supposed to halt the country’s dizzying downward economic spiral.
Mr. Mugabe’s efforts to placate his generals, as well as senior politicians in his party who are disgruntled about their loss of clout, culminated in his decision last week to unilaterally claim control of ministries that have been pivotal to his 28 years of unbroken political dominance and are seen as critical to protecting his senior generals from the risk of being charged with crimes.
Mr. Mugabe, 84, signed an agreement on Sept. 15 to share power with the political opposition, after an election season in which more than 100 opposition supporters were killed and thousands were beaten — a campaign of violence that senior officials in Mr. Mugabe’s party said was organized by the military.
A collapse of the deal would probably intensify Zimbabwe’s status as an international pariah, deepen hunger and poverty, and set off a fresh exodus of refugees to neighboring countries. Yet since the agreement was signed, the country’s three senior military commanders have worried about their fate under a unity government that includes the main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, as prime minister — a man they deeply distrust, who was himself viciously beaten by the police last year — three officials close to Mr. Mugabe said in recent interviews.
In addition to his retention of control of the armed forces, Mr. Mugabe’s insistence on retaining the Home Affairs Ministry, which oversees a police force that could potentially investigate and arrest those responsible for political violence, threatens to destroy the deal.
Mr. Tsvangirai told thousands of wildly cheering supporters in Harare on Sunday that he would not be part of a deal that did not give his party control of the Home and Finance Ministries — and he denounced what he termed Mr. Mugabe’s power grab.
Thabo Mbeki, the ousted president of South Africa, who brokered the power-sharing deal, met on Tuesday with Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai to try to rescue the accord. But Mr. Mbeki’s own clout is now greatly diminished by his precipitous fall from power last month as leader of South Africa, the regional superpower.
Zimbabwe’s information minister, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, disputed the idea that the military commanders feared prosecution. “President Mugabe is commander in chief of the armed forces and head of the security ministries,” he said. “There is no one guilty here. No one is talking about arrests of anyone. The army is apolitical.”
According to other senior officials in the government, however, three days after Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai signed their deal, Mr. Mugabe huddled with the inner circle of generals and politicians who run the country with him, known as the Joint Operations Command.
Even without the pressure from his top generals and officials, Mr. Mugabe may well have been unwilling to relinquish control of core ministries. But on that day, he asked them what they thought of the deal. His military commanders told him they feared it would leave them vulnerable to prosecution for their role in organizing the crackdown before the June runoff election — a crackdown so sweeping that it prompted Mr. Tsvangirai to quit the race days before it was held, saying none of his supporters should have to die to vote for him.
“They said it was too risky to leave the repercussions of such an apparently brutal operation to chance,” said a Mugabe confidant; that person and two others who attended the meeting described what happened on condition that they not be named, because the deliberations were secret.
Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai, a 56-year-old former trade union leader, have developed a surprisingly comfortable relationship over months of negotiations, and in the days after the deal was signed, Mr. Tsvangirai said the octogenarian leader had complained that he was getting a lot of resistance to the deal from within his own party.
“But if he’s getting pressure from his own party, so are we,” Mr. Tsvangirai said in an interview.
Many of Mr. Tsvangirai’s workers and supporters paid a terrible price for their political views, in burned homes, broken bones and flayed bodies. At a minimum, opposition officials say, the party’s rank and file want a police force that will protect them from abuse — and many also want justice for the wrongs done to them.
The passions within Mr. Tsvangirai’s own party were on display Aug. 26 when Mr. Mugabe inaugurated Parliament, where, for the first time since Zimbabwe gained independence from white minority rule in 1980, the opposition had a majority. Some opposition members cried out over and over, “You are a murderer!” Mr. Mugabe’s hands trembled.
At the rally on Sunday, Mr. Tsvangirai sought to reassure Mr. Mugabe’s party that the Movement for Democratic Change, the opposition party, would not seek retribution. “The guilty are afraid,” he said, “but the M.D.C. means well.”
