There are photographs of the artifacts at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/scien ... &th&emc=th
October 21, 2008
Under Maryland Street, Ties to African Past
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Over the years of exploring the old houses and streets of Annapolis, Md., archaeologists have uncovered a trove of artifacts of early American slave culture. Among them are humble remains connected with religious practices, which bear the stamp of the slaves’ West African heritage.
Early in the 18th century, as they were being baptized, African-Americans clung to “spirit practices” in rituals of healing and the invocation of ancestral and supernatural powers. Sometimes called black magic, these occult rites would persist in America in modified form, later, as voodoo and hoodoo.
University of Maryland archaeologists have discovered in Annapolis what they say is one of the earliest examples of traditional African religious artifacts in North America. It is a clay “bundle,” roughly the size and shape of a football, filled with about 300 pieces of metal and a stone axe, whose blade sticks out of the clay, pointing skyward.
The bundle, found in April and dated to 1700, appears to be a direct transplant of African religion into what is now the United States, said Mark P. Leone, a professor of anthropology at Maryland who directed the excavations. The materials and construction, he said, differed from the hoodoo caches his teams had previously found in Annapolis.
“The bundle is African in design, not African-American,” Dr. Leone said in an announcement of the discovery. “The people who made this used local materials. But their knowledge of the charms and the spirit world probably came with them directly from Africa.”
In interviews last week, Dr. Leone and scholars of West African culture said they could not yet determine the bundle’s association with a specific religion or ethnic group.
Frederick Lamp, curator of African art at the Yale University Art Gallery, who was not involved in the discovery, said there was “no reason to doubt” the bundle’s direct link to the long tradition of West African religious practices. “But bundles filled with materials seen to have extraordinary spiritual power were used by many different cultures in Africa,” he said.
Dr. Lamp noted that X-rays of the bundle’s contents revealed an abundance of lead shot, iron nails and copper pins. “Some of the pins were bent, indicating this was a purposeful part of a ritual,” he said.
Metal worked in fire was widely seen as having special power, Dr. Lamp added, “and combining these materials in compacted clay was believed to increase the power of these objects.” The practice, he said, is well documented to this day among the Mande groups, principally in what are now Sierra Leone, Guinea and Mali, and the Yoruba people of Nigeria and Benin.
Nor should the Kongo people be ruled out as a source of these religious practices, scholars said. This culture, living in lands around the Congo River and in Angola and Cabinda, was a major source of African-American slaves. Kongo bundles contain stones, shells and other items that are supposed to hold the spirits of the dead for the use of the living in a custom that underlies hoodoo.
The bundle’s most striking component, the stone axe, was especially intriguing. Dr. Lamp said this brought to mind the Yoruba and the Fon people of Benin, who considered the axe blade a symbol of Shango, their god of thunder and lightning.
Matthew D. Cochran, a doctoral student in anthropology at University College London, who uncovered the bundle, said it would probably prove to be associated with Yoruba practices related to Shango.
In the lands of coastal West Africa then, and in its rural areas still, these rituals and materials were used by community practitioners, whose role was akin to that of American Indian medicine men. They were not attached to any world religion, or any institution. But people went to them at small sanctuaries in the woods in time of grief and distress. The practitioners, with one of these bundles at hand, rallied spiritual forces to deal with personal crises.
The Annapolis bundle, presumably made by a recent African immigrant, was excavated four feet below Fleet Street, which is near the Maryland Capitol and the waterfront. The object is 10 inches high, 6 inches wide and 4 inches thick. It remains intact, though an outer wrapping, probably of leather or cloth, has decayed, leaving an impression on the clay surface. The bundle is to go on display this week at the African American Museum in Annapolis.
Mr. Cochran said that as he dug at the bottom of the trench, the object first appeared to be a flat stone embedded in sediment. Then he saw small bits of lead shot scattered about. As the archaeologists freed the lumpy mass, a corner cracked open, exposing the pins and nails inside.
“I had seen hoodoo materials from Annapolis,” Mr. Cochran said, “and my sense immediately was that we had something African and important, but it was unclear what it was.”
In the next week, the bundle was examined and X-rayed by experts under the direction of Dr. Leone. The bundle’s age, from the turn of the 18th century, or no later than 1720, was estimated from well-dated pottery shards found in the excavations. But how the object survived the centuries is a mystery, though its placement on what was then the street surface suggests to Dr. Leone a surprising aspect of the practices of slaves at the time.
In previous explorations, material remains of African-related religion were almost always found buried in backyards or hidden under hearths and in basement corners. Early African-Americans seemed to practice their spirit rituals in secret.
A close examination, Dr. Leone said, showed that the bundle was probably originally placed in the gutter alongside the street, in the open for all to see. At the time the street was paved with logs and sawdust and only later covered with modern surfaces, burying the bundle.
Dr. Leone said the bundle’s visibility suggested “an unexpected level of public toleration” of African religion in colonial Annapolis. Most of the artifacts indicating that the practices were conducted in secrecy came from 50 years later. According to articles in a newspaper of the period, white people in Annapolis engaged openly in magic and witchcraft, of the English variety.
“So both European and African spirit practices may have been more acceptable then,” Dr. Leone concluded. “That changed after 1750 with the growing influence of the Enlightenment.”
AFRICA
October 28, 2008
Court Rules Niger Failed by Allowing Girl’s Slavery
By LYDIA POLGREEN
DAKAR, Senegal — A West African regional court ruled Monday that the government of Niger had failed to protect a young woman sold into slavery at the age of 12.
The landmark ruling, the first of its kind by a regional tribunal now sitting in Niamey, Niger’s capital, ordered the government to pay about $19,000 in damages to the woman, Hadijatou Mani, who is now 24.
Slavery is outlawed throughout Africa, but it persists in pockets of Niger, Mali, Mauritania and amid conflicts like the one in northern Uganda. Antislavery organizations estimate that 43,000 people are enslaved in Niger alone, where nomadic tribes like the Tuareg and Toubou have for centuries held members of other ethnic groups as slaves.
Ms. Mani’s experience was typical of the practice. She was born into a traditional slave class and sold to Souleymane Naroua when she was 12 for about $500.
Ms. Mani told court officials that Mr. Naroua had forced her to work his fields for a decade. She also claimed that he raped her repeatedly over the years.
“I was beaten so many times I would run back to my family,” she told the BBC. “Then after a day or two I would be brought back.”
Ms. Mani brought her case to the court this year, arguing that the Niger government had failed to enforce its antislavery laws.
She had initially sought protection under Niger’s laws. In 2005, Mr. Naroua gave her a certificate freeing her, but when she tried to get married he claimed that she was already married to him.
A local court ruled for Ms. Mani, but a higher court reversed the judgment. In an absurd twist, Ms. Mani, who had gone ahead and married the other man, was sentenced to six months in jail for bigamy. She was released after serving two months.
“Nobody deserves to be enslaved,” Ms. Mani said in a statement. “We are all equal and deserve to be treated the same. I hope that everybody in slavery today can find their freedom. No woman should suffer the way I did.”
Slavery has long been tolerated in Niger. The Niamey government outlawed the practice in 2003, but it continues in the remote reaches of the vast, arid and impoverished nation that straddles the Sahara.
Antislavery organizations hailed the decision as an important victory against deeply entrenched social customs.
“For 17 years, we have been working towards bringing slavery to the attention of the authorities,” said Ilguilas Weila, president of Timidria, a Niger antislavery advocacy group, in a statement. “This verdict means that the state of Niger will now have to resolve this problem once and for all.”
The Community Court of Justice, the entity that ruled against Niger, is a judicial arm of Ecowas, a political and trade group of West African nations. The court, which can sit in any of the member nations, was created in 2000 and has made a number of important rulings.
But its limited ability to enforce them has sapped its influence.
Earlier this year, the court ordered the government of Gambia to release a journalist who had been missing for two years and was believed to be in government custody. Gambia ignored the judgment.
*****
October 28, 2008
Congo Rebels Advance; Protesters Hurl Rocks at U.N. Compound
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and NEIL MACFARQUHAR
NAIROBI, Kenya — Hundreds of furious protesters hurled rocks at a United Nations compound in eastern Congo on Monday in frustration that peacekeepers had not halted the rebel advance through the countryside, while the Spanish general leading the peacekeeping mission abruptly resigned.
Jaya Murthy, a spokesman for Unicef in the eastern Congo city of Goma, said heavy fighting between government troops and rebel forces was spawning a vast wave of internally displaced people, with tens of thousands evacuating several battle zones, often for the second or third time in recent months.
As many as 250,000 people have been driven from their homes since August, with the collapse of a peace deal between the government and rebels under the command of Laurent Nkunda, a renegade general who says he is fighting to protect ethnic Tutsis.
Several Western aid workers who spoke by phone from Goma on Monday described a panicky atmosphere, with the rebels gobbling up territory in the hills above Goma and Westerners hunkering down in their compounds, fearful of stepping outside.
“We’re on alert,” Mr. Murthy said. “We’re not sure what’s in store for the future, but whatever it is, it’s not good.”
The general who resigned, Lt. Gen. Vicente Díaz de Villegas y Herrería, was officially appointed just seven weeks ago to lead the United Nations’ Congo mission and had been in the country for only three weeks.
The announcement in New York that he was stepping down, from the spokeswoman for Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, said only that General Díaz was leaving for “personal reasons.”
But some United Nations officials described his oral resignation as an emotional one. Two officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose details of the resignation, said he had criticized the lack of a coherent strategy, the lack of a mandate and the lack of resources needed to get the peacekeeping job done.
General Díaz’s departure is expected to increase tension between the African forces serving with peacekeeping operations on the continent and United Nations headquarters, which has been lobbying heavily for the African Union to be more flexible about accepting outsiders. His appointment as force commander had been a significant test case in those efforts.
The rebel leader, Mr. Nkunda, has rejected several cease-fires brokered by the United Nations. Recently, he threatened to take his war all the way to Kinshasa, Congo’s capital, on the other side of the country.
His forces are much better trained and equipped than the government troops, who are notorious for turning their rusty guns on civilians and for fleeing when faced with a real threat. On Sunday, Mr. Nkunda’s forces seized an army base, for the second time in recent weeks.
According to United Nations officials, the protest started Monday morning around 9 after Congolese activists organized a large crowd to march on the United Nations compound in Goma. The protest quickly degenerated into violence, with demonstrators pelting the compound and nearby United Nations cars with large stones.
There were unconfirmed reports about casualties, with some Congolese officials reporting that the United Nations peacekeepers had killed two protesters in an attempt to quell the crowd. A spokesman for the peacekeepers could not be immediately reached.
The violence in eastern Congo has continued unabated for several years now, despite the presence of the United Nations’ largest peacekeeping force, with more than 17,000 troops. Brig. Gen. Ishmeel Ben Quartey of Ghana will lead the mission for the moment, the United Nations said, and Gen. Edmond Mulet of Guatemala, the assistant secretary general for peacekeeping, is in Congo.
“The population is not happy with the U.N.,” Mr. Murthy said. “They feel they are not protected. They are getting extremely angry.”
Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Nairobi, Kenya, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.
Court Rules Niger Failed by Allowing Girl’s Slavery
By LYDIA POLGREEN
DAKAR, Senegal — A West African regional court ruled Monday that the government of Niger had failed to protect a young woman sold into slavery at the age of 12.
The landmark ruling, the first of its kind by a regional tribunal now sitting in Niamey, Niger’s capital, ordered the government to pay about $19,000 in damages to the woman, Hadijatou Mani, who is now 24.
Slavery is outlawed throughout Africa, but it persists in pockets of Niger, Mali, Mauritania and amid conflicts like the one in northern Uganda. Antislavery organizations estimate that 43,000 people are enslaved in Niger alone, where nomadic tribes like the Tuareg and Toubou have for centuries held members of other ethnic groups as slaves.
Ms. Mani’s experience was typical of the practice. She was born into a traditional slave class and sold to Souleymane Naroua when she was 12 for about $500.
Ms. Mani told court officials that Mr. Naroua had forced her to work his fields for a decade. She also claimed that he raped her repeatedly over the years.
“I was beaten so many times I would run back to my family,” she told the BBC. “Then after a day or two I would be brought back.”
Ms. Mani brought her case to the court this year, arguing that the Niger government had failed to enforce its antislavery laws.
She had initially sought protection under Niger’s laws. In 2005, Mr. Naroua gave her a certificate freeing her, but when she tried to get married he claimed that she was already married to him.
A local court ruled for Ms. Mani, but a higher court reversed the judgment. In an absurd twist, Ms. Mani, who had gone ahead and married the other man, was sentenced to six months in jail for bigamy. She was released after serving two months.
“Nobody deserves to be enslaved,” Ms. Mani said in a statement. “We are all equal and deserve to be treated the same. I hope that everybody in slavery today can find their freedom. No woman should suffer the way I did.”
Slavery has long been tolerated in Niger. The Niamey government outlawed the practice in 2003, but it continues in the remote reaches of the vast, arid and impoverished nation that straddles the Sahara.
Antislavery organizations hailed the decision as an important victory against deeply entrenched social customs.
“For 17 years, we have been working towards bringing slavery to the attention of the authorities,” said Ilguilas Weila, president of Timidria, a Niger antislavery advocacy group, in a statement. “This verdict means that the state of Niger will now have to resolve this problem once and for all.”
The Community Court of Justice, the entity that ruled against Niger, is a judicial arm of Ecowas, a political and trade group of West African nations. The court, which can sit in any of the member nations, was created in 2000 and has made a number of important rulings.
But its limited ability to enforce them has sapped its influence.
Earlier this year, the court ordered the government of Gambia to release a journalist who had been missing for two years and was believed to be in government custody. Gambia ignored the judgment.
*****
October 28, 2008
Congo Rebels Advance; Protesters Hurl Rocks at U.N. Compound
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and NEIL MACFARQUHAR
NAIROBI, Kenya — Hundreds of furious protesters hurled rocks at a United Nations compound in eastern Congo on Monday in frustration that peacekeepers had not halted the rebel advance through the countryside, while the Spanish general leading the peacekeeping mission abruptly resigned.
Jaya Murthy, a spokesman for Unicef in the eastern Congo city of Goma, said heavy fighting between government troops and rebel forces was spawning a vast wave of internally displaced people, with tens of thousands evacuating several battle zones, often for the second or third time in recent months.
As many as 250,000 people have been driven from their homes since August, with the collapse of a peace deal between the government and rebels under the command of Laurent Nkunda, a renegade general who says he is fighting to protect ethnic Tutsis.
Several Western aid workers who spoke by phone from Goma on Monday described a panicky atmosphere, with the rebels gobbling up territory in the hills above Goma and Westerners hunkering down in their compounds, fearful of stepping outside.
“We’re on alert,” Mr. Murthy said. “We’re not sure what’s in store for the future, but whatever it is, it’s not good.”
The general who resigned, Lt. Gen. Vicente Díaz de Villegas y Herrería, was officially appointed just seven weeks ago to lead the United Nations’ Congo mission and had been in the country for only three weeks.
The announcement in New York that he was stepping down, from the spokeswoman for Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, said only that General Díaz was leaving for “personal reasons.”
But some United Nations officials described his oral resignation as an emotional one. Two officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose details of the resignation, said he had criticized the lack of a coherent strategy, the lack of a mandate and the lack of resources needed to get the peacekeeping job done.
General Díaz’s departure is expected to increase tension between the African forces serving with peacekeeping operations on the continent and United Nations headquarters, which has been lobbying heavily for the African Union to be more flexible about accepting outsiders. His appointment as force commander had been a significant test case in those efforts.
The rebel leader, Mr. Nkunda, has rejected several cease-fires brokered by the United Nations. Recently, he threatened to take his war all the way to Kinshasa, Congo’s capital, on the other side of the country.
His forces are much better trained and equipped than the government troops, who are notorious for turning their rusty guns on civilians and for fleeing when faced with a real threat. On Sunday, Mr. Nkunda’s forces seized an army base, for the second time in recent weeks.
According to United Nations officials, the protest started Monday morning around 9 after Congolese activists organized a large crowd to march on the United Nations compound in Goma. The protest quickly degenerated into violence, with demonstrators pelting the compound and nearby United Nations cars with large stones.
There were unconfirmed reports about casualties, with some Congolese officials reporting that the United Nations peacekeepers had killed two protesters in an attempt to quell the crowd. A spokesman for the peacekeepers could not be immediately reached.
The violence in eastern Congo has continued unabated for several years now, despite the presence of the United Nations’ largest peacekeeping force, with more than 17,000 troops. Brig. Gen. Ishmeel Ben Quartey of Ghana will lead the mission for the moment, the United Nations said, and Gen. Edmond Mulet of Guatemala, the assistant secretary general for peacekeeping, is in Congo.
“The population is not happy with the U.N.,” Mr. Murthy said. “They feel they are not protected. They are getting extremely angry.”
Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Nairobi, Kenya, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.
October 29, 2008
U.N. Blocked From Pulling Workers Out of Congo
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and NEIL MACFARQUHAR
NAIROBI, Kenya — With rebels closing in and artillery shells raining down, the United Nations said it decided on Tuesday to extract its aid workers who were holed up in the eastern Congolese village of Rutshuru.
But the attempt to evacuate roughly 50 aid workers trapped in the battle zone deep in the forest was halted after furious villagers attacked the armed convoy and blocked the road, United Nations officials said. In the melee, even Congolese government forces fired on the convoy, the officials said.
“The situation was very chaotic,” said Ivo Brandau, a United Nations spokesman in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital. “The convoy had to turn back.”
United Nations troops deployed helicopters and established infantry lines to try to prevent the rebels from overrunning Rutshuru and from reaching Goma, the provincial capital, said Alan Doss, the top United Nations official in the country. The rebels were breaking up into small groups to try to get around the United Nations forces, he said, but the peacekeepers were determined to try to repulse any attack on Goma, if it came.
The situation has deteriorated over the past three days in eastern Congo. Mr. Doss said the peacekeeping troops were overstretched in trying to protect the civilian population, which is caught in the middle of vicious fighting between a rebel group and the Congolese Army. In many areas, aid operations have ground to a halt. Hundreds of thousands of people are trying to flee, but it seems to be getting harder and harder to reach them.
“We have about 15 trucks loaded with food, and they can’t move,” said Marcus Prior, a spokesman for the United Nations World Food Program in Nairobi.
Mobs of civilians stoned the bases of United Nations forces in both Goma and Rutshuru. One civilian was killed Monday by a stray bullet when United Nations soldiers fired over the heads of the protesters trying to overrun the Goma base, Mr. Doss said from Kinshasa.
Mr. Doss, the representative of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in Congo, said he understood the civilian frustration, and he urged diplomatic efforts to get all groups together for talks.
“We cannot have a soldier behind every tree, in every field, on every road and in every market; it is impossible,” he said, adding that United Nations forces had been trying to explain to the civilians that by besieging the bases they were slowing efforts to attack the hostile forces.
In New York on Tuesday, the United Nations Security Council strongly condemned the offensive and called for a cease-fire.
Mr. Doss appeared before the Security Council this month, pleading for an increase in the 17,000 troops he has spread out all over the country, with about 6,000 in the area around Goma.
The fighting near Goma had made it too dangerous to distribute food in the rural areas, said Mr. Prior, the food program spokesman. In Goma, operations had been suspended because of the level of hostility against the United Nations.
Eastern Congo has been plagued by violence and insecurity for years and is home to the largest United Nations peacekeeping mission in the world. But the peacekeepers have seemed unable to stop one man, Laurent Nkunda, a renegade Congolese general, who is leading the rebel charge on Goma.
For the past several weeks, Mr. Nkunda’s troops have been gobbling up territory and forcing the Congolese government’s forces to retreat. They are now within 10 miles of Goma, and they are employing new hit-and-run tactics that seem to be frustrating the United Nations peacekeepers who are working with the Congolese military to beat back the rebels.
The fighting has driven villagers to look for a safe place to hide. Mr. Doss estimated that 100,000 had been displaced in the past few days, although estimates of new displacements were difficult amid people who had moved two and three times.
Juliette Prodhan, the country director for Oxfam’s aid programs in Congo, said the volume of people on the road had increased from a few hundred trudging toward Goma to more than 20,000. “There is widespread fear and panic,” she said.
Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Nairobi, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.
U.N. Blocked From Pulling Workers Out of Congo
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and NEIL MACFARQUHAR
NAIROBI, Kenya — With rebels closing in and artillery shells raining down, the United Nations said it decided on Tuesday to extract its aid workers who were holed up in the eastern Congolese village of Rutshuru.
But the attempt to evacuate roughly 50 aid workers trapped in the battle zone deep in the forest was halted after furious villagers attacked the armed convoy and blocked the road, United Nations officials said. In the melee, even Congolese government forces fired on the convoy, the officials said.
“The situation was very chaotic,” said Ivo Brandau, a United Nations spokesman in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital. “The convoy had to turn back.”
United Nations troops deployed helicopters and established infantry lines to try to prevent the rebels from overrunning Rutshuru and from reaching Goma, the provincial capital, said Alan Doss, the top United Nations official in the country. The rebels were breaking up into small groups to try to get around the United Nations forces, he said, but the peacekeepers were determined to try to repulse any attack on Goma, if it came.
The situation has deteriorated over the past three days in eastern Congo. Mr. Doss said the peacekeeping troops were overstretched in trying to protect the civilian population, which is caught in the middle of vicious fighting between a rebel group and the Congolese Army. In many areas, aid operations have ground to a halt. Hundreds of thousands of people are trying to flee, but it seems to be getting harder and harder to reach them.
“We have about 15 trucks loaded with food, and they can’t move,” said Marcus Prior, a spokesman for the United Nations World Food Program in Nairobi.
Mobs of civilians stoned the bases of United Nations forces in both Goma and Rutshuru. One civilian was killed Monday by a stray bullet when United Nations soldiers fired over the heads of the protesters trying to overrun the Goma base, Mr. Doss said from Kinshasa.
Mr. Doss, the representative of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in Congo, said he understood the civilian frustration, and he urged diplomatic efforts to get all groups together for talks.
“We cannot have a soldier behind every tree, in every field, on every road and in every market; it is impossible,” he said, adding that United Nations forces had been trying to explain to the civilians that by besieging the bases they were slowing efforts to attack the hostile forces.
In New York on Tuesday, the United Nations Security Council strongly condemned the offensive and called for a cease-fire.
Mr. Doss appeared before the Security Council this month, pleading for an increase in the 17,000 troops he has spread out all over the country, with about 6,000 in the area around Goma.
The fighting near Goma had made it too dangerous to distribute food in the rural areas, said Mr. Prior, the food program spokesman. In Goma, operations had been suspended because of the level of hostility against the United Nations.
Eastern Congo has been plagued by violence and insecurity for years and is home to the largest United Nations peacekeeping mission in the world. But the peacekeepers have seemed unable to stop one man, Laurent Nkunda, a renegade Congolese general, who is leading the rebel charge on Goma.
For the past several weeks, Mr. Nkunda’s troops have been gobbling up territory and forcing the Congolese government’s forces to retreat. They are now within 10 miles of Goma, and they are employing new hit-and-run tactics that seem to be frustrating the United Nations peacekeepers who are working with the Congolese military to beat back the rebels.
The fighting has driven villagers to look for a safe place to hide. Mr. Doss estimated that 100,000 had been displaced in the past few days, although estimates of new displacements were difficult amid people who had moved two and three times.
Juliette Prodhan, the country director for Oxfam’s aid programs in Congo, said the volume of people on the road had increased from a few hundred trudging toward Goma to more than 20,000. “There is widespread fear and panic,” she said.
Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Nairobi, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.
There is a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/world ... rates.html
October 31, 2008
Somalia's Pirates Flourish in a Lawless Nation
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
BOOSAASO, Somalia — This may be one of the most dangerous towns in Somalia, a place where you can get kidnapped faster than you can wipe the sweat off your brow. But it is also one of the most prosperous.
Money changers walk around with thick wads of hundred-dollar bills. Palatial new houses are rising up next to tin-roofed shanties. Men in jail reminisce, with a twinkle in their eyes, about their days living like kings.
This is the story of Somalia's booming, not-so-underground pirate economy. The country is in chaos, countless children are starving and people are killing one another in the streets of Mogadishu, the capital, for a handful of grain.
But one particular line of work — piracy — seems to be benefiting quite openly from all this lawlessness and desperation. This year, Somali officials say, pirate profits are on track to reach a record $50 million, all of it tax free.
"These guys are making a killing," said Mohamud Muse Hirsi, the top Somali official in Boosaaso, who himself is widely suspected of working with the pirates, though he vigorously denies it.
More than 75 vessels have been attacked this year, far more than any other year in recent memory. About a dozen have been set upon in the past month alone, including a Ukrainian freighter packed with tanks, antiaircraft guns and other heavy weaponry, which was brazenly seized in September.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/world ... rates.html
October 31, 2008
Somalia's Pirates Flourish in a Lawless Nation
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
BOOSAASO, Somalia — This may be one of the most dangerous towns in Somalia, a place where you can get kidnapped faster than you can wipe the sweat off your brow. But it is also one of the most prosperous.
Money changers walk around with thick wads of hundred-dollar bills. Palatial new houses are rising up next to tin-roofed shanties. Men in jail reminisce, with a twinkle in their eyes, about their days living like kings.
This is the story of Somalia's booming, not-so-underground pirate economy. The country is in chaos, countless children are starving and people are killing one another in the streets of Mogadishu, the capital, for a handful of grain.
But one particular line of work — piracy — seems to be benefiting quite openly from all this lawlessness and desperation. This year, Somali officials say, pirate profits are on track to reach a record $50 million, all of it tax free.
"These guys are making a killing," said Mohamud Muse Hirsi, the top Somali official in Boosaaso, who himself is widely suspected of working with the pirates, though he vigorously denies it.
More than 75 vessels have been attacked this year, far more than any other year in recent memory. About a dozen have been set upon in the past month alone, including a Ukrainian freighter packed with tanks, antiaircraft guns and other heavy weaponry, which was brazenly seized in September.
There is a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/03/world ... congo.html
November 3, 2008
News Analysis
In Congo, a Little Fighting Brings a Lot of Fear
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
GOMA, Congo — When Congo shakes, Africa trembles.
This vast linchpin of a country at the green heart of the continent, covering 905,000 square miles and bordering nine nations, never goes down alone.
When the Congolese state began to collapse in 1996, it set off a regional war. When it imploded again in 1998, it dragged in armies from a half-dozen other African countries. The two wars and the mayhem since have killed possibly five million people, a death toll that human rights groups say is the worst related to any conflict since World War II.
The worry now is that Congo is on the brink again, with neighbors poised to jump in, which is why the relatively small-scale bush fighting last week attracted some of the most intense diplomatic activity Congo has seen in years. The French foreign minister, the British foreign minister, top United Nations diplomats and the State Department’s highest official for Africa all jetted in to the decrepit but important lakeside city of Goma.
The hills around Goma are now firmly in rebel hands after rebel fighters routed the Congolese Army late last month, and had the rebels not declared an 11th-hour cease-fire, Goma itself would now be theirs.
“The political damage this has caused is enormous,” said Koen Vlassenroot, a professor at Ghent University in Belgium who specializes in eastern Congo.
The rebel victory laid bare the fecklessness of the Congolese government, two years after the most expensive, foreign-financed election in African history, despite the muscle of the largest United Nations peacekeeping mission, with 17,000 troops in the country.
Perhaps even more alarming was the performance of that mission. Not only were the peacekeepers unable to stop the rebels’ advance — the rebels have already turned a captured United Nations base into an impromptu bush gym — but they were unable to protect civilians, which is their mandate.
On Wednesday night, as the rebels encircled Goma, rogue government soldiers plundered, raped and killed in their retreat from the town.
More in the link provided above.
*****
Zambian vote sparks protests
Herald News Services
Monday, November 03, 2008
The leader of Zambia's ruling party was accused Sunday of rigging the elections after he was sworn back in as president following a narrow victory.
Rupiah Banda beat Michael Sata -- who had earlier had an advantage of more than 100,000 votes -- by just 35,209 out of almost 1.8 million ballots cast.
The closeness of the result raised fears of possible violent outbursts by supporters of the populist opposition leader and police used tear gas to disperse scores of protesters in the slum of Mandevu.
At the swearing-in ceremony, Banda, 71, was watched by his 21-year-old wife Thandiwe, with President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe sitting next to her.
Pledging to be "president of all Zambians," Banda appealed to the opposition: "For Zambians' sake we will look forward, not back. The campaign is over, what is in the past must remain so. I offer my friendship to Michael Sata. It is not my intention to govern a divided nation."
© The Calgary Herald 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/03/world ... congo.html
November 3, 2008
News Analysis
In Congo, a Little Fighting Brings a Lot of Fear
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
GOMA, Congo — When Congo shakes, Africa trembles.
This vast linchpin of a country at the green heart of the continent, covering 905,000 square miles and bordering nine nations, never goes down alone.
When the Congolese state began to collapse in 1996, it set off a regional war. When it imploded again in 1998, it dragged in armies from a half-dozen other African countries. The two wars and the mayhem since have killed possibly five million people, a death toll that human rights groups say is the worst related to any conflict since World War II.
The worry now is that Congo is on the brink again, with neighbors poised to jump in, which is why the relatively small-scale bush fighting last week attracted some of the most intense diplomatic activity Congo has seen in years. The French foreign minister, the British foreign minister, top United Nations diplomats and the State Department’s highest official for Africa all jetted in to the decrepit but important lakeside city of Goma.
The hills around Goma are now firmly in rebel hands after rebel fighters routed the Congolese Army late last month, and had the rebels not declared an 11th-hour cease-fire, Goma itself would now be theirs.
“The political damage this has caused is enormous,” said Koen Vlassenroot, a professor at Ghent University in Belgium who specializes in eastern Congo.
The rebel victory laid bare the fecklessness of the Congolese government, two years after the most expensive, foreign-financed election in African history, despite the muscle of the largest United Nations peacekeeping mission, with 17,000 troops in the country.
Perhaps even more alarming was the performance of that mission. Not only were the peacekeepers unable to stop the rebels’ advance — the rebels have already turned a captured United Nations base into an impromptu bush gym — but they were unable to protect civilians, which is their mandate.
On Wednesday night, as the rebels encircled Goma, rogue government soldiers plundered, raped and killed in their retreat from the town.
More in the link provided above.
*****
Zambian vote sparks protests
Herald News Services
Monday, November 03, 2008
The leader of Zambia's ruling party was accused Sunday of rigging the elections after he was sworn back in as president following a narrow victory.
Rupiah Banda beat Michael Sata -- who had earlier had an advantage of more than 100,000 votes -- by just 35,209 out of almost 1.8 million ballots cast.
