(0) (7)

Michael Totten seems to be acquiring a taste for visiting totalitarian hellholes. This time he is wanding around the socialist paradise of Libya. As usual he paints an interesting picture.

(1) (3)

How quickly this (click on this picture to make the triumph even bigger!) . . .

. . . has turned into this:

After England sneaked the Ashes 2-1, they have now been soundly beaten 2-0 by Pakistan. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. If Warne don't get you then Shoaib Akhtar and Danish Kaneria must. I wonder what Al Qaeda will make of that.

All very catastrophic. Until you turn your mind to a real catastrophe. To put all of the above in perspective, spare a thought for cricket in Zimbabwe, a grain of sand through which to see the chaos of the world out there.

A year or two ago, there was a great exodus of international cricketers from Zimbabwe, but they were mostly white guys, with only the occasional black man involved. The Mugabe regime had no problem calling them a bunch of racists and Uncle Toms.

But just over a week ago, the new Zimbabwe captain, the impeccably black Tatenda Taibu, and a thoroughly gutsy cricketer by the way, having already expressed his extreme displeasure at what was happening to Zimbabwean cricket, and having lead another huge player rebellion, by the new multi-coloured lot, remember, resigned:

"I've resigned from Zimbabwe cricket as a whole," Taibu said from Harare on Thursday.

"I've had problems with the way Zimbabwe cricket is being run for the past few years," said the 22-year-old, the youngest captain in Test cricket history when he took over in May 2004.

Maybe that was what decided that Mugabe regime that something had to be done. Basically, a couple of Mugabe-ites had been given Zimbabwe cricket to "run", i.e. ruin, loot, etc., and the Mugabe regime (i.e. Robert bloody Mugabe) decided that they had to stop, or would at any rate make good scapegoats for what even they (Mugabe) now saw as a problem. So, the Zimbabwe equivalent of the men in big raincoats went round at 4 am to arrest the two miscreants. But, they had been tipped off and had fled.

Cricket people are complaining about the uselessness of cricket's global governing body, the ICC, in this matter. But you cannot really expect the ICC to sort out Zimbabwe cricket. The problem is not cricket in Zimbabwe, the problem is Zimbabwe.

Nevertheless, cricket, by dramatising so publicly the horror story that is Zimbabwe now, may actually be contributing something:

John Stremlau, professor of international affairs at South Africa's Witwatersrand University, said the Zimbabwe Cricket meltdown could become the catalyst for a much broader internal revolt.

"Inflation is more than 400 per cent, the US dollar to the Zim [Zimbabwe dollar] is running at 1 to 100,000 [on the black market] and everything's been criminalised and linked to the survival of the Zimbabwe cabal," he said.

"The mystery is when the tipping point will come and it'd be an interesting footnote to history if it was the flap over the cricket team."

Yes it would. The sooner Mugabe is tipped, alive or dead, into the bucket of history the better, and nobody is going to be particularly choosy about what tipped him. If cricket can help to see off this monster, good for cricket.

If that happens, then maybe the apparently myopic policy of other cricketing countries just carrying on playing with whatever cricketers Zimbabwe put into the field against them will have been justified, sort of. Results are what matter when you are dealing with something like Mugabe, not your mere conscience. Had cricket quarantined itself from Zimbabwe, this latest fiasco could not have happened, because any cricket problems in Zimbabwe would (a) not have attracted nearly so much outside attention, and (b) would have been blameable by Mugabe on outside interference.

Had Taibu not had the chance to prove himself to be the formidable cricketer and personality that he is, his resignation would not have counted for much. As it is, it just might count, as Professor Stremlau says, for rather a lot.

(0) (18)

In response to overwhelming popular demand (Julian Taylor can be a bit overwhelming sometimes) here is the text of the Marie Antoinette International Dead Liberty Award for the year 2005, which has been awarded by the Libertarian Alliance to Robert Gabriel Mugabe, and which I featured yesterday in one of these photographs.

Click on this:

I hope you (Julian Taylor) can read that okay, and that it need not be typed in, again.

So, since we are on the subject of Mugabe, how are things in Zimbabwe these days? Well, this story says quite a lot:

Harare, Zimbabwe, 11/17 - A magistrates court in Zimbabwe Thursday dropped corruption charges against President Robert Mugabe`s nephew, two weeks after his high profile arrest on suspicion of graft involving billions of dollars.

Leo Mugabe and his wife Veronica were arrested on charges of illegally selling flour on the local market and exporting it to Mozambique.

Trade in wheat and flour, both of which are in short supply here, is controlled and exports are banned to preserve stocks for the local market.

No evidence, according to the magistrate. I do not suppose that lack of evidence is usually much of a problem, in Zimbabwe nowadays. But this case must have been rather different.