Still, as the generals are said to have noted, the 30-page agreement signed a month ago with great fanfare before heads of state from across southern Africa includes no explicit promise of immunity for political crimes.
The seeds of the current impasse were planted on the day the deal was signed. Mr. Tsvangirai put his name to the document, though he had not yet reached an understanding about how he and Mr. Mugabe would divide the ministries, said an opposition official close to the confidential talks.
Mr. Mbeki, the mediator, convinced Mr. Tsvangirai that agreeing to a framework for governing would build confidence. “It was to tie Morgan’s and Mugabe’s hands together and their feet together until they realized they have to cohabitate,” the opposition official said.
The next day, at a meeting of his party’s politburo, Mr. Mugabe came under withering fire for surrendering too much authority, politburo members said. The deal was unpopular with both of the main factions in the party: one led by Emmerson Mnangagwa, 62, a former security chief who ran Mr. Mugabe’s campaign for the election runoff; the other led by Joice Mujuru, 53, one of Mr. Mugabe’s two vice presidents, and her husband, Solomon Mujuru, 59, a former army commander. The Mujuru camp complained that Mrs. Mujuru had been reduced to a figurehead in the deal.
Both factions saw the agreement as threatening their control over patronage that they need to win elections, according to a senior official close to Mr. Mugabe. And both were angling for the most powerful jobs from a shrinking pie of ministerial appointments. Under the deal, ZANU-PF, Mr. Mugabe’s party, was entitled to only 15 of the 31 ministries. Politburo members loyal to Mr. Mujuru accused the president of planning to give Mr. Mnangagwa the best portfolios, as a reward for leading the warlike campaign for Mr. Mugabe’s re-election in the June 27 runoff.
Mr. Mugabe, in turn, blamed factionalism within the party, and the failure of party leaders to campaign vigorously for him, for Mr. Tsvangirai’s having won more votes than he did in the March general election — sentiments he repeated a day later, Sept. 17, at a meeting of the party’s Central Committee.
“If only we had not blundered in the harmonized election, we would not be facing all this humiliation,” the state-owned newspaper, The Herald, quoted Mr. Mugabe as saying, even as he insisted, “We remain in the driving seat.”
Mr. Mugabe got another earful when he met on Sept. 18 with the Joint Operations Command, the inner circle.
Opinion within the command was divided on the deal.
The commissioners of the police and of prisons, Augustine Chihuri and Paradzai Zimondi, and the director general of the Central Intelligence Organization, Happyton Bonyongwe, said the opposition would not want to violate the spirit of the deal by seeking prosecutions, according to officials who were present. A senior official close to Mr. Mugabe who attended the meeting explained that the police were not so worried about prosecution because their vulnerability stemmed more from negligence — that they did not stop the violence or arrest its perpetrators. Nor had the prison services participated directly in the violence. And the intelligence agents, because they dress in plain clothes, are less recognizable.
“The C.I.O. agents are faceless,” the official said. “The problem is with the uniformed forces, because their names are out there with the people.”
But Gen. Constantine Chiwenga, the commander of the Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Philip Sibanda, the army commander; and Air Marshal Perence Shiri, the air force commander, said they worried because there had been no explicit guarantee of immunity, according to participants in the meeting.
Spokesmen for the military did not return calls left at their offices on Tuesday. Col. Ben Ncube, spokesman for the Zimbabwe Defense Forces, was reached on his cellphone, but the line went dead when he was asked about General Chiwenga’s views on the power-sharing agreement.
Officials at the military meeting said the military leaders had reason to be concerned that there was simply too much evidence of their role. A list of 200 officers they had deployed across the country to oversee the intimidation and beating of opposition supporters — complete with names, ranks and districts where each one was posted — had been leaked to journalists and civic groups.
“The real fear is with the army generals, because their people ran the runoff campaign,” one official said.
Two journalists contributed reporting from Harare, Zimbabwe.