The closeness of the result raised fears of possible violent outbursts by supporters of the populist opposition leader and police used tear gas to disperse scores of protesters in the slum of Mandevu.
At the swearing-in ceremony, Banda, 71, was watched by his 21-year-old wife Thandiwe, with President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe sitting next to her.
Pledging to be "president of all Zambians," Banda appealed to the opposition: "For Zambians' sake we will look forward, not back. The campaign is over, what is in the past must remain so. I offer my friendship to Michael Sata. It is not my intention to govern a divided nation."
© The Calgary Herald 2008
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7710394.stm
Kenya declares holiday for Obama
Kenya has declared Thursday a public holiday to celebrate the election of Barack Obama to the US presidency.
Mr Obama's father was from Kenya and his victory has prompted jubilation across the country.
"We the Kenyan people are immensely proud of your Kenyan roots," President Mwai Kibaki said.
The BBC's Juliet Njeri says Mr Obama's step-grandmother was seen dancing and cheering jubilantly outside her house after the results were declared.
She says Mr Obama's family stayed up all night in the western Kenyan village of Kogelo watching the election count, and they are now preparing for a big party.
Your victory has demonstrated that no person... should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world for a better place
Nelson Mandela
African leaders from South Africa to Somalia have sent their congratulations to the US president-elect.
Nelson Mandela, South Africa's first black president, welcomed Mr Obama's victory as a sign of hope for everyone.
"Your victory has demonstrated that no person anywhere in the world should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world for a better place," he said in a letter of congratulations.
Unifying
In Kisumu city, near the Obamas' home village, there is a carnival atmosphere and people have poured onto the streets singing Mr Obama's praises, our reporter says.
Political leaders are expected to join massive celebrations planned in the city, which considers Mr Obama their chosen son, she says.
In January, Kisumu was the scene of running battles between members of the public and police after riots broke out over the Kenya's contested elections.
But correspondents say the US election seems to be a unifying moment for the country, with people reported to be saying that Mr Obama's victory is a victory for all Kenyans.
In the capital, crowds were seen singing and dancing, waving branches and carrying posters of Mr Obama along Ngong Road, one of Nairobi's major highways.
"Your victory is not only an inspiration to millions of people all over the world, but it has special resonance with us here in Kenya," Mr Kibaki said.
Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.
Barack Obama's election success is celebrated
Mr Obama's victory is being celebrated across the continent.
South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu said it showed "that for people of colour, the sky is the limit".
The BBC's world affairs correspondent Adam Mynott says Mr Obama will inherit a foreign policy legacy in Africa that has been one of the high points of the George Bush administration.
Earlier this year President Bush toured through five African nations and people greeted him in their thousands to applaud him for America's huge contribution in the fight against HIV/Aids.
Since its launch five years ago, his Aids relief programme has spent more than $15bn dollars (£9.5bn) on the continent and saved many thousands of lives.
He says Africans will look to Mr Obama to deliver more when he takes office in January, and his difficulty will lie in matching the soaring expectations.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/a ... 710394.stm
Published: 2008/11/05 13:27:25 GMT
Kenya declares holiday for Obama
Kenya has declared Thursday a public holiday to celebrate the election of Barack Obama to the US presidency.
Mr Obama's father was from Kenya and his victory has prompted jubilation across the country.
"We the Kenyan people are immensely proud of your Kenyan roots," President Mwai Kibaki said.
The BBC's Juliet Njeri says Mr Obama's step-grandmother was seen dancing and cheering jubilantly outside her house after the results were declared.
She says Mr Obama's family stayed up all night in the western Kenyan village of Kogelo watching the election count, and they are now preparing for a big party.
Your victory has demonstrated that no person... should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world for a better place
Nelson Mandela
African leaders from South Africa to Somalia have sent their congratulations to the US president-elect.
Nelson Mandela, South Africa's first black president, welcomed Mr Obama's victory as a sign of hope for everyone.
"Your victory has demonstrated that no person anywhere in the world should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world for a better place," he said in a letter of congratulations.
Unifying
In Kisumu city, near the Obamas' home village, there is a carnival atmosphere and people have poured onto the streets singing Mr Obama's praises, our reporter says.
Political leaders are expected to join massive celebrations planned in the city, which considers Mr Obama their chosen son, she says.
In January, Kisumu was the scene of running battles between members of the public and police after riots broke out over the Kenya's contested elections.
But correspondents say the US election seems to be a unifying moment for the country, with people reported to be saying that Mr Obama's victory is a victory for all Kenyans.
In the capital, crowds were seen singing and dancing, waving branches and carrying posters of Mr Obama along Ngong Road, one of Nairobi's major highways.
"Your victory is not only an inspiration to millions of people all over the world, but it has special resonance with us here in Kenya," Mr Kibaki said.
Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.
Barack Obama's election success is celebrated
Mr Obama's victory is being celebrated across the continent.
South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu said it showed "that for people of colour, the sky is the limit".
The BBC's world affairs correspondent Adam Mynott says Mr Obama will inherit a foreign policy legacy in Africa that has been one of the high points of the George Bush administration.
Earlier this year President Bush toured through five African nations and people greeted him in their thousands to applaud him for America's huge contribution in the fight against HIV/Aids.
Since its launch five years ago, his Aids relief programme has spent more than $15bn dollars (£9.5bn) on the continent and saved many thousands of lives.
He says Africans will look to Mr Obama to deliver more when he takes office in January, and his difficulty will lie in matching the soaring expectations.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/a ... 710394.stm
Published: 2008/11/05 13:27:25 GMT
There is a related multimedia at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/08/world ... congo.html
November 8, 2008
U.N. Chief and African Leaders Seek Congo Peace
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — There was an obvious place setting missing Friday at the emergency summit meeting called to bring peace to war-ravaged eastern Congo.
The placards were neatly laid out for the presidents of Congo, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi and the Congo Republic, as well as United Nations officials and Western diplomats. They huddled together in an oak-paneled conference room in a secluded Nairobi hotel, surrounded by a battalion of bodyguards.
But conspicuously absent was the man who started the crisis in the first place: Laurent Nkunda, the rebel general who has threatened to take over all of Congo and whose fighters recently brought central Africa to its most turbulent moment in years.
“Mr. Nkunda was not invited,” said Alan Doss, the chief of the United Nations mission to Congo.
When asked why not, Jakaya Kikwete, Tanzania’s president and the current chairman of the African Union, said, “This was a meeting of the leaders.”
Mr. Nkunda’s forces have been battling Congolese government troops since August, in a region where violence has raged on and off for the past decade. The recent fighting climaxed last week, when Mr. Nkunda’s men (and boys, because he uses a lot of child soldiers) routed Congolese government troops and were poised to seize Goma, the strategic city in eastern Congo.
The fighting turned hundreds of thousands of people into refugees, many of them sick, wounded and starving. Mr. Nkunda then declared a cease-fire, which the United Nations is desperately trying to keep intact.
It was out of concern that the cease-fire was unraveling and that Congo’s problems were threatening to draw in neighboring armies — the kind of international conflict that has devastated the region before — that top United Nations and African officials called the emergency meeting in Kenya. Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, flew in for the talks, and he opened the meeting saying, “This has been one of the worst human tragedies of our time.”
The African leaders then signed a multipronged agreement calling for an immediate end to the conflict, and they said that if United Nations peacekeepers could not protect civilians from senseless killing, African peacekeepers would be sent to the front lines.
“We’re happy with what we’ve accomplished,” Mr. Kikwete said at the end of the meeting.
More at the link mentioned above.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/08/world ... congo.html
November 8, 2008
U.N. Chief and African Leaders Seek Congo Peace
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — There was an obvious place setting missing Friday at the emergency summit meeting called to bring peace to war-ravaged eastern Congo.
The placards were neatly laid out for the presidents of Congo, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi and the Congo Republic, as well as United Nations officials and Western diplomats. They huddled together in an oak-paneled conference room in a secluded Nairobi hotel, surrounded by a battalion of bodyguards.
But conspicuously absent was the man who started the crisis in the first place: Laurent Nkunda, the rebel general who has threatened to take over all of Congo and whose fighters recently brought central Africa to its most turbulent moment in years.
“Mr. Nkunda was not invited,” said Alan Doss, the chief of the United Nations mission to Congo.
When asked why not, Jakaya Kikwete, Tanzania’s president and the current chairman of the African Union, said, “This was a meeting of the leaders.”
Mr. Nkunda’s forces have been battling Congolese government troops since August, in a region where violence has raged on and off for the past decade. The recent fighting climaxed last week, when Mr. Nkunda’s men (and boys, because he uses a lot of child soldiers) routed Congolese government troops and were poised to seize Goma, the strategic city in eastern Congo.
The fighting turned hundreds of thousands of people into refugees, many of them sick, wounded and starving. Mr. Nkunda then declared a cease-fire, which the United Nations is desperately trying to keep intact.
It was out of concern that the cease-fire was unraveling and that Congo’s problems were threatening to draw in neighboring armies — the kind of international conflict that has devastated the region before — that top United Nations and African officials called the emergency meeting in Kenya. Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, flew in for the talks, and he opened the meeting saying, “This has been one of the worst human tragedies of our time.”
The African leaders then signed a multipronged agreement calling for an immediate end to the conflict, and they said that if United Nations peacekeepers could not protect civilians from senseless killing, African peacekeepers would be sent to the front lines.
“We’re happy with what we’ve accomplished,” Mr. Kikwete said at the end of the meeting.
More at the link mentioned above.
November 10, 2008
African Leaders Act to Defuse Conflict in Congo
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and CELIA W. DUGGER
NAIROBI, Kenya — As skirmishes continued to test a shaky cease-fire in eastern Congo on Sunday, southern African leaders agreed to send military advisers to the region immediately, and a peacekeeping force later if necessary.
After a marathon emergency summit meeting Sunday in Johannesburg, members of the Southern African Development Community called for an immediate cease-fire and the opening of safe corridors for aid to get through.
“We are aware we are facing a tragedy and time is not on our side,” Tomaz Salomao, the Southern African Development Community’s executive secretary, said at a midnight news conference.
Rebel forces led by Gen. Laurent Nkunda have been battling Congolese government troops since August in a region where violence has raged on and off for a decade.
Human rights groups say that some 250,000 people driven from their homes urgently need assistance.
Mr. Salomao said the military advisers were being sent immediately. Peacekeeping troops, he said, would be sent “if and when necessary.”
A communiqué issued after the meeting said the group’s goal was to assist the Congolese Army, and it described General Nkunda as a threat to the country’s integrity.
“We firmly believe that there is no military solution to the problem,” said President Kgalema Motlanthe of South Africa. “We call for an immediate cease-fire to allow humanitarian assistance to the displaced people.”
A United Nations spokesman, Lt. Col. Jean-Paul Dietrich, said the fighting on Sunday broke out around dawn in Ngungu, a small village west of Goma, the provincial capital and a strategic trade hub.
Local Mai-Mai militias, who are aligned with the Congolese government and see themselves as protectors of their land, ambushed rebel soldiers with assault rifles. Several dozen men from the two sides then battled each other at close range, Colonel Dietrich said.
The skirmish lasted five hours and about 500 people fled Ngungu before United Nations peacekeepers brokered a truce. Preliminary reports indicate that one person was killed and several were wounded.
“The Congolese Army considered this minor fighting,” Colonel Dietrich said.
Still, United Nations officials said, it was alarming, and it showed the complexity of the multisided conflict that has involved rebels, often predatory government troops, local militias and United Nations peacekeepers.
Fighting like this has flared up several times in the past few days, threatening to plunge eastern Congo back into full-fledged war.
In late October, just as the rebels were about to march into Goma, they declared a cease-fire.
Since then, Western diplomats and top African officials have been meeting around the clock to solidify the cease-fire and find a more permanent solution.
On Friday, the presidents of seven African nations held a meeting in Nairobi and urged all parties to stop fighting and open corridors for aid workers.
Many of the people displaced by the conflict are hungry and sick, and aid workers are now struggling to contain a cholera outbreak in the makeshift camps near Goma.
There are dozens of local militias in eastern Congo who call themselves Mai-Mai, a reference to a belief in spiritual powers, such as holy oil and amulets, which the fighters often wear in battle.
United Nations officials have said that Mai-Mai fighters are getting increasingly aggressive, in contrast to Congolese troops who seem to have calmed down.
“The government wants to stick to the agreement,” Colonel Dietrich said. But, he added, “the Mai-Mai seem to be getting frustrated. This is a problem.”
Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Nairobi, and Celia W. Dugger from Johannesburg.
African Leaders Act to Defuse Conflict in Congo
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and CELIA W. DUGGER
NAIROBI, Kenya — As skirmishes continued to test a shaky cease-fire in eastern Congo on Sunday, southern African leaders agreed to send military advisers to the region immediately, and a peacekeeping force later if necessary.
After a marathon emergency summit meeting Sunday in Johannesburg, members of the Southern African Development Community called for an immediate cease-fire and the opening of safe corridors for aid to get through.
“We are aware we are facing a tragedy and time is not on our side,” Tomaz Salomao, the Southern African Development Community’s executive secretary, said at a midnight news conference.
Rebel forces led by Gen. Laurent Nkunda have been battling Congolese government troops since August in a region where violence has raged on and off for a decade.
Human rights groups say that some 250,000 people driven from their homes urgently need assistance.
Mr. Salomao said the military advisers were being sent immediately. Peacekeeping troops, he said, would be sent “if and when necessary.”
A communiqué issued after the meeting said the group’s goal was to assist the Congolese Army, and it described General Nkunda as a threat to the country’s integrity.
“We firmly believe that there is no military solution to the problem,” said President Kgalema Motlanthe of South Africa. “We call for an immediate cease-fire to allow humanitarian assistance to the displaced people.”
A United Nations spokesman, Lt. Col. Jean-Paul Dietrich, said the fighting on Sunday broke out around dawn in Ngungu, a small village west of Goma, the provincial capital and a strategic trade hub.
Local Mai-Mai militias, who are aligned with the Congolese government and see themselves as protectors of their land, ambushed rebel soldiers with assault rifles. Several dozen men from the two sides then battled each other at close range, Colonel Dietrich said.
The skirmish lasted five hours and about 500 people fled Ngungu before United Nations peacekeepers brokered a truce. Preliminary reports indicate that one person was killed and several were wounded.
“The Congolese Army considered this minor fighting,” Colonel Dietrich said.
Still, United Nations officials said, it was alarming, and it showed the complexity of the multisided conflict that has involved rebels, often predatory government troops, local militias and United Nations peacekeepers.
Fighting like this has flared up several times in the past few days, threatening to plunge eastern Congo back into full-fledged war.
In late October, just as the rebels were about to march into Goma, they declared a cease-fire.
Since then, Western diplomats and top African officials have been meeting around the clock to solidify the cease-fire and find a more permanent solution.
On Friday, the presidents of seven African nations held a meeting in Nairobi and urged all parties to stop fighting and open corridors for aid workers.
Many of the people displaced by the conflict are hungry and sick, and aid workers are now struggling to contain a cholera outbreak in the makeshift camps near Goma.
There are dozens of local militias in eastern Congo who call themselves Mai-Mai, a reference to a belief in spiritual powers, such as holy oil and amulets, which the fighters often wear in battle.
United Nations officials have said that Mai-Mai fighters are getting increasingly aggressive, in contrast to Congolese troops who seem to have calmed down.
“The government wants to stick to the agreement,” Colonel Dietrich said. But, he added, “the Mai-Mai seem to be getting frustrated. This is a problem.”
Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Nairobi, and Celia W. Dugger from Johannesburg.
Photograph at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/arts/ ... ref=slogin
November 11, 2008
An Appraisal
Taking Africa With Her to the World
By JON PARELES
To be the voice of a nation speaking to the wider world is a tough mission for any performer. To be the voice of an entire continent is exponentially more difficult. Both were mantles that the South African singer Miriam Makeba took on willingly and forcefully. Despite her lifelong claim that she was not a political singer, she became “Mama Africa” with an activist’s tenacity and a musician’s ear. She died Sunday, at 76, after a concert in Italy.
Treating her listeners as one global community, Ms. Makeba sang in any language she chose, from her own Xhosa to the East African lingua franca Swahili to Portuguese to Yiddish. She also took sides: against South African apartheid and for a worldwide movement against racism, to the point of derailing her career when she married the black power advocate Stokely Carmichael in the late 1960s. (They were divorced in the mid-1970s.) Even during three decades of life as an exile and expatriate — the South African government revoked her passport in 1960 — she made it clear that South Africa was her home and her bedrock as an artist.
Her voice, more properly voices, were unstoppable. Always cosmopolitan, Ms. Makeba knew her Billie Holiday as well as old Xhosa melodies like “The Click Song,” with its percussive syllables, which became one of her international hits. She could sound light, lilting and girlish; she could be flirtatious, bluesy or utterly exuberant. Her voice also held a layer of rawer, sharper exhortation: the tone of village songs and spirit invocations, the traditions that were her birthright — songs she revisited on her 1988 album “Sangoma” (Warner Brothers). Her huge repertory didn’t feature strident protest songs but in love songs and lullabies, party songs and calls for unity there was an indomitable will to survive: a joyful tenacity that could translate as both deep cultural memory and immediate defiance.
She must have been an exotic apparition in the 1960s, upbeat and already a star in South Africa, wowing Europe and then arriving in the United States with support from Harry Belafonte. She had already, bravely, sung in an anti-apartheid documentary, “Come Back, Africa.” In exile she was still an ambassador, showing America and the world an Africa full of vibrant, irresistible sounds: the loping mbube grooves that Paul Simon would rediscover decades later, the flow of African words, the grain of her voice.
Videos on YouTube from 1966 show Ms. Makeba, with her musicians in jackets and ties, performing in an elegant long dress that also happens to have a leopard-skin pattern: supper-club Africana that’s at home on any continent. Her music was different but not forbidding, especially with her own charisma to introduce it. Before anyone was tossing around terms like “world music,” she was creating it, making her heritage portable while preserving its essence.
She was never a purist, but always proud of her roots.
Ms. Makeba arrived during America’s civil-rights struggles and performed at the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s marches. A visible reminder that discrimination stretched beyond the United States, she denounced apartheid in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in 1963. It’s impossible to guess what she may have been thinking when she sang her 1967 “Pata Pata,” with its bits of English narration — “ ‘Pata Pata’ is the name of a dance we do down Johannesburg way” — in the full knowledge that she herself would not be welcome back in Johannesburg until a regime change.
Prohibited from returning to South Africa, she settled instead in Guinea, in West Africa, where she participated in that country’s government-assisted movement toward musical “authenticité” — merging traditional styles with new instruments — and let her repertory stretch further. For a while she also joined Guinea’s United Nations delegation.
Ms. Makeba didn’t have the career of a pop singer, thinking about hits and trends and markets. She followed conscience and history instead, becoming a symbol of integrity and pan-Africanism — lending her imprimatur, for instance, by performing on Mr. Simon’s 1987 “Graceland” tour, which carried South African music worldwide while implicitly pointing to the apartheid that still prevailed at home. Through five decades of making music, down to her final studio album, “Reflections,” in 2004 and concerts till the day she died, she sang with a voice that was unmistakably African, and just as unmistakably fearless.
Link to her music
<http://www.sweetslyrics.com/433578.Miri ... Malaika%20
(My%20Angel).html>
OTHER copycats (google it...)
http://www.dewani.ca/Malaika.mp3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvGxuuaIJGM
Original Kiswhahili words of Malaika:
English interpretion of Malaika:(below)
Malaika, nakupenda Malaika
Malaika, nakupenda Malaika
Nami nifanyeje, kijana mwenzio
Nashindwa na mali sina we
Ningekuoa Malaika
Nashindwa na mali sina we
Ningekuoa Malaika
Pesa zasumbua roho yangu
Pesa zasumbua roho yangu
Nami nifanyeje, kijana mwenzio
Ningekuoa Malaika
Nashindwa na mali sina we
Ningekuoa Malaika
Kidege hukuwaza kidege
Kidege hukuwaza kidege
Nami nifanyeje, kijana mwenzio
Nashindwa na mali sina we
Ningekuoa Malaika
Nashindwa na mali sina we
Ningekuoa Malaika
Angel, I love you my angel
Angel, I love you my angel
What can I do, my love
I don't have any money
I would have married you my angel
I don't have any money
I would have married you my angel
Money is troubling my heart
Money is troubling my heart
What can I do, my love
I can't take care of you
I would have married you my angel
I don't have any money
I would have married you my angel
Little bird, I dream about you little bird
Little bird, I dream about you little bird
What can I do, my angel
I don't have any money
I would have married you my angel
I don't have any money
I would have married you my angel
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/arts/ ... ref=slogin
November 11, 2008
An Appraisal
Taking Africa With Her to the World
By JON PARELES
To be the voice of a nation speaking to the wider world is a tough mission for any performer. To be the voice of an entire continent is exponentially more difficult. Both were mantles that the South African singer Miriam Makeba took on willingly and forcefully. Despite her lifelong claim that she was not a political singer, she became “Mama Africa” with an activist’s tenacity and a musician’s ear. She died Sunday, at 76, after a concert in Italy.
Treating her listeners as one global community, Ms. Makeba sang in any language she chose, from her own Xhosa to the East African lingua franca Swahili to Portuguese to Yiddish. She also took sides: against South African apartheid and for a worldwide movement against racism, to the point of derailing her career when she married the black power advocate Stokely Carmichael in the late 1960s. (They were divorced in the mid-1970s.) Even during three decades of life as an exile and expatriate — the South African government revoked her passport in 1960 — she made it clear that South Africa was her home and her bedrock as an artist.
Her voice, more properly voices, were unstoppable. Always cosmopolitan, Ms. Makeba knew her Billie Holiday as well as old Xhosa melodies like “The Click Song,” with its percussive syllables, which became one of her international hits. She could sound light, lilting and girlish; she could be flirtatious, bluesy or utterly exuberant. Her voice also held a layer of rawer, sharper exhortation: the tone of village songs and spirit invocations, the traditions that were her birthright — songs she revisited on her 1988 album “Sangoma” (Warner Brothers). Her huge repertory didn’t feature strident protest songs but in love songs and lullabies, party songs and calls for unity there was an indomitable will to survive: a joyful tenacity that could translate as both deep cultural memory and immediate defiance.
She must have been an exotic apparition in the 1960s, upbeat and already a star in South Africa, wowing Europe and then arriving in the United States with support from Harry Belafonte. She had already, bravely, sung in an anti-apartheid documentary, “Come Back, Africa.” In exile she was still an ambassador, showing America and the world an Africa full of vibrant, irresistible sounds: the loping mbube grooves that Paul Simon would rediscover decades later, the flow of African words, the grain of her voice.
Videos on YouTube from 1966 show Ms. Makeba, with her musicians in jackets and ties, performing in an elegant long dress that also happens to have a leopard-skin pattern: supper-club Africana that’s at home on any continent. Her music was different but not forbidding, especially with her own charisma to introduce it. Before anyone was tossing around terms like “world music,” she was creating it, making her heritage portable while preserving its essence.
She was never a purist, but always proud of her roots.
Ms. Makeba arrived during America’s civil-rights struggles and performed at the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s marches. A visible reminder that discrimination stretched beyond the United States, she denounced apartheid in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in 1963. It’s impossible to guess what she may have been thinking when she sang her 1967 “Pata Pata,” with its bits of English narration — “ ‘Pata Pata’ is the name of a dance we do down Johannesburg way” — in the full knowledge that she herself would not be welcome back in Johannesburg until a regime change.
Prohibited from returning to South Africa, she settled instead in Guinea, in West Africa, where she participated in that country’s government-assisted movement toward musical “authenticité” — merging traditional styles with new instruments — and let her repertory stretch further. For a while she also joined Guinea’s United Nations delegation.
Ms. Makeba didn’t have the career of a pop singer, thinking about hits and trends and markets. She followed conscience and history instead, becoming a symbol of integrity and pan-Africanism — lending her imprimatur, for instance, by performing on Mr. Simon’s 1987 “Graceland” tour, which carried South African music worldwide while implicitly pointing to the apartheid that still prevailed at home. Through five decades of making music, down to her final studio album, “Reflections,” in 2004 and concerts till the day she died, she sang with a voice that was unmistakably African, and just as unmistakably fearless.
Link to her music
<http://www.sweetslyrics.com/433578.Miri ... Malaika%20
(My%20Angel).html>
OTHER copycats (google it...)
http://www.dewani.ca/Malaika.mp3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvGxuuaIJGM
Original Kiswhahili words of Malaika:
English interpretion of Malaika:(below)
Malaika, nakupenda Malaika
Malaika, nakupenda Malaika
Nami nifanyeje, kijana mwenzio
Nashindwa na mali sina we
Ningekuoa Malaika
Nashindwa na mali sina we
Ningekuoa Malaika
Pesa zasumbua roho yangu
Pesa zasumbua roho yangu
Nami nifanyeje, kijana mwenzio
Ningekuoa Malaika
Nashindwa na mali sina we
Ningekuoa Malaika
Kidege hukuwaza kidege
Kidege hukuwaza kidege
Nami nifanyeje, kijana mwenzio
Nashindwa na mali sina we
Ningekuoa Malaika
Nashindwa na mali sina we
Ningekuoa Malaika
Angel, I love you my angel
Angel, I love you my angel
What can I do, my love
I don't have any money
I would have married you my angel
I don't have any money
I would have married you my angel
Money is troubling my heart
Money is troubling my heart
What can I do, my love
I can't take care of you
I would have married you my angel
I don't have any money
I would have married you my angel
Little bird, I dream about you little bird
Little bird, I dream about you little bird
What can I do, my angel
I don't have any money
I would have married you my angel
I don't have any money
I would have married you my angel
A continent of orphans
Africans fear adoption will rob their future
Robert Remington
Calgary Herald
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
CREDIT: Leah Hennel, Calgary Herald
Two years ago, Calgarian Tandela Swann adopted her son Mark, whom she nursed back to health while volunteering in 2003 at an orphanage in Uganda.
CREDIT: Leah Hennel, Calgary Herald
Gina Dolinsky and her daughter Samara.
Part 4: View From the Other Side
When Strangers Become Family
For six months, the Calgary Herald followed one family's unpredictable journey to adopt a child from another land.
Saturday: The Path to Ethiopia. The Bailey family faces obstacles -- time, money, paperwork -- to expand their family.
Sunday: Meeting Mamush. The Baileys go to Ethiopia, but will this young orphan find a spot in their family?
Monday: Mamush comes to Canada. Homesickness, language barriers and discrimination -- the struggles to adapt to a new country.
Today: Trends, tragedies and triumphs. How international adoption is changing the world.
- - -
As a foreigner approaches, one-year-old Emma runs to the arms of Charles Kiyimba and begins to cry. "Babaa," she wails, using the word for father in her native Acholi language.
Kiyimba, director of the SOS Children's Village in Gulu, is babaa to 105 orphaned children, many of them made so by northern Uganda's recent 22-year civil war. Some, like Emma, were born in the bush to rebel soldiers who were killed. Their mothers, abducted by rebels and themselves barely out of childhood, either abandoned their babies or perished in the conflict.
"All of the children here are victims," Kiyimba says. "Some were born to the rebels. Others have parents who were victims of HIV. Here, we have many people living in camps and disease can strike very fast."
According to the United Nations International Childrens' Fund (UNICEF), there are an estimated 2.3 million orphans like Emma in Uganda. Few are available for adoption. Although one in six children in this central African nation are without parents, cultural and societal values make adoption difficult.
"The concept of adoption I would say is foreign to Africa," says Ocheng Vincent Ocen, a Baptist minister and director of the Gulu school district. He says African society, with its deep-rooted extended family system, makes adoption almost unheard of except when relatives cannot be located, such as in desperate cases of children abandoned in railway stations, on doorsteps, or even discarded into latrines.
"Most of our people, because of the extended family system, resist very much uprooting children from their communities," says Norbert Mao, chairman of the war-ravaged Gulu northern district. "We have orphans, no doubt, but these orphans have at least some relative and our extended family system gives room for them."
Reluctance to give up children for adoption exists throughout many African nations. "Relatives will take care of you even if they are poor. It is because of our belief in the extended family," says Alex Lengeju, director of the SOS village in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
UNICEF estimates there are an astonishing 48.3 million orphans in sub-Saharan Africa, a figure that will rise to 53.1 million by 2010. One quarter of those have lost their parents to AIDS. With conflicts and other diseases ravaging an entire generation, Africa is becoming a continent of orphans.
Despite these staggering numbers, many African nations are loathe to adopt out these children internationally due to a mistrust of the intentions of foreigners, a fear of losing their future generation and an underlying belief that the need to give away one's children is symbolic of your failure as a nation.
More....
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... f&sponsor=
Africans fear adoption will rob their future
Robert Remington
Calgary Herald
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
CREDIT: Leah Hennel, Calgary Herald
Two years ago, Calgarian Tandela Swann adopted her son Mark, whom she nursed back to health while volunteering in 2003 at an orphanage in Uganda.
CREDIT: Leah Hennel, Calgary Herald
Gina Dolinsky and her daughter Samara.
Part 4: View From the Other Side
When Strangers Become Family
For six months, the Calgary Herald followed one family's unpredictable journey to adopt a child from another land.
Saturday: The Path to Ethiopia. The Bailey family faces obstacles -- time, money, paperwork -- to expand their family.
Sunday: Meeting Mamush. The Baileys go to Ethiopia, but will this young orphan find a spot in their family?
Monday: Mamush comes to Canada. Homesickness, language barriers and discrimination -- the struggles to adapt to a new country.
Today: Trends, tragedies and triumphs. How international adoption is changing the world.
- - -
As a foreigner approaches, one-year-old Emma runs to the arms of Charles Kiyimba and begins to cry. "Babaa," she wails, using the word for father in her native Acholi language.
Kiyimba, director of the SOS Children's Village in Gulu, is babaa to 105 orphaned children, many of them made so by northern Uganda's recent 22-year civil war. Some, like Emma, were born in the bush to rebel soldiers who were killed. Their mothers, abducted by rebels and themselves barely out of childhood, either abandoned their babies or perished in the conflict.
"All of the children here are victims," Kiyimba says. "Some were born to the rebels. Others have parents who were victims of HIV. Here, we have many people living in camps and disease can strike very fast."
According to the United Nations International Childrens' Fund (UNICEF), there are an estimated 2.3 million orphans like Emma in Uganda. Few are available for adoption. Although one in six children in this central African nation are without parents, cultural and societal values make adoption difficult.
"The concept of adoption I would say is foreign to Africa," says Ocheng Vincent Ocen, a Baptist minister and director of the Gulu school district. He says African society, with its deep-rooted extended family system, makes adoption almost unheard of except when relatives cannot be located, such as in desperate cases of children abandoned in railway stations, on doorsteps, or even discarded into latrines.