I wonder how Robert Mugabe himself feels about this. I do not assume that he will automatically side with his nephew. As I wrote here, a while ago, I was briefly acquainted with another relative of his, and I can report that the Mugabe family is not the proverbial big happy one. They do not all stick together. They quarrel. And Robert Mugabe is easily stubborn enough and self-righteously cruel enough to throw a relative to the wolves, if he decided that this was the right thing for him to do, just as he has decided that wrecking Zimbabwe is the right thing for him to do and will stubbornly continue with that, until death or ruin stops him.

In other words, this Libertarian Alliance prize will change nothing in Zimbabwe, nothing at all. But, future recipients of the award may perhaps be influenced by it.

(2) (42)

I recall how, a few months back, during all the fuss about Making Poverty History by having a singsong, well dressed and articulate Africans were to be seen on our television screens explaining, throughout the week in question, that, actually, just chucking money at Africa would not really solve the problem. In fact, some of them said, it could well make things worse by making it less necessary for the governments that hoovered up most of the money to earn their money, so to speak, by taxing their own misgoverned and hence impoverished people. (I use the word "earn" in a very relative sort of sense here.)

Last night, the same thing happened again. Kofi Annan had been enthusing about that now quite famous hundred dollar laptop. And once again, well dressed and articulate Africans was summoned to the studios, and they said that, actually, if you are looking for a way to spend a hundred dollars on an African child, you could do a whole lot better than spend in on a laptop computer.

Victor Keegan also waxes enthusiastic about the hundred dollar laptop in the Guardian today, being understandably reluctant to enthuse about the other hot topic at the big UN shindig in Tunis where the hundred dollar laptop was being promoted, which is the UN plan to take over the internet.

But until the UN puts its own house in order by controlling member states imposing censorship on the web, such as China and Tunisia, it won't have the moral authority - let alone the management skills - to do the job itself.

Quite so, although I do not like that "until". My attitude to the internet is simple. It ain't bust. Don't unfix it by putting the UN in charge of it, ever. However, as it says here (you need to scroll past the woes of Sony):

The battle for control of the Net ended peacefully before the fight even began, but some are still unhappy with the outcome.

Me included. What they mean is that lots of people wanted more done on this front. I wanted less than they have already done, which is that they have set up a completely powerless talking shop to discuss "internet governance". And if you believe that the plan is for this talking shop to do nothing but talk for ever and be completely powerless for ever, then you will believe anything.

Although the hundred dollar laptop could not possibly be as big a catastrophe as the UN's planned strangulation of the internet, it could nevertheless waste a lot of money and cause a lot of grief. Imagine not having had any food for two days and being presented with one of these contraptions, as will surely happen to many wretched Africans if this boondoggle goes ahead.

As Tim Worstall explained at the ASI blog over a month ago, a posting that Kofi Annan has clearly not read but should have, that hundred dollar price assumes huge production runs, and also assumes that the various governments who are supposed to pay for these things will also bear the further costs of explaining to people how they work and of mending them when they go wrong. Worse, if these devices are to supply the internet connections that they are supposed to, these governments may have to contrive communicational infrastructure that does not now exist,. As Worstall points out, the kind of people now getting most enthusiastic about this gadget are also the kind of people who are most opposed to the idea of making aid conditional on things like that being done more sensibly.

Even at a hundred dollars, as the well dressed Africans were pointing out last night, these thing are absolutely not a bargain for an African child. Schooling for a year would make more sense. Better food would be nice.

On the face of it, making a kind of global Volkswagen of laptops is appealing. But the more usual method for making cheap stuff is for it to be made expensively first, and checked out by rich organisations and rich people, and then gradually - or, as often happens, not so gradually - cheapened. This is what is happening anyway with computers, and even more spectacularly with mobile phones, which already are hundred dollar portable computers with communication built in, if you think about it. Keegan mentions the success of cheap mobile phones in Africa, but does not seem to have absorbed the lesson of that success, which is that mobile phones are, it turns out, a whole lot easier to use in Africa than laptops. Ah yes, but those mobiles are being used to do business, not being given to the kiddies.

You get the feeling that Kofi Annan is really only trying to make the UN look necessary and useful, instead of a big pointless coagulation of corruption and foolishness which he is now unwilling or unable to clean up. Here, he reckons, is his chance to say that "Business isn't supplying this, but hey! – we can!". The truth is that they can probably not do this but that bad old big business maybe soon will and in many ways already is doing it. If it ever does make sense for Africa's children all to have laptops, this will surely not be until the price of them goes down to something nearer to ten dollars than a hundred. My guess is they will all have mobiles long before then.

(0) (3)

I often slag off the BBC, so let me praise them today. The BBC are banned from Zimbabwe. In the best traditions of journalism, back in August correspondent Justin Pearce went there anyway.