There is a related video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/18/world ... &th&emc=th
October 18, 2008
Rape Victims’ Words Help Jolt Congo Into Change
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
BUKAVU, Congo — Honorata Kizende looked out at the audience and began with a simple, declarative sentence.
“There was no dinner,” she said.
“It was me who was dinner. Me, because they kicked me roughly to the ground, and they ripped off all my clothes, and between the two of them, they held my feet. One took my left foot, one took my right, and the same with my arms, and between the two of them they proceeded to rape me. Then all five of them raped me.”
The audience, which had been called together by local and international aid groups and included everyone from high-ranking politicians to street kids with no shoes, stared at her in disbelief.
Congo, it seems, is finally facing its horrific rape problem, which United Nations officials have called the worst sexual violence in the world. Tens of thousands of women, possibly hundreds of thousands, have been raped in the past few years in this hilly, incongruously beautiful land. Many of these rapes have been marked by a level of brutality that is shocking even by the twisted standards of a place riven by civil war and haunted by warlords and drug-crazed child soldiers.
After years of denial and shame, the silence is being broken. Because of stepped-up efforts in the past nine months by international organizations and the Congolese government, rapists are no longer able to count on a culture of impunity. Of course, countless men still get away with assaulting women. But more and more are getting caught, prosecuted and put behind bars.
European aid agencies are spending tens of millions of dollars building new courthouses and prisons across eastern Congo, in part to punish rapists. Mobile courts are holding rape trials in villages deep in the forest that have not seen a black-robed magistrate since the Belgians ruled the country decades ago.
The American Bar Association opened a legal clinic in January specifically to help rape victims bring their cases to court. So far the work has resulted in eight convictions. Here in Bukavu, one of the biggest cities in the country, a special unit of Congolese police officers has filed 103 rape cases since the beginning of this year, more than any year in recent memory.
In Bunia, a town farther north, rape prosecutions are up 600 percent compared with five years ago. Congolese investigators have even been flown to Europe to learn “CSI”-style forensic techniques. The police have arrested some of the most violent offenders, often young militiamen, most likely psychologically traumatized themselves, who have thrust sticks, rocks, knives and assault rifles inside women.
“We’re starting to see results,” said Pernille Ironside, a United Nations official in eastern Congo.
The number of those arrested is still tiny compared with that of the perpetrators on the loose, and often the worst offenders are not caught because they are marauding bandits who attack villages in the night, victimize women and then melt back into the forest.
This is all happening in a society where women tend to be beaten down anyway. Women in Congo do most of the work —at home, in the fields and in the market, where they carry enormous loads of bananas on their bent backs — and yet they are often powerless. Many women who are raped are told to keep quiet. Often, it is a shame for the entire family, and many rape victims have been kicked out of their villages and turned into beggars.
Grass-roots groups are trying to change this culture, and they have started by encouraging women who have been raped to speak out in open forums, like a courtroom full of spectators, just with no accused.
At the event in Bukavu in mid-September, Ms. Kizende’s story of being abducted by an armed group, then putting her life back together after months as a sex slave, drew tears — and cheers. It seems that the taboo against talking about rape is beginning to lift. Many women in the audience wore T-shirts that read in Kiswahili: “I refuse to be raped. What about you?”
Activists are fanning out to villages on foot and by bicycle to deliver a simple but often novel message: rape is wrong. Men’s groups are even being formed.
But these improvements are simply the first, tentative steps of progress in a very troubled country.
United Nations officials said the number of rapes had appeared to be decreasing over the past year. But the recent surge of fighting between the Congolese government and rebel groups, and all the violence and predation that goes with it, is jeopardizing those gains.
“It’s safer today than it was,” said Euphrasie Mirindi, a woman who was raped in 2006. “But it’s still not safe.”
Poverty, chaos, disease and war. These are the constants of eastern Congo. Many people believe that the rape problem will not be solved until the area tastes peace. But that might not be anytime soon.
