Ruin By Design
- From: "zakanaka" <lalapansi@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 2 Aug 2005 08:47:58 -0700
Ruin By Design
The U.N. misses it, but Mugabe's regime is Zimbabwe's problem.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Opinion Journal, from the Wall Street Journal - Wednesday, July 27,
2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
To whatever extent the recent United Nations report on Zimbabwe calls
attention to the brutalities of the country's tyrant, President Robert
Mugabe, the U.N. has performed a service. But as far as the report
translates into nothing more than a fresh bout of aid funnelled via
Mugabe's regime, this U.N. initiative will only compound the suffering
in Zimbabwe--where the government's latest atrocity has been to "clean
up" the cities by evicting hundreds of thousands of poor people,
destroying their dwellings and leaving them jobless, homeless and
hungry.
In describing this scene, the U.N. report provides a wealth of detail,
but takes a detour around the basic cause, which is not, as the report
concludes, such stuff as "improper advice" acted upon by "over-zealous
officials." The real cause is the long and ruinous rule of Mugabe and
his cronies.
With a delicacy over-zealously inappropriate in itself to dealings with
the tyrant whose regime has been responsible for wreck of Zimbabwe,
the report starts by thanking Mr. Mugabe for his "warm welcome" to the
U.N. delegation, which visited the country from June 26 to July 8. The
report, issued by the secretary-general's special envoy Anna Kajumulo
Tibaijuka, then proceeds to the usual U.N. prescription that what
Zimbabwe needs is more aid, and a framework--here comes the UN
lingo--"to ensure the sustainability of humanitarian response." While
the report also calls for the "culprits" to be called to justice under
Zimbabwe laws, Mugabe himself is somehow excused from direct
responsibility.
Instead, the report faults wealthy nations for not providing more aid
already, and notes that "With respect to the funding issue, some in the
Zimbabwe political elite and intelligentsia, as well as others of
similar persuasion around the continent, believe the international
community is concerned more with 'regime change' and that there is no
real and genuine concern for the welfare of ordinary people."
Apart from the problem, not mentioned in the U.N. report's comment,
that after a quarter-century of Mugabe's rule the surviving Zimbabwe
elite are to a great extent Mugabe's own cronies, there is the
profound difficulty that in Zimbabwe's state-choked economy, Mugabe
has a record of diverting foreign aid to his supporters, while
starving--as well as mugging and murdering--his
opposition. Aid workers themselves in recent years have lamented the
difficulty of channeling aid in Zimbabwe to the intended beneficiaries.
The danger with any massive, not to mentioned "sustainable"
humanitarian response, is that it will most likely translate into
sustainability of Mugabe's regime (generating hefty fees along the way
or any U.N. agencies involved).
What to do? Rushing aid to help the starving and homeless is an impulse
common to decent people anywhere. There is no doubt that Mugabe's
regime has created a crisis, to which some will be moved for the best
of reasons to respond. But to downplay the role of the tyrant himself,
in hope he will "engage" with humanitarian donors, and in kindly
manner mend the mistakes of his reportedly wayward subordinates, is to
misinterpret his methods, shore up his rule, and most probably sustain
or even worsen the miseries of Zimbabwe.
Atrocities under Mugabe are nothing new. Since Zimbabwe gained
independence from Britain in 1980, Mugabe has ruled with what is
apparently the prime directive of remaining in power, whatever the
cost.The U.N. report, in its brief history of the country's struggles,
fails to mention that one of Mugabe's first moves after coming to power
was to invite in North Korean advisers, to train the shock troops
known in Zimbabwe as the "Fifth Brigade." In the 1980s, Mugabe
dispatched this Fifth Brigade to massacre an estimated 18,000
Zimbabweans opposed to his rule--far more than the number of people
slaughtered, say, at Srebenica, and more than six times the number
murdered in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
The world paid no notice. Most of those who died were not members of
Zimbabwe's white minority; they were black, most of them belonging to
the Ndebele tribe. Mugabe then consolidated power, and was feted for
years as a champion of African progress. Indeed, the new U.N. report,
while omitting mention of this slaughter, describes Mugabe in admiring
terms as "part of that exclusive club of African statesmen" who
"fought colonialism and racial discrimination."
The report also gives an odd account of the farm invasions that from
1998 on escalated in Zimbabwe not only into the eviction of white
land-owners, but the ruin of the country's agricultural base--replaced
not by fair distribution of property and rule of law for blacks, but
by plunder, violence, and enrichment of Mugabe's chums at the expense
of millions of black Zimbabweans. The model for this was not equitable
land reform, but Communist China's cultural revolution, the methods of
which Mugabe and his crony "war veterans" learned in the 1960s and
early 1970s at the knees of Mao Tse-tung himself. And the mobs who
invaded the farms, while described as war veterans, did not consist on
the ground of the aging satraps of Mugabe's elite circle--who profited
from the policy. They were youth militia, unleashed by the aging
Mugabe in an effort to thwart a growing opposition movement, and keep
his grip on power.
The U.N. report does warn that its findings are incomplete. But they
are rather worse than that. The eviction of hundreds of thousands was
not, in Mugabe's universe, a policy mistake. It was, for Zimbabwe's
murderous tyrant, a success--now yielding leverage over decent people
who are indeed prone to send help to those suffering in Zimbabwe. We
have seen this cycle
before. It is what led to the U.N. devising, albeit on a far grander
scale, with a far bigger cut for its own administrative services, the
now scandal-ridden Oil-for-Food program in Iraq, which fortified
Saddam Hussein and helped him keep power for years beyond what many in
the early 1990s expected. What must be grasped in dealing with
Zimbabwe is that the problem is Mugabe himself. And whatever welcome,
warm or otherwise, he may provide to visiting U.N. delegations, the
true recovery can only begin with his departure.
Ms. Rosett is a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for the
Defense of Democracies. Her column appears here and in The Wall Street
Journal Europe on alternate Wednesdays.
_________________________________________________
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