Following the mass evictions from and destruction of Harare's squatter camps, hundreds of thousands have been sent to their "home" villages. Never mind that the evictees are city people who may not have seen the village since childhood, or at all. Naturally, they become paupers. The lot of those who do not have even that much of a home village is even worse. People whose parents or grandparents originally came from other African coutries have been left in limbo.

What in this sorry tale can count as a sign of hope, you ask? Only this: even soldiers and policemen go hungry says a more recent BBC report. When even those who take service under the tyrant cannot be sure of their next meal, one may hope the end is near.

Do not expect the good times to roll once Mugabe's obsequies are done - or his noose is cut down. Chaos can be an ugly thing, and Zimbabwe's political culture has been brutalised. But without Mugabe's megalomaniac desire for tidiness, so typical of dictators, this campaign to sweep human beings aside as if they were rubbish will probably lapse.

(1) (66)

Well, I can not say this bad story came as a total surprise, given the near-total lack of respect for property rights and the rule of law in Africa:

South Africa says it will for the first time force a white farmer to sell his land under a redistribution plan.

The story goes on to say that the seizure is part of a drive to "redistribute" land to people who lost what was rightfully theirs as a result of the 20th Century apartheid regime. Hmmm. It seems to me that on an abstract level relating to rectification of previous injustices, there is some credibility to this idea. However, the big problem is that the people who will get chunks of this land are unlikely to have much to do with the people who were allegedly robbed of said land in the first place, assuming that such a claim can be validated. (Of course if there are people who could claim that they or their ancestors were robbed of what was rightly theirs, then I have no objection in principle to some restitution).

In practice, as we have seen all too clearly in nearby Zimbabwe, the spoils of any assault on white-owned farmland will go to the political hacks and cronies of the governing regime, and likely bring about a serious, possibly catastrophic loss of economic wealth and food in a part of the world, that is not, to put it mildly, greatly endowed with such things.

Perhaps the president of South Africa should put this book on his reading list. Or perhaps he should remember to heed his own words.

More than anything else, Africa needs stable, enforceable property rights, period, if it is clamber out of its current state. Sir Bob Geldolf and friends, please note.

(0) (4)

I like to interrupt TV coverage of test cricket with CEEFAX news of about other cricket matches, and this afternoon the news trickled through that England were (probably) winning – and then that they had finally won – the Ashes!

The ladies of Australia have had the same armlock on the Female Ashes as their menfolk have had on the Male Ashes in recent years, only more so. But today the English ladies beat the Australian ladies by 6 wickets to clinch a series win. With luck, England will get the Male Ashes back this summer as well. The men of Australia followed on today at Trent Bridge, and the men of England are well placed to get a win tomorrow and go one up with one to play in their series. Here's to us limeys making it a double.

I wonder if a lady will ever play international cricket for her men's team, so to speak. Cricket is not a game that is wholly conditional on brawn, although you do have to be fit, of course. Some of the greatest ever batsmen, like Bradman, Gavaskar and Tendulkar to name but three, have been quite small men. And bowlers, even quick ones, do not have to be giants either. And great slow bowlers can be quite small, and even physically handicapped. So, even if a female physique may be a handicap, it may one day be overcome.

Meanwhile the usual low-level politico-sporting storm rumbles and bumbles along about whether Civilisation ought, still, to be playing cricket games against Zimbabwe. At one time I was in the habit of making a bit of a fuss about such games here, because it was a way to make a fuss about Zimbabwe. But all the world that cares now knows that Robert Mugabe is ruining that unhappy country and the only question is whether someone can end his life and/or despotic reign before natural causes finally oblige. Other African rulers do not want anything done, because this might set a dangerous precedent. I mean, what kind of place would Africa become if merely being a thieving and destructive monster meant that you lost your job as tyrant? Very different, that is for damn sure. And since the rest of the world is disinclined to revive White Imperialism and barge in and rearrange matters without lots of local consent – the only new imperialists in Africa these days are the Chinese, and they are there for the minerals, not to take up the Yellow Man's Burden – it really does not matter what the cricketers do about Zimbabwe. Playing against the current politically deranged Zimbabwe team and thrashing it probably does just as much good (and just as little) as refusing to play against it.

(0) (13)

What do you do when you have driven your economy off a cliff? Why, you raise taxes.

Zimbabwe's finance minister has imposed a string of tax rises to bridge a huge spending shortfall and the effects of drought and slum clearances. A tax on drinks and cigarettes has been increased by 50% and mobile phone airtime will also be subjected to a 22.5% tax, Herbert Murerwa said.

Zimbabwe is beset with shortages of food, fuel and foreign currency, and rampant unemployment and inflation.

An opposition MP said the extra budget showed that the government was "broke".

The title is a forgivable slur on King Canute who recognised the natural limits of kingship. With reference to ZANU-PF, it is perhaps more acceptable to use the diminutive of his name, which is, of course, Cnut.