Laurent Nkunda, a well-armed Tutsi warlord, or a savior of his people, depending on whom you ask, recently threatened to wage war across the country. Clashes between his troops, many of them child soldiers, and government forces have driven hundreds of thousands of people from their homes in the past few months. His forces, along with those from the dozens of other rebel groups hiding out in the hills, are thought to be mainly responsible for the epidemic of brutal rapes.
United Nations officials say the most sadistic rapes are committed by depraved killers who participated in Rwanda’s genocide in 1994 and then escaped into Congo. These attacks have left thousands of women with their insides destroyed. But the Congolese National Army, a ragtag undisciplined force of teenage troops who sport wrap-around shades and rusty rifles, has also been blamed. The government has been slow to punish its own, but Congolese generals recently announced they would set up new military tribunals to prosecute soldiers accused of rape.
No one — doctors, aid workers, Congolese and Western researchers — can explain exactly why Congo’s rape problem is the worst in the world. The attacks continue despite the presence of the largest United Nations peacekeeping force, with more than 17,000 troops. Impunity is thought to be a big factor, which is why there is now so much effort on bolstering Congo’s creaky and often corrupt justice system. The sheer number of armed groups spread over thousands of miles of thickly forested territory, fighting over Congo’s rich mineral spoils, also makes it incredibly difficult to protect civilians. The ceaseless instability has held the whole eastern swath of the country hostage.
In Bukavu, everywhere you look, something is broken: a railing, a window, a pickup cruising around with no fenders, a woman trudging along the road with no eyes.
The Congolese government admits it is at a loss, especially in keeping women safe.
“Every day, women are raped,” said Louis Leonce Muderhwa, the governor of South Kivu Province. “This isn’t peace.”
Activists from overseas have been pouring in. Few are more passionate than Eve Ensler, the American playwright who wrote “The Vagina Monologues,” which has been performed in more than 100 countries. She came to Congo last month to work with rape victims.
“I have spent the past 10 years of my life in the rape mines of the world,” she said. “But I have never seen anything like this.”
She calls it “femicide,” a systematic campaign to destroy women.
Ms. Ensler is helping open a center in Bukavu called the City of Joy, which will provide counseling to rape victims and teach leadership skills and self-defense. Her hope is to build an army of rape survivors who will push with an urgency — that has so far been absent — for a solution to end Congo’s ceaseless wars.
The City of Joy is rising behind Panzi Hospital, where the worst of the worst rape cases are treated. But even this refuge has come under attack. Last month, an irate mob stormed the hospital. The mob demanded that the doctors give them the body of a thief, so it could be burned. When the doctors refused, several angry young men beat up nurses and smashed windows. But it was not clear if the body was the only thing that had set them off.
“They don’t like our work,” said Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist. “Maybe what we’re doing is disturbing people.”
The stories of these rapes are clearly disturbing. But that is the point, to shake people up and grab their attention.
“The details are the scariest part,” Ms. Ensler said.
At the event last month, many people in the audience covered their mouths as they listened. Some could not bear it and burst out of the room crying.
One speaker, Claudine Mwabachizi, told how she was kidnapped by bandits in the forest, strapped to a tree and repeatedly gang-raped. The bandits did unspeakable things, she said, like disemboweling a pregnant woman right in front of her. “A lot of us keep these secrets to ourselves,” she said.
She was going public, she said, “to free my sisters.”
But Congo, if anything, is a land of contrasts. The soil here is rich, but the people are starving. The minerals are limitless, but the government is broke.
After the speaking-out event was over, Ms. Mwabachizi said she felt exhausted.
But, she added, “I feel strong.”
She was given a pink shawl with a message printed on it.
“I have survived,” it read. “I can do anything.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/18/world ... &th&emc=th
October 18, 2008
Rape Victims’ Words Help Jolt Congo Into Change
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
BUKAVU, Congo — Honorata Kizende looked out at the audience and began with a simple, declarative sentence.