"Most of our people, because of the extended family system, resist very much uprooting children from their communities," says Norbert Mao, chairman of the war-ravaged Gulu northern district. "We have orphans, no doubt, but these orphans have at least some relative and our extended family system gives room for them."
Reluctance to give up children for adoption exists throughout many African nations. "Relatives will take care of you even if they are poor. It is because of our belief in the extended family," says Alex Lengeju, director of the SOS village in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
UNICEF estimates there are an astonishing 48.3 million orphans in sub-Saharan Africa, a figure that will rise to 53.1 million by 2010. One quarter of those have lost their parents to AIDS. With conflicts and other diseases ravaging an entire generation, Africa is becoming a continent of orphans.
Despite these staggering numbers, many African nations are loathe to adopt out these children internationally due to a mistrust of the intentions of foreigners, a fear of losing their future generation and an underlying belief that the need to give away one's children is symbolic of your failure as a nation.
More....
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... f&sponsor=
There is a related multimedia and more linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/world ... ref=slogin
November 16, 2008
The Spoils
Congo’s Riches, Looted by Renegade Troops
By LYDIA POLGREEN
BISIE, Congo — Deep in the forest, high on a ridge stripped bare of trees and vines, the colonel sat atop his mountain of ore. In track pants and a T-shirt, he needed no uniform to prove he was a soldier, no epaulets to reveal his rank. Everyone here knows that Col. Samy Matumo, commander of a renegade brigade of army troops that controls this mineral-rich territory, is the master of every hilltop as far as the eye can see.
Columns of men, bent double under 110-pound sacks of tin ore, emerged from the colonel’s mine shaft. It had been carved hundreds of feet into the mountain with Iron Age tools powered by human sweat, muscle and bone. Porters carry the ore nearly 30 miles on their backs, a two-day trek through a mud-slicked maze to the nearest road and a world hungry for the laptops and other electronics that tin helps create, each man a link in a long global chain.
On paper, the exploration rights to this mine belong to a consortium of British and South African investors who say they will turn this perilous and exploitative operation into a safe, modern beacon of prosperity for Congo. But in practice, the consortium’s workers cannot even set foot on the mountain. Like a mafia, Colonel Matumo and his men extort, tax and appropriate at will, draining this vast operation, worth as much as $80 million a year.
The exploitation of this mountain is emblematic of the failure to right this sprawling African nation after many years of tyranny and war, and of the deadly role the country’s immense natural wealth has played in its misery.
Despite a costly effort to unite the nation’s many militias into a single national army, plus billions of dollars spent on international peacekeepers and an election in 2006 that brought democracy to Congo for the first time in four decades, the government is unable or unwilling to force these fighters — who wear government army uniforms and collect government paychecks — to leave the mountain.
The ore these fighters control is central to the chaos that plagues Congo, helping to perpetuate a conflict in which as many as five million people have died since the mid-1990s, mostly from hunger and disease. In the latest chapter, fighting between government troops and a renegade general named Laurent Nkunda has forced hundreds of thousands of civilians here in eastern Congo to flee and pushed the nation to the brink of a new regional war.
The proceeds of mines like this one, along with the illegal tributes collected on roads and border crossings controlled by rebel groups, militias and government soldiers, help bankroll virtually every armed group in the region.
No roads lead to Bisie. This hidden town of 10,000 lies about 30 miles down a winding, muddy footpath through dense, equatorial forest. Built entirely for the mine, it is a cloistered world of expropriation and violence that mirrors the broad crisis in Congo.
This is Africa’s resource curse: The wealth is unearthed by the poor, controlled by the strong, then sold to a world largely oblivious of its origins.
Under Colonel Matumo, Bisie is a Darwinian place where those with weapons and money leech off a desperate horde.
The chokehold begins far from the mine. At the trailhead, a burly soldier demands 50 cents from each person entering the narrow trail to the mine. A clamoring crowd hands wrinkled bills to the soldier, who opens the wooden gate a crack to let in those with cash.
At the other end of the trail, at the base of the mountain, another crowd forms at the gate into Bisie. Porters exhausted from the two-day trek sprawl on felled trees, waiting for soldiers to inspect their loads and extract another tribute. The price is usually 10 percent of entering merchandise and cash.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/world ... ref=slogin
November 16, 2008
The Spoils
Congo’s Riches, Looted by Renegade Troops
By LYDIA POLGREEN
BISIE, Congo — Deep in the forest, high on a ridge stripped bare of trees and vines, the colonel sat atop his mountain of ore. In track pants and a T-shirt, he needed no uniform to prove he was a soldier, no epaulets to reveal his rank. Everyone here knows that Col. Samy Matumo, commander of a renegade brigade of army troops that controls this mineral-rich territory, is the master of every hilltop as far as the eye can see.
Columns of men, bent double under 110-pound sacks of tin ore, emerged from the colonel’s mine shaft. It had been carved hundreds of feet into the mountain with Iron Age tools powered by human sweat, muscle and bone. Porters carry the ore nearly 30 miles on their backs, a two-day trek through a mud-slicked maze to the nearest road and a world hungry for the laptops and other electronics that tin helps create, each man a link in a long global chain.
On paper, the exploration rights to this mine belong to a consortium of British and South African investors who say they will turn this perilous and exploitative operation into a safe, modern beacon of prosperity for Congo. But in practice, the consortium’s workers cannot even set foot on the mountain. Like a mafia, Colonel Matumo and his men extort, tax and appropriate at will, draining this vast operation, worth as much as $80 million a year.
The exploitation of this mountain is emblematic of the failure to right this sprawling African nation after many years of tyranny and war, and of the deadly role the country’s immense natural wealth has played in its misery.
Despite a costly effort to unite the nation’s many militias into a single national army, plus billions of dollars spent on international peacekeepers and an election in 2006 that brought democracy to Congo for the first time in four decades, the government is unable or unwilling to force these fighters — who wear government army uniforms and collect government paychecks — to leave the mountain.
The ore these fighters control is central to the chaos that plagues Congo, helping to perpetuate a conflict in which as many as five million people have died since the mid-1990s, mostly from hunger and disease. In the latest chapter, fighting between government troops and a renegade general named Laurent Nkunda has forced hundreds of thousands of civilians here in eastern Congo to flee and pushed the nation to the brink of a new regional war.
The proceeds of mines like this one, along with the illegal tributes collected on roads and border crossings controlled by rebel groups, militias and government soldiers, help bankroll virtually every armed group in the region.
No roads lead to Bisie. This hidden town of 10,000 lies about 30 miles down a winding, muddy footpath through dense, equatorial forest. Built entirely for the mine, it is a cloistered world of expropriation and violence that mirrors the broad crisis in Congo.
This is Africa’s resource curse: The wealth is unearthed by the poor, controlled by the strong, then sold to a world largely oblivious of its origins.
Under Colonel Matumo, Bisie is a Darwinian place where those with weapons and money leech off a desperate horde.
The chokehold begins far from the mine. At the trailhead, a burly soldier demands 50 cents from each person entering the narrow trail to the mine. A clamoring crowd hands wrinkled bills to the soldier, who opens the wooden gate a crack to let in those with cash.
At the other end of the trail, at the base of the mountain, another crowd forms at the gate into Bisie. Porters exhausted from the two-day trek sprawl on felled trees, waiting for soldiers to inspect their loads and extract another tribute. The price is usually 10 percent of entering merchandise and cash.
November 18, 2008
Pirates Seize Saudi Tanker Off Kenya
By ROBERT F. WORTH
JIDDA, Saudi Arabia — Pirates captured a Saudi-owned supertanker loaded with more than $100 million worth of crude oil off the coast of Kenya, seizing the largest ship ever hijacked, United States Navy officials said Monday.
The hijacking follows a string of increasingly brazen attacks by Somali pirates in recent months, but this appears to be the first time that pirates have seized a full oil tanker.
“This is unprecedented,” Lt. Nathan Christensen, a spokesman for the Fifth Fleet, told Reuters. “It’s the largest ship that we’ve seen pirated. It’s three times the size of an aircraft carrier.”
The attack took place despite an increased multinational naval presence off the Somali coast, where most of the recent hijackings have taken place. The pirates are generally heavily armed, and travel in speedboats equipped with satellite phones and GPS equipment.
Piracy has increased sharply this year, with more than 80 ships attacked so far off the Somali coast, 36 of them successfully hijacked, according to the International Maritime Bureau, a piracy watchdog agency based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Among those hijacked, 14 ships with a total of more than 200 crew members are still being held.
The supertanker, the Sirius Star, was hijacked more than 450 nautical miles southeast of Mombasa, Kenya, Navy officials said. That is far to the south of most recent attacks, suggesting that the pirates may be expanding their range in an effort to avoid the multinational naval patrols now plying the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea.
“I’m stunned by the range of it,” said Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a news conference in Washington. The ship’s distance from the coast was “the longest distance I’ve seen for any of these incidents,” he said.
The 1,080-foot ship was carrying two million barrels of oil, according to its owner, Vela International, a subsidiary of the Saudi Arabia-based oil giant Saudi Aramco. Its 25-member crew includes citizens of Croatia, Britain, the Philippines, Poland, and Saudi Arabia, the United States Navy said.
Few details were available about how and when the attack took place. But Vela released a statement saying the crew appeared to be safe.
Piracy gained a new level of international attention in September when a Ukrainian freighter packed with tanks, antiaircraft guns and other heavy weapons was captured. That freighter is still under pirate control.
Warships from the United States, Russia, NATO, India and Europe soon began steaming toward Somalia’s waters. Aircraft now crisscross the skies on reconnaissance missions. They appear to have had some success: the percentage of successful pirate attacks dropped to 31 percent in October from 53 percent in August, according to the United States Navy.
But the pirates have proved resilient. There have been several attacks in the past week alone. On Tuesday, several people were killed when British sailors battled pirates to thwart an attack on a Danish shipping vessel, United States Navy officials said.
The pirates have several advantages. Their hunting grounds, from the Gulf of Aden to the Kenyan coast, comprise more than a million square miles. To be safe, merchant ships must stay in a narrow corridor identified by naval authorities. Of 15 recent pirate attacks, 10 took place outside those corridors, naval officials said.
Most ships do not have heavy security, while the pirates are fast and well armed. The ransom payments have been rising. Only a few years ago the average ransom was in the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. In 2008 they have mostly ranged from $500,000 to $2 million.
The pirates’ profits are set to reach a record $50 million in 2008, Somali officials say. Shipping firms are usually prepared to pay, because the sums are still low compared with the value of the ships.
Pirates Seize Saudi Tanker Off Kenya
By ROBERT F. WORTH
JIDDA, Saudi Arabia — Pirates captured a Saudi-owned supertanker loaded with more than $100 million worth of crude oil off the coast of Kenya, seizing the largest ship ever hijacked, United States Navy officials said Monday.
The hijacking follows a string of increasingly brazen attacks by Somali pirates in recent months, but this appears to be the first time that pirates have seized a full oil tanker.
“This is unprecedented,” Lt. Nathan Christensen, a spokesman for the Fifth Fleet, told Reuters. “It’s the largest ship that we’ve seen pirated. It’s three times the size of an aircraft carrier.”
The attack took place despite an increased multinational naval presence off the Somali coast, where most of the recent hijackings have taken place. The pirates are generally heavily armed, and travel in speedboats equipped with satellite phones and GPS equipment.
Piracy has increased sharply this year, with more than 80 ships attacked so far off the Somali coast, 36 of them successfully hijacked, according to the International Maritime Bureau, a piracy watchdog agency based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Among those hijacked, 14 ships with a total of more than 200 crew members are still being held.
The supertanker, the Sirius Star, was hijacked more than 450 nautical miles southeast of Mombasa, Kenya, Navy officials said. That is far to the south of most recent attacks, suggesting that the pirates may be expanding their range in an effort to avoid the multinational naval patrols now plying the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea.
“I’m stunned by the range of it,” said Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a news conference in Washington. The ship’s distance from the coast was “the longest distance I’ve seen for any of these incidents,” he said.
The 1,080-foot ship was carrying two million barrels of oil, according to its owner, Vela International, a subsidiary of the Saudi Arabia-based oil giant Saudi Aramco. Its 25-member crew includes citizens of Croatia, Britain, the Philippines, Poland, and Saudi Arabia, the United States Navy said.
Few details were available about how and when the attack took place. But Vela released a statement saying the crew appeared to be safe.
Piracy gained a new level of international attention in September when a Ukrainian freighter packed with tanks, antiaircraft guns and other heavy weapons was captured. That freighter is still under pirate control.
Warships from the United States, Russia, NATO, India and Europe soon began steaming toward Somalia’s waters. Aircraft now crisscross the skies on reconnaissance missions. They appear to have had some success: the percentage of successful pirate attacks dropped to 31 percent in October from 53 percent in August, according to the United States Navy.
But the pirates have proved resilient. There have been several attacks in the past week alone. On Tuesday, several people were killed when British sailors battled pirates to thwart an attack on a Danish shipping vessel, United States Navy officials said.
The pirates have several advantages. Their hunting grounds, from the Gulf of Aden to the Kenyan coast, comprise more than a million square miles. To be safe, merchant ships must stay in a narrow corridor identified by naval authorities. Of 15 recent pirate attacks, 10 took place outside those corridors, naval officials said.
Most ships do not have heavy security, while the pirates are fast and well armed. The ransom payments have been rising. Only a few years ago the average ransom was in the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. In 2008 they have mostly ranged from $500,000 to $2 million.
The pirates’ profits are set to reach a record $50 million in 2008, Somali officials say. Shipping firms are usually prepared to pay, because the sums are still low compared with the value of the ships.
November 23, 2008
Carter Group Barred From Zimbabwe
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s 84-year-old president, clinging to power after 28 years in office, barred another famous 84-year-old, former President Jimmy Carter, from entering the country Saturday. The globe-trotting, Nobel Prize-winning Mr. Carter said it was a novel experience for him. He had never before been denied a visa.
Mr. Mugabe’s decision to forbid a humanitarian visit by Mr. Carter, former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and Graça Machel, Nelson Mandela’s wife, was a measure of the Zimbabwean leader’s disdain for international opinion at a time when deepening hunger, raging hyperinflation and the collapse of health, sanitation and education services have crippled Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe’s foreign minister was quoted in the state media Sunday saying authorities had only asked Mr. Annan and his colleagues to postpone their trip and accusing Mr. Annan of misrepresenting the government’s position.
Mr. Carter, Mr. Annan and Ms. Machel said they had hoped to get a firsthand sense of the crisis and to assess the help the country needs.
Ms. Machel said both South Africa’s president, Kgalema Motlanthe, and his recently ousted predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, who is mediating the Zimbabwe crisis, had sought permission from Zimbabwean authorities for them to enter the country. Mr. Carter said Mr. Mugabe himself said no.
“It seems obvious to me that leaders of the government are immune to reaching out for help for their own people,” Mr. Carter said at a news conference in Johannesburg.
Mr. Carter said Zimbabwe’s envoy in Washington had advised him that he would not be issued a visa after he applied for one several weeks ago, but Mr. Carter said the staff of the group sponsoring the trip, the Elders, thought visas would be issued at the airport. South African officials advised the humanitarian mission’s members on Friday evening that they would not be allowed to enter the country.
Zimbabwe’s foreign minister, Simbarashe Mumbengegwi, was quoted in the state-owned newspaper, The Sunday Mail, saying authorities had not barred the threesome, but had only postponed the visit because Mr. Annan had not consulted with the government on the timing and program for the visit. He said it would have been difficult for the team to meaningfully assess the situation on the ground given that Zimbabwe’s government itself had already conducted a humanitarian audit with United Nations officials.
“It is most unfortunate that the former secretary general has, for reasons best known to himself, misrepresented the position of the government of Zimbabwe,” Mr. Mumbengegwi said. “The allegations are not supported by facts.”
Zimbabwe’s information minister, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, reached Saturday on his cellphone, said that he had been in an all-day meeting and was unable to comment. Another state-owned newspaper, The Herald, reported on Thursday that the three had been told to come later because the government was busy with power-sharing negotiations and the planting season.
The article also anonymously quoted an official as saying that the prospective visitors — who belong to the Elders, a group of prominent people Mr. Mandela founded last year to take up global issues — was made up of “personalities deemed hostile to Zimbabwe.”
The source said that the group included those who had been openly critical of Mr. Mugabe. Mr. Mandela expressed his own regret in June, during one of his 90th birthday celebrations, at what he called Zimbabwe’s “tragic failure of leadership.” His wife, Ms. Machel, said that she had been denied a visa to Zimbabwe in July when she sought to lead a delegation of women there, making the government’s decision to bar her Saturday the second time she had ever been denied a visa.
Mr. Carter, Mr. Annan and Ms. Machel all expressed extreme disappointment that they were unable to talk to ordinary Zimbabweans about deteriorating conditions in their country.
“We want the people of Zimbabwe to know we care and we support them,” said Ms. Machel, an advocate for women and children.
Mr. Mugabe, a wily political survivor, has managed to fend off pressure from African heads of state to reach a power-sharing deal with Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, who despite winning more votes in March did not get enough to avert a runoff. He dropped out days before the final vote in June, citing brutality against his party workers and backers.
Mr. Mugabe’s critics had hoped that South Africa’s new leaders, Mr. Motlanthe and Jacob Zuma, president of the African National Congress, would take a harder line than Mr. Mbeki, but there is little evidence yet of a substantive change of policy.
After Mr. Mugabe, the aging liberation hero, and Mr. Tsvangirai, a former trade union leader, signed a power-sharing deal on Sept. 15, Mr. Mugabe unilaterally announced the division of cabinet ministries between their parties, a step the opposition denounced as unfair. Mr. Mugabe’s police force has beaten and arrested people demonstrating for a settlement. And his government has denied Mr. Tsvangirai a passport.
When leaders from the 15 countries that make up the Southern African Development Community, known as S.A.D.C., met in Johannesburg this month, they insisted Mr. Tsvangirai share control of the home ministry. That ministry oversees the police, which have long been part of the security forces enforcing Mr. Mugabe’s control. Mr. Mugabe, however, had already claimed the security forces and the intelligence agency for his party, ZANU-PF.
Mr. Motlanthe, in particular, has since faced sharp criticism at home for failing to stand up to Mr. Mugabe. The Star, a South African daily newspaper, said in a Nov. 12 editorial that it seemed Mr. Motlanthe “could no more stand up to the bully Mugabe than either Mbeki or S.A.D.C. members could.”
South Africa itself is increasingly feeling the fallout of Zimbabwe’s decline. The breakdown of Zimbabwe’s water and sanitation systems, which the government there no longer has the cash to maintain, has led to a cholera epidemic that is spilling over the border into South Africa. Zimbabwe’s Health Ministry itself acknowledged last week that cholera had spread to 9 of the country’s 10 provinces. And international health officials say the disease has sickened more than 6,000 people and killed almost 300.
Martin Meredith, author of “The Fate of Africa,” a modern political history of the continent, said the Zimbabwe crisis had laid bare the weakness of Mr. Mugabe’s neighbors.
“All these governments in southern Africa are fairly pusillanimous in dealing with Zimbabwe, except Botswana,” he said. “The real difficulty facing them is that they don’t have any options unless they’re willing to take action against Mugabe.”
Carter Group Barred From Zimbabwe
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s 84-year-old president, clinging to power after 28 years in office, barred another famous 84-year-old, former President Jimmy Carter, from entering the country Saturday. The globe-trotting, Nobel Prize-winning Mr. Carter said it was a novel experience for him. He had never before been denied a visa.
Mr. Mugabe’s decision to forbid a humanitarian visit by Mr. Carter, former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and Graça Machel, Nelson Mandela’s wife, was a measure of the Zimbabwean leader’s disdain for international opinion at a time when deepening hunger, raging hyperinflation and the collapse of health, sanitation and education services have crippled Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe’s foreign minister was quoted in the state media Sunday saying authorities had only asked Mr. Annan and his colleagues to postpone their trip and accusing Mr. Annan of misrepresenting the government’s position.
Mr. Carter, Mr. Annan and Ms. Machel said they had hoped to get a firsthand sense of the crisis and to assess the help the country needs.
Ms. Machel said both South Africa’s president, Kgalema Motlanthe, and his recently ousted predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, who is mediating the Zimbabwe crisis, had sought permission from Zimbabwean authorities for them to enter the country. Mr. Carter said Mr. Mugabe himself said no.
“It seems obvious to me that leaders of the government are immune to reaching out for help for their own people,” Mr. Carter said at a news conference in Johannesburg.
Mr. Carter said Zimbabwe’s envoy in Washington had advised him that he would not be issued a visa after he applied for one several weeks ago, but Mr. Carter said the staff of the group sponsoring the trip, the Elders, thought visas would be issued at the airport. South African officials advised the humanitarian mission’s members on Friday evening that they would not be allowed to enter the country.
Zimbabwe’s foreign minister, Simbarashe Mumbengegwi, was quoted in the state-owned newspaper, The Sunday Mail, saying authorities had not barred the threesome, but had only postponed the visit because Mr. Annan had not consulted with the government on the timing and program for the visit. He said it would have been difficult for the team to meaningfully assess the situation on the ground given that Zimbabwe’s government itself had already conducted a humanitarian audit with United Nations officials.
“It is most unfortunate that the former secretary general has, for reasons best known to himself, misrepresented the position of the government of Zimbabwe,” Mr. Mumbengegwi said. “The allegations are not supported by facts.”
Zimbabwe’s information minister, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, reached Saturday on his cellphone, said that he had been in an all-day meeting and was unable to comment. Another state-owned newspaper, The Herald, reported on Thursday that the three had been told to come later because the government was busy with power-sharing negotiations and the planting season.
The article also anonymously quoted an official as saying that the prospective visitors — who belong to the Elders, a group of prominent people Mr. Mandela founded last year to take up global issues — was made up of “personalities deemed hostile to Zimbabwe.”
The source said that the group included those who had been openly critical of Mr. Mugabe. Mr. Mandela expressed his own regret in June, during one of his 90th birthday celebrations, at what he called Zimbabwe’s “tragic failure of leadership.” His wife, Ms. Machel, said that she had been denied a visa to Zimbabwe in July when she sought to lead a delegation of women there, making the government’s decision to bar her Saturday the second time she had ever been denied a visa.
Mr. Carter, Mr. Annan and Ms. Machel all expressed extreme disappointment that they were unable to talk to ordinary Zimbabweans about deteriorating conditions in their country.
“We want the people of Zimbabwe to know we care and we support them,” said Ms. Machel, an advocate for women and children.
Mr. Mugabe, a wily political survivor, has managed to fend off pressure from African heads of state to reach a power-sharing deal with Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, who despite winning more votes in March did not get enough to avert a runoff. He dropped out days before the final vote in June, citing brutality against his party workers and backers.
Mr. Mugabe’s critics had hoped that South Africa’s new leaders, Mr. Motlanthe and Jacob Zuma, president of the African National Congress, would take a harder line than Mr. Mbeki, but there is little evidence yet of a substantive change of policy.
After Mr. Mugabe, the aging liberation hero, and Mr. Tsvangirai, a former trade union leader, signed a power-sharing deal on Sept. 15, Mr. Mugabe unilaterally announced the division of cabinet ministries between their parties, a step the opposition denounced as unfair. Mr. Mugabe’s police force has beaten and arrested people demonstrating for a settlement. And his government has denied Mr. Tsvangirai a passport.
When leaders from the 15 countries that make up the Southern African Development Community, known as S.A.D.C., met in Johannesburg this month, they insisted Mr. Tsvangirai share control of the home ministry. That ministry oversees the police, which have long been part of the security forces enforcing Mr. Mugabe’s control. Mr. Mugabe, however, had already claimed the security forces and the intelligence agency for his party, ZANU-PF.
Mr. Motlanthe, in particular, has since faced sharp criticism at home for failing to stand up to Mr. Mugabe. The Star, a South African daily newspaper, said in a Nov. 12 editorial that it seemed Mr. Motlanthe “could no more stand up to the bully Mugabe than either Mbeki or S.A.D.C. members could.”
South Africa itself is increasingly feeling the fallout of Zimbabwe’s decline. The breakdown of Zimbabwe’s water and sanitation systems, which the government there no longer has the cash to maintain, has led to a cholera epidemic that is spilling over the border into South Africa. Zimbabwe’s Health Ministry itself acknowledged last week that cholera had spread to 9 of the country’s 10 provinces. And international health officials say the disease has sickened more than 6,000 people and killed almost 300.
Martin Meredith, author of “The Fate of Africa,” a modern political history of the continent, said the Zimbabwe crisis had laid bare the weakness of Mr. Mugabe’s neighbors.
“All these governments in southern Africa are fairly pusillanimous in dealing with Zimbabwe, except Botswana,” he said. “The real difficulty facing them is that they don’t have any options unless they’re willing to take action against Mugabe.”
November 25, 2008
Barred From Zimbabwe, but Not Silent
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, 84, managed to keep three members of the Elders, founded by Nelson Mandela to tackle intractable problems, out of Zimbabwe over the weekend. But the members gave Mr. Mugabe and leaders from across southern Africa an earful on Monday about Zimbabwe’s grave humanitarian crisis and their responsibility to act more assertively to resolve it.
Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, bluntly told the heads of state in the 15-nation regional bloc, the Southern African Development Community, which is often accused of coddling Mr. Mugabe, “It’s obvious that S.A.D.C. could have and should have done more.”
Graça Machel, a women’s rights advocate who is married to Mr. Mandela, said after three days of listening to stories of heartbreak from Zimbabwe in conversations here with refugees and others, “Either the leadership doesn’t have a clear picture of the suffering of their own people, or they don’t care.”
Former President Jimmy Carter suggested that heads of state in the region had no clue about the extreme hardships in Zimbabwe, while Zimbabwe’s leaders were callous. He said the African Union and the United Nations should send teams to document the situation inside the country. “We all have the feeling leaders of S.A.D.C. do not know what is going on in Zimbabwe,” he said.
Their remarks are likely to sting Mr. Mugabe, in power for 28 years. Ms. Machel’s and Mr. Carter’s connections to him go back decades.
Ms. Machel’s first marriage was to Samora Machel, the Mozambican leader who fought Portuguese rule and led his newly independent nation until he died in a plane crash in 1986. She said in an interview that she had been close with Mr. Mugabe and his wife, Sally, until Mrs. Mugabe died in 1992.
The relationship “became even more aloof” after Ms. Machel married Mr. Mandela, she said. “Mugabe was the star of this region before South Africa became free,” Ms. Machel said. “By the time South Africa became free, the whole attention of the world turns to South Africa. That was an issue.”
Mr. Carter, 84, said in an interview that as president, he supported the end of white minority rule in Zimbabwe, called Rhodesia at the time. He recalled a White House event celebrating Mr. Mugabe’s rise to power before Mr. Carter left office in 1981.
Mr. Mugabe “held my hand up in front of the whole crowd and said, ‘This is the only man that might beat me in an election in Zimbabwe,’ ” Mr. Carter recalled.
Mr. Mugabe is sensitive to criticism, and these comments are likely to gall him. The Herald, his state-owned mouthpiece, quoted an anonymous source last week as saying that Mr. Annan had been openly critical of Mr. Mugabe. A Herald editorial on Monday accused Mr. Annan, as it has other African leaders who differed with Mr. Mugabe, of “putting himself at the beck and call of the white West.”
The three in the Elders contingent on Zimbabwe sounded an alarm on Monday about the rapidly deteriorating living conditions there. They spent the past few days meeting with Zimbabwe’s opposition leaders and South Africa’s president, Kgalema Motlanthe, as well as aid workers, Western diplomats, United Nations representatives and Zimbabweans who had fled their homeland.
At the start of their visit on Saturday, the three leaders said they were on a humanitarian mission. They ended the trip on Monday by saying that Zimbabwe’s collapsing public services — health, education, sanitation, water — could not be fixed until a power-sharing deal between Mr. Mugabe and the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, took effect and the country had a functioning government again.
Negotiators for Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai are expected to meet again on Tuesday as South Africa’s former president, Thabo Mbeki, the mediator in the Zimbabwe crisis, seeks to persuade them to form a collaborative government more than two months after they signed an agreement to do so.
“S.A.D.C. must bring its full weight to bear to ensure the agreement is fully implemented,” Mr. Annan said.
Under the deal, Mr. Mugabe would remain president, while Mr. Tsvangirai would become prime minister. But they have been feuding over how to divide the most powerful ministries, and particularly over control of the police force, an engine of Mr. Mugabe’s repressive rule. The Southern African Development Community has directed them to share management of the ministry that oversees the police.
Mr. Tsvangirai won the March presidential election, but not by enough to avert a runoff, which he quit because of state-sponsored attacks on the opposition.
Mr. Mbeki has for years been criticized for his quiet diplomacy on Zimbabwe. South Africa’s new leaders were somewhat noisier on Monday. Jacob Zuma, Mr. Mbeki’s archrival and successor as president of the African National Congress, was evenhanded in his comments on the power-sharing negotiations, but after meeting Mr. Annan, Mr. Carter and Ms. Machel, he said the decision by Zimbabwean authorities not to grant them visas “does give an unfortunate picture.”
President Motlanthe of South Africa, chairman of the regional development group, said his government had tried to speak to Mr. Mugabe about letting the three visit Zimbabwe, and was told that Mr. Mugabe was out of town and would get back to them on his return. “He didn’t come back to us,” Mr. Motlanthe said.
After meeting Mr. Annan, Mr. Carter and Ms. Machel, Mr. Motlanthe agreed that without a political settlement and the formation of a legitimate government, the situation in Zimbabwe “may implode or collapse altogether.”
Barred From Zimbabwe, but Not Silent
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, 84, managed to keep three members of the Elders, founded by Nelson Mandela to tackle intractable problems, out of Zimbabwe over the weekend. But the members gave Mr. Mugabe and leaders from across southern Africa an earful on Monday about Zimbabwe’s grave humanitarian crisis and their responsibility to act more assertively to resolve it.
Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, bluntly told the heads of state in the 15-nation regional bloc, the Southern African Development Community, which is often accused of coddling Mr. Mugabe, “It’s obvious that S.A.D.C. could have and should have done more.”
Graça Machel, a women’s rights advocate who is married to Mr. Mandela, said after three days of listening to stories of heartbreak from Zimbabwe in conversations here with refugees and others, “Either the leadership doesn’t have a clear picture of the suffering of their own people, or they don’t care.”
Former President Jimmy Carter suggested that heads of state in the region had no clue about the extreme hardships in Zimbabwe, while Zimbabwe’s leaders were callous. He said the African Union and the United Nations should send teams to document the situation inside the country. “We all have the feeling leaders of S.A.D.C. do not know what is going on in Zimbabwe,” he said.