(2) (14)

Franklin Cudjoe, Director of the Ghanaan think tank Imani, who has been visiting the UK in order to contest the nonsense being spouted about how to solve Africa's problems by Live 8 etc., gave a fingerclickin' good talk at my home on Friday. The fingerclickin' being a reference to the amount of money stolen every second – $4,700 – by African governments. My thanks to Helen Szamuely for also reporting on this event.

Ghana sounds like a relatively prosperous and urbanised country, by African standards, and it was interesting to hear an African talking about the complications of airline deregulation and exactly how much members of parliament get paid per day (enough to keep them snugly on board the gravy train, no matter what they may have said at election time), rather than just famine, malnutrition, etc.

The anti-globalisation crowd say that multinational corporations are causing corruption in Africa. Actually, they often find it a huge barrier to trading in Africa. KLM wanted to run some flights from Ghana to neighbouring African countries, but the bribes demanded of them were too extortionate, and they pulled out. Travelling between countries in that part of Africa seems to involve choosing which bunch of state highwaymen you prefer to be shaken down by. It is understandable that, economically speaking, lots of colonial African countries used to look outwards, so to speak, with most of their trade being organised by their colonial masters. It is not so understandable why this is still the pattern.

I asked Franklin who in Ghana he thinks is doing the most to improve the place. His answer was the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development. What Africa needs is good government. And the way to start trying to get good government is to talk and write out loud with anyone who will listen – especially the next generation – about what that is and ought to be. There as here, in enterprises of this kind, the internet has helped

Franklin sounded a lot like Hayek – which is no coincidence, because he talked about how much Hayek had influenced his early thinking – in his insistence upon the intellectual struggle as the first step in trying to achieve anything more concrete. You get nowhere by nagging politicians direct. You have to change the assumptions within which they work. That takes time but it can be done, and by the sound of it he is doing his best.

Michael Jennings pointed out that all over the Far East, lots of those little upwardly mobile trading niches that used to be occupied by the Chinese diaspora are now occupied by the Ghanaan diaspora. Clearly there is nothing wrong with the talents of the Ghanaan people. They just need the right setting to flourish in.

(3) (22)

I have been waiting for the left to come out in support of Mugabe. After all, they worship Che Guevara, the warmonger and homophobe. They wear CCCP t-shirts even though that regime murdered 60 million people. So I was not at all surprised to read this John Vidal article in The Guardian this week:

It's open season on the Harare regime and it appears that anyone can say anything they like without recourse to accuracy or reality. Whipped into a frenzy of hypocritical outrage, the EU, Britain and the US, as well as the World Bank - all of which have been responsible for millions of evictions in Africa and elsewhere as conditions of infrastructure projects - have rushed to condemn the "atrocities".

The vilification of Mugabe is now out of control. The UN security council and the G8 have been asked to debate the evictions, and Mugabe is being compared to Pol Pot in Cambodia. Meanwhile, the evictions are mentioned in the same breath as the genocide in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans - although perhaps only three people have so far accidentally died. Only at the very end of some reports is it said that the Harare city authority's stated reason for the evictions is to build better, legal houses for 150,000 people.

In other words, the Guardian is saying that Mugabe is not so bad after all. Remarkable.

(0) (21)

At Hyde Park, Dido just introduced as the "African Ambassador for Music from Senegal", Youssou N'Dour*, who she was "in awe" of, "not just because he has a wonderful voice, but because of his wonderful beliefs". He came on stage to say:

"The debt cancellation is OK. The aid is OK. But, please, open your markets."

There will be an awful lot of well-intentioned nonsense given unquestioning, reverential coverage today, with ignorance and platitudes dressed up as profundity. Maybe, however, for perhaps the first time at an event of this type and on this scale, a kernel of truth will wriggle its way onto TV.

I consider this a small but notable victory for the notion that, if you permit free speech and are prepared to tolerate every misguided and moronic idea, eventually the truth will out.

* [edit]: add correct spelling and link.

(1) (18)

I am watching a news report on Newsnight, broadcast by the BBC, about private education in Nigeria. The report is the work of Professor James Tooley, who I think is one of the most interesting public intellectuals in the world.

Tooley has been roaming the world in recent years, finding cheap, successful, private schools, which are everywhere outperforming the shoddy state provided schools. Nigeria is no different.

It is one thing to see white blokes in suits saying at some pro free market conference that the private sector is better than the public sector. Watching Nigerian parents explaining the same thing, to a BBC news camera, is something else again.

So why, Tooley is asking, is everyone in denial? There is no global crisis in education. The private sector is supplying higher standards at a fraction of the cost.

Now we are in white blokes discussing it all mode, and Professor Keith Lewin of Sussex University is explaining that what Tooley has spent the last decade scrutinising with his own eyes is all a figment of his, Tooley's, imagination.