“There was no dinner,” she said.
“It was me who was dinner. Me, because they kicked me roughly to the ground, and they ripped off all my clothes, and between the two of them, they held my feet. One took my left foot, one took my right, and the same with my arms, and between the two of them they proceeded to rape me. Then all five of them raped me.”
The audience, which had been called together by local and international aid groups and included everyone from high-ranking politicians to street kids with no shoes, stared at her in disbelief.
Congo, it seems, is finally facing its horrific rape problem, which United Nations officials have called the worst sexual violence in the world. Tens of thousands of women, possibly hundreds of thousands, have been raped in the past few years in this hilly, incongruously beautiful land. Many of these rapes have been marked by a level of brutality that is shocking even by the twisted standards of a place riven by civil war and haunted by warlords and drug-crazed child soldiers.
After years of denial and shame, the silence is being broken. Because of stepped-up efforts in the past nine months by international organizations and the Congolese government, rapists are no longer able to count on a culture of impunity. Of course, countless men still get away with assaulting women. But more and more are getting caught, prosecuted and put behind bars.
European aid agencies are spending tens of millions of dollars building new courthouses and prisons across eastern Congo, in part to punish rapists. Mobile courts are holding rape trials in villages deep in the forest that have not seen a black-robed magistrate since the Belgians ruled the country decades ago.
The American Bar Association opened a legal clinic in January specifically to help rape victims bring their cases to court. So far the work has resulted in eight convictions. Here in Bukavu, one of the biggest cities in the country, a special unit of Congolese police officers has filed 103 rape cases since the beginning of this year, more than any year in recent memory.
In Bunia, a town farther north, rape prosecutions are up 600 percent compared with five years ago. Congolese investigators have even been flown to Europe to learn “CSI”-style forensic techniques. The police have arrested some of the most violent offenders, often young militiamen, most likely psychologically traumatized themselves, who have thrust sticks, rocks, knives and assault rifles inside women.
“We’re starting to see results,” said Pernille Ironside, a United Nations official in eastern Congo.
The number of those arrested is still tiny compared with that of the perpetrators on the loose, and often the worst offenders are not caught because they are marauding bandits who attack villages in the night, victimize women and then melt back into the forest.
This is all happening in a society where women tend to be beaten down anyway. Women in Congo do most of the work —at home, in the fields and in the market, where they carry enormous loads of bananas on their bent backs — and yet they are often powerless. Many women who are raped are told to keep quiet. Often, it is a shame for the entire family, and many rape victims have been kicked out of their villages and turned into beggars.
Grass-roots groups are trying to change this culture, and they have started by encouraging women who have been raped to speak out in open forums, like a courtroom full of spectators, just with no accused.
At the event in Bukavu in mid-September, Ms. Kizende’s story of being abducted by an armed group, then putting her life back together after months as a sex slave, drew tears — and cheers. It seems that the taboo against talking about rape is beginning to lift. Many women in the audience wore T-shirts that read in Kiswahili: “I refuse to be raped. What about you?”
Activists are fanning out to villages on foot and by bicycle to deliver a simple but often novel message: rape is wrong. Men’s groups are even being formed.
But these improvements are simply the first, tentative steps of progress in a very troubled country.
United Nations officials said the number of rapes had appeared to be decreasing over the past year. But the recent surge of fighting between the Congolese government and rebel groups, and all the violence and predation that goes with it, is jeopardizing those gains.
“It’s safer today than it was,” said Euphrasie Mirindi, a woman who was raped in 2006. “But it’s still not safe.”
Poverty, chaos, disease and war. These are the constants of eastern Congo. Many people believe that the rape problem will not be solved until the area tastes peace. But that might not be anytime soon.
Laurent Nkunda, a well-armed Tutsi warlord, or a savior of his people, depending on whom you ask, recently threatened to wage war across the country. Clashes between his troops, many of them child soldiers, and government forces have driven hundreds of thousands of people from their homes in the past few months. His forces, along with those from the dozens of other rebel groups hiding out in the hills, are thought to be mainly responsible for the epidemic of brutal rapes.