Their remarks are likely to sting Mr. Mugabe, in power for 28 years. Ms. Machel’s and Mr. Carter’s connections to him go back decades.
Ms. Machel’s first marriage was to Samora Machel, the Mozambican leader who fought Portuguese rule and led his newly independent nation until he died in a plane crash in 1986. She said in an interview that she had been close with Mr. Mugabe and his wife, Sally, until Mrs. Mugabe died in 1992.
The relationship “became even more aloof” after Ms. Machel married Mr. Mandela, she said. “Mugabe was the star of this region before South Africa became free,” Ms. Machel said. “By the time South Africa became free, the whole attention of the world turns to South Africa. That was an issue.”
Mr. Carter, 84, said in an interview that as president, he supported the end of white minority rule in Zimbabwe, called Rhodesia at the time. He recalled a White House event celebrating Mr. Mugabe’s rise to power before Mr. Carter left office in 1981.
Mr. Mugabe “held my hand up in front of the whole crowd and said, ‘This is the only man that might beat me in an election in Zimbabwe,’ ” Mr. Carter recalled.
Mr. Mugabe is sensitive to criticism, and these comments are likely to gall him. The Herald, his state-owned mouthpiece, quoted an anonymous source last week as saying that Mr. Annan had been openly critical of Mr. Mugabe. A Herald editorial on Monday accused Mr. Annan, as it has other African leaders who differed with Mr. Mugabe, of “putting himself at the beck and call of the white West.”
The three in the Elders contingent on Zimbabwe sounded an alarm on Monday about the rapidly deteriorating living conditions there. They spent the past few days meeting with Zimbabwe’s opposition leaders and South Africa’s president, Kgalema Motlanthe, as well as aid workers, Western diplomats, United Nations representatives and Zimbabweans who had fled their homeland.
At the start of their visit on Saturday, the three leaders said they were on a humanitarian mission. They ended the trip on Monday by saying that Zimbabwe’s collapsing public services — health, education, sanitation, water — could not be fixed until a power-sharing deal between Mr. Mugabe and the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, took effect and the country had a functioning government again.
Negotiators for Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai are expected to meet again on Tuesday as South Africa’s former president, Thabo Mbeki, the mediator in the Zimbabwe crisis, seeks to persuade them to form a collaborative government more than two months after they signed an agreement to do so.
“S.A.D.C. must bring its full weight to bear to ensure the agreement is fully implemented,” Mr. Annan said.
Under the deal, Mr. Mugabe would remain president, while Mr. Tsvangirai would become prime minister. But they have been feuding over how to divide the most powerful ministries, and particularly over control of the police force, an engine of Mr. Mugabe’s repressive rule. The Southern African Development Community has directed them to share management of the ministry that oversees the police.
Mr. Tsvangirai won the March presidential election, but not by enough to avert a runoff, which he quit because of state-sponsored attacks on the opposition.
Mr. Mbeki has for years been criticized for his quiet diplomacy on Zimbabwe. South Africa’s new leaders were somewhat noisier on Monday. Jacob Zuma, Mr. Mbeki’s archrival and successor as president of the African National Congress, was evenhanded in his comments on the power-sharing negotiations, but after meeting Mr. Annan, Mr. Carter and Ms. Machel, he said the decision by Zimbabwean authorities not to grant them visas “does give an unfortunate picture.”
President Motlanthe of South Africa, chairman of the regional development group, said his government had tried to speak to Mr. Mugabe about letting the three visit Zimbabwe, and was told that Mr. Mugabe was out of town and would get back to them on his return. “He didn’t come back to us,” Mr. Motlanthe said.
After meeting Mr. Annan, Mr. Carter and Ms. Machel, Mr. Motlanthe agreed that without a political settlement and the formation of a legitimate government, the situation in Zimbabwe “may implode or collapse altogether.”
November 26, 2008
Study Cites Toll of AIDS Policy in South Africa
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — A new study by Harvard researchers estimates that the South African government would have prevented the premature deaths of 365,000 people earlier this decade if it had provided antiretroviral drugs to AIDS patients and widely administered drugs to help prevent pregnant women from infecting their babies.
The Harvard study concluded that the policies grew out of President Thabo Mbeki’s denial of the well-established scientific consensus about the viral cause of AIDS and the essential role of antiretroviral drugs in treating it.
Coming in the wake of Mr. Mbeki’s ouster in September after a power struggle in his party, the African National Congress, the report has reignited questions about why Mr. Mbeki, a man of great acumen, was so influenced by AIDS denialists.
And it has again caused soul-searching about why his colleagues in the party did not act earlier to challenge his resistance to broadly accepted methods of treating and preventing AIDS.
Reckoning with a legacy of such policies, Mr. Mbeki’s’s successor, Kgalema Motlanthe, acted on the first day of his presidency two months ago to remove the health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, a polarizing figure who had proposed garlic, lemon juice and beetroot as AIDS remedies.
He replaced her with Barbara Hogan, who has brought South Africa — the most powerful country in a region at the epicenter of the world’s AIDS pandemic — back into the mainstream.
“I feel ashamed that we have to own up to what Harvard is saying,” Ms. Hogan, an A.N.C. stalwart who was imprisoned for a decade during the anti-apartheid struggle, said in a recent interview. “The era of denialism is over completely in South Africa.”
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/world ... nted=print
Study Cites Toll of AIDS Policy in South Africa
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — A new study by Harvard researchers estimates that the South African government would have prevented the premature deaths of 365,000 people earlier this decade if it had provided antiretroviral drugs to AIDS patients and widely administered drugs to help prevent pregnant women from infecting their babies.
The Harvard study concluded that the policies grew out of President Thabo Mbeki’s denial of the well-established scientific consensus about the viral cause of AIDS and the essential role of antiretroviral drugs in treating it.
Coming in the wake of Mr. Mbeki’s ouster in September after a power struggle in his party, the African National Congress, the report has reignited questions about why Mr. Mbeki, a man of great acumen, was so influenced by AIDS denialists.
And it has again caused soul-searching about why his colleagues in the party did not act earlier to challenge his resistance to broadly accepted methods of treating and preventing AIDS.
Reckoning with a legacy of such policies, Mr. Mbeki’s’s successor, Kgalema Motlanthe, acted on the first day of his presidency two months ago to remove the health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, a polarizing figure who had proposed garlic, lemon juice and beetroot as AIDS remedies.
He replaced her with Barbara Hogan, who has brought South Africa — the most powerful country in a region at the epicenter of the world’s AIDS pandemic — back into the mainstream.
“I feel ashamed that we have to own up to what Harvard is saying,” Ms. Hogan, an A.N.C. stalwart who was imprisoned for a decade during the anti-apartheid struggle, said in a recent interview. “The era of denialism is over completely in South Africa.”
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/world ... nted=print
December 4, 2008
Rwanda Stirs Deadly Brew of Troubles in Congo
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
KIGALI, Rwanda — There is a general rule in Africa, if not across the world: Behind any rebellion with legs is usually a meddling neighbor. And whether the rebellion in eastern Congo explodes into another full-fledged war, and drags a large chunk of central Africa with it, seems likely to depend on the involvement of Rwanda, Congo’s tiny but disproportionately mighty neighbor.
There is a long and bloody history here, and this time around the evidence seems to be growing that Rwanda is meddling again in Congo’s troubles; at a minimum, the interference is on the part of many Rwandans. As before, Rwanda’s stake in Congo is a complex mix of strategic interest, business opportunity and the real fears of a nation that has heroically rebuilt itself after near obliteration by ethnic hatred.
The signs are ever-more obvious, if not yet entirely open. Several demobilized Rwandan soldiers, speaking in hushed tones in Kigali, Rwanda’s tightly controlled capital, described a systematic effort by Rwanda’s government-run demobilization commission to send hundreds if not thousands of fighters to the rebel front lines.
Former rebel soldiers in Congo said that they had seen Rwandan officers plucking off the Rwandan flags from the shoulders of their fatigues after they had arrived and that Rwandan officers served as the backbone of the rebel army. Congolese wildlife rangers in the gorilla park on the thickly forested Rwanda-Congo border said countless heavily armed men routinely crossed over from Rwanda into Congo.
A Rwandan government administrator said a military hospital in Kigali was treating many Rwandan soldiers who were recently wounded while fighting in Congo, but the administrator said he could be jailed for talking about it.
There seems to be a reinvigorated sense of the longstanding brotherhood between the Congolese rebels, who are mostly ethnic Tutsi, and the Tutsi-led government of Rwanda, which has supported these same rebels in the past.
The brotherhood is relatively secret for now, just as it was in the late 1990s when Rwanda denied being involved in Congo, only to later admit that it was occupying a vast section of the country. Rwanda’s leaders are vigilant about not endangering their carefully crafted reputation as responsible, development-oriented friends of the West.
Senior Rwandan officials do not deny that demobilized Rwandan soldiers are fighting in Congo, but they say the soldiers are doing it on their own, without any government backing.
“They are ordinary citizens, and if their travel documents are in order, they can go ahead and travel,” said Joseph Mutaboba, Rwanda’s special envoy for the Great Lakes region.
But according to several demobilized soldiers, Rwandan government officials are involved, providing bus fare for the men to travel to Congo and updating the rebel leadership each month on how many fighters from Rwanda are about to come over. Once they get to the rebel camps, the Rwandan veterans said, they flash their Rwandan Army identification cards and then are assigned to a rebel unit.
“We usually get a promotion,” said one fighter who was recently a corporal in the Rwandan Army and served as a sergeant in the rebel forces last month. He said that he could be severely punished if identified and that Rwandan officials and rebel commanders told the fighters not to say anything about the cooperation.
Another cause for suspicion is Rwanda’s past plundering of Congo’s rich trove of minerals, going back to the late 1990s when the Rwandan Army seized control of eastern Congo and pumped hundreds of millions of dollars of smuggled coltan, cassiterite and even diamonds back to Rwanda, according to United Nations documents.
Many current high-ranking Rwandan officials, including the minister of finance, the ambassador to China and the deputy director of the central bank, were executives at a holding company that a United Nations panel in 2002 implicated in the illicit mineral trade and called to be sanctioned. The officials say that they are no longer part of that company and that the company did nothing wrong. Nonetheless, eastern Congo’s lucrative mineral business still seems to be heavily influenced by ethnic Rwandan businessmen with close ties to Kigali.
Some of the most powerful players today, like Modeste Makabuza Ngoga, who runs a small empire of coffee, tea, transport and mineral companies in eastern Congo, are part of a Tutsi-dominated triangle involving the Rwandan government, the conflict-driven mineral trade and a powerful rebel movement led by a renegade general, Laurent Nkunda, a former officer in Rwanda’s army.
Several United Nations reports have accused Mr. Makabuza Ngoga of using strong-arm tactics to smuggle minerals from Congo to Rwanda and one report said that he enjoyed “close ties” to Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame. This week a rebel spokesman said that Mr. Makabuza Ngoga was on Mr. Nkunda’s “College of Honorables,” essentially a rebel advisory board. Mr. Nkunda’s troops recently marched into areas known to be mineral rich — and areas where ethnic Rwandan businessmen are trying to gain a foothold.
Mr. Makabuza Ngoga said in an interview that he was not doing anything illegal.
“I’m just a businessman,” he said. “I work with them all.”
A Tale of Two Africas
Rwanda and Congo are polar opposites, a true David-and-Goliath matchup. Crossing the border from Gisenyi, Rwanda, to Goma, Congo, is a journey across two Africas, in the span of about 100 yards.
The two-minute walk takes you from one of the smallest, tidiest, most promising countries on the continent, where women in white rubber gloves sweep the streets every morning and government employees are at their desks by 7 a.m., to one of the biggest, messiest and most violent African states, home to a conflict that has killed more than five million people, more than any other since World War II.
While Congo is vast, Rwanda is packed. While the Congolese are often playful, known for outlandish dress and great music, Rwandans are reserved. While Congo is naturally rich, Rwanda is perennially poor. Yet Rwanda has emerged as a darling of the aid world, praised for strong, uncorrupt leadership and the strides it has made in fighting AIDS and poverty.
The fates of the two countries are inextricably linked. In 1994, Hutu militias in Rwanda killed 800,000 people, mostly minority Tutsis, and then fled into eastern Congo. Rwanda responded by invading Congo in 1997 and 1998, denying it each time initially but later taking responsibility. Those invasions catalyzed years of war that drew in the armies of half a dozen African countries.
When the Rwandan military controlled eastern Congo from 1998 to 2002, it established a highly organized military-industrial network to illegally exploit Congo’s riches, according to United Nations documents.
A 2002 United Nations report said that top Rwandan military officers worked closely with some of the most notorious smugglers and arms traffickers in the world, including Viktor Bout, a former Soviet arms dealer nicknamed the Merchant of Death who was arrested this year.
“I used to see generals at the airport coming back from Congo with suitcases full of cash,” said a former Rwandan government official who said that if he was identified, he could be killed.
Rwanda may have a lot going for it — a high economic growth rate, low corruption, a Parliament with a majority of seats held by women. But many people here say they do not feel free. When the former government official was interviewed at a Kigali hotel, he abruptly stopped talking whenever the maid walked by.
“You never know,” he whispered, nodding toward the young woman who was smiling behind a plate-glass window smeared with soap suds. “She could be a lieutenant.”
Scarred by a Genocide
Rwanda is tiny, tough and intensely patriotic. Like Israel, it is a postgenocidal state, built on an ethos of self-sacrifice. Its national motto is Never Again.
One oft-cited threat is the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, also known as the F.D.L.R., a mostly Hutu militia that is based just across the border in the green folds of eastern Congo. The militia is thought to number 5,000 to 10,000 fighters. Some of its leaders are wanted “genocidaires” who fled Rwanda in 1994 after massacring Tutsi.
“These guys want to come back and finish the job,” said Maj. Jill Rutaremara, a spokesman for Rwanda’s Defense Forces.
Mr. Nkunda, the rebel leader, has used the presence of the Hutu militia and the Congo government’s failure to disarm it as a rationale for his continued armed struggle. His forces have routed Congolese government troops in the past two months and pushed the region to the precipice of another regional war.
United Nations officials say he has not acted entirely alone, either: they said they observed Rwandan tanks firing from Rwandan territory to support Mr. Nkunda’s troops as they advanced in October. Rwandan officials denied this.
Rwandan military officers admit, when pressed, that the Hutu militia has little chance of destabilizing Rwanda. The last time it attacked inside Rwanda was 2001.
Some Western diplomats, Congolese officials and Rwandan dissidents now believe that the Rwandan government is simply using the F.D.L.R. as an excuse to prop up Mr. Nkunda and maintain a sphere of influence in the mineral-rich area across the border.
“These are people who want to make business, and they cover it up with politics,” said Faustin Twagiramungu, a former Rwandan prime minister now in exile in Belgium.
Congolese officials say that that the Rwandan government is making no efforts to bring the Hutu militiamen back into Rwanda because Rwanda wants to make sure that any Hutu-Tutsi violence plays out in Congo.
“What’s happening in eastern Congo is a Rwandese war is being fought on Congolese soil,” said Kikaya bin Karubi, a member of Congo’s Parliament.
Rwandan officials dismiss these claims with a confident chuckle.
“We want to deal with these guys here,” Major Rutaremara said. “We want them back.”
Mr. Mutaboba, the Rwandan government envoy, said the allegations were part of “an organized campaign to distort the whole problem and give it a regional dimension.”
“It’s not,” he said. “It’s a Congo problem.”
Ethnic and Business Ties
But it may be hard drawing a fine line between Congo and Rwanda, despite the lines on a map. There is a long history of ethnic and business ties that seamlessly flow across the colonially imposed borders, especially among the minority Tutsi who dominate business on both sides, yet at the same time, feel threatened and a heightened sense of community as a result.
For example, several demobilized Rwandan soldiers in Kigali said the vast majority of volunteers who recently crossed the border to fight with Mr. Nkunda were Tutsi. Some of the soldiers said that they had relatives living in eastern Congo and that it was like a second home to them.
According to four soldiers and one employee at the Rwandan demobilization commission, at the end of their monthly meetings, officials at the commission ask for anyone fit and ready to fight to stand up. Sometimes the commission provides bus fare to the border, the soldiers said, and other travel costs. The soldiers usually travel unarmed, picking up weapons on the other side, they said.
One demobilized Rwandan lieutenant who just got back from fighting in Congo looked surprised when asked why he went.
“Why? I am Tutsi,” he said. “One hundred percent Tutsi.”
Rwanda Stirs Deadly Brew of Troubles in Congo
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
KIGALI, Rwanda — There is a general rule in Africa, if not across the world: Behind any rebellion with legs is usually a meddling neighbor. And whether the rebellion in eastern Congo explodes into another full-fledged war, and drags a large chunk of central Africa with it, seems likely to depend on the involvement of Rwanda, Congo’s tiny but disproportionately mighty neighbor.
There is a long and bloody history here, and this time around the evidence seems to be growing that Rwanda is meddling again in Congo’s troubles; at a minimum, the interference is on the part of many Rwandans. As before, Rwanda’s stake in Congo is a complex mix of strategic interest, business opportunity and the real fears of a nation that has heroically rebuilt itself after near obliteration by ethnic hatred.
The signs are ever-more obvious, if not yet entirely open. Several demobilized Rwandan soldiers, speaking in hushed tones in Kigali, Rwanda’s tightly controlled capital, described a systematic effort by Rwanda’s government-run demobilization commission to send hundreds if not thousands of fighters to the rebel front lines.
Former rebel soldiers in Congo said that they had seen Rwandan officers plucking off the Rwandan flags from the shoulders of their fatigues after they had arrived and that Rwandan officers served as the backbone of the rebel army. Congolese wildlife rangers in the gorilla park on the thickly forested Rwanda-Congo border said countless heavily armed men routinely crossed over from Rwanda into Congo.
A Rwandan government administrator said a military hospital in Kigali was treating many Rwandan soldiers who were recently wounded while fighting in Congo, but the administrator said he could be jailed for talking about it.
There seems to be a reinvigorated sense of the longstanding brotherhood between the Congolese rebels, who are mostly ethnic Tutsi, and the Tutsi-led government of Rwanda, which has supported these same rebels in the past.
The brotherhood is relatively secret for now, just as it was in the late 1990s when Rwanda denied being involved in Congo, only to later admit that it was occupying a vast section of the country. Rwanda’s leaders are vigilant about not endangering their carefully crafted reputation as responsible, development-oriented friends of the West.
Senior Rwandan officials do not deny that demobilized Rwandan soldiers are fighting in Congo, but they say the soldiers are doing it on their own, without any government backing.
“They are ordinary citizens, and if their travel documents are in order, they can go ahead and travel,” said Joseph Mutaboba, Rwanda’s special envoy for the Great Lakes region.
But according to several demobilized soldiers, Rwandan government officials are involved, providing bus fare for the men to travel to Congo and updating the rebel leadership each month on how many fighters from Rwanda are about to come over. Once they get to the rebel camps, the Rwandan veterans said, they flash their Rwandan Army identification cards and then are assigned to a rebel unit.
“We usually get a promotion,” said one fighter who was recently a corporal in the Rwandan Army and served as a sergeant in the rebel forces last month. He said that he could be severely punished if identified and that Rwandan officials and rebel commanders told the fighters not to say anything about the cooperation.
Another cause for suspicion is Rwanda’s past plundering of Congo’s rich trove of minerals, going back to the late 1990s when the Rwandan Army seized control of eastern Congo and pumped hundreds of millions of dollars of smuggled coltan, cassiterite and even diamonds back to Rwanda, according to United Nations documents.
Many current high-ranking Rwandan officials, including the minister of finance, the ambassador to China and the deputy director of the central bank, were executives at a holding company that a United Nations panel in 2002 implicated in the illicit mineral trade and called to be sanctioned. The officials say that they are no longer part of that company and that the company did nothing wrong. Nonetheless, eastern Congo’s lucrative mineral business still seems to be heavily influenced by ethnic Rwandan businessmen with close ties to Kigali.
Some of the most powerful players today, like Modeste Makabuza Ngoga, who runs a small empire of coffee, tea, transport and mineral companies in eastern Congo, are part of a Tutsi-dominated triangle involving the Rwandan government, the conflict-driven mineral trade and a powerful rebel movement led by a renegade general, Laurent Nkunda, a former officer in Rwanda’s army.
Several United Nations reports have accused Mr. Makabuza Ngoga of using strong-arm tactics to smuggle minerals from Congo to Rwanda and one report said that he enjoyed “close ties” to Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame. This week a rebel spokesman said that Mr. Makabuza Ngoga was on Mr. Nkunda’s “College of Honorables,” essentially a rebel advisory board. Mr. Nkunda’s troops recently marched into areas known to be mineral rich — and areas where ethnic Rwandan businessmen are trying to gain a foothold.
Mr. Makabuza Ngoga said in an interview that he was not doing anything illegal.
“I’m just a businessman,” he said. “I work with them all.”
A Tale of Two Africas
Rwanda and Congo are polar opposites, a true David-and-Goliath matchup. Crossing the border from Gisenyi, Rwanda, to Goma, Congo, is a journey across two Africas, in the span of about 100 yards.
The two-minute walk takes you from one of the smallest, tidiest, most promising countries on the continent, where women in white rubber gloves sweep the streets every morning and government employees are at their desks by 7 a.m., to one of the biggest, messiest and most violent African states, home to a conflict that has killed more than five million people, more than any other since World War II.
While Congo is vast, Rwanda is packed. While the Congolese are often playful, known for outlandish dress and great music, Rwandans are reserved. While Congo is naturally rich, Rwanda is perennially poor. Yet Rwanda has emerged as a darling of the aid world, praised for strong, uncorrupt leadership and the strides it has made in fighting AIDS and poverty.
The fates of the two countries are inextricably linked. In 1994, Hutu militias in Rwanda killed 800,000 people, mostly minority Tutsis, and then fled into eastern Congo. Rwanda responded by invading Congo in 1997 and 1998, denying it each time initially but later taking responsibility. Those invasions catalyzed years of war that drew in the armies of half a dozen African countries.
When the Rwandan military controlled eastern Congo from 1998 to 2002, it established a highly organized military-industrial network to illegally exploit Congo’s riches, according to United Nations documents.
A 2002 United Nations report said that top Rwandan military officers worked closely with some of the most notorious smugglers and arms traffickers in the world, including Viktor Bout, a former Soviet arms dealer nicknamed the Merchant of Death who was arrested this year.
“I used to see generals at the airport coming back from Congo with suitcases full of cash,” said a former Rwandan government official who said that if he was identified, he could be killed.
Rwanda may have a lot going for it — a high economic growth rate, low corruption, a Parliament with a majority of seats held by women. But many people here say they do not feel free. When the former government official was interviewed at a Kigali hotel, he abruptly stopped talking whenever the maid walked by.
“You never know,” he whispered, nodding toward the young woman who was smiling behind a plate-glass window smeared with soap suds. “She could be a lieutenant.”
Scarred by a Genocide
Rwanda is tiny, tough and intensely patriotic. Like Israel, it is a postgenocidal state, built on an ethos of self-sacrifice. Its national motto is Never Again.
One oft-cited threat is the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, also known as the F.D.L.R., a mostly Hutu militia that is based just across the border in the green folds of eastern Congo. The militia is thought to number 5,000 to 10,000 fighters. Some of its leaders are wanted “genocidaires” who fled Rwanda in 1994 after massacring Tutsi.
“These guys want to come back and finish the job,” said Maj. Jill Rutaremara, a spokesman for Rwanda’s Defense Forces.
Mr. Nkunda, the rebel leader, has used the presence of the Hutu militia and the Congo government’s failure to disarm it as a rationale for his continued armed struggle. His forces have routed Congolese government troops in the past two months and pushed the region to the precipice of another regional war.
United Nations officials say he has not acted entirely alone, either: they said they observed Rwandan tanks firing from Rwandan territory to support Mr. Nkunda’s troops as they advanced in October. Rwandan officials denied this.
Rwandan military officers admit, when pressed, that the Hutu militia has little chance of destabilizing Rwanda. The last time it attacked inside Rwanda was 2001.
Some Western diplomats, Congolese officials and Rwandan dissidents now believe that the Rwandan government is simply using the F.D.L.R. as an excuse to prop up Mr. Nkunda and maintain a sphere of influence in the mineral-rich area across the border.
“These are people who want to make business, and they cover it up with politics,” said Faustin Twagiramungu, a former Rwandan prime minister now in exile in Belgium.
Congolese officials say that that the Rwandan government is making no efforts to bring the Hutu militiamen back into Rwanda because Rwanda wants to make sure that any Hutu-Tutsi violence plays out in Congo.
“What’s happening in eastern Congo is a Rwandese war is being fought on Congolese soil,” said Kikaya bin Karubi, a member of Congo’s Parliament.
Rwandan officials dismiss these claims with a confident chuckle.
“We want to deal with these guys here,” Major Rutaremara said. “We want them back.”
Mr. Mutaboba, the Rwandan government envoy, said the allegations were part of “an organized campaign to distort the whole problem and give it a regional dimension.”
“It’s not,” he said. “It’s a Congo problem.”
Ethnic and Business Ties
But it may be hard drawing a fine line between Congo and Rwanda, despite the lines on a map. There is a long history of ethnic and business ties that seamlessly flow across the colonially imposed borders, especially among the minority Tutsi who dominate business on both sides, yet at the same time, feel threatened and a heightened sense of community as a result.
For example, several demobilized Rwandan soldiers in Kigali said the vast majority of volunteers who recently crossed the border to fight with Mr. Nkunda were Tutsi. Some of the soldiers said that they had relatives living in eastern Congo and that it was like a second home to them.
According to four soldiers and one employee at the Rwandan demobilization commission, at the end of their monthly meetings, officials at the commission ask for anyone fit and ready to fight to stand up. Sometimes the commission provides bus fare to the border, the soldiers said, and other travel costs. The soldiers usually travel unarmed, picking up weapons on the other side, they said.
One demobilized Rwandan lieutenant who just got back from fighting in Congo looked surprised when asked why he went.
“Why? I am Tutsi,” he said. “One hundred percent Tutsi.”
Zimbabwe to introduce $200 million note
December 6, 2008
A man displays the new $100 million bank note in Harare, Zimbabwe. The government announced Saturday that a $200 million note will also be introduced.
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 6&sponsor=
Photograph by : Philimon Bulawayo
/ ReutersHARARE - Inflation-wracked Zimbabwe plans to introduce a $200 million note just days after a $100 million note came into circulation, the government announced Saturday.
The 200 million dollar note, announced in a notice in the government gazette, will bring to 28 the number of notes put into circulation by the central bank this year alone, as the country struggles with the world's highest inflation rate of 231 million per cent.
On Thursday the central bank introduced $100 million, $50 million and $10 million notes while at the same time increasing withdrawal limits for individuals and companies.
The 100 million dollar note is worth only about 14 US dollars, and its value erodes by the day.
Cash can now only be withdrawn once a week from banks, according to the latest measures by the central bank.
Ordinary people can withdraw $100 million a week while companies are permitted to withdraw $50 million.
Prices of basic goods and services rose sharply on Thursday when the $100 million note was introduced.
Long queues in banks and cash shortages are commonplace in Zimbabwe as people take hours to withdraw money which is still not enough to see them through the day.
The 100,000 banknote is worth only one US dollar on the widely-used parallel black market and is only half the amount needed to buy a loaf of bread.
Zimbabwe's political leaders are currently deadlocked over who should control key ministries in a power-sharing deal brokered by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) after March elections thrust the country into crisis.
Once the region's breadbasket, the country is facing widespread food shortages while cholera has killed 575 people, the UN said on Friday.
© Copyright (c) AFP
****
It's time for Mugabe to go: U.S.
Cholera kills 575, national emergency declared
By Nelson BanyaDecember 5, 2008
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 2&sponsor=
A file photo of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. U.S. said on Friday that Mugabe's departure from office was long overdue and a food crisis and cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe meant it was now vital for the international community to act.
Photograph by : Marwan Naamani/AFP/Getty Images
HARARE - The United States said on Friday that President Robert Mugabe's departure from office was long overdue and a food crisis and cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe meant it was now vital for the international community to act.
Zimbabwe has declared a national emergency and appealed for international help to battle a cholera outbreak that has killed 575 people with 12,700 reported cases of the disease, according to the United Nations.
"It's well past time for Robert Mugabe to leave," U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in Copenhagen.
In a further sign of growing international pressure, European Union diplomats said the EU planned more sanctions against Zimbabwe next week unless there was progress in ending the political deadlock.
The EU has prepared a list of 11 officials to be added next Monday or Tuesday to the existing list of over 100 officials, including Mugabe, who cannot travel to the EU, two diplomats said.
Nobel laureate and South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu said on Thursday that Mugabe must step down or be removed by force and that the Zimbabwean leader faced indictment for war crimes in the Hague unless he quit.
Rice said the stalled power-sharing talks, a "sham election" earlier this year, economic meltdown and the humanitarian toll from the cholera epidemic required swift action.
"If this is not evidence to the international community that it's time to stand up for what is right I don't know what will be," Rice told a news conference, adding: "... frankly the nations of the region have to lead it."
Economic meltdown in Zimbabwe, isolated by Western countries under Mugabe's increasingly authoritarian rule, has left the health system ill-prepared to cope with the cholera epidemic that it once would have prevented or treated easily.
The country has the highest official modern-day inflation of 231 million percent but inflation is seen much higher with prices doubling every 24 hours. Basic foods are often unobtainable and the currency worthless.
The cholera cases have been fuelled by the collapse of the water system, which has forced residents to drink from contaminated wells and streams.
South Africa said on Friday it would send a team of senior government officials to Zimbabwe next week to assess the food crisis and investigate what aid is needed.
"The purpose of the visit will be to assess the situation on the ground, determine the level of assistance required and to consult with the representatives of the various stakeholders in Zimbabwe on how a ... distribution and monitoring mechanism could be set up," government spokesman Themba Maseko said.
Thousands of Zimbabweans are believed to cross the border, often illegally, into South Africa each day. A cholera centre has been set up in the South African border town of Musina.
Mozambique said on Friday it had put all areas near the border with Zimbabwe on maximum alert over the threat of cholera entering the country from its neighbour.
"The massive and uncontrolled entry of Zimbabweans into Mozambique in search of a better life due to the economic crisis there could be an open door for the further spread of the disease which is also affecting us," Mozambique Health Ministry spokesman Martinho Djedje said.
Zimbabwe does not have the funds to pay doctors and nurses or buy medicine and aid agency Oxfam said at least 300,000 people weakened by lack of food are in danger from the epidemic.