Tooley has the advantage over Lewin. He has been there. He has seen it. He has found schools which, until he and his colleagues found them, nobody not directly involved with the schools in question knew existed. This is market success, says Tooley, and we should celebrate it.

Tooley's report showed an incandescently eloquent private sector teacher in action. And he also showed a state school teacher in a state school classroom, a classroom filled with state school pupils who were busy trying teaching one another, while he, the state school teacher, was fast asleep at his desk.

Lewin says that this is all a tragedy, because he sees state failure. The state is, or should be, the educator of last resort. Market success is important to Lewin only because as far as he is concerned market success equals state failure, and state failure is bad bad bad. Lewin refers to "his colleagues in Africa", who agree with him and do not agree with Tooley.

Those, I would guess, would be the state education bureaucrats who, time and time again, do not even realise that there is a thriving educational private sector in their own country, pretty much right under their noses. The government bureaucrats whom Lewin (I suspect) spends most of his African research time communing with, have little idea about this ferment of private education. Insofar as they do know of it, they do not want to know of it, because it makes them feel irrelevant. This is because they are irrelevant. And if they are irrelevant then so is the living that Professor Keith Lewin of Sussex University makes helping to prepare all this state bureaucrats for their careers in state education.

Now Lewin is talking gibberish about why Britain nationalised its schools in 1870. What we have just seen, says Lewin, invites the withdrawal of the state from the provision of all public services. Well, yes.

The thing about Tooley is not just what he says. It is also the sincerity and enthusiasm with which he says it. He will never convert the Lewins of this world. But he does seriously contest what they say, and, just like the numerous private schools which he has found the world over – in Africa, in China, in India, in Pakistan, in fact everywhere he looks – he does it with a fraction of the resources that the Lewin side of this debate now commands.

For more about all this, read this Sunday Times article by Tooley, which I would never have found out about had it not been for the BBC.

The BBC, outrageously biased, rampant supplier of last resort of rampantly pro-capitalist propaganda.

(1) (5)

Richard B. North has a terrific set of articles about the current focus on Africa, debt-relief and poverty brought about partly by the efforts of Sir Bob "keep it off eBay" Geldof. It is fair to summarise that North is not totally blown away with admiration by the scruffy former lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, or indeed with the grandstanding of our own wonderful PM, Tony Blair.

Definitely not the sort of articles one would expect to get on a college degree reading list. How I wish the weblog existed when studying for my degree back in the 80s.

(0) (30)

Laziness in blogging is defined as examining the attitude of the United Nations or any other NGO in regard to some humanitarian crisis caused by your common garden dictator. Easy and rich pickings. For this particular example, let us take Robert "Gay Gangster" Mugabe as an egregious example of dictatorial excess and the World Food Programme as your normal international bureaucracy.

In reality, "Mad Bob" has ruined his country, urinated on the poor and used food aid as a tool of oppression and death. In UNWorld, Comrade Bob is a welcome member of the international community. As James Morris, 'United Nations Special Envoy for Humanitarian Affairs for Southern Africa' (such a big title for an oh-so important man), stated recently:

Mr Morris said the President told him that Zimbabwe welcomed assistance that was purely humanitarian.

"We have had a very positive discussion with President Mugabe. We have had a very good working relationship for several years. The President said he welcomed food assistance that comes with humanitarian commitment," said Mr Morris.

He said Zimbabwe and the World Food Programme (WFP), a UN agency, had a good working relationship stretching over several years.

Mr Morris knows that this is the case because Comrade Mugabe is committed to agricultural reform.

The UN envoy said it emerged during his talks with Cde Mugabe that the President was committed to the development of agriculture and ensuring food security in Zimbabwe.

"I thank the President for his commitment to agriculture," said Mr Morris.

The website of the World Food Programme is slightly better (or worse, if you think that a chink of reality can be damned by faint praise). Their "In Brief" on Mr Morris's visit to Zimbabwe notes many contributing factors, but the state is not given the starring role it deserves:

Food production in Zimbabwe is affected by several factors, including erratic rains, shortages of inputs such as fertilizer and inadequate tillage.

It is also affected by the spread of HIV/AIDS, which commonly afflicts people in their most productive years.

Moreover, the centralized pricing structure for maize in Zimbabwe creates a disincentive for production above subsistence levels.

However, a key reason for food shortages this year will be drought.

The commercial farming sector, which declined as a result of land reform, previously provided an important stabilising factor in maize production, particularly during years of erratic rains, as the crop was mainly produced by irrigation.

While communal farms traditionally produce the greater portion of food, they are largely dependent on rainfall.

This post is the product of laziness or the United Nations is a turkey shoot! Take your pick!

(1) (23)

There is an excellent article in the print version of The Economist describing the situation in the Congo.