United Nations officials say the most sadistic rapes are committed by depraved killers who participated in Rwanda’s genocide in 1994 and then escaped into Congo. These attacks have left thousands of women with their insides destroyed. But the Congolese National Army, a ragtag undisciplined force of teenage troops who sport wrap-around shades and rusty rifles, has also been blamed. The government has been slow to punish its own, but Congolese generals recently announced they would set up new military tribunals to prosecute soldiers accused of rape.
No one — doctors, aid workers, Congolese and Western researchers — can explain exactly why Congo’s rape problem is the worst in the world. The attacks continue despite the presence of the largest United Nations peacekeeping force, with more than 17,000 troops. Impunity is thought to be a big factor, which is why there is now so much effort on bolstering Congo’s creaky and often corrupt justice system. The sheer number of armed groups spread over thousands of miles of thickly forested territory, fighting over Congo’s rich mineral spoils, also makes it incredibly difficult to protect civilians. The ceaseless instability has held the whole eastern swath of the country hostage.
In Bukavu, everywhere you look, something is broken: a railing, a window, a pickup cruising around with no fenders, a woman trudging along the road with no eyes.
The Congolese government admits it is at a loss, especially in keeping women safe.
“Every day, women are raped,” said Louis Leonce Muderhwa, the governor of South Kivu Province. “This isn’t peace.”
Activists from overseas have been pouring in. Few are more passionate than Eve Ensler, the American playwright who wrote “The Vagina Monologues,” which has been performed in more than 100 countries. She came to Congo last month to work with rape victims.
“I have spent the past 10 years of my life in the rape mines of the world,” she said. “But I have never seen anything like this.”
She calls it “femicide,” a systematic campaign to destroy women.
Ms. Ensler is helping open a center in Bukavu called the City of Joy, which will provide counseling to rape victims and teach leadership skills and self-defense. Her hope is to build an army of rape survivors who will push with an urgency — that has so far been absent — for a solution to end Congo’s ceaseless wars.
The City of Joy is rising behind Panzi Hospital, where the worst of the worst rape cases are treated. But even this refuge has come under attack. Last month, an irate mob stormed the hospital. The mob demanded that the doctors give them the body of a thief, so it could be burned. When the doctors refused, several angry young men beat up nurses and smashed windows. But it was not clear if the body was the only thing that had set them off.
“They don’t like our work,” said Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist. “Maybe what we’re doing is disturbing people.”
The stories of these rapes are clearly disturbing. But that is the point, to shake people up and grab their attention.
“The details are the scariest part,” Ms. Ensler said.
At the event last month, many people in the audience covered their mouths as they listened. Some could not bear it and burst out of the room crying.
One speaker, Claudine Mwabachizi, told how she was kidnapped by bandits in the forest, strapped to a tree and repeatedly gang-raped. The bandits did unspeakable things, she said, like disemboweling a pregnant woman right in front of her. “A lot of us keep these secrets to ourselves,” she said.
She was going public, she said, “to free my sisters.”
But Congo, if anything, is a land of contrasts. The soil here is rich, but the people are starving. The minerals are limitless, but the government is broke.
After the speaking-out event was over, Ms. Mwabachizi said she felt exhausted.
But, she added, “I feel strong.”
She was given a pink shawl with a message printed on it.
“I have survived,” it read. “I can do anything.”
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/subscr ... printerfri
endly/story/4239419p-4882670c.html
The English is coming! The English is coming!
Gwynne Dyer
Updated: October 17, 2008 at 05:47 PM CDT
Just over half of Africa's 52 countries speak French, but the number is dropping. This month Rwanda defected, announcing that henceforward only English will be taught in the schools. It would not be overstating the
case to say that this caused alarm and despondency in France.