"Millions of people were already facing starvation. With unemployment over 80 percent, and food unavailable across the country, they now have to contend with cholera and other diseases as the water and sanitation systems break down," Peter Mutoredzanwa, Country Director for Oxfam in Zimbabwe, said.
Mutoredzanwa said in a statement almost half of Zimbabwe's 13 million population have been weakened by serious food shortages and indications were that more than 5 million people will urgently need food aid by January.
South Africa will announce an aid package for Zimbabwe next week, Maseko said, adding Zimbabwe's political parties have agreed that all aid should be distributed in a non-partisan way.
Hopes of rescuing Zimbabwe from the humanitarian crisis are complicated by the deadlock between Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai over how to implement a power-sharing pact.
Western nations, which accused Mugabe of running the once prosperous nation into the ground, have promised aid. European Union ministers have agreed to provide an initial 200,000 euros to the Red Cross and other aid agencies.
© Copyright (c) Reuters
****
Kenya leader aims to oust Mugabe
By Steven EdwardsDecember 4, 2008
'I do believe strongly that if the leadership of South Africa took a firm stand and told (Robert) Mugabe (above) to quit, he would have no choice but to do so,' said Kenya's Prime Minister Raila Odinga.
Photograph by : Alexander Joe/AFP/Getty Images
UNITED NATIONS - Kenya’s prime minister signalled Thursday that Robert Mugabe’s days in power may be numbered as he called on African leaders to oust the Zimbabwean president.
Raila Odinga - Kenya’s leader since April - said he is confident Zimbabwe’s powerful neighbour South Africa will force out Mugabe when Jacob Zuma emerges as president as expected next year.
“I do believe strongly that if the leadership of South Africa took a firm stand and told Mugabe to quit, he would have no choice but to do so,” Odinga said after meeting with Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
He said Zuma, who as president of the African National Congress announced an alliance with the Kenyan leader when they met this week and discussed Zimbabwe, would have “no hesitation in taking that step.”
Odinga’s comments, reported by the BBC, are some of the strongest said publicly by an African leader about Zimbabwe. They suggest the traditional reluctance of many in his position to turn on former colonial liberation heroes like Mugabe is waning.
They also signal a major break with former South African president Thabo Mbeki over how to resolve Zimbabwe’s political crisis, which is unfolding against a backdrop of economic chaos and an expanding cholera outbreak that has already killed more than 560 people.
Mbeki, currently mediating in the crisis, as recently as last week publicly accused Tsvangirai of seeking support from the West rather than from African neighbours. But Odinga made clear Thursday he was throwing his weight behind the Zimbabwean.
“It’s time for African governments . . . to push (Mugabe) out of power,” Odinga said.
He revealed he had advised Tsvangirai not to return to power-sharing talks, which Mugabe was obliged to enter following an election widely seen as rigged by his Zanu-PF party.
“Power-sharing is dead in Zimbabwe and will not work with a dictator who does not really believe in power-sharing,” Odinga said.
The talks broke down after Tsvangirai refused to share control over the Home Affairs Ministry, and said Mbeki and other regional leaders “did not have the courage” to stand up to Mugabe.
Mbeki shot back in a 4,000-word letter published in a South African newspaper that said Tsvangirai had been “offensive in terms of African culture.”
The Sept. 15 power-sharing accord had already given Mugabe control of the army, which in Africa is frequently the source of political power. It also said Mugabe would remain as president, while Tsvangirai would be prime minister.
The row has complicated the international response to the ongoing humanitarian crises in Zimbabwe.
Canada is among countries that have suspended all funding to the Zimbabwean government, channelling help - $10 million so far this year - through charities and international organizations such as the United Nations.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown Thursday announced some $20 million in emergency aid to tackle the cholera crisis. He also denounced Mugabe for having created a “failed state.”
“Thousands are stricken with cholera and must be helped urgently,” he said. “The international community’s differences with Mugabe will not prevent us doing so - we are increasing our development aid and calling on others to follow suit.”
Adding to measures aimed at trying to isolate the Mugabe regime, Canada in September imposed “targeted” sanctions “on key members of the Zimbabwe regime.”
“We continue to maintain economic and political measures against Zimbabwe,” said Catherine Loubier, spokeswoman for Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon.
“These sanctions will remain in effect until the government of Zimbabwe has committed itself to positive shifts in policy that result in improvements in freedom, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.”
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service
December 6, 2008
A man displays the new $100 million bank note in Harare, Zimbabwe. The government announced Saturday that a $200 million note will also be introduced.
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 6&sponsor=
Photograph by : Philimon Bulawayo
/ ReutersHARARE - Inflation-wracked Zimbabwe plans to introduce a $200 million note just days after a $100 million note came into circulation, the government announced Saturday.
The 200 million dollar note, announced in a notice in the government gazette, will bring to 28 the number of notes put into circulation by the central bank this year alone, as the country struggles with the world's highest inflation rate of 231 million per cent.
On Thursday the central bank introduced $100 million, $50 million and $10 million notes while at the same time increasing withdrawal limits for individuals and companies.
The 100 million dollar note is worth only about 14 US dollars, and its value erodes by the day.
Cash can now only be withdrawn once a week from banks, according to the latest measures by the central bank.
Ordinary people can withdraw $100 million a week while companies are permitted to withdraw $50 million.
Prices of basic goods and services rose sharply on Thursday when the $100 million note was introduced.
Long queues in banks and cash shortages are commonplace in Zimbabwe as people take hours to withdraw money which is still not enough to see them through the day.
The 100,000 banknote is worth only one US dollar on the widely-used parallel black market and is only half the amount needed to buy a loaf of bread.
Zimbabwe's political leaders are currently deadlocked over who should control key ministries in a power-sharing deal brokered by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) after March elections thrust the country into crisis.
Once the region's breadbasket, the country is facing widespread food shortages while cholera has killed 575 people, the UN said on Friday.
© Copyright (c) AFP
****
It's time for Mugabe to go: U.S.
Cholera kills 575, national emergency declared
By Nelson BanyaDecember 5, 2008
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 2&sponsor=
A file photo of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. U.S. said on Friday that Mugabe's departure from office was long overdue and a food crisis and cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe meant it was now vital for the international community to act.
Photograph by : Marwan Naamani/AFP/Getty Images
HARARE - The United States said on Friday that President Robert Mugabe's departure from office was long overdue and a food crisis and cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe meant it was now vital for the international community to act.
Zimbabwe has declared a national emergency and appealed for international help to battle a cholera outbreak that has killed 575 people with 12,700 reported cases of the disease, according to the United Nations.
"It's well past time for Robert Mugabe to leave," U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in Copenhagen.
In a further sign of growing international pressure, European Union diplomats said the EU planned more sanctions against Zimbabwe next week unless there was progress in ending the political deadlock.
The EU has prepared a list of 11 officials to be added next Monday or Tuesday to the existing list of over 100 officials, including Mugabe, who cannot travel to the EU, two diplomats said.
Nobel laureate and South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu said on Thursday that Mugabe must step down or be removed by force and that the Zimbabwean leader faced indictment for war crimes in the Hague unless he quit.
Rice said the stalled power-sharing talks, a "sham election" earlier this year, economic meltdown and the humanitarian toll from the cholera epidemic required swift action.
"If this is not evidence to the international community that it's time to stand up for what is right I don't know what will be," Rice told a news conference, adding: "... frankly the nations of the region have to lead it."
Economic meltdown in Zimbabwe, isolated by Western countries under Mugabe's increasingly authoritarian rule, has left the health system ill-prepared to cope with the cholera epidemic that it once would have prevented or treated easily.
The country has the highest official modern-day inflation of 231 million percent but inflation is seen much higher with prices doubling every 24 hours. Basic foods are often unobtainable and the currency worthless.
The cholera cases have been fuelled by the collapse of the water system, which has forced residents to drink from contaminated wells and streams.
South Africa said on Friday it would send a team of senior government officials to Zimbabwe next week to assess the food crisis and investigate what aid is needed.
"The purpose of the visit will be to assess the situation on the ground, determine the level of assistance required and to consult with the representatives of the various stakeholders in Zimbabwe on how a ... distribution and monitoring mechanism could be set up," government spokesman Themba Maseko said.
Thousands of Zimbabweans are believed to cross the border, often illegally, into South Africa each day. A cholera centre has been set up in the South African border town of Musina.
Mozambique said on Friday it had put all areas near the border with Zimbabwe on maximum alert over the threat of cholera entering the country from its neighbour.
"The massive and uncontrolled entry of Zimbabweans into Mozambique in search of a better life due to the economic crisis there could be an open door for the further spread of the disease which is also affecting us," Mozambique Health Ministry spokesman Martinho Djedje said.
Zimbabwe does not have the funds to pay doctors and nurses or buy medicine and aid agency Oxfam said at least 300,000 people weakened by lack of food are in danger from the epidemic.
"Millions of people were already facing starvation. With unemployment over 80 percent, and food unavailable across the country, they now have to contend with cholera and other diseases as the water and sanitation systems break down," Peter Mutoredzanwa, Country Director for Oxfam in Zimbabwe, said.
Mutoredzanwa said in a statement almost half of Zimbabwe's 13 million population have been weakened by serious food shortages and indications were that more than 5 million people will urgently need food aid by January.
South Africa will announce an aid package for Zimbabwe next week, Maseko said, adding Zimbabwe's political parties have agreed that all aid should be distributed in a non-partisan way.
Hopes of rescuing Zimbabwe from the humanitarian crisis are complicated by the deadlock between Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai over how to implement a power-sharing pact.
Western nations, which accused Mugabe of running the once prosperous nation into the ground, have promised aid. European Union ministers have agreed to provide an initial 200,000 euros to the Red Cross and other aid agencies.
© Copyright (c) Reuters
****
Kenya leader aims to oust Mugabe
By Steven EdwardsDecember 4, 2008
'I do believe strongly that if the leadership of South Africa took a firm stand and told (Robert) Mugabe (above) to quit, he would have no choice but to do so,' said Kenya's Prime Minister Raila Odinga.
Photograph by : Alexander Joe/AFP/Getty Images
UNITED NATIONS - Kenya’s prime minister signalled Thursday that Robert Mugabe’s days in power may be numbered as he called on African leaders to oust the Zimbabwean president.
Raila Odinga - Kenya’s leader since April - said he is confident Zimbabwe’s powerful neighbour South Africa will force out Mugabe when Jacob Zuma emerges as president as expected next year.
“I do believe strongly that if the leadership of South Africa took a firm stand and told Mugabe to quit, he would have no choice but to do so,” Odinga said after meeting with Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
He said Zuma, who as president of the African National Congress announced an alliance with the Kenyan leader when they met this week and discussed Zimbabwe, would have “no hesitation in taking that step.”
Odinga’s comments, reported by the BBC, are some of the strongest said publicly by an African leader about Zimbabwe. They suggest the traditional reluctance of many in his position to turn on former colonial liberation heroes like Mugabe is waning.
They also signal a major break with former South African president Thabo Mbeki over how to resolve Zimbabwe’s political crisis, which is unfolding against a backdrop of economic chaos and an expanding cholera outbreak that has already killed more than 560 people.
Mbeki, currently mediating in the crisis, as recently as last week publicly accused Tsvangirai of seeking support from the West rather than from African neighbours. But Odinga made clear Thursday he was throwing his weight behind the Zimbabwean.
“It’s time for African governments . . . to push (Mugabe) out of power,” Odinga said.
He revealed he had advised Tsvangirai not to return to power-sharing talks, which Mugabe was obliged to enter following an election widely seen as rigged by his Zanu-PF party.
“Power-sharing is dead in Zimbabwe and will not work with a dictator who does not really believe in power-sharing,” Odinga said.
The talks broke down after Tsvangirai refused to share control over the Home Affairs Ministry, and said Mbeki and other regional leaders “did not have the courage” to stand up to Mugabe.
Mbeki shot back in a 4,000-word letter published in a South African newspaper that said Tsvangirai had been “offensive in terms of African culture.”
The Sept. 15 power-sharing accord had already given Mugabe control of the army, which in Africa is frequently the source of political power. It also said Mugabe would remain as president, while Tsvangirai would be prime minister.
The row has complicated the international response to the ongoing humanitarian crises in Zimbabwe.
Canada is among countries that have suspended all funding to the Zimbabwean government, channelling help - $10 million so far this year - through charities and international organizations such as the United Nations.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown Thursday announced some $20 million in emergency aid to tackle the cholera crisis. He also denounced Mugabe for having created a “failed state.”
“Thousands are stricken with cholera and must be helped urgently,” he said. “The international community’s differences with Mugabe will not prevent us doing so - we are increasing our development aid and calling on others to follow suit.”
Adding to measures aimed at trying to isolate the Mugabe regime, Canada in September imposed “targeted” sanctions “on key members of the Zimbabwe regime.”
“We continue to maintain economic and political measures against Zimbabwe,” said Catherine Loubier, spokeswoman for Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon.
“These sanctions will remain in effect until the government of Zimbabwe has committed itself to positive shifts in policy that result in improvements in freedom, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.”
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service
There is an interesting multimedia and a striking video related to the article linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/world ... congo.html
December 11, 2008
A Massacre in Congo, Despite Nearby Support
By LYDIA POLGREEN
KIWANJA, Congo — At last the bullets had stopped, and François Kambere Siviri made a dash for the door. After hiding all night from firefights between rebels and a government-allied militia over this small but strategic town, he was desperate to get to the latrine a few feet away.
“Pow, pow, pow,” said his widowed mother, Ludia Kavira Nzuva, recounting how the rebels killed her 25-year-old son just outside her front door. As they abandoned his bloodied corpse, she said, one turned to her and declared, “Voilà, here is your gift.”
In little more than 24 hours, at least 150 people would be dead, most of them young men, summarily executed by the rebels last month as they tightened their grip over parts of eastern Congo, according to witnesses and human-rights investigators.
And yet, as the killings took place, a contingent of about 100 United Nations peacekeepers was less than a mile away, struggling to understand what was happening outside the gates of its base. The peacekeepers were short of equipment and men, United Nations officials said, and they were focusing on evacuating frightened aid workers and searching for a foreign journalist who had been kidnapped. Already overwhelmed, officials said, they had no intelligence capabilities or even an interpreter who could speak the necessary languages.
The peacekeepers said they had no idea that the killings were taking place until it was all over.
The executions in Kiwanja are a study in the unfettered cruelty meted out by the armed groups fighting for power and resources in eastern Congo. But the events are also a textbook example of the continuing failure of the world’s largest international peacekeeping force, which has a mandate to protect the Congolese people from brutality.
In this instance, the failure came from a mix of poor communication and staffing, inadequate equipment, intelligence breakdowns and spectacularly bad luck, said Lt. Col. H. S. Brar, the commander of the Indian peacekeepers based in Kiwanja.
But the killings and the stumbling response to the rebel advance were symptomatic of problems that have plagued the United Nations peacekeeping force in Congo for years, said Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, who investigated the slayings this month. The rebel onslaught was even led by a commander who is wanted on war crimes charges by the International Criminal Court.
“Kiwanja was a disaster for everyone,” Ms. Van Woudenberg said. “The people were betrayed not just by rebels who committed terrible war crimes against them but by the international community that failed to protect them.”
In the past year alone, hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes as the rebels, led by a renegade army general, have waged a fierce insurgency against the government and its allied militias.
In an interview, the rebel general, Laurent Nkunda, denied that his troops had executed civilians here, accusing militias allied with the government of trying to make his rebel movement look bad.
“We cannot kill the population,” he said. “It is not in our behavior to kill and to rape.”
But extensive interviews with victims, aid workers and human-rights investigators showed that Mr. Nkunda’s men carried out a door-to-door military operation over two days in which young men and others were executed.
The trouble began on Oct. 28, when Congolese Army troops fled the town, fearful of the advance of Mr. Nkunda’s troops.
The soldiers, who had already been routed by Mr. Nkunda’s men farther south, looted and raped as they ran, taking everything of value and even forcing some residents to help them carry the spoils, according to witnesses and investigators. Fearful residents had to choose between two bad options: follow the rampaging army or wait to see what the rebels might bring.
With the soldiers long gone, Mr. Nkunda’s troops took the towns of Kiwanja and Rutshuru without firing a shot. Immediately, they ordered the residents who remained to torch sprawling camps that held about 30,000 people displaced by earlier fighting, proclaiming that it was now safe for the camp dwellers to return to their villages, witnesses said.
“They said there was security, so everyone should go home,” said François Hazumutima, a retired teacher who had been living in a nearby camp. “But none of us felt safe.”
A week later, on Nov. 4, a group of militia fighters known as the Mai Mai carried out a surprise attack on Kiwanja. But the rebels soon routed the Mai Mai — and ordered all residents to leave.
The soldiers then went house to house, saying they were searching for militia fighters who stayed behind to fight. But many residents who stayed were scared their houses would be looted or were too old or infirm to flee, according to witnesses. Others had simply not gotten the message to leave.
The rebels came to the door of a 25-year-old trader, banging and threatening to shoot their way in.
“There were gunshots everywhere,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “They asked for money. I gave them $200.”
He then watched in impotent horror as the rebels went to his 22-year-old brother’s house next door. The man, a student, had no money to offer them. The soldiers ordered him to lie on the ground. They stabbed him in the neck with their bayonets and shot him in the head, he said.
“They said, ‘If you don’t have money, you are Mai Mai,’ ” he said. “Everyone who was young was destined to die.”
Muwavita Mukangusi said she was out in the fields farming with her husband when the shooting started. Their three young daughters were at home, so Ms. Mukangusi ran back. Her husband hid in the fields, returning only at nightfall. The next morning the rebels came.
“They took my husband,” she said, her eyes rimmed in red. “Because I had $50 in the house, I took $25 to them. But it was not enough. I added $25. It was still not enough. They accused him of being Mai Mai.”
The rebels beat him, she said, then forced him to the ground and shot him in the back of the head.
According to witnesses and clips of video shot at the time, Jean Bosco Ntaganda, Mr. Nkunda’s chief of staff, commanded the troops that carried out the killings. Mr. Ntaganda, whose nom de guerre is the Terminator, is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes committed while he was commanding a different armed group earlier in the war.
Meanwhile, confusion reigned at the nearby peacekeepers’ base. The company of soldiers sits in a spot that is decidedly not strategic, nestled in a valley that is highly vulnerable to incoming fire and has a poor vantage point from which to keep tabs on the surrounding area.
The company’s only translator left the base on Oct. 26 and was not replaced until more than two weeks later. But even in normal times, communications are limited. To make logistical arrangements, the peacekeepers depend largely on civilian staff members who work normal business hours and have weekends off. Unable to speak to most of the population and with almost no intelligence capabilities, Colonel Brar groped his way through a fog of rumor, speculation and misinformation.
“During this whole time, there was an informational vacuum,” Colonel Brar said.
With just one company of soldiers and three armored vehicles, the colonel’s peacekeepers were overmatched, he said. Patrols had to be aborted because rebels and militia fighters opened fire with heavy weapons that could pierce the vehicles’ cladding. The peacekeepers said they could not tell the difference between the different armed groups and were fearful of firing on civilians.
The colonel said he was juggling orders from headquarters in Goma to rescue stranded aid workers and search for a kidnapped foreign journalist. Sending out too many patrols would leave no one to protect the thousands of civilians gathered around the base, trapped in the vulnerable valley.
Making matters worse, the peacekeepers’ armored vehicles are largely unable to handle the muddy terrain of the neighborhoods hit hardest by the violence. It was not until the fighting was over that the full horror of the killings was discovered in houses stuffed with dead bodies.
“We launched patrols in areas we thought there would be clashes,” he explained. “But we could not be everywhere at once.”
As the shooting died down, residents said they found streets littered with bodies. Most, but not all, were young men and boys. One health care worker, who spoke anonymously for fear of reprisals, helped the Red Cross recover the bodies.
“Some were killed with bullets, others bayoneted,” the worker said. Among the injured sent to the regional hospital, the worker said, were “two women, one small girl of 9 years and one boy of 11 years.”
Witnesses said the rebels ordered that the bodies be buried quickly and far from the cemetery, to avoid leaving evidence for war crimes investigators.
“They did not want any mass graves,” said another man, who participated in the burials.
The worker said that by the end of Nov. 6, they had collected 150 bodies, the same toll reached by Human Rights Watch. The count could be higher still, he said, since the rebels have hampered efforts at a fuller accounting of the dead and missing.
Mr. Nkunda’s men continue to hold the town, as well as neighboring Rutshuru. Outwardly, calm has returned to the streets. But mothers have sent their sons packing because the rebels have been forcing men and boys to join them.
Mujawimana Nyiragasigwa said her 15-year-old son Jimia was snatched by soldiers in broad daylight last month. He had been out looking for work when the soldiers rounded him up, she said, and he has been missing for two and a half weeks.
“If I ever see him again, it will be by the grace of God,” she said.
Colonel Brar was clearly troubled by what happened here but said he and his troops did their best in an awful situation.
“We did what we could,” he said. “Imagine if we had not been here. Many more could have died.”
Ms. Kavira Nzuva, whose son François was killed, said his death had hollowed out her life. Gaunt and hobbled at 67, she was forced to return to the fields to farm.
François had supported her with his photography business. He had wired her mud-walled house for electricity and paid the monthly bill. He had built her a new kitchen. She kept a thick album of pictures of him, a tall man always eager to strike a pose for the camera.
“He was my youngest child,” she said. “I don’t know how I will live without him.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/world ... congo.html
December 11, 2008
A Massacre in Congo, Despite Nearby Support
By LYDIA POLGREEN
KIWANJA, Congo — At last the bullets had stopped, and François Kambere Siviri made a dash for the door. After hiding all night from firefights between rebels and a government-allied militia over this small but strategic town, he was desperate to get to the latrine a few feet away.
“Pow, pow, pow,” said his widowed mother, Ludia Kavira Nzuva, recounting how the rebels killed her 25-year-old son just outside her front door. As they abandoned his bloodied corpse, she said, one turned to her and declared, “Voilà, here is your gift.”
In little more than 24 hours, at least 150 people would be dead, most of them young men, summarily executed by the rebels last month as they tightened their grip over parts of eastern Congo, according to witnesses and human-rights investigators.
And yet, as the killings took place, a contingent of about 100 United Nations peacekeepers was less than a mile away, struggling to understand what was happening outside the gates of its base. The peacekeepers were short of equipment and men, United Nations officials said, and they were focusing on evacuating frightened aid workers and searching for a foreign journalist who had been kidnapped. Already overwhelmed, officials said, they had no intelligence capabilities or even an interpreter who could speak the necessary languages.
The peacekeepers said they had no idea that the killings were taking place until it was all over.
The executions in Kiwanja are a study in the unfettered cruelty meted out by the armed groups fighting for power and resources in eastern Congo. But the events are also a textbook example of the continuing failure of the world’s largest international peacekeeping force, which has a mandate to protect the Congolese people from brutality.
In this instance, the failure came from a mix of poor communication and staffing, inadequate equipment, intelligence breakdowns and spectacularly bad luck, said Lt. Col. H. S. Brar, the commander of the Indian peacekeepers based in Kiwanja.
But the killings and the stumbling response to the rebel advance were symptomatic of problems that have plagued the United Nations peacekeeping force in Congo for years, said Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, who investigated the slayings this month. The rebel onslaught was even led by a commander who is wanted on war crimes charges by the International Criminal Court.
“Kiwanja was a disaster for everyone,” Ms. Van Woudenberg said. “The people were betrayed not just by rebels who committed terrible war crimes against them but by the international community that failed to protect them.”
In the past year alone, hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes as the rebels, led by a renegade army general, have waged a fierce insurgency against the government and its allied militias.
In an interview, the rebel general, Laurent Nkunda, denied that his troops had executed civilians here, accusing militias allied with the government of trying to make his rebel movement look bad.
“We cannot kill the population,” he said. “It is not in our behavior to kill and to rape.”
But extensive interviews with victims, aid workers and human-rights investigators showed that Mr. Nkunda’s men carried out a door-to-door military operation over two days in which young men and others were executed.
The trouble began on Oct. 28, when Congolese Army troops fled the town, fearful of the advance of Mr. Nkunda’s troops.
The soldiers, who had already been routed by Mr. Nkunda’s men farther south, looted and raped as they ran, taking everything of value and even forcing some residents to help them carry the spoils, according to witnesses and investigators. Fearful residents had to choose between two bad options: follow the rampaging army or wait to see what the rebels might bring.
With the soldiers long gone, Mr. Nkunda’s troops took the towns of Kiwanja and Rutshuru without firing a shot. Immediately, they ordered the residents who remained to torch sprawling camps that held about 30,000 people displaced by earlier fighting, proclaiming that it was now safe for the camp dwellers to return to their villages, witnesses said.
“They said there was security, so everyone should go home,” said François Hazumutima, a retired teacher who had been living in a nearby camp. “But none of us felt safe.”
A week later, on Nov. 4, a group of militia fighters known as the Mai Mai carried out a surprise attack on Kiwanja. But the rebels soon routed the Mai Mai — and ordered all residents to leave.
The soldiers then went house to house, saying they were searching for militia fighters who stayed behind to fight. But many residents who stayed were scared their houses would be looted or were too old or infirm to flee, according to witnesses. Others had simply not gotten the message to leave.
The rebels came to the door of a 25-year-old trader, banging and threatening to shoot their way in.
“There were gunshots everywhere,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “They asked for money. I gave them $200.”
He then watched in impotent horror as the rebels went to his 22-year-old brother’s house next door. The man, a student, had no money to offer them. The soldiers ordered him to lie on the ground. They stabbed him in the neck with their bayonets and shot him in the head, he said.
“They said, ‘If you don’t have money, you are Mai Mai,’ ” he said. “Everyone who was young was destined to die.”
Muwavita Mukangusi said she was out in the fields farming with her husband when the shooting started. Their three young daughters were at home, so Ms. Mukangusi ran back. Her husband hid in the fields, returning only at nightfall. The next morning the rebels came.
“They took my husband,” she said, her eyes rimmed in red. “Because I had $50 in the house, I took $25 to them. But it was not enough. I added $25. It was still not enough. They accused him of being Mai Mai.”
The rebels beat him, she said, then forced him to the ground and shot him in the back of the head.
According to witnesses and clips of video shot at the time, Jean Bosco Ntaganda, Mr. Nkunda’s chief of staff, commanded the troops that carried out the killings. Mr. Ntaganda, whose nom de guerre is the Terminator, is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes committed while he was commanding a different armed group earlier in the war.
Meanwhile, confusion reigned at the nearby peacekeepers’ base. The company of soldiers sits in a spot that is decidedly not strategic, nestled in a valley that is highly vulnerable to incoming fire and has a poor vantage point from which to keep tabs on the surrounding area.
The company’s only translator left the base on Oct. 26 and was not replaced until more than two weeks later. But even in normal times, communications are limited. To make logistical arrangements, the peacekeepers depend largely on civilian staff members who work normal business hours and have weekends off. Unable to speak to most of the population and with almost no intelligence capabilities, Colonel Brar groped his way through a fog of rumor, speculation and misinformation.
“During this whole time, there was an informational vacuum,” Colonel Brar said.
With just one company of soldiers and three armored vehicles, the colonel’s peacekeepers were overmatched, he said. Patrols had to be aborted because rebels and militia fighters opened fire with heavy weapons that could pierce the vehicles’ cladding. The peacekeepers said they could not tell the difference between the different armed groups and were fearful of firing on civilians.
The colonel said he was juggling orders from headquarters in Goma to rescue stranded aid workers and search for a kidnapped foreign journalist. Sending out too many patrols would leave no one to protect the thousands of civilians gathered around the base, trapped in the vulnerable valley.
Making matters worse, the peacekeepers’ armored vehicles are largely unable to handle the muddy terrain of the neighborhoods hit hardest by the violence. It was not until the fighting was over that the full horror of the killings was discovered in houses stuffed with dead bodies.
“We launched patrols in areas we thought there would be clashes,” he explained. “But we could not be everywhere at once.”
As the shooting died down, residents said they found streets littered with bodies. Most, but not all, were young men and boys. One health care worker, who spoke anonymously for fear of reprisals, helped the Red Cross recover the bodies.
“Some were killed with bullets, others bayoneted,” the worker said. Among the injured sent to the regional hospital, the worker said, were “two women, one small girl of 9 years and one boy of 11 years.”
Witnesses said the rebels ordered that the bodies be buried quickly and far from the cemetery, to avoid leaving evidence for war crimes investigators.
“They did not want any mass graves,” said another man, who participated in the burials.
The worker said that by the end of Nov. 6, they had collected 150 bodies, the same toll reached by Human Rights Watch. The count could be higher still, he said, since the rebels have hampered efforts at a fuller accounting of the dead and missing.
Mr. Nkunda’s men continue to hold the town, as well as neighboring Rutshuru. Outwardly, calm has returned to the streets. But mothers have sent their sons packing because the rebels have been forcing men and boys to join them.
Mujawimana Nyiragasigwa said her 15-year-old son Jimia was snatched by soldiers in broad daylight last month. He had been out looking for work when the soldiers rounded him up, she said, and he has been missing for two and a half weeks.
“If I ever see him again, it will be by the grace of God,” she said.
Colonel Brar was clearly troubled by what happened here but said he and his troops did their best in an awful situation.
“We did what we could,” he said. “Imagine if we had not been here. Many more could have died.”
Ms. Kavira Nzuva, whose son François was killed, said his death had hollowed out her life. Gaunt and hobbled at 67, she was forced to return to the fields to farm.
François had supported her with his photography business. He had wired her mud-walled house for electricity and paid the monthly bill. He had built her a new kitchen. She kept a thick album of pictures of him, a tall man always eager to strike a pose for the camera.
“He was my youngest child,” she said. “I don’t know how I will live without him.”
December 12, 2008
Cholera Is Raging, Despite Denial by Mugabe
By CELIA W. DUGGER
HARARE, Zimbabwe — Cholera swept through the five youngest children in the Chigudu family with cruel and bewildering haste.
On a recent Saturday, the children had chased one another through streets that flow with raw sewage, and chattered happily as they bedded down for the night. The diarrhea and vomiting began around midnight. Relatives frantically prepared solutions of water, sugar and salt for the youngsters, aged 20 months to 12 years, to drink.
But by morning, they were limp and hollow-eyed. The disease was draining their bodies of fluid.
“Then they started to die,” said their brother Lovegot, 18. “Prisca was first, second Sammy, then Shantel, Clopas and Aisha, the littlest one, last.”
A ferocious cholera epidemic, spread by water contaminated with human excrement, has stricken more than 16,000 people across Zimbabwe since August and killed more than 780. President Robert G. Mugabe said Thursday that the epidemic had ended, but health experts are warning that the number of cases could surpass 60,000, and that half the country’s population of 12 million is at risk.