That's the Congo. Private cellphone networks work and private airlines work because the landlines do not and the bush has eaten the roads. Public servants serve mostly to make life difficult for the public, in the hope of squeezing some cash out of them. Congo is a police state, but without the benefits. The police have unchecked powers, but provide little security. Your correspondent needed three separate permits to visit the railway station in Kinshasa, where he was stopped and questioned six times in 45 minutes. Yet he found that all the seats, windows and light fixtures has been stolen from the trains.

I put this paragraph up for all those people who have not experienced this sort of thing first hand and cannot accept that the single biggest obstacle to ending poverty in Africa is the nature of African nation states. Until that changes, sending aid under all but the most controlled circumstances is more often than not either subsidising the very people who cause the problems in the first place or, at best, flushing 90¢ on the dollar down the toilet in terms of helping the people you really want to benefit from your largess.

The solution? Good question, but it sure as hell is not more of the same. In Africa even more than most other places, truly, the state is not your friend.

(0) (67)

Sir Bob "Make Poverty History" Geldof is getting the vapours over the fact that tickets for his various supposed poverty-relief events have been put up for sale on that symbol of dark, rampant capitalism, eBay. In particular, he seems all upset that a big corporation like eBay should make any money from such a highminded event.

Horsefeathers, is all I can say. eBay, in my view, contributes vastly more to the sum total of human happiness and welfare than that preening stage army of hasbeens, wannabees and well-intentioned nitwits that have clustered around Sir Bob. As has already been recounted in detail here, Sir Bob Geldof is a man of infuriating contradictions, able to talk with piercing clarity and lack of cant about the corruption of African governments and yet also willing and able to spout the cheap pieties that seem to accompany many a post-colonial guiltfest such as Live8.

If Africa's economy were run with the same brio, dash and entrepreneurial brilliance of eBay, Sir Bob and his ilk would have to spend a little more time on what they supposedly do best.

UPDATE: thinking this through in the light of watching Geldof on the television, I can certainly applaud his desire to steer as much revenue to the poor of the world as possible but there seems no awareness on the part of the Live 8 crowd that what Africa needs is precisely the sort of business acumen of which eBay is a modern example.

UPDATE 1: eBay has blocked sales of such tickets on its pages, according to the BBC.

(2) (11)

Moeletsi Mbeki, the brother of South Africa's President, says that the private sector is key to modern economic development in Africa. But, he says, African leaders and Western donors are holding it back. On the website of his organization, the South African Institute of International Affairs, he argues that:

foreign donors could play a more constructive role than they are doing at present through their current efforts to sustain the political elites and African states with budgetary support and the like.

Instead of giving more money to African governments, Mbeki says donors should providing the expertise to help establish independent financial institutions like credit unions and savings banks and help shield them from political elites.

Moreover, African governments need less power and the private sector more:

Africa's private sector is predominantly made up of peasants and secondly, of subsidiaries of foreign-owned multinational corporations. Neither of these two groups have the complete freedom to operate in the market place because they are both politically dominated by others - non-producers who control the state. Herein lay the weakness of the private sector in Africa that explains its inability to become the engine of economic development. Africa's private sector lacks political power and is therefore not free to operate to maximize its objectives. Above all, it is not free to decide what happens to its savings.

African elites have prevented peasants from reinvesting their earnings in machinery to improve their productivity:

Fundamentally, the political elite uses its control of the state to extract the surplus or savings that if the peasant were free to retain they would have invested in improving their production techniques or to diversify into other economic activities. Through marketing boards, taxation systems and the like, the political elite diverts these savings to finance its own consumption and the strengthening of the repressive instruments of the state.

The economic looting of multinational companies after independence means that international investors are wary of investing in Africa:

When the colonialists retreated from the 1950s onwards, these colonial subsidiaries [Western companies] lost their key protector, the colonial state. Before long they, like the peasants, fell prey to the appetites and whims of the new African political elites who controlled the newly independent African states. The lucky ones were nationalized and their owners were therefore paid compensation; the not so lucky ones were 'privatized' [confiscated by individual politicians without compensation.]

Moeletsi Mbeki's comments are in stark contrast to those of Gordon Brown who thinks that simply throwing more at African governments is going to bring prosperity. Mbeki recognises that the West should be helping get more private investment into African and helping improve the institutions that enable business to thrive.

Crossposted from the Globalisation Institute Blog.

(3) (81)

The decision to write off billions of dollars in debt for various Third World nations is in effect a subsidy for bad governance. Oh sure, the debt relief is tied to various conditions aimed at improving the kleptocratic ways that are the norm in the world's various hellholes, but it is still just a way of saying that in the final analysis it is western taxpayers yet again who will be the ones picking up bill for the actions of various corrupt WaBenz bureaucrats.