You couldn't help feeling, either, that Rwanda's trade and industry minister, Vincent Karega, was deliberately rubbing salt in the wound when he explained why French was being scrapped. "French is spoken only in France, some parts of west Africa, and parts of Canada and Switzerland," he said. (In parts of Belgium, too, actually, not to mention Haiti, but you get the point.) "English has emerged as a backbone for growth and development not only in the region but around the globe."
No country cares more passionately for its language than France, and it has waged a long and expensive campaign to guarantee the survival of a French-speaking zone in central and west Africa. It even provided the bulk of the foreign aid for the former Belgian colonies that spoke French: Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. But the present government of Rwanda
has special reasons not to be fond of France.
Getting very close to the regimes in African countries that have French as an official language, even sending troops to protect them from their domestic enemies, has always been part of Paris's strategy for preserving the status of French as a world language. In Rwanda's case, that put France in bed with the extremist Hutu-dominated regime that ruled the densely populated country before the genocide, to such an extent that Paris largely paid for the tripling in size of the Rwandan army in 1990-91.
When the Hutu regime began murdering the minority Tutsis in industrial quantities in 1994, France did not abandon it. The French president at the time, Francois Mitterrand, is alleged to have remarked that "in such countries, genocide is not too important..." And a principal reason that France overlooked its Rwandan ally's ghastly behaviour was that the Tutsi-led opposition in exile mostly spoke English, having found refuge in English-speaking Uganda.
An estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 1994, but the Uganda-based Rwanda Patriotic Front put an end to the genocide by invading the country and overthrowing the regime. Even a direct French military intervention in Rwanda (thinly disguised as a humanitarian operation) could not save the Hutu "genocidiaires," as they are universally known. So it was not to be expected that the new, mainly English-speaking government in Rwanda would have warm feelings towards France.
Fourteen years later, more than 95 per cent of Rwanda's secondary schools still teach mainly in French, although an alternative English instructional program or intensive English language courses are usually available. Knowledge of both English and French is required for university entrance (and for most government jobs), but the government's own statistics say that only three per cent of the population are fluent in English. Nevertheless, the new decision ends the teaching of French in Rwandan schools.
The government defends it as a purely business decision, driven by Rwanda's membership in the largely English-speaking East African Community (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi), but there is no question that resentment of France also plays a role. This is a country that has already expelled the French ambassador and closed down the French cultural centre, international school and radio station.
But can an African country just switch from one European language to another like that? It can if, like Rwanda, it only uses one language domestically. Almost all Rwandans, whether Hutu or Tutsi, speak Kinyarwanda, so they have no need for a lingua franca to communicate among themselves. Only those going into higher education or working with foreigners need any other language at all - which is why only eight per cent of Rwandans speak fluent French after all this time.
This is far from typical of African countries, most of which have many different ethnic groups, each with its own language. Such countries use the language of the former colonial power as a neutral "national" language, and have such a large investment in teaching it by now that switching is out of the question. The Congo will always use French; Nigeria will always use English; Mozambique will always use Portuguese.
So francophones can relax: their language is not about to be vanish from the African continent. On the other hand, French will always lose out to English in situations like Rwanda, where there is a single national language and the main reason for learning a foreign language is communication with the rest of the world. Vietnam, an ex-French colony, has long taught English as the main foreign language in its schools, and Madagascar, also formerly ruled by France, made English a national language last year.
English-speakers often assume that this world role for their language owes something to its huge vocabulary and wonderful literature, or at least to the fact that Hollywood speaks English. Nothing of the sort.
The sole reason is that the world's dominant power for the past two centuries has been English-speaking: Britain in the 19th century, and the United States in the 20th. Timing is everything, and English just happened to be the leading candidate when globalization created the need for an agreed global second language.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are
published in 45 countries.
endly/story/4239419p-4882670c.html
The English is coming! The English is coming!