The outbreak is yet more evidence that Zimbabwe’s most fundamental public services — including water and sanitation, public schools and hospitals — are shutting down, much like the organs of a severely dehydrated cholera victim.
Zimbabwe’s once promising economy, disastrously mismanaged by Mr. Mugabe’s government, has been spiraling downward for almost a decade, but residents here say the free fall has gained frightening velocity in recent weeks. Most of the nation’s schools, which were once the pride of Africa, producing a highly literate population, have virtually ceased to function as teachers, whose salaries no longer even cover the cost of the bus fare to work, quit showing up.
With millions enduring severe and worsening hunger, and cholera spilling into neighboring countries, there are rising international calls for Mr. Mugabe to step down after 28 years in power. But he seems only to be digging in, and his announcement about the epidemic’s end came just a day after the World Health Organization warned that the outbreak was grave enough to carry “serious regional implications.”
Water cutoffs are common and prolonged here, but last week the taps went dry in virtually all of the capital’s densely packed suburbs, where people most need clean drinking water to wash their hands and food, essential steps to containing cholera. On rutted streets crowded with out-of-school children and jobless adults, piles of uncollected garbage mounted and thick brown sludge burbled up from burst sewer lines.
The capital’s two largest hospitals, sprawling facilities that once would have provided sophisticated care in just such a crisis, had largely shut down weeks earlier after doctors and nurses, their salaries rendered virtually worthless by the nation’s crippling hyperinflation, simply stopped coming to work.
Inflation officially hit 231 million percent in July, but John Robertson, an independent economist in Zimbabwe, estimates that it has now surged to an astounding eight quintillion percent — that is an eight followed by 18 zeros.
The situation has deteriorated to such a degree that soldiers — Mr. Mugabe’s enduring muscle — rioted last week on the streets of the capital, breaking windows and looting stores, after waiting days in bank lines without being able to withdraw their meager salaries from cash-short tellers. A midlevel officer who participated in the mayhem, but spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of prosecution, said troops were enraged that they could no longer afford to buy food or send their children to school.
“As we talk, children of chefs are in private schools learning while ours are playing in dusty roads,” he said bitterly, using the local term for the people in power.
Rumors about this extraordinary unrest in the army’s ranks have circulated feverishly, with some speculating that the rioting was staged to justify imposing a state of emergency. Others hoped it finally signaled the beginning of the end for Mr. Mugabe.
Still, the Mugabe government’s ability to clamp down on dissent seems intact. The police quelled the riot. Sixteen soldiers now face a court-martial. Beyond that, about 20 opposition party activists and human rights workers have recently disappeared. Last week, armed men abducted a well-known human rights activist, Jestina Mukoko, at dawn while she was barefoot, still in her nightgown and bereft of her eyeglasses and as her teenage son looked on helplessly.
Political analysts have long predicted that Mr. Mugabe’s hold on power — which he has refused to loosen since September, when he signed a power-sharing deal with his nemesis, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai — would be broken only after the economy completely imploded and daily life became intolerable.
But as the endgame of the octogenarian Mr. Mugabe’s rule plays out, the human tragedies mount.
In a country with the terrible distinction of having the second highest proportion of orphans in the world — one in four children has lost one or both parents — the closing of schools and hospitals is hitting these most vulnerable children mercilessly.
Aisha Makombo, 15, has been raising her 11-year-old sister, Khadija, since their mother died of AIDS last year. An expressive girl with a soft, round face, Aisha, who is H.I.V. negative, has been struggling to get drug treatment for Khadija, who is now sick with AIDS.
She took her little sister, so stunted she appears half her actual age, to Parirenyatwa Hospital, the nation’s largest referral hospital, last year, but crucial test results needed to qualify Khadija for life-saving medications were inexplicably misplaced.
On a later visit, Aisha was told the machine that performed the tests was broken. Now the hospital is virtually closed. Aisha said she was referred to private doctors who demanded payment in South African rand or American dollars, but the girls had no money.
Aisha’s eyes filled with tears as she explained that she had been able to obtain only cotrimoxazole, an antibiotic used to treat opportunistic infections, for her little sister.
Aisha used to escape the sadness of her life by going to school, but two months ago the teachers at her high school stopped showing up.
“She didn’t bid us farewell, she just left,” Aisha said of her math teacher, the one she misses most of all. “At first, we thought she would come back, but then we gave up hope.”
Aisha now scrambles to barter her labor for food, while her little sister, too weak to work, attends a small school run by a nonprofit group. Last week, Aisha started a four-day job, bent over in a field, readying it for planting. In exchange, she was to get two pounds of flour and a bottle of cooking oil, as well as a shirt and blouse for Khadija.
The girls pray together each night before going to sleep in the tiny, grubby, windowless room they share. The small house belongs to their grandfather, but he admitted it was Aisha who provided the food for him and her 45-year-old uncle who sometimes steals the cornmeal she earns, as well as the girls’ clothes to sell secondhand.
Yet the girls say they cling to their dreams. Aisha’s is to be a doctor, Khadija’s a bank teller, each hungering for what the sisters do not have — health and money for medicine and food.
Zimbabwe has one of the world’s highest rates of H.I.V. infection, and now a raging cholera crisis. But with the economic collapse decimating revenues needed to run the country’s public health systems, mortality rates among cholera victims here are five times higher than in other countries, public health experts said.
Mr. Mugabe’s government — in its pursuit of power and money — has also contributed to both catastrophes, analysts say.
Earlier this year, the government jeopardized $188 million in aid from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria by taking $7.3 million the organization had donated and spending it on other, unrelated expenses. Only at the 11th hour, under threat that the money would be withheld, did the government reimburse the Global Fund for the missing funds.
And two years ago, the government took control of Harare’s water and sewer systems from the opposition-controlled city council, depriving the local government of a crucial source of revenue to keep services functioning.
“The real motive was to dilute the influence of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change and cripple them financially,” said Justice Mavezenge, an officer with the Combined Harare Residents Association, a civic group.
Last week, even Mr. Mugabe’s mouthpiece, the newspaper The Herald, castigated the state-run water authority for running out of chemicals to purify Harare’s water supply — chemicals it said could have been trucked in from South Africa in less than 24 hours.
The United Nation’s Children’s Fund and international donors have stepped into the void. They have begun trucking 50 tankers of fresh water into the most densely settled suburbs and will be providing water treatment chemicals for the city over the next four months, said Unicef’s acting country director, Roeland Monasch.
But some aid officials fear that the epidemic will be impossible to contain because of the failing water and sanitation systems in places like Budiriro, the Harare suburb where the Chigudu children died and where half the country’s cases have occurred.
“We’re not going to be able to control it,” said one aid agency adviser, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution. “The likely scenario is that people who get sick in places like Budiriro will go home for the festive season and you’ll get flash points all over the rural areas.”
Cholera stole the five Chigudu children in just two days, on Nov. 17 and 18, and the grandmother and aunt who helped care for them died just days later. Their father, who returned home just hours after the last of his children died, got his first inkling of unspeakable calamity when his youngest ones weren’t there to clamber all over him as he walked in the door.
“I will never get my children back,” he said.
The death toll mounts each day. Chipo and Tecla Murape rushed their orphaned 5-year-old niece, Moisha, to the clinic in Chitungwiza, a city just south of Harare, last week. Nurses told the family the veins in the girl’s arms had collapsed because she had lost so much fluid. No doctor ever saw her, her relatives said, and the nurses never hit a vein. Moisha, a shy, but friendly girl, instead drank rehydration fluids.
Throughout the day, she complained of a terrible thirst and a stomachache. On the advice of clinic workers, her aunts did not even hold her hand as she lay dying, fearing infection. After night fell, the nurses said there was nothing more they could do and suggested that Moisha’s relatives take her to the city’s hospital, some two and a half miles away.
But there was no ambulance. Tecla Murape, 42, swaddled Moisha to her back and set off hurriedly for the hourlong walk, her heart pounding with worry. Under a dark, moonless sky, she took a shortcut through a maize field, leaping across yet another putrid sewage spill. By the time they arrived, Mrs. Murape’s clothes were soaked with Moisha’s watery diarrhea. Hours later, Moisha died.
Cholera Is Raging, Despite Denial by Mugabe
By CELIA W. DUGGER
HARARE, Zimbabwe — Cholera swept through the five youngest children in the Chigudu family with cruel and bewildering haste.
On a recent Saturday, the children had chased one another through streets that flow with raw sewage, and chattered happily as they bedded down for the night. The diarrhea and vomiting began around midnight. Relatives frantically prepared solutions of water, sugar and salt for the youngsters, aged 20 months to 12 years, to drink.
But by morning, they were limp and hollow-eyed. The disease was draining their bodies of fluid.
“Then they started to die,” said their brother Lovegot, 18. “Prisca was first, second Sammy, then Shantel, Clopas and Aisha, the littlest one, last.”
A ferocious cholera epidemic, spread by water contaminated with human excrement, has stricken more than 16,000 people across Zimbabwe since August and killed more than 780. President Robert G. Mugabe said Thursday that the epidemic had ended, but health experts are warning that the number of cases could surpass 60,000, and that half the country’s population of 12 million is at risk.
The outbreak is yet more evidence that Zimbabwe’s most fundamental public services — including water and sanitation, public schools and hospitals — are shutting down, much like the organs of a severely dehydrated cholera victim.
Zimbabwe’s once promising economy, disastrously mismanaged by Mr. Mugabe’s government, has been spiraling downward for almost a decade, but residents here say the free fall has gained frightening velocity in recent weeks. Most of the nation’s schools, which were once the pride of Africa, producing a highly literate population, have virtually ceased to function as teachers, whose salaries no longer even cover the cost of the bus fare to work, quit showing up.
With millions enduring severe and worsening hunger, and cholera spilling into neighboring countries, there are rising international calls for Mr. Mugabe to step down after 28 years in power. But he seems only to be digging in, and his announcement about the epidemic’s end came just a day after the World Health Organization warned that the outbreak was grave enough to carry “serious regional implications.”
Water cutoffs are common and prolonged here, but last week the taps went dry in virtually all of the capital’s densely packed suburbs, where people most need clean drinking water to wash their hands and food, essential steps to containing cholera. On rutted streets crowded with out-of-school children and jobless adults, piles of uncollected garbage mounted and thick brown sludge burbled up from burst sewer lines.
The capital’s two largest hospitals, sprawling facilities that once would have provided sophisticated care in just such a crisis, had largely shut down weeks earlier after doctors and nurses, their salaries rendered virtually worthless by the nation’s crippling hyperinflation, simply stopped coming to work.
Inflation officially hit 231 million percent in July, but John Robertson, an independent economist in Zimbabwe, estimates that it has now surged to an astounding eight quintillion percent — that is an eight followed by 18 zeros.
The situation has deteriorated to such a degree that soldiers — Mr. Mugabe’s enduring muscle — rioted last week on the streets of the capital, breaking windows and looting stores, after waiting days in bank lines without being able to withdraw their meager salaries from cash-short tellers. A midlevel officer who participated in the mayhem, but spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of prosecution, said troops were enraged that they could no longer afford to buy food or send their children to school.
“As we talk, children of chefs are in private schools learning while ours are playing in dusty roads,” he said bitterly, using the local term for the people in power.
Rumors about this extraordinary unrest in the army’s ranks have circulated feverishly, with some speculating that the rioting was staged to justify imposing a state of emergency. Others hoped it finally signaled the beginning of the end for Mr. Mugabe.
Still, the Mugabe government’s ability to clamp down on dissent seems intact. The police quelled the riot. Sixteen soldiers now face a court-martial. Beyond that, about 20 opposition party activists and human rights workers have recently disappeared. Last week, armed men abducted a well-known human rights activist, Jestina Mukoko, at dawn while she was barefoot, still in her nightgown and bereft of her eyeglasses and as her teenage son looked on helplessly.
Political analysts have long predicted that Mr. Mugabe’s hold on power — which he has refused to loosen since September, when he signed a power-sharing deal with his nemesis, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai — would be broken only after the economy completely imploded and daily life became intolerable.
But as the endgame of the octogenarian Mr. Mugabe’s rule plays out, the human tragedies mount.
In a country with the terrible distinction of having the second highest proportion of orphans in the world — one in four children has lost one or both parents — the closing of schools and hospitals is hitting these most vulnerable children mercilessly.
Aisha Makombo, 15, has been raising her 11-year-old sister, Khadija, since their mother died of AIDS last year. An expressive girl with a soft, round face, Aisha, who is H.I.V. negative, has been struggling to get drug treatment for Khadija, who is now sick with AIDS.
She took her little sister, so stunted she appears half her actual age, to Parirenyatwa Hospital, the nation’s largest referral hospital, last year, but crucial test results needed to qualify Khadija for life-saving medications were inexplicably misplaced.
On a later visit, Aisha was told the machine that performed the tests was broken. Now the hospital is virtually closed. Aisha said she was referred to private doctors who demanded payment in South African rand or American dollars, but the girls had no money.
Aisha’s eyes filled with tears as she explained that she had been able to obtain only cotrimoxazole, an antibiotic used to treat opportunistic infections, for her little sister.
Aisha used to escape the sadness of her life by going to school, but two months ago the teachers at her high school stopped showing up.
“She didn’t bid us farewell, she just left,” Aisha said of her math teacher, the one she misses most of all. “At first, we thought she would come back, but then we gave up hope.”
Aisha now scrambles to barter her labor for food, while her little sister, too weak to work, attends a small school run by a nonprofit group. Last week, Aisha started a four-day job, bent over in a field, readying it for planting. In exchange, she was to get two pounds of flour and a bottle of cooking oil, as well as a shirt and blouse for Khadija.
The girls pray together each night before going to sleep in the tiny, grubby, windowless room they share. The small house belongs to their grandfather, but he admitted it was Aisha who provided the food for him and her 45-year-old uncle who sometimes steals the cornmeal she earns, as well as the girls’ clothes to sell secondhand.
Yet the girls say they cling to their dreams. Aisha’s is to be a doctor, Khadija’s a bank teller, each hungering for what the sisters do not have — health and money for medicine and food.
Zimbabwe has one of the world’s highest rates of H.I.V. infection, and now a raging cholera crisis. But with the economic collapse decimating revenues needed to run the country’s public health systems, mortality rates among cholera victims here are five times higher than in other countries, public health experts said.
Mr. Mugabe’s government — in its pursuit of power and money — has also contributed to both catastrophes, analysts say.
Earlier this year, the government jeopardized $188 million in aid from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria by taking $7.3 million the organization had donated and spending it on other, unrelated expenses. Only at the 11th hour, under threat that the money would be withheld, did the government reimburse the Global Fund for the missing funds.
And two years ago, the government took control of Harare’s water and sewer systems from the opposition-controlled city council, depriving the local government of a crucial source of revenue to keep services functioning.
“The real motive was to dilute the influence of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change and cripple them financially,” said Justice Mavezenge, an officer with the Combined Harare Residents Association, a civic group.
Last week, even Mr. Mugabe’s mouthpiece, the newspaper The Herald, castigated the state-run water authority for running out of chemicals to purify Harare’s water supply — chemicals it said could have been trucked in from South Africa in less than 24 hours.
The United Nation’s Children’s Fund and international donors have stepped into the void. They have begun trucking 50 tankers of fresh water into the most densely settled suburbs and will be providing water treatment chemicals for the city over the next four months, said Unicef’s acting country director, Roeland Monasch.
But some aid officials fear that the epidemic will be impossible to contain because of the failing water and sanitation systems in places like Budiriro, the Harare suburb where the Chigudu children died and where half the country’s cases have occurred.
“We’re not going to be able to control it,” said one aid agency adviser, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution. “The likely scenario is that people who get sick in places like Budiriro will go home for the festive season and you’ll get flash points all over the rural areas.”
Cholera stole the five Chigudu children in just two days, on Nov. 17 and 18, and the grandmother and aunt who helped care for them died just days later. Their father, who returned home just hours after the last of his children died, got his first inkling of unspeakable calamity when his youngest ones weren’t there to clamber all over him as he walked in the door.
“I will never get my children back,” he said.
The death toll mounts each day. Chipo and Tecla Murape rushed their orphaned 5-year-old niece, Moisha, to the clinic in Chitungwiza, a city just south of Harare, last week. Nurses told the family the veins in the girl’s arms had collapsed because she had lost so much fluid. No doctor ever saw her, her relatives said, and the nurses never hit a vein. Moisha, a shy, but friendly girl, instead drank rehydration fluids.
Throughout the day, she complained of a terrible thirst and a stomachache. On the advice of clinic workers, her aunts did not even hold her hand as she lay dying, fearing infection. After night fell, the nurses said there was nothing more they could do and suggested that Moisha’s relatives take her to the city’s hospital, some two and a half miles away.
But there was no ambulance. Tecla Murape, 42, swaddled Moisha to her back and set off hurriedly for the hourlong walk, her heart pounding with worry. Under a dark, moonless sky, she took a shortcut through a maize field, leaping across yet another putrid sewage spill. By the time they arrived, Mrs. Murape’s clothes were soaked with Moisha’s watery diarrhea. Hours later, Moisha died.
December 13, 2008
U.S. Training in Africa Aims to Deter Extremists
By ERIC SCHMITT
KATI, Mali — Thousands of miles from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, another side of America’s fight against terrorism is unfolding in this remote corner of West Africa. American Green Berets are training African armies to guard their borders and patrol vast desolate expanses against infiltration by Al Qaeda’s militants, so the United States does not have to.
A recent exercise by the United States military here was part of a wide-ranging plan, developed after the Sept. 11 attacks, to take counterterrorism training and assistance to places outside the Middle East, like the Philippines and Indonesia. In Africa, a five-year, $500 million partnership between the State and Defense Departments includes Algeria, Chad, Mauritania, Mali, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Tunisia, and Libya is on the verge of joining.
American efforts to fight terrorism in the region also include nonmilitary programs, like instruction for teachers and job training for young Muslim men who could be singled out by militants’ recruiting campaigns.
One goal of the program is to act quickly in these countries before terrorism becomes as entrenched as it is in Somalia, an East African nation where there is a heightened militant threat. And unlike Somalia, Mali is willing and able to have dozens of American and European military trainers conduct exercises here, and its leaders are plainly worried about militants who have taken refuge in its vast Saharan north.
“Mali does not have the means to control its borders without the cooperation of the United States,” Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, a former prime minister, said in an interview.
More and a related video summarizing the essay linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/13/world ... &th&emc=th
****
December 13, 2008
Editorial
Nowhere to Hide
Here are the fruits of Robert Mugabe’s rule of horrors: political chaos, economic collapse, desperate food shortages, violence and now a fierce cholera epidemic. Eight-hundred people have died. More than 16,000 are infected, and there is no end in sight.
The increasingly delusional Mr. Mugabe — Zimbabwe’s illegitimate president — announced on Thursday that the cholera crisis is over. Tell that to the Chigudu family which, as The Times’s Celia Dugger reported, lost five children, aged 20 months to 12 years, in a matter of hours. Or to the World Health Organization, which warns that the crisis now poses a regional threat.
Mr. Mugabe blames the West for the epidemic that is spread by water contaminated with human excrement. The blame is all his. Water taps in the capital’s dense suburbs went dry last week, so people could not wash their hands or food. Hospitals are closed. Garbage is everywhere. Sludge spews from burst sewer lines.
The international community must provide emergency shipments of food, water purification tablets and anti-cholera drugs. The United States has allocated another $6.2 million for supplies like soap, rehydration tablets and water containers. Unfortunately, the dying will continue until Mr. Mugabe allows international health care workers to enter the country and do their jobs.
There will be no end to these horrors until Mr. Mugabe is gone. He stole this year’s election and has blocked a unity government. South Africa and other states that insist on an African-led solution to this crisis must stop enabling Mr. Mugabe and lead. They must renounce their recognition of Mr. Mugabe as president and press him and his cronies to cede power. The cholera epidemic, spilling into South Africa and other border states, shows there is nowhere to hide from Mr. Mugabe’s legacy.
U.S. Training in Africa Aims to Deter Extremists
By ERIC SCHMITT
KATI, Mali — Thousands of miles from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, another side of America’s fight against terrorism is unfolding in this remote corner of West Africa. American Green Berets are training African armies to guard their borders and patrol vast desolate expanses against infiltration by Al Qaeda’s militants, so the United States does not have to.
A recent exercise by the United States military here was part of a wide-ranging plan, developed after the Sept. 11 attacks, to take counterterrorism training and assistance to places outside the Middle East, like the Philippines and Indonesia. In Africa, a five-year, $500 million partnership between the State and Defense Departments includes Algeria, Chad, Mauritania, Mali, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Tunisia, and Libya is on the verge of joining.
American efforts to fight terrorism in the region also include nonmilitary programs, like instruction for teachers and job training for young Muslim men who could be singled out by militants’ recruiting campaigns.
One goal of the program is to act quickly in these countries before terrorism becomes as entrenched as it is in Somalia, an East African nation where there is a heightened militant threat. And unlike Somalia, Mali is willing and able to have dozens of American and European military trainers conduct exercises here, and its leaders are plainly worried about militants who have taken refuge in its vast Saharan north.
“Mali does not have the means to control its borders without the cooperation of the United States,” Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, a former prime minister, said in an interview.
More and a related video summarizing the essay linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/13/world ... &th&emc=th
****
December 13, 2008
Editorial
Nowhere to Hide
Here are the fruits of Robert Mugabe’s rule of horrors: political chaos, economic collapse, desperate food shortages, violence and now a fierce cholera epidemic. Eight-hundred people have died. More than 16,000 are infected, and there is no end in sight.
The increasingly delusional Mr. Mugabe — Zimbabwe’s illegitimate president — announced on Thursday that the cholera crisis is over. Tell that to the Chigudu family which, as The Times’s Celia Dugger reported, lost five children, aged 20 months to 12 years, in a matter of hours. Or to the World Health Organization, which warns that the crisis now poses a regional threat.
Mr. Mugabe blames the West for the epidemic that is spread by water contaminated with human excrement. The blame is all his. Water taps in the capital’s dense suburbs went dry last week, so people could not wash their hands or food. Hospitals are closed. Garbage is everywhere. Sludge spews from burst sewer lines.
The international community must provide emergency shipments of food, water purification tablets and anti-cholera drugs. The United States has allocated another $6.2 million for supplies like soap, rehydration tablets and water containers. Unfortunately, the dying will continue until Mr. Mugabe allows international health care workers to enter the country and do their jobs.
There will be no end to these horrors until Mr. Mugabe is gone. He stole this year’s election and has blocked a unity government. South Africa and other states that insist on an African-led solution to this crisis must stop enabling Mr. Mugabe and lead. They must renounce their recognition of Mr. Mugabe as president and press him and his cronies to cede power. The cholera epidemic, spilling into South Africa and other border states, shows there is nowhere to hide from Mr. Mugabe’s legacy.
December 15, 2008
The Spoils
Battle in a Poor Land for Riches Beneath the Soil
By LYDIA POLGREEN
AIR MOUNTAINS, Niger — Until last year, the only trigger Amoumoun Halil had pulled was the one on his livestock-vaccination gun. This spring, a battered Kalashnikov rifle rested uneasily on his shoulder. When he donned his stiff fatigues, his lopsided gait and smiling eyes stood out among his hard-faced guerrilla brethren.
Mr. Halil, a 40-year-old veterinary engineer, was a reluctant soldier in a rebellion that had broken out over an improbable — and as yet unrealized — bonanza in one of the world’s poorest countries.
A battle is unfolding on the stark mountains and scalloped dunes of northern Niger between a band of Tuareg nomads, who claim the riches beneath their homeland are being taken by a government that gives them little in return, and an army that calls the fighters drug traffickers and bandits.
It is a new front of an old war to control the vast wealth locked beneath African soil. Niger’s northern desert caps one of the world’s largest deposits of uranium, and demand for it has surged as global warming has increased interest in nuclear power. Growing economies like China and India are scouring the globe for the crumbly ore known as yellowcake. A French mining company is building the world’s largest uranium mine in northern Niger, and a Chinese state company is building another mine nearby.
Uranium could infuse Niger with enough cash to catapult it out of the kind of poverty that causes one in five Niger children to die before turning 5.
Or it could end in a calamitous war that leaves Niger more destitute than ever. Mineral wealth has fueled conflict across Africa for decades, a series of bloody, smash-and-grab rebellions that shattered nations. The misery wrought has left many Africans to conclude that mineral wealth is a curse.
More and a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/15/world ... .html?_r=1
The Spoils
Battle in a Poor Land for Riches Beneath the Soil
By LYDIA POLGREEN
AIR MOUNTAINS, Niger — Until last year, the only trigger Amoumoun Halil had pulled was the one on his livestock-vaccination gun. This spring, a battered Kalashnikov rifle rested uneasily on his shoulder. When he donned his stiff fatigues, his lopsided gait and smiling eyes stood out among his hard-faced guerrilla brethren.
Mr. Halil, a 40-year-old veterinary engineer, was a reluctant soldier in a rebellion that had broken out over an improbable — and as yet unrealized — bonanza in one of the world’s poorest countries.
A battle is unfolding on the stark mountains and scalloped dunes of northern Niger between a band of Tuareg nomads, who claim the riches beneath their homeland are being taken by a government that gives them little in return, and an army that calls the fighters drug traffickers and bandits.
It is a new front of an old war to control the vast wealth locked beneath African soil. Niger’s northern desert caps one of the world’s largest deposits of uranium, and demand for it has surged as global warming has increased interest in nuclear power. Growing economies like China and India are scouring the globe for the crumbly ore known as yellowcake. A French mining company is building the world’s largest uranium mine in northern Niger, and a Chinese state company is building another mine nearby.
Uranium could infuse Niger with enough cash to catapult it out of the kind of poverty that causes one in five Niger children to die before turning 5.
Or it could end in a calamitous war that leaves Niger more destitute than ever. Mineral wealth has fueled conflict across Africa for decades, a series of bloody, smash-and-grab rebellions that shattered nations. The misery wrought has left many Africans to conclude that mineral wealth is a curse.
More and a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/15/world ... .html?_r=1
December 16, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Can Africa Trade Its Way to Peace?
By HERMAN J. COHEN
Washington
THE conflict in eastern Congo over the past 12 years has been as much a surrogate war between Congo and neighboring Rwanda as an internal ethnic insurgency, as a United Nations report underscored last week. The only way to end a war that has caused five million deaths and forced millions to flee their homes in Congo’s two eastern provinces is to address the conflict’s international dimensions. The role of Rwanda — which borders the provinces and which denied the accusations in the United Nations report over the weekend — is of prime importance.
The international community has worked hard to resolve the conflicts among the various parties: the sovereign states of Rwanda and Congo as well as the assorted militias and private armies that are sponsored by these two governments and by opportunistic local warlords. But despite the deployment of 17,000 United Nations peacekeepers, and many efforts at mediation with constructive American support, the situation appears intractable.
The failure of international diplomacy is related to the economic roots of the problem, which began with the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Until the economic conundrum is addressed, there is little prospect for a solution.
The genocidal war between the majority Hutu and the minority Tutsi in Rwanda spilled into Congo, and the eastern part of that vast country has been unstable ever since. When Tutsi rebel forces took power in Rwanda in June 1994, more than a million Hutu fled to Congo, where they settled into refugee camps on the Rwandan border.
After two years of cross-border raids from the refugee camps by exiled Hutu soldiers who had participated in the genocide, the Rwandan Army attacked and destroyed the camps, with the quiet but unambiguous approval of the United States in the absence of another solution to the violence. Most of the Hutu refugees returned to Rwanda, but about 100,000 of them, along with the exiled Hutu soldiers, moved westward as a disciplined group into Congo’s interior.
The Rwandan Army pursued the escaping Hutu and caught up with them near the city of Kisangani at the headwaters of the Congo River. The refugees were massacred, but the former Hutu soldiers escaped to neighboring countries.
The move against the refugee camps was the first step in a well-planned action by Rwanda in 1996 and 1997 to overwhelm the weak Congolese Army and, with the help of the Congolese opposition, overthrow the 30-year dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko. With logistical support from Uganda and Angola, the military action succeeded in less than three months. A new government in Congo was installed under President Laurent Kabila, an exile handpicked by the Rwandans.
And from 1996 to today, the Tutsi-led Rwandan government has been in effective control of Congo’s eastern provinces of North and South Kivu. This control has been maintained through intermittent military occupation and the presence of Congolese militias financed and trained by the Rwandan Army.
During these 12 years of Rwandan control, the mineral-rich provinces have been economically integrated into Rwanda. During this time, Congo’s governments have been preoccupied with internal and external wars elsewhere, and have been unable to combat foreign control of the eastern provinces, a thousand miles from the capital, Kinshasa.
But two years ago, Congo held multiparty elections that were judged to be transparent and credible by international observers. For the first time in a decade, there was hope for stability. President Joseph Kabila (the son of Laurent Kabila, who was assassinated in 2001) turned his attention to trying to gain control of the eastern provinces.
Unfortunately, this has led to increased conflict and suffering. The main source of the current violence is an insurgent force of ethnic Congolese Tutsi commanded by Laurent Nkunda, a former general in the Congolese Army. He claims to be fighting to defend the Tutsi community from discrimination and from the former Rwandan Hutu fighters who have returned from neighboring countries and now operate in the forested hills of eastern Congo.
General Nkunda’s military operations, however, are aimed mainly against the Congolese Army’s efforts to restore Congo’s sovereignty over its eastern provinces. His force is well armed and financed by the Rwandan government. The armed Hutu presence in the provinces provides the Rwandan government with a pretext to justify its interference there.
Having controlled the Kivu provinces for 12 years, Rwanda will not relinquish access to resources that constitute a significant percentage of its gross national product. At the same time, Congo’s government is within its rights to take control of the resources there for the benefit of the Congolese people. This economic conflict must be taken into account.
This provides an opportunity for the incoming Obama administration. Acts of war and military occupation aside, there is a natural economic synergy between eastern Congo and the nations of East Africa, including Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda. The normal flow of trade from eastern Congo is to Indian Ocean ports rather than the Atlantic Ocean, which is more than a thousand miles away.
After his inauguration, Barack Obama should appoint a special negotiator who would propose a framework for an economic common market encompassing Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. This agreement would allow the free movement of people and trade. It would give Rwandan businesses continued access to Congolese minerals and forests. The products made from those raw materials would continue to be exported through Rwanda. The big change would be the payment of royalties and taxes to the Congolese government. For most Rwandan businesses, those payments would be offset by increased revenues.
In addition, the free movement of people would empty the refugee camps and would allow the densely populated countries of Rwanda and Burundi to supply needed labor to Congo and Tanzania.
If such a common market could be negotiated, Rwanda and Congo would no longer need to finance and arm militias to wage war over the natural resources in Congo’s eastern provinces. Without government backing, the fighting groups would either dissolve on their own or be integrated into legitimate armed forces.