And what of those poor nations who actually do repay their loans? What of those who keep corruption under control and who have a ruling class that does not see private businesses as a personal piggy bank to be raided as needed? What message is sent to them when they see the incompetent and corrupt rewarded with free money so that some celebrity activists can make economic illiterates feel good about themselves?

Which brings me to Geldof. I just cannot figure out this guy; on one hand he says self-evident sensible things like (emphasis added):

Bob Geldof admitted today no amount of aid to Africa could eradicate poverty on the continent while its Governments remain corrupt. The former singer was launching a 170-page compact summary of the Africa Commission's report which will be presented to the G8 summit this July.

And the maverick Irishman repeated his call for 'hundreds of thousands' to converge on Edinburgh to coincide with the summit at Gleneagles. He said: "The issue governance is at the forefront of this compact. You can't give aid to countries when they return it to us in debt payment, especially if you don't allow them to trade with us. None of that will function unless there is a decent Government."

But then says something as preposterous as:

Fears over corrupt African regimes should not be used to delay aid to the poverty-stricken continent, Bob Geldof said yesterday. Less than 48 hours after both Tony Blair and George W Bush insisted that corrupt regimes had to be tackled to ensure that aid was not wasted, the Live 8 organiser told them to "get off the corruption thing" and deliver the promised help.

So what is one to make of that? By his own admission, Africa's appalling governance is a huge contributing factor to poverty and woe (not to mention the continent's horrific record regarding civil liberties) yet we are urged to "get off the corruption thing". So to use Geldof's sort of language... what the fuck?

If governance is perhaps the single biggest factor (amongst several) that makes the Third World so damn poor, surely the Western taxpayers whose money Geldof is to keen to give away should indeed be asking if they really want their money to end up in someone else's Swiss bank accounts via Kinshasa or Freetown.

Sadly for Africa, most of the things written about the causes and solutions of poverty in the Third World, or at least the articles that get serious column inches, are drivel by 'celebrity activists' who are ill-informed and arrogant in equal measure. A prime example being the mind numbingly ignorant Chris Martin for example, who thinks 'shareholders', the people who provide the capital to wealth creating businesses, which are the "great evil of this modern world" rather than, say, the governments of North Korea, Cuba and Burma. But then such folks do not concern themselves with actual benefits to poor people in various far off places but rather with pithy soundbites and causing emotional surges brought on by 'doing something', regardless of whether or not it actually improves anything for anyone other that a few Mercedes Benz dealers in sub-Saharan Africa and some portfolio managers in Zürich.

No, none of this really has anything to do with helping common people in the Third World.

(0) (10)

A general strike now... will it evolve into more forcefukl resistance to Mugabe's thugs? I certainly hope so but do not underestimate the violence that Mugabe and his cotery will use to hang on to power (and their lives).

(1) (13)

Many of the commentariat in my previous post on the ongoing horror that is Zimbabwe indicated that the MDC (Movement for Democratic Change) were a poor choice for me to suggest sending arms to in order to oppose the ZANU-PF tyranny. The MDC are purely a movement dedicated to bring about change democratically via the ballot box, right?

Then please explain this rather inspiring outburst:

The people of Zimbabwe have a right to defend to themselves and to rise up against the oppressive Mugabe regime, Tendai Biti, the MDC member of parliament, has said. Speaking in a radio interview with SWRadioAfrica’s Violet Gonda, he said leadership would emerge to direct popular uprisings.

"I can’t tell you by who, but I can assure you that there will be decisive action against fascism and I can tell you that the next few days are going to be interesting," said Biti.

Pressed to identify the leadership, Biti replied: "I can't tell you - and the hundreds of Central Intelligence Organisation officers who I know are listening to me right now – about who is going to provide the leadership, who is going to do what, and so forth – but what I can guarantee you is that the anger is overflowing in the veins of the average Zimbabweans. They will defend themselves. The time for smiling at fascism is over."

Sounds to me if someone would just provide them with enough guns and a few truck loads of ammunition, these boys are well and truly good to go. Well Godspeed, gentlemen, may you all soon be celebrating together in Harare whilst Mugabe hangs from a nearby lamppost.

(26) (58)

Robert Mugabe continues his insane demolition of houses and businesses as he increasingly starts to look like Pol Pot reborn, seeking to depopulate the cites and drive the now homeless and unemployed population into the countryside to eke out an even more miserable living, thereby dispersing and isolating people from communities which might oppose his tyrannical rule.

And where are the marchers in the west? Where are the protesters calling for justice in Zimbabwe? Where is the outrage from those tireless tribunes of the Third World, the UN? Why can I not hear the snarls of fury from the alphabet soup of NGOs? What of the legions of Guardian readers finding out about all this? What are they going to call for? Amnesty International is getting a lot of (bad) publicity from having called Guantanamo Bay 'a gulag' whilst now admitting they do not actually know what is happening there, yet why are they not straining every fibre of their being in opposition to this African horror? There is tyranny aplenty to be opposed without having to invent any.