Gwynne Dyer
Updated: October 17, 2008 at 05:47 PM CDT
Just over half of Africa's 52 countries speak French, but the number is dropping. This month Rwanda defected, announcing that henceforward only English will be taught in the schools. It would not be overstating the
case to say that this caused alarm and despondency in France.
You couldn't help feeling, either, that Rwanda's trade and industry minister, Vincent Karega, was deliberately rubbing salt in the wound when he explained why French was being scrapped. "French is spoken only in France, some parts of west Africa, and parts of Canada and Switzerland," he said. (In parts of Belgium, too, actually, not to mention Haiti, but you get the point.) "English has emerged as a backbone for growth and development not only in the region but around the globe."
No country cares more passionately for its language than France, and it has waged a long and expensive campaign to guarantee the survival of a French-speaking zone in central and west Africa. It even provided the bulk of the foreign aid for the former Belgian colonies that spoke French: Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. But the present government of Rwanda
has special reasons not to be fond of France.
Getting very close to the regimes in African countries that have French as an official language, even sending troops to protect them from their domestic enemies, has always been part of Paris's strategy for preserving the status of French as a world language. In Rwanda's case, that put France in bed with the extremist Hutu-dominated regime that ruled the densely populated country before the genocide, to such an extent that Paris largely paid for the tripling in size of the Rwandan army in 1990-91.
When the Hutu regime began murdering the minority Tutsis in industrial quantities in 1994, France did not abandon it. The French president at the time, Francois Mitterrand, is alleged to have remarked that "in such countries, genocide is not too important..." And a principal reason that France overlooked its Rwandan ally's ghastly behaviour was that the Tutsi-led opposition in exile mostly spoke English, having found refuge in English-speaking Uganda.
An estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 1994, but the Uganda-based Rwanda Patriotic Front put an end to the genocide by invading the country and overthrowing the regime. Even a direct French military intervention in Rwanda (thinly disguised as a humanitarian operation) could not save the Hutu "genocidiaires," as they are universally known. So it was not to be expected that the new, mainly English-speaking government in Rwanda would have warm feelings towards France.
Fourteen years later, more than 95 per cent of Rwanda's secondary schools still teach mainly in French, although an alternative English instructional program or intensive English language courses are usually available. Knowledge of both English and French is required for university entrance (and for most government jobs), but the government's own statistics say that only three per cent of the population are fluent in English. Nevertheless, the new decision ends the teaching of French in Rwandan schools.
The government defends it as a purely business decision, driven by Rwanda's membership in the largely English-speaking East African Community (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi), but there is no question that resentment of France also plays a role. This is a country that has already expelled the French ambassador and closed down the French cultural centre, international school and radio station.
But can an African country just switch from one European language to another like that? It can if, like Rwanda, it only uses one language domestically. Almost all Rwandans, whether Hutu or Tutsi, speak Kinyarwanda, so they have no need for a lingua franca to communicate among themselves. Only those going into higher education or working with foreigners need any other language at all - which is why only eight per cent of Rwandans speak fluent French after all this time.
This is far from typical of African countries, most of which have many different ethnic groups, each with its own language. Such countries use the language of the former colonial power as a neutral "national" language, and have such a large investment in teaching it by now that switching is out of the question. The Congo will always use French; Nigeria will always use English; Mozambique will always use Portuguese.
So francophones can relax: their language is not about to be vanish from the African continent. On the other hand, French will always lose out to English in situations like Rwanda, where there is a single national language and the main reason for learning a foreign language is communication with the rest of the world. Vietnam, an ex-French colony, has long taught English as the main foreign language in its schools, and Madagascar, also formerly ruled by France, made English a national language last year.
English-speakers often assume that this world role for their language owes something to its huge vocabulary and wonderful literature, or at least to the fact that Hollywood speaks English. Nothing of the sort.
The sole reason is that the world's dominant power for the past two centuries has been English-speaking: Britain in the 19th century, and the United States in the 20th. Timing is everything, and English just happened to be the leading candidate when globalization created the need for an agreed global second language.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are
published in 45 countries.