If undertaken with enough will and persistence, an American-led mediation to create a common market in East Africa could end the war and transform the region.
Herman J. Cohen was the assistant secretary of state for Africa from 1989 to 1993.
****
December 16, 2008
Pirates Outmaneuver Warships Off Somalia
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
ON THE ARABIAN SEA — Rear Adm. Giovanni Gumiero is going on a pirate hunt.
From the deck of an Italian destroyer cruising the pirate-infested waters off Somalia’s coast, he has all the modern tools at his fingertips — radar, sonar, infrared cameras, helicopters, a cannon that can sink a ship 10 miles away — to take on a centuries-old problem that harks back to the days of schooners and eye patches.
“Our presence will deter them,” the admiral said confidently.
But the wily buccaneers of Somalia’s seas do not seem especially deterred — instead, they seem to be getting only wilier. More than a dozen warships from Italy, Greece, Turkey, India, Denmark, Saudi Arabia, France, Russia, Britain, Malaysia and the United States have joined the hunt.
And yet, in the past two months alone, the pirates have attacked more than 30 vessels, eluding the naval patrols, going farther out to sea and seeking bigger, more lucrative game, including an American cruise ship and a 1,000-foot Saudi oil tanker.
The pirates are recalibrating their tactics, attacking ships in beelike swarms of 20 to 30 skiffs, and threatening to choke off one of the busiest shipping arteries in the world, at the mouth of the Red Sea.
United Nations officials recently estimated that Somali pirates had netted as much as $120 million this year in ransom payments — an astronomical sum for a country whose economy has been gutted by 17 years of chaos and war. Some shipping companies are now rerouting their vessels to avoid Somalia’s waters, detouring thousands of miles around the Cape of Good Hope, at the southern tip of Africa.
More and a related video at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/world ... &th&emc=th
Op-Ed Contributor
Can Africa Trade Its Way to Peace?
By HERMAN J. COHEN
Washington
THE conflict in eastern Congo over the past 12 years has been as much a surrogate war between Congo and neighboring Rwanda as an internal ethnic insurgency, as a United Nations report underscored last week. The only way to end a war that has caused five million deaths and forced millions to flee their homes in Congo’s two eastern provinces is to address the conflict’s international dimensions. The role of Rwanda — which borders the provinces and which denied the accusations in the United Nations report over the weekend — is of prime importance.
The international community has worked hard to resolve the conflicts among the various parties: the sovereign states of Rwanda and Congo as well as the assorted militias and private armies that are sponsored by these two governments and by opportunistic local warlords. But despite the deployment of 17,000 United Nations peacekeepers, and many efforts at mediation with constructive American support, the situation appears intractable.
The failure of international diplomacy is related to the economic roots of the problem, which began with the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Until the economic conundrum is addressed, there is little prospect for a solution.
The genocidal war between the majority Hutu and the minority Tutsi in Rwanda spilled into Congo, and the eastern part of that vast country has been unstable ever since. When Tutsi rebel forces took power in Rwanda in June 1994, more than a million Hutu fled to Congo, where they settled into refugee camps on the Rwandan border.
After two years of cross-border raids from the refugee camps by exiled Hutu soldiers who had participated in the genocide, the Rwandan Army attacked and destroyed the camps, with the quiet but unambiguous approval of the United States in the absence of another solution to the violence. Most of the Hutu refugees returned to Rwanda, but about 100,000 of them, along with the exiled Hutu soldiers, moved westward as a disciplined group into Congo’s interior.
The Rwandan Army pursued the escaping Hutu and caught up with them near the city of Kisangani at the headwaters of the Congo River. The refugees were massacred, but the former Hutu soldiers escaped to neighboring countries.
The move against the refugee camps was the first step in a well-planned action by Rwanda in 1996 and 1997 to overwhelm the weak Congolese Army and, with the help of the Congolese opposition, overthrow the 30-year dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko. With logistical support from Uganda and Angola, the military action succeeded in less than three months. A new government in Congo was installed under President Laurent Kabila, an exile handpicked by the Rwandans.
And from 1996 to today, the Tutsi-led Rwandan government has been in effective control of Congo’s eastern provinces of North and South Kivu. This control has been maintained through intermittent military occupation and the presence of Congolese militias financed and trained by the Rwandan Army.
During these 12 years of Rwandan control, the mineral-rich provinces have been economically integrated into Rwanda. During this time, Congo’s governments have been preoccupied with internal and external wars elsewhere, and have been unable to combat foreign control of the eastern provinces, a thousand miles from the capital, Kinshasa.
But two years ago, Congo held multiparty elections that were judged to be transparent and credible by international observers. For the first time in a decade, there was hope for stability. President Joseph Kabila (the son of Laurent Kabila, who was assassinated in 2001) turned his attention to trying to gain control of the eastern provinces.
Unfortunately, this has led to increased conflict and suffering. The main source of the current violence is an insurgent force of ethnic Congolese Tutsi commanded by Laurent Nkunda, a former general in the Congolese Army. He claims to be fighting to defend the Tutsi community from discrimination and from the former Rwandan Hutu fighters who have returned from neighboring countries and now operate in the forested hills of eastern Congo.
General Nkunda’s military operations, however, are aimed mainly against the Congolese Army’s efforts to restore Congo’s sovereignty over its eastern provinces. His force is well armed and financed by the Rwandan government. The armed Hutu presence in the provinces provides the Rwandan government with a pretext to justify its interference there.
Having controlled the Kivu provinces for 12 years, Rwanda will not relinquish access to resources that constitute a significant percentage of its gross national product. At the same time, Congo’s government is within its rights to take control of the resources there for the benefit of the Congolese people. This economic conflict must be taken into account.
This provides an opportunity for the incoming Obama administration. Acts of war and military occupation aside, there is a natural economic synergy between eastern Congo and the nations of East Africa, including Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda. The normal flow of trade from eastern Congo is to Indian Ocean ports rather than the Atlantic Ocean, which is more than a thousand miles away.
After his inauguration, Barack Obama should appoint a special negotiator who would propose a framework for an economic common market encompassing Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. This agreement would allow the free movement of people and trade. It would give Rwandan businesses continued access to Congolese minerals and forests. The products made from those raw materials would continue to be exported through Rwanda. The big change would be the payment of royalties and taxes to the Congolese government. For most Rwandan businesses, those payments would be offset by increased revenues.
In addition, the free movement of people would empty the refugee camps and would allow the densely populated countries of Rwanda and Burundi to supply needed labor to Congo and Tanzania.
If such a common market could be negotiated, Rwanda and Congo would no longer need to finance and arm militias to wage war over the natural resources in Congo’s eastern provinces. Without government backing, the fighting groups would either dissolve on their own or be integrated into legitimate armed forces.
If undertaken with enough will and persistence, an American-led mediation to create a common market in East Africa could end the war and transform the region.
Herman J. Cohen was the assistant secretary of state for Africa from 1989 to 1993.
****
December 16, 2008
Pirates Outmaneuver Warships Off Somalia
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
ON THE ARABIAN SEA — Rear Adm. Giovanni Gumiero is going on a pirate hunt.
From the deck of an Italian destroyer cruising the pirate-infested waters off Somalia’s coast, he has all the modern tools at his fingertips — radar, sonar, infrared cameras, helicopters, a cannon that can sink a ship 10 miles away — to take on a centuries-old problem that harks back to the days of schooners and eye patches.
“Our presence will deter them,” the admiral said confidently.
But the wily buccaneers of Somalia’s seas do not seem especially deterred — instead, they seem to be getting only wilier. More than a dozen warships from Italy, Greece, Turkey, India, Denmark, Saudi Arabia, France, Russia, Britain, Malaysia and the United States have joined the hunt.
And yet, in the past two months alone, the pirates have attacked more than 30 vessels, eluding the naval patrols, going farther out to sea and seeking bigger, more lucrative game, including an American cruise ship and a 1,000-foot Saudi oil tanker.
The pirates are recalibrating their tactics, attacking ships in beelike swarms of 20 to 30 skiffs, and threatening to choke off one of the busiest shipping arteries in the world, at the mouth of the Red Sea.
United Nations officials recently estimated that Somali pirates had netted as much as $120 million this year in ransom payments — an astronomical sum for a country whose economy has been gutted by 17 years of chaos and war. Some shipping companies are now rerouting their vessels to avoid Somalia’s waters, detouring thousands of miles around the Cape of Good Hope, at the southern tip of Africa.
More and a related video at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/world ... &th&emc=th
There is a related video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/world ... &th&emc=th
December 21, 2008
Angry Youths Become a Force in Darfur
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
HAMIDIYA CAMP, Sudan — The sheik was in a panic.
The agitated youth in this West Darfur refugee camp, young men and adolescents who traditionally would have deferred to his authority, had gotten wind of his presence at a ceremony also attended by an official with the Sudanese government, their longtime antagonists.
Terrified that the youths would accuse him of treason, the sheik begged United Nations officials to rush to his aid and vouch that he had not even broached the topic of compromise involving his people’s cause.
The youths are known collectively as the “shabab,” the Arabic word for young men. And they have become a vehemently pro-rebel political force in the camps for the 2.7 million people displaced by years of war between the Arab-dominated Sudanese government and rebels in the Darfur region of Sudan.
Increasingly angry and outspoken about their uncertain fate, the generation that came of age in the camps is challenging the traditional sheiks, upending the age-old authority structure of their tribal society and complicating efforts to achieve peace.
“They are much more extreme than the sheiks,” said the United Nations official who related the episode of the frightened sheik, speaking anonymously to avoid jeopardizing his own acceptance among the shabab. “And they are hotheaded.”
Eleven tribal sheiks around Zalingei — where Hamadiya is one of five refugee camps housing 120,000 people — have been killed since the beginning of 2007. One sheik was found with a nail hammered into his forehead. Another was shot at point-blank range. The cases remain unsolved, but some suspicion falls on the shabab.
“The sheiks and the traditional leaders have been influenced by the government, so the young people don’t believe that the sheiks are still loyal to both the cause and the people of Darfur,” said Abdallah Adam Khater, a Khartoum-based publisher and political writer from Darfur. The word influenced is a local euphemism for bribed.
More in the above mentioned link.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/world ... &th&emc=th
December 21, 2008
Angry Youths Become a Force in Darfur
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
HAMIDIYA CAMP, Sudan — The sheik was in a panic.
The agitated youth in this West Darfur refugee camp, young men and adolescents who traditionally would have deferred to his authority, had gotten wind of his presence at a ceremony also attended by an official with the Sudanese government, their longtime antagonists.
Terrified that the youths would accuse him of treason, the sheik begged United Nations officials to rush to his aid and vouch that he had not even broached the topic of compromise involving his people’s cause.
The youths are known collectively as the “shabab,” the Arabic word for young men. And they have become a vehemently pro-rebel political force in the camps for the 2.7 million people displaced by years of war between the Arab-dominated Sudanese government and rebels in the Darfur region of Sudan.
Increasingly angry and outspoken about their uncertain fate, the generation that came of age in the camps is challenging the traditional sheiks, upending the age-old authority structure of their tribal society and complicating efforts to achieve peace.
“They are much more extreme than the sheiks,” said the United Nations official who related the episode of the frightened sheik, speaking anonymously to avoid jeopardizing his own acceptance among the shabab. “And they are hotheaded.”
Eleven tribal sheiks around Zalingei — where Hamadiya is one of five refugee camps housing 120,000 people — have been killed since the beginning of 2007. One sheik was found with a nail hammered into his forehead. Another was shot at point-blank range. The cases remain unsolved, but some suspicion falls on the shabab.
“The sheiks and the traditional leaders have been influenced by the government, so the young people don’t believe that the sheiks are still loyal to both the cause and the people of Darfur,” said Abdallah Adam Khater, a Khartoum-based publisher and political writer from Darfur. The word influenced is a local euphemism for bribed.
More in the above mentioned link.
December 22, 2008
In Zimbabwe, Survival Lies in Scavenging
By CELIA W. DUGGER
NZVERE, Zimbabwe — Along a road in Matabeleland, barefoot children stuff their pockets with corn kernels that have blown off a truck as if the brownish bits, good only for animal feed in normal times, were gold coins.
In the dirt lanes of Chitungwiza, the Mugarwes, a family of firewood hawkers, bake a loaf of bread, their only meal, with 11 slices for the six of them. All devour two slices except the youngest, age 2. He gets just one.
And on the tiny farms here in the region of Mashonaland, once a breadbasket for all of southern Africa, destitute villagers pull the shells off wriggling crickets and beetles, then toss what is left in a hot pan. “If you get that, you have a meal,” said Standford Nhira, a spectrally thin farmer whose rib cage is etched on his chest and whose socks have collapsed around his sticklike ankles.
The half-starved haunt the once bountiful landscape of Zimbabwe, where a recent United Nations survey found that 7 in 10 people had eaten either nothing or only a single meal the day before.
Still dominated after nearly three decades by their authoritarian president, Robert Mugabe, Zimbabweans are now enduring their seventh straight year of hunger. This largely man-made crisis, occasionally worsened by drought and erratic rains, has been brought on by catastrophic agricultural policies, sweeping economic collapse and a ruling party that has used farmland and food as weapons in its ruthless — and so far successful — quest to hang on to power.
But this year is different. This year, the hunger is much worse.
Photo and more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/world ... &th&emc=th
In Zimbabwe, Survival Lies in Scavenging
By CELIA W. DUGGER
NZVERE, Zimbabwe — Along a road in Matabeleland, barefoot children stuff their pockets with corn kernels that have blown off a truck as if the brownish bits, good only for animal feed in normal times, were gold coins.
In the dirt lanes of Chitungwiza, the Mugarwes, a family of firewood hawkers, bake a loaf of bread, their only meal, with 11 slices for the six of them. All devour two slices except the youngest, age 2. He gets just one.
And on the tiny farms here in the region of Mashonaland, once a breadbasket for all of southern Africa, destitute villagers pull the shells off wriggling crickets and beetles, then toss what is left in a hot pan. “If you get that, you have a meal,” said Standford Nhira, a spectrally thin farmer whose rib cage is etched on his chest and whose socks have collapsed around his sticklike ankles.
The half-starved haunt the once bountiful landscape of Zimbabwe, where a recent United Nations survey found that 7 in 10 people had eaten either nothing or only a single meal the day before.
Still dominated after nearly three decades by their authoritarian president, Robert Mugabe, Zimbabweans are now enduring their seventh straight year of hunger. This largely man-made crisis, occasionally worsened by drought and erratic rains, has been brought on by catastrophic agricultural policies, sweeping economic collapse and a ruling party that has used farmland and food as weapons in its ruthless — and so far successful — quest to hang on to power.
But this year is different. This year, the hunger is much worse.
Photo and more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/world ... &th&emc=th
December 23, 2008
Ghana’s Image, Glowing Abroad, Is Beginning to Show a Few Blemishes at Home
By LYDIA POLGREEN
ACCRA, Ghana — Just a few years ago, democracy’s march across Africa seemed unstoppable. These days, it seems stalled: vote rigging in Nigeria, a convulsion of ethnic violence after disputed elections in Kenya and outright theft at the polls in Zimbabwe are among the most recent signs.
That may be why those looking for reasons to be hopeful about democracy in Africa have their sights set on Ghana, the first sub-Saharan country to wrest independence from colonial power, and now a nation that appears to be bucking the antidemocratic trend. Elections to choose a new president and Parliament on Dec. 7 went smoothly and without violence. A runoff will be held Sunday between the two top presidential contenders.
“In Ghana, we know how to have a democracy,” said Doris Quartey, a teacher who planned to vote for the governing party. “We are an example for the whole continent.”
Ghana has long been a favorite of foreign donors and Western governments in a region often known for brutal civil wars, corruption and tyranny. With its growing economy and squeaky-clean image, Ghana is a frequently cited success story.
Yet roiling just below the surface are tensions over how the country has been governed, who is benefiting from economic growth and whether corruption is on the rise. Some people here worry that the country’s image as a bastion of peace and democracy is merely a sign of the low expectations outsiders have for Africa.
“Let’s allow that Ghana has achieved some things,” said Yao Graham
Photo and more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/world ... wanted=all
Ghana’s Image, Glowing Abroad, Is Beginning to Show a Few Blemishes at Home
By LYDIA POLGREEN
ACCRA, Ghana — Just a few years ago, democracy’s march across Africa seemed unstoppable. These days, it seems stalled: vote rigging in Nigeria, a convulsion of ethnic violence after disputed elections in Kenya and outright theft at the polls in Zimbabwe are among the most recent signs.
That may be why those looking for reasons to be hopeful about democracy in Africa have their sights set on Ghana, the first sub-Saharan country to wrest independence from colonial power, and now a nation that appears to be bucking the antidemocratic trend. Elections to choose a new president and Parliament on Dec. 7 went smoothly and without violence. A runoff will be held Sunday between the two top presidential contenders.
“In Ghana, we know how to have a democracy,” said Doris Quartey, a teacher who planned to vote for the governing party. “We are an example for the whole continent.”
Ghana has long been a favorite of foreign donors and Western governments in a region often known for brutal civil wars, corruption and tyranny. With its growing economy and squeaky-clean image, Ghana is a frequently cited success story.
Yet roiling just below the surface are tensions over how the country has been governed, who is benefiting from economic growth and whether corruption is on the rise. Some people here worry that the country’s image as a bastion of peace and democracy is merely a sign of the low expectations outsiders have for Africa.
“Let’s allow that Ghana has achieved some things,” said Yao Graham
Photo and more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/world ... wanted=all
December 24, 2008
Coup Attempt in Guinea After Strongman Dies
By ALAN COWELL
LONDON — The 24-year reign of Guinea’s president, one of Africa’s longest-ruling strongmen, ended in confusion and chaos on Tuesday as a group of soldiers seized on his death to proclaim a coup that was immediately challenged by government officials.
Troops in armored personnel carriers took to the streets of Conakry, the capital of Guinea, an impoverished West African state, but there were no immediate reports of bloodshed, according to news agencies. Rather, the “putsch,” as one lawmaker called it, began to unfold in time-honored fashion with a group of officers taking control of the airwaves to announce that the Constitution and the government had been suspended.
Soon afterward, the government denied the claim. Prime Minister Ahmed Tidiane Souaré said in a state broadcast that he was speaking from his office and that his government “continues to function as it should,” The Associated Press reported.
The prime minister was responding to statements by a uniformed army officer on state television and radio that a group calling itself the National Council for Democracy and Development was “taking charge of the destiny of the Guinean people,” news agencies reported.
“The Constitution is dissolved,” the officer was quoted as saying. “The government is dissolved. The institutions of the republic are dissolved.”
President Lansana Conté, 74, whose death on Monday after a long, unspecified illness was announced in the early hours of Tuesday, belonged to a generation of African leaders — the so-called Big Men — who seized power through the gun and ruled ruthlessly.
The claimed coup attempt mirrored Mr. Conté’s own rise to power in a military takeover in 1984, after the death of his predecessor, Ahmed Sékou Touré. Mr. Touré ruled with an iron fist when the country became independent from France in 1958.
Underpinned by the army, each man ran the country as a personal domain, crushing dissent while Guinea’s 10 million people slipped ever deeper into grinding poverty. Despite potential riches from agriculture and minerals — in particular, the world’s largest deposits of bauxite, used to make aluminum — Guinea ranks among the world’s poorest countries.
Mr. Conté faced at least two attempts by military elements to eject him from office. He formed a political party to win elections in 1993, 1998 and 2003, but the ballots were widely depicted by independent monitors as fraudulent.
Mr. Conté’s ill health was an open secret among his people for many months, but he did not groom a successor, leaving a power vacuum that some officers and soldiers apparently sought to fill.
There was some doubt about the military’s appetite for a takeover.
“It’s a minority of soldiers and officers,” the president of the National Assembly, Aboubacar Somparé, told a French television station, France 24. “Guinea is now lawless and going through a restless transition,” he said, calling the claimed mutiny a “putsch.”
“We have heard that officers are negotiating among themselves,” he added. “We are waiting for the results.”
Guinea’s chaos underscored concern about the future of multiparty rule in Africa only a few years after the continent seemed to be enjoying a steady blossoming of democracy. In the last two years, the setbacks have included rigged ballots in Nigeria and violence after disputed elections in Kenya and Zimbabwe.
The African Union, the continent’s biggest representative group, expressed concern about the military’s action in Guinea.
Agence France-Presse said the takeover was announced by a military captain called Moussa Dadis Camara, who said a “consultative council” of civilian and military personnel would run the country to combat “deep despair,” revive the economy and fight corruption.
The military broadcast, starting around 7:30 a.m. local time, followed a night of confusion. According to news reports, Mr. Conté’s death was announced at 2 a.m. at a news conference of civilian and military leaders. Mr. Somparé, the president of the National Assembly, urged the Supreme Court to follow the Constitution and name him president.
Mr. Conté’s stewardship of Guinea drew widespread accusations of abuse from human rights monitors. In August, Human Rights Watch said in an assessment that Guinea had “been rocked by civil unrest that has typically been met with brutal and excessive use of force by government security forces.”
“In January and February 2007, security forces violently repressed a nationwide strike called to protest corruption, bad governance and deteriorating economic conditions, resulting in the deaths of more than 130 protesters,” the assessment said. Human Rights Watch also cited evidence of police torture of detainees to extract confessions, among other abuses.
The reported coup attempt on Tuesday followed signs of a profound malaise in the country, verging on mass unrest.
Last month, frustrated youths took to the crumbling streets of Conakry for three days, throwing stones and setting tires on fire in escalating protests over high gas prices. Witnesses said that at least one person was killed when government troops shot at demonstrators.
The threat of a coup emerged long before Tuesday. In May, soldiers took the army’s second in command as a hostage to protest poor pay and living conditions.
Coup Attempt in Guinea After Strongman Dies
By ALAN COWELL
LONDON — The 24-year reign of Guinea’s president, one of Africa’s longest-ruling strongmen, ended in confusion and chaos on Tuesday as a group of soldiers seized on his death to proclaim a coup that was immediately challenged by government officials.
Troops in armored personnel carriers took to the streets of Conakry, the capital of Guinea, an impoverished West African state, but there were no immediate reports of bloodshed, according to news agencies. Rather, the “putsch,” as one lawmaker called it, began to unfold in time-honored fashion with a group of officers taking control of the airwaves to announce that the Constitution and the government had been suspended.
Soon afterward, the government denied the claim. Prime Minister Ahmed Tidiane Souaré said in a state broadcast that he was speaking from his office and that his government “continues to function as it should,” The Associated Press reported.
The prime minister was responding to statements by a uniformed army officer on state television and radio that a group calling itself the National Council for Democracy and Development was “taking charge of the destiny of the Guinean people,” news agencies reported.
“The Constitution is dissolved,” the officer was quoted as saying. “The government is dissolved. The institutions of the republic are dissolved.”
President Lansana Conté, 74, whose death on Monday after a long, unspecified illness was announced in the early hours of Tuesday, belonged to a generation of African leaders — the so-called Big Men — who seized power through the gun and ruled ruthlessly.
The claimed coup attempt mirrored Mr. Conté’s own rise to power in a military takeover in 1984, after the death of his predecessor, Ahmed Sékou Touré. Mr. Touré ruled with an iron fist when the country became independent from France in 1958.
Underpinned by the army, each man ran the country as a personal domain, crushing dissent while Guinea’s 10 million people slipped ever deeper into grinding poverty. Despite potential riches from agriculture and minerals — in particular, the world’s largest deposits of bauxite, used to make aluminum — Guinea ranks among the world’s poorest countries.
Mr. Conté faced at least two attempts by military elements to eject him from office. He formed a political party to win elections in 1993, 1998 and 2003, but the ballots were widely depicted by independent monitors as fraudulent.
Mr. Conté’s ill health was an open secret among his people for many months, but he did not groom a successor, leaving a power vacuum that some officers and soldiers apparently sought to fill.
There was some doubt about the military’s appetite for a takeover.
“It’s a minority of soldiers and officers,” the president of the National Assembly, Aboubacar Somparé, told a French television station, France 24. “Guinea is now lawless and going through a restless transition,” he said, calling the claimed mutiny a “putsch.”
“We have heard that officers are negotiating among themselves,” he added. “We are waiting for the results.”
Guinea’s chaos underscored concern about the future of multiparty rule in Africa only a few years after the continent seemed to be enjoying a steady blossoming of democracy. In the last two years, the setbacks have included rigged ballots in Nigeria and violence after disputed elections in Kenya and Zimbabwe.
The African Union, the continent’s biggest representative group, expressed concern about the military’s action in Guinea.
Agence France-Presse said the takeover was announced by a military captain called Moussa Dadis Camara, who said a “consultative council” of civilian and military personnel would run the country to combat “deep despair,” revive the economy and fight corruption.
The military broadcast, starting around 7:30 a.m. local time, followed a night of confusion. According to news reports, Mr. Conté’s death was announced at 2 a.m. at a news conference of civilian and military leaders. Mr. Somparé, the president of the National Assembly, urged the Supreme Court to follow the Constitution and name him president.
Mr. Conté’s stewardship of Guinea drew widespread accusations of abuse from human rights monitors. In August, Human Rights Watch said in an assessment that Guinea had “been rocked by civil unrest that has typically been met with brutal and excessive use of force by government security forces.”
“In January and February 2007, security forces violently repressed a nationwide strike called to protest corruption, bad governance and deteriorating economic conditions, resulting in the deaths of more than 130 protesters,” the assessment said. Human Rights Watch also cited evidence of police torture of detainees to extract confessions, among other abuses.
The reported coup attempt on Tuesday followed signs of a profound malaise in the country, verging on mass unrest.
Last month, frustrated youths took to the crumbling streets of Conakry for three days, throwing stones and setting tires on fire in escalating protests over high gas prices. Witnesses said that at least one person was killed when government troops shot at demonstrators.
The threat of a coup emerged long before Tuesday. In May, soldiers took the army’s second in command as a hostage to protest poor pay and living conditions.
December 28, 2008
White Farmers Confront Mugabe in a Legal Battle
By CELIA W. DUGGER
Gruesome photo at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/world ... nted=print
CHEGUTU, Zimbabwe — Edna Madzongwe, president of the Senate and a powerful member of Zimbabwe’s ruling party, began showing up uninvited at the Etheredges’ farm here last year, at times still dressed up after a day in Parliament.
And she made her intentions clear, the Etheredges say: she wanted their farm and intended to get it through the government’s land redistribution program.
The farm is a beautiful spread, with three roomy farm houses and a lush, 55,000-tree orange orchard that generates $4 million a year in exports. The Etheredges, outraged by what they saw as her attempt to steal the farm, secretly taped their exchanges with her.
“Are you really serious to tell me that I cannot take up residence because of what it does to you?” she asked Richard Etheredge, 72, whose father bought the farm in 1947. “Government takes what it wants.”
He dryly replied, “That we don’t deny,” according to a transcript of the tapes.
Mr. Etheredge this year became one of dozens of white farmers to challenge the government’s right to confiscate their land, and they sought relief in an unusual place: a tribunal of African judges established by the 15 nations of the Southern African Development Community regional trade bloc.
The case is rooted in one of the most fraught issues facing not just Zimbabwe, but other nations in the region, especially South Africa: the unjust division of land between whites and blacks that is a legacy of colonialism and white minority rule.
But the tribunal’s recent ruling, in favor of the white farmers, is also a milestone of particular relevance to Zimbabwe. It suggests that a growing number of influential Africans — among them religious leaders and now jurists — are confronting Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s 84-year-old liberation hero and president, for his government’s violations of human rights and the rule of law, even as most regional heads of state continue to resist taking harsher steps to isolate his government.
Zimbabwe’s handling of the land issue has had disastrous consequences. Since 2000, when Mr. Mugabe began encouraging the violent invasion of the country’s large, white-owned commercial farms — once the country’s largest employers — food production has collapsed, hunger has afflicted millions and the economy has never recovered.
Mr. Mugabe presents this redistribution as a triumph over greedy whites. But it set off a scramble for the best farms among the country’s ruling elite, who often had little knowledge or interest in farming, and became a potent source of patronage for Mr. Mugabe. His own relatives, as well as generals, judges, ministers and members of Parliament, were beneficiaries, farmer and human rights groups say.
By this year, the number of white-owned commercial farms dwindled to about 300 from 4,500. Even many of the remaining ones came under assault in this year’s bloodstained election season.
Among those singled out were farms here in Chegutu, where some owners had dared to take their cases to the S.A.D.C. tribunal, challenging Mr. Mugabe before judges he could not entice with gifts of land.
In March, the tribunal ordered the Zimbabwean authorities not to evict any farmers seeking legal protection, pending resolution of the case. But as with other international efforts to influence Mr. Mugabe and his allies, Zimbabwean authorities apparently decided to ignore the tribunal’s order.
On June 17 — just 10 days before the discredited presidential runoff between Mr. Mugabe and his rival, Morgan Tsvangirai — dozens of youths led by a man named Gilbert Moyo surrounded Mr. Etheredge’s son, Peter, 38, at the main gate of the farm, family members said.
“Moyo told me he’d been sent by Edna,” Peter recalled, referring to Mrs. Madzongwe, the Senate president. Peter said Mr. Moyo threatened to kill him if the Etheredge clan did not clear off the farm immediately.
Peter, his twin, James, and their families fled.
Mrs. Madzongwe denied hiring Mr. Moyo and his gang. “If a farm is acquired, there are rules,” she said in a recent telephone interview. “I go by the book.”
But Jason Lawrence Cox, a local farmer, swore in an affidavit that he saw her on June 21 drive past piles of the Etheredges’ belongings, dumped at the side of the road, and onto their farm.
The gang had looted the three family homes on the farm of all but the large mounted heads of an eland and a kudu, according to photos taken before and after the invasion. They used a jackhammer to break through the foot-thick wall of the walk-in safe. The haul from the homes and the farm included 1,760 pounds of ivory, 14 handmade guns, 14 refrigerators and freezers, 5 stoves, 3 tractors, a pickup truck and 400 tons of oranges, the family said.
Eleven days later, a far more violent farm invasion occurred at the home of Mike and Angela Campbell, also here in Chegutu. Mr. Campbell, 76, was the first farmer to take on Mr. Mugabe before the tribunal.
A gang came that Sunday afternoon, pouring out of a pickup truck and a bus, Mrs. Campbell said. Her son-in-law, Ben Freeth, 38, said that he was bludgeoned with rifle butts and that his skull and ribs were fractured. Mike Campbell was also severely beaten.
Mrs. Campbell, 66, said she was dragged by her hair, after her arm was broken in multiple places, and dumped next to her husband. The doctor who treated them in the capital, Harare, signed affidavits confirming the severity of their injuries.