Clearly the only chance for the people of Zimbabwe is for someone, anyone, to help them to rise up and meet violence with violence. They do not need aid, they need guns and ammunition so that supporters of the MDC can start shooting at anyone associated with ZANU-PF or the 'security' services. Time for Mugabe's swaggering police thugs to be met with a hail of gunfire rather than terrified sobbing. But of course the South African ANC government, far from being a possible solution to the rapidly deteriorating situation across the border, is aiding and abetting in the Cambodia-ization of Zimbabwe. I look forward to Saint Nelson Mandela taking a loud, public and sustained stand against Mugabe's madness. Yeah, right.

If Tony Blair was serious about doing something about poverty in Africa, he would be sending guns to the MDC and to anyone else who is willing to resist and threatening to have some gentlemen from Hereford put a .338 hole between Mugabe's eyes unless things change radically. What a pity Zimbabwe does not have oil or maybe more people would give a damn what is happening there.

(1) (10)

Mass starvation in Zimbabwe has not discouraged the British government from funding a campaign which promotes anti-white "land reform" in Africa. The UK's Department for International Development gave £338,000 last year in "civil society" funding to support War on Want, a hard-Left campaign group formerly run by George Galloway.

War on Want has been central in setting up the Landless Peoples' Movement in South Africa. The Movement says it supports "the gallant actions of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe" in taking land from white farmers. According to War on Want: "The LPM is still at the early stages of mobilising people. It is working on building up the movement's leadership and profile, and developing ways to attract new members, and build relations with government and other movements. War on Want supports and assists their work."

War on Want says that white people own too high a percentage of African land and it says WoW is "at the centre of the tough battle for land."

It is unclear why the Department for International Development has anything to do with War on Want, given that the policies it supports have led to Zimbabwe becoming the fastest shrinking economy in the world.

Crossposted from the Globalisation Institute Blog.

(0) (8)

The Globalization Institute's crack of dawn email of links continues to arrive, every week day, and continues to be well worth getting.

One of the recent links thus promulgated was to this editorial, from Kenya.

First few paragraphs:

With all the money they get as emoluments, one would have expected that our Members of Parliament would strive to ensure that they do an honest day's job all year round.

But a report on their performance released yesterday shockingly says that the legislators only did 57 full working days the whole of last year. Allowing for public holidays, weekends and the days Parliament was in recess, this translates to less than two months of work.

Yet, these are people who are enjoying a salary package of Sh500,000 and other perks. They are the people who have been entrusted with articulating the needs of their people in Parliament.

Despite this, the study conducted by the Institute for Civic Affairs and Development says, there are some MPs who never brought any Bills to the House, never contributed to any and never raised a point of order.

In plain terms, this could be called incompetence.

One of the more depressing and destructive assumptions now rampaging about the world and doing damage to it is that the basic job of politicians is to pass laws. The more laws they pass, the better they must be doing.

But would Kenya really be a better governed country if all its members of parliament were to bring Bills to the House, instead of only some? Is it really the ultimate criticism of a politician that he never tries to pass any new laws. If politics means passing more laws, then maybe Kenya is lucky that it is not getting as much politics as it is paying for. There are far worse political vices than laziness.

I get the rough idea. Kenya's parliamentarians are not the greatest, and I am sure that is true. But this is a very bad way to explain what is so wrong with them.

(0) (12)

Surprise surprise:

President Robert Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF party today emerged victorious in the official results of a Zimbabwean parliamentary election criticised by the opposition and western powers as fraudulent.

With 84 of the contested 120 parliamentary seats declared, Zanu-PF took 51. Morgan Tsvangirai's opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) won 33, according to results on the official counting screen at the Harare election centre.

The ruling party entered the race needing only 46 seats to obtain a simple majority in the 150-seat parliament, where 30 members are Mugabe appointees.

Still, at least this election has given everyone something to grab hold of, and it surely counts for something that Mugabe feels that he needs to fake the result he wants.

It is interesting how much more interest the pro-Iraq-war blogosphere is paying to Zimbabwe now. It is all because of the Iraq election. Until that happened, the pro-Iraq-war blogosphere was understandably pre-occcupied with Iraq, and other misery-spots tended to be neglected. But since the election, the pro-Iraq-war blogosphere is interested in any circumstance which seems in any way to be being influenced by that election. Suddenly, all political badness everywhere is part of the story, provided only that some locals are making democratic noises, demonstrating, etc.

I am not complaining. This just goes to show how right they were when they said, those that did, that the election would make a huge difference. It has.

However, this is interesting. It is a piece by S. J. Masty at the Social Affairs Unit blog, trashing the whole idea of spreading democracy hither and thither, in