“Mike was so battered, I hardly recognized him,” Mrs. Campbell said. “I didn’t know he was alive until he groaned.” The three of them were loaded into the Campbells’ truck and driven to a nighttime vigil of youth loyal to the ruling party at Mr. Moyo’s base camp, she said.
It was cold, and men poured freezing water over them. Mr. Campbell drifted in and out of consciousness. By the flickering light of bonfires, the youths denounced the Campbells as white pigs, Mrs. Campbell said, and ordered her to sing revolutionary songs. She remembers singing a children’s song instead, which enraged one of her intoxicated tormentors. He charged at her, she said, trying to thrust a burning stick into her mouth.
Later that night, the Campbells and Mr. Freeth were again stuffed into the back of the Campbells’ truck. Before they were dumped, Mrs. Campbell said, the kidnappers insisted that she sign a paper promising not to press the tribunal case.
Within days — just as the international outcry mounted over the state-sponsored beatings of thousands of opposition supporters — photographs of the grotesquely battered faces of the Campbells and Mr. Freeth circulated on the Internet.
By July 4, the police informed the farmers here who were part of the tribunal case that they could go back to their land. Peter Etheredge speculated that the authorities might have relented because the photographs were spreading online just as Mr. Mugabe was meeting with Africa’s leaders about his country’s political crisis.
On Nov. 28, the farmers gathered in Windhoek, Namibia, to hear the final ruling of five judges of the S.A.D.C. tribunal. As Justice Luis Antonio Mondlane of Mozambique read the full 60-page decision aloud, it dawned on the farmers that they had won.
The tribunal found that the government had breached its obligations under the trade bloc’s treaty, which committed it to respecting human rights, democracy and the rule of law, by denying the farmers compensation for their farms and court review of the government’s confiscation of them.
More broadly, it rejected the government’s claim that the land redistribution program was meant to right the wrongs of a colonial era when a white minority ruled what was then Rhodesia. Instead, the court found that the government had itself racially discriminated against the white farmers.
In a stinging rebuke, the tribunal, citing an earlier legal case, said it would have reached a different conclusion had the government not awarded “the spoils of expropriation primarily to ruling party adherents.”
The usually stoic farmers wept. “We burst into tears, the whole lot of us,” Mr. Freeth said.
The reaction of the government was defiant. Didymus Mutasa, the minister who oversees the distribution of seized land, told the state media that the judges were “daydreaming” if they thought Zimbabwe would heed the ruling.
The government would take over the rest of the white-owned farms, he vowed. And the state has since moved to prosecute four Chegutu farmers, though not yet the Etheredges or the Campbells, for illegally occupying land they owned before the government claimed it, the farmers’ lawyer, Dave Drury, said.
Perhaps it was a banner at the recent funeral of a ruling party boss that best captured the government’s rejection of those who question its righteousness, even a panel of distinguished African jurists.
The banner said: “The Rhodesian Tribunal Can Go to Hell.”
White Farmers Confront Mugabe in a Legal Battle
By CELIA W. DUGGER
Gruesome photo at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/world ... nted=print
CHEGUTU, Zimbabwe — Edna Madzongwe, president of the Senate and a powerful member of Zimbabwe’s ruling party, began showing up uninvited at the Etheredges’ farm here last year, at times still dressed up after a day in Parliament.
And she made her intentions clear, the Etheredges say: she wanted their farm and intended to get it through the government’s land redistribution program.
The farm is a beautiful spread, with three roomy farm houses and a lush, 55,000-tree orange orchard that generates $4 million a year in exports. The Etheredges, outraged by what they saw as her attempt to steal the farm, secretly taped their exchanges with her.
“Are you really serious to tell me that I cannot take up residence because of what it does to you?” she asked Richard Etheredge, 72, whose father bought the farm in 1947. “Government takes what it wants.”
He dryly replied, “That we don’t deny,” according to a transcript of the tapes.
Mr. Etheredge this year became one of dozens of white farmers to challenge the government’s right to confiscate their land, and they sought relief in an unusual place: a tribunal of African judges established by the 15 nations of the Southern African Development Community regional trade bloc.
The case is rooted in one of the most fraught issues facing not just Zimbabwe, but other nations in the region, especially South Africa: the unjust division of land between whites and blacks that is a legacy of colonialism and white minority rule.
But the tribunal’s recent ruling, in favor of the white farmers, is also a milestone of particular relevance to Zimbabwe. It suggests that a growing number of influential Africans — among them religious leaders and now jurists — are confronting Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s 84-year-old liberation hero and president, for his government’s violations of human rights and the rule of law, even as most regional heads of state continue to resist taking harsher steps to isolate his government.
Zimbabwe’s handling of the land issue has had disastrous consequences. Since 2000, when Mr. Mugabe began encouraging the violent invasion of the country’s large, white-owned commercial farms — once the country’s largest employers — food production has collapsed, hunger has afflicted millions and the economy has never recovered.
Mr. Mugabe presents this redistribution as a triumph over greedy whites. But it set off a scramble for the best farms among the country’s ruling elite, who often had little knowledge or interest in farming, and became a potent source of patronage for Mr. Mugabe. His own relatives, as well as generals, judges, ministers and members of Parliament, were beneficiaries, farmer and human rights groups say.
By this year, the number of white-owned commercial farms dwindled to about 300 from 4,500. Even many of the remaining ones came under assault in this year’s bloodstained election season.
Among those singled out were farms here in Chegutu, where some owners had dared to take their cases to the S.A.D.C. tribunal, challenging Mr. Mugabe before judges he could not entice with gifts of land.
In March, the tribunal ordered the Zimbabwean authorities not to evict any farmers seeking legal protection, pending resolution of the case. But as with other international efforts to influence Mr. Mugabe and his allies, Zimbabwean authorities apparently decided to ignore the tribunal’s order.
On June 17 — just 10 days before the discredited presidential runoff between Mr. Mugabe and his rival, Morgan Tsvangirai — dozens of youths led by a man named Gilbert Moyo surrounded Mr. Etheredge’s son, Peter, 38, at the main gate of the farm, family members said.
“Moyo told me he’d been sent by Edna,” Peter recalled, referring to Mrs. Madzongwe, the Senate president. Peter said Mr. Moyo threatened to kill him if the Etheredge clan did not clear off the farm immediately.
Peter, his twin, James, and their families fled.
Mrs. Madzongwe denied hiring Mr. Moyo and his gang. “If a farm is acquired, there are rules,” she said in a recent telephone interview. “I go by the book.”
But Jason Lawrence Cox, a local farmer, swore in an affidavit that he saw her on June 21 drive past piles of the Etheredges’ belongings, dumped at the side of the road, and onto their farm.
The gang had looted the three family homes on the farm of all but the large mounted heads of an eland and a kudu, according to photos taken before and after the invasion. They used a jackhammer to break through the foot-thick wall of the walk-in safe. The haul from the homes and the farm included 1,760 pounds of ivory, 14 handmade guns, 14 refrigerators and freezers, 5 stoves, 3 tractors, a pickup truck and 400 tons of oranges, the family said.
Eleven days later, a far more violent farm invasion occurred at the home of Mike and Angela Campbell, also here in Chegutu. Mr. Campbell, 76, was the first farmer to take on Mr. Mugabe before the tribunal.
A gang came that Sunday afternoon, pouring out of a pickup truck and a bus, Mrs. Campbell said. Her son-in-law, Ben Freeth, 38, said that he was bludgeoned with rifle butts and that his skull and ribs were fractured. Mike Campbell was also severely beaten.
Mrs. Campbell, 66, said she was dragged by her hair, after her arm was broken in multiple places, and dumped next to her husband. The doctor who treated them in the capital, Harare, signed affidavits confirming the severity of their injuries.
“Mike was so battered, I hardly recognized him,” Mrs. Campbell said. “I didn’t know he was alive until he groaned.” The three of them were loaded into the Campbells’ truck and driven to a nighttime vigil of youth loyal to the ruling party at Mr. Moyo’s base camp, she said.
It was cold, and men poured freezing water over them. Mr. Campbell drifted in and out of consciousness. By the flickering light of bonfires, the youths denounced the Campbells as white pigs, Mrs. Campbell said, and ordered her to sing revolutionary songs. She remembers singing a children’s song instead, which enraged one of her intoxicated tormentors. He charged at her, she said, trying to thrust a burning stick into her mouth.
Later that night, the Campbells and Mr. Freeth were again stuffed into the back of the Campbells’ truck. Before they were dumped, Mrs. Campbell said, the kidnappers insisted that she sign a paper promising not to press the tribunal case.
Within days — just as the international outcry mounted over the state-sponsored beatings of thousands of opposition supporters — photographs of the grotesquely battered faces of the Campbells and Mr. Freeth circulated on the Internet.
By July 4, the police informed the farmers here who were part of the tribunal case that they could go back to their land. Peter Etheredge speculated that the authorities might have relented because the photographs were spreading online just as Mr. Mugabe was meeting with Africa’s leaders about his country’s political crisis.
On Nov. 28, the farmers gathered in Windhoek, Namibia, to hear the final ruling of five judges of the S.A.D.C. tribunal. As Justice Luis Antonio Mondlane of Mozambique read the full 60-page decision aloud, it dawned on the farmers that they had won.
The tribunal found that the government had breached its obligations under the trade bloc’s treaty, which committed it to respecting human rights, democracy and the rule of law, by denying the farmers compensation for their farms and court review of the government’s confiscation of them.
More broadly, it rejected the government’s claim that the land redistribution program was meant to right the wrongs of a colonial era when a white minority ruled what was then Rhodesia. Instead, the court found that the government had itself racially discriminated against the white farmers.
In a stinging rebuke, the tribunal, citing an earlier legal case, said it would have reached a different conclusion had the government not awarded “the spoils of expropriation primarily to ruling party adherents.”
The usually stoic farmers wept. “We burst into tears, the whole lot of us,” Mr. Freeth said.
The reaction of the government was defiant. Didymus Mutasa, the minister who oversees the distribution of seized land, told the state media that the judges were “daydreaming” if they thought Zimbabwe would heed the ruling.
The government would take over the rest of the white-owned farms, he vowed. And the state has since moved to prosecute four Chegutu farmers, though not yet the Etheredges or the Campbells, for illegally occupying land they owned before the government claimed it, the farmers’ lawyer, Dave Drury, said.
Perhaps it was a banner at the recent funeral of a ruling party boss that best captured the government’s rejection of those who question its righteousness, even a panel of distinguished African jurists.
The banner said: “The Rhodesian Tribunal Can Go to Hell.”
Time ripe to topple Mugabe
By Mansoor LadhaDecember 30, 2008
Shame on Africa's leaders that they have waited this long and have done nothing in Zimbabwe while Robert Mugabe goes ahead with his tyrannical regime, ignoring the plight of his people. How long are they and the international community going to wait?
I remember the days when the Organization for African Unity used to vocalize about white minority domination, apartheid and racism. But now in the case of Zimbabwe, with few exceptions, Africa has remained silent. It's a shameful lesson in African history that African leaders, usually vocal in their denunciation of apartheid, are noticeably quiet in the case of Mugabe.
As everyone knows, the situation in Zimbabwe is worsening day by day. It should be clear by now that after being in office since 1980, Mugabe has no desire to give up power. Even if he loses an election, he will not yield. The only solution there is to either assassinate him from within or to topple him.
As far as the first solution is concerned, it would be impossible to do so as the army is in Mugabe's pockets so there is very little that can be expected from within. Somehow dictators always know that if they want to cling to power, they should keep the colonels happy by supplying them with enough lucrative goodies.
A few African leaders have criticized Mugabe openly. Among them are Kenya's Prime Minister Raila Odinga and South African Desmond Tutu, the retired Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, who stated that Mugabe should step down from office. He made a lot of sense when he suggested that African nations should even resort to military force if necessary to remove Mugabe from office, during an interview with Dutch TV program Nova.
Another option to force Mugabe to step down, Tutu said, is to threaten him with prosecution at the International Criminal Court. Mugabe "is destroying a wonderful country," Tutu lamented. "A country that used to be a bread basket . . . has now become a basket case itself needing help."
The ZANU-PF and MDC power-sharing agreement for all intents and purposes appears to be dead. To add fuel to the political pyre, Zimbabwe's cholera epidemic continues to spread and has now claimed more than 1,000 lives among 20,581 cases since August. The easily preventable disease has spread because of the collapse of health services and water sanitation in Zimbabwe.
The UN World Health Organization has said the total number of cases could reach 60,000 unless the epidemic is stopped and yet Mugabe won't allow physicians from other neighbouring African countries the visa to enter Zimbabwe with medicines.
The only solution, therefore, is for Zimbabwe's neighbours to get together and invade the country. The time for discussions and debates is over. South African ruling ANC leader Jacob Zuma has already said in a radio interview there was no reason for sending troops to Zimbabwe. "Why military intervention when there is no war?" he told South Africa's 702 Talk Radio. "We should be pressurizing them to see the light."
Where are the courageous African leaders like the late president Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, who ousted Idi Amin after recognizing that his neighbour had become a tyrant and invaded Uganda to bring an end to the tyrannical regime? Nyerere has set an excellent precedent for African leaders to follow, but I see that they lack the courage that is required to do so.
Mind you, Amin was brutal, but his regime was even better than Mugabe's as people in Uganda were beaten, tortured, abused and hundreds were murdered, but never did they starve to death or see the level of suffering which is to be found in today's Zimbabwe, and yet there is no action from African leaders.
There is still a ray of hope that some country like, Botswana, though not as powerful as South Africa, may take the lead to invade Zimbabwe, or maybe Zuma may be persuaded to change his mind. But the clock is ticking and Zimbabweans are suffering and dying. Something must be done to stop that suffering.
If Africa doesn't act, then as a last resort the international community should take matters into its own hands. Many may not like this suggestion but a mercenary or an international force should invade Zimbabwe and capture Mugabe and his closest allies. An example comes to mind when in 1976, Israeli commandos rescued 100 hostages, mostly Israelis or Jews, held by pro-Palestinian hijackers at Entebbe airport in Uganda.
Ugandan soldiers and the hijackers were taken completely by surprise when three Hercules transport planes landed after a 4,000-kilometre trip from Israel. About 200 elite troops ran out and stormed the airport building.
If this is not acceptable, then the United States, saviour of all democracies, should be persuaded when Barack Obama takes office next month to invade Zimbabwe.
Bush invaded Iraq so why can't President Obama, the first African-American president of the United States, authorize the invasion of an African country (Zimbabwe) and topple Mugabe's regime? The idea doesn't seem that far-fetched.
After Zimbabwe is invaded, Mugabe and his henchmen should be brought to The Hague to stand trail for their crimes against the people of Zimbabwe. His regime has not only brought destruction, but cholera, poverty, runaway inflation, destitution and starvation--reducing the country into one of the failed and mismanaged states. If we don't act now, history will blame us for it.
As Martin Luther said: "We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people."
Mansoor Ladha Is A Journalist Based In Calgary. He Is Author Of The Book Entitled, A Portrait In Pluralism: Aga Khan's Shia Ismaili Muslims, Published By Detselig.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
By Mansoor LadhaDecember 30, 2008
Shame on Africa's leaders that they have waited this long and have done nothing in Zimbabwe while Robert Mugabe goes ahead with his tyrannical regime, ignoring the plight of his people. How long are they and the international community going to wait?
I remember the days when the Organization for African Unity used to vocalize about white minority domination, apartheid and racism. But now in the case of Zimbabwe, with few exceptions, Africa has remained silent. It's a shameful lesson in African history that African leaders, usually vocal in their denunciation of apartheid, are noticeably quiet in the case of Mugabe.
As everyone knows, the situation in Zimbabwe is worsening day by day. It should be clear by now that after being in office since 1980, Mugabe has no desire to give up power. Even if he loses an election, he will not yield. The only solution there is to either assassinate him from within or to topple him.
As far as the first solution is concerned, it would be impossible to do so as the army is in Mugabe's pockets so there is very little that can be expected from within. Somehow dictators always know that if they want to cling to power, they should keep the colonels happy by supplying them with enough lucrative goodies.
A few African leaders have criticized Mugabe openly. Among them are Kenya's Prime Minister Raila Odinga and South African Desmond Tutu, the retired Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, who stated that Mugabe should step down from office. He made a lot of sense when he suggested that African nations should even resort to military force if necessary to remove Mugabe from office, during an interview with Dutch TV program Nova.
Another option to force Mugabe to step down, Tutu said, is to threaten him with prosecution at the International Criminal Court. Mugabe "is destroying a wonderful country," Tutu lamented. "A country that used to be a bread basket . . . has now become a basket case itself needing help."
The ZANU-PF and MDC power-sharing agreement for all intents and purposes appears to be dead. To add fuel to the political pyre, Zimbabwe's cholera epidemic continues to spread and has now claimed more than 1,000 lives among 20,581 cases since August. The easily preventable disease has spread because of the collapse of health services and water sanitation in Zimbabwe.
The UN World Health Organization has said the total number of cases could reach 60,000 unless the epidemic is stopped and yet Mugabe won't allow physicians from other neighbouring African countries the visa to enter Zimbabwe with medicines.
The only solution, therefore, is for Zimbabwe's neighbours to get together and invade the country. The time for discussions and debates is over. South African ruling ANC leader Jacob Zuma has already said in a radio interview there was no reason for sending troops to Zimbabwe. "Why military intervention when there is no war?" he told South Africa's 702 Talk Radio. "We should be pressurizing them to see the light."
Where are the courageous African leaders like the late president Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, who ousted Idi Amin after recognizing that his neighbour had become a tyrant and invaded Uganda to bring an end to the tyrannical regime? Nyerere has set an excellent precedent for African leaders to follow, but I see that they lack the courage that is required to do so.
Mind you, Amin was brutal, but his regime was even better than Mugabe's as people in Uganda were beaten, tortured, abused and hundreds were murdered, but never did they starve to death or see the level of suffering which is to be found in today's Zimbabwe, and yet there is no action from African leaders.
There is still a ray of hope that some country like, Botswana, though not as powerful as South Africa, may take the lead to invade Zimbabwe, or maybe Zuma may be persuaded to change his mind. But the clock is ticking and Zimbabweans are suffering and dying. Something must be done to stop that suffering.
If Africa doesn't act, then as a last resort the international community should take matters into its own hands. Many may not like this suggestion but a mercenary or an international force should invade Zimbabwe and capture Mugabe and his closest allies. An example comes to mind when in 1976, Israeli commandos rescued 100 hostages, mostly Israelis or Jews, held by pro-Palestinian hijackers at Entebbe airport in Uganda.
Ugandan soldiers and the hijackers were taken completely by surprise when three Hercules transport planes landed after a 4,000-kilometre trip from Israel. About 200 elite troops ran out and stormed the airport building.
If this is not acceptable, then the United States, saviour of all democracies, should be persuaded when Barack Obama takes office next month to invade Zimbabwe.
Bush invaded Iraq so why can't President Obama, the first African-American president of the United States, authorize the invasion of an African country (Zimbabwe) and topple Mugabe's regime? The idea doesn't seem that far-fetched.
After Zimbabwe is invaded, Mugabe and his henchmen should be brought to The Hague to stand trail for their crimes against the people of Zimbabwe. His regime has not only brought destruction, but cholera, poverty, runaway inflation, destitution and starvation--reducing the country into one of the failed and mismanaged states. If we don't act now, history will blame us for it.
As Martin Luther said: "We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people."
Mansoor Ladha Is A Journalist Based In Calgary. He Is Author Of The Book Entitled, A Portrait In Pluralism: Aga Khan's Shia Ismaili Muslims, Published By Detselig.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Ghana vote shows 'democracy at work'
By Christian AkorlieJanuary 5, 2009
The election of John Atta-Mills as Ghana's president is seen as a rare example of functioning democracy in Africa.
Photograph by : Pius Utomi Ekpei, Agence France-Presse, Getty Images
Ghana's largely peaceful and credible presidential election was a rare example of a functioning democracy in Africa and should be a model for the continent, African leaders, voters and diplomats said on Sunday.
Much attention in Africa and elsewhere was focused on the Ghanaian vote after a year of political crises, many of them violent, tarnished Africa's democratic credentials.
Opposition candidate John Atta Mills was declared the winner on Saturday after the closely fought election in the gold and cocoa exporter was settled by a run-off.
"John Atta Mills' victory and the conduct of the people of Ghana provides a rare example of democracy at work in Africa," Kenya's prime minister Raila Odinga said in a statement.
While some violence was reported, international observers say the vote was mostly peaceful, in contrast with many other African countries, where democracy was battered in 2008.
More than 1,000 people were killed in postelection violence in Kenya last year and in Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai have been deadlocked for months over a power-sharing agreement after disputed elections.
"Ghanaians can and should take pride in this democratic achievement. With their continuing show of commitment to the democratic process, Ghana and its leaders are setting an admirable example," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a statement.
Mauritania's first freely elected leader was overthrown in a military coup in August and army officers in Guinea took power after the death of President Lansana Conte in December.
South Africa is likely to go to the polls in March in what analysts expect will be its most tense vote since the end of apartheid in 1994 after a power struggle split the ruling African National Congress last year. "(The Ghanaian election) bears testimony to the respect for democracy and good governance in Africa," South African President Kgalema Motlanthe said.
Ghana's neighbour Ivory Coast again postponed presidential elections last year.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
By Christian AkorlieJanuary 5, 2009
The election of John Atta-Mills as Ghana's president is seen as a rare example of functioning democracy in Africa.
Photograph by : Pius Utomi Ekpei, Agence France-Presse, Getty Images
Ghana's largely peaceful and credible presidential election was a rare example of a functioning democracy in Africa and should be a model for the continent, African leaders, voters and diplomats said on Sunday.
Much attention in Africa and elsewhere was focused on the Ghanaian vote after a year of political crises, many of them violent, tarnished Africa's democratic credentials.
Opposition candidate John Atta Mills was declared the winner on Saturday after the closely fought election in the gold and cocoa exporter was settled by a run-off.
"John Atta Mills' victory and the conduct of the people of Ghana provides a rare example of democracy at work in Africa," Kenya's prime minister Raila Odinga said in a statement.
While some violence was reported, international observers say the vote was mostly peaceful, in contrast with many other African countries, where democracy was battered in 2008.
More than 1,000 people were killed in postelection violence in Kenya last year and in Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai have been deadlocked for months over a power-sharing agreement after disputed elections.
"Ghanaians can and should take pride in this democratic achievement. With their continuing show of commitment to the democratic process, Ghana and its leaders are setting an admirable example," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a statement.
Mauritania's first freely elected leader was overthrown in a military coup in August and army officers in Guinea took power after the death of President Lansana Conte in December.
South Africa is likely to go to the polls in March in what analysts expect will be its most tense vote since the end of apartheid in 1994 after a power struggle split the ruling African National Congress last year. "(The Ghanaian election) bears testimony to the respect for democracy and good governance in Africa," South African President Kgalema Motlanthe said.
Ghana's neighbour Ivory Coast again postponed presidential elections last year.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
January 17, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Zimbabwe Is Dying
By BOB HERBERT
If you want to see hell on earth, go to Zimbabwe where the madman Robert Mugabe has brought the country to such a state of ruin that medical care for most of the inhabitants has all but ceased to exist.
Life expectancy in Zimbabwe is now the lowest in the world: 37 years for men and 34 for women. A cholera epidemic is raging. People have become ill with anthrax after eating the decaying flesh of animals that had died from the disease. Power was lost to the morgue in the capital city of Harare, leaving the corpses to rot.
Most of the world is ignoring the agony of Zimbabwe, a once prosperous and medically advanced nation in southern Africa that is suffering from political and economic turmoil — and the brutality of Mugabe’s long and tyrannical reign.
The decline in health services over the past year has been staggering. An international team of doctors that conducted an “emergency assessment” of the state of medical care last month seemed stunned by the catastrophe they witnessed. The team was sponsored by Physicians for Human Rights. In their report, released this week, the doctors said:
“The collapse of Zimbabwe’s health system in 2008 is unprecedented in scale and scope. Public-sector hospitals have been shuttered since November 2008. The basic infrastructure for the maintenance of public health, particularly water and sanitation services, have abruptly deteriorated in the worsening political and economic climate.”
Doctors and nurses are trying to do what they can under the most harrowing of circumstances: facilities with no water, no functioning toilets and barely any medicine or supplies. The report quoted the director of a mission hospital:
“A major problem is the loss of life and fetal wastage we are seeing with obstetric patients. They come so late, the fetuses are already dead. We see women with eclampsia who have been seizing for 12 hours. There is no intensive care unit here, and now there is no intensive care in Harare.
“If we had intensive care, we know it would be immediately full of critically ill patients. As it is, they just die.”
Mugabe’s corrupt, violent and profoundly destructive reign has left Zim-babwe in shambles. It’s a nation overwhelmed by poverty, the H.I.V./AIDS pandemic and hyperinflation. Once considered the “breadbasket” of Africa, Zimbabwe is now a country that cannot feed its own people. The unemployment rate is higher than 80 percent. Malnutrition is widespread, as is fear.
A nurse told the Physicians for Human Rights team: “We are not supposed to have hunger in Zimbabwe. So even though we do see it, we cannot report it.”
Mugabe signed a power-sharing agreement a few months ago with a political opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, who out-polled Mugabe in an election last March but did not win a majority of the votes. But continuing turmoil, including violent attacks by Mugabe’s supporters and allegations that Mugabe forces have engaged in torture, have prevented the agreement from taking effect.
The widespread skepticism that greeted Mugabe’s alleged willingness to share power only increased when he ranted, just last month: “I will never, never, never surrender ... Zimbabwe is mine.”
Meanwhile, health care in Zimbabwe has fallen into the abyss. “This emergency is so grave that some entity needs to step in there and take over the health delivery system,” said Susannah Sirkin, the deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights.
In November, the primary public referral hospital in Harare, Parirenyatwa Hospital, shut down. Its medical school closed with it. The nightmare that forced the closings was spelled out in the report:
“The hospital had no running water since August of 2008. Toilets were overflowing, and patients and staff had nowhere to void — soon making the hospital uninhabitable. Parirenyatwa Hospital was closed four months into the cholera epidemic, arguably the worst of all possible times to have shut down public hospital access. Successful cholera care, treatment and control are impossible, however, in a facility without clean water and functioning toilets.”
The hospital’s surgical wards were closed in September. A doctor described the heartbreaking dilemma of having children in his care who he knew would die without surgery. “I have no pain medication,” he said, “some antibiotics, but no nurses ... If I don’t operate, the patient will die. But if I do the surgery, the child will die also.”
What’s documented in the Physicians for Human Rights report is evidence of a shocking medical and human rights disaster that warrants a much wider public spotlight, and an intensified effort to mount an international humanitarian intervention.
Some organizations are already on the case, including Doctors Without Borders and Unicef. But Zimbabwe is dying, and much more is needed.
Op-Ed Columnist
Zimbabwe Is Dying
By BOB HERBERT
If you want to see hell on earth, go to Zimbabwe where the madman Robert Mugabe has brought the country to such a state of ruin that medical care for most of the inhabitants has all but ceased to exist.
Life expectancy in Zimbabwe is now the lowest in the world: 37 years for men and 34 for women. A cholera epidemic is raging. People have become ill with anthrax after eating the decaying flesh of animals that had died from the disease. Power was lost to the morgue in the capital city of Harare, leaving the corpses to rot.
Most of the world is ignoring the agony of Zimbabwe, a once prosperous and medically advanced nation in southern Africa that is suffering from political and economic turmoil — and the brutality of Mugabe’s long and tyrannical reign.
The decline in health services over the past year has been staggering. An international team of doctors that conducted an “emergency assessment” of the state of medical care last month seemed stunned by the catastrophe they witnessed. The team was sponsored by Physicians for Human Rights. In their report, released this week, the doctors said:
“The collapse of Zimbabwe’s health system in 2008 is unprecedented in scale and scope. Public-sector hospitals have been shuttered since November 2008. The basic infrastructure for the maintenance of public health, particularly water and sanitation services, have abruptly deteriorated in the worsening political and economic climate.”
Doctors and nurses are trying to do what they can under the most harrowing of circumstances: facilities with no water, no functioning toilets and barely any medicine or supplies. The report quoted the director of a mission hospital:
“A major problem is the loss of life and fetal wastage we are seeing with obstetric patients. They come so late, the fetuses are already dead. We see women with eclampsia who have been seizing for 12 hours. There is no intensive care unit here, and now there is no intensive care in Harare.
“If we had intensive care, we know it would be immediately full of critically ill patients. As it is, they just die.”
Mugabe’s corrupt, violent and profoundly destructive reign has left Zim-babwe in shambles. It’s a nation overwhelmed by poverty, the H.I.V./AIDS pandemic and hyperinflation. Once considered the “breadbasket” of Africa, Zimbabwe is now a country that cannot feed its own people. The unemployment rate is higher than 80 percent. Malnutrition is widespread, as is fear.
A nurse told the Physicians for Human Rights team: “We are not supposed to have hunger in Zimbabwe. So even though we do see it, we cannot report it.”
Mugabe signed a power-sharing agreement a few months ago with a political opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, who out-polled Mugabe in an election last March but did not win a majority of the votes. But continuing turmoil, including violent attacks by Mugabe’s supporters and allegations that Mugabe forces have engaged in torture, have prevented the agreement from taking effect.
The widespread skepticism that greeted Mugabe’s alleged willingness to share power only increased when he ranted, just last month: “I will never, never, never surrender ... Zimbabwe is mine.”
Meanwhile, health care in Zimbabwe has fallen into the abyss. “This emergency is so grave that some entity needs to step in there and take over the health delivery system,” said Susannah Sirkin, the deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights.
In November, the primary public referral hospital in Harare, Parirenyatwa Hospital, shut down. Its medical school closed with it. The nightmare that forced the closings was spelled out in the report:
“The hospital had no running water since August of 2008. Toilets were overflowing, and patients and staff had nowhere to void — soon making the hospital uninhabitable. Parirenyatwa Hospital was closed four months into the cholera epidemic, arguably the worst of all possible times to have shut down public hospital access. Successful cholera care, treatment and control are impossible, however, in a facility without clean water and functioning toilets.”
The hospital’s surgical wards were closed in September. A doctor described the heartbreaking dilemma of having children in his care who he knew would die without surgery. “I have no pain medication,” he said, “some antibiotics, but no nurses ... If I don’t operate, the patient will die. But if I do the surgery, the child will die also.”
What’s documented in the Physicians for Human Rights report is evidence of a shocking medical and human rights disaster that warrants a much wider public spotlight, and an intensified effort to mount an international humanitarian intervention.
Some organizations are already on the case, including Doctors Without Borders and Unicef. But Zimbabwe is dying, and much more is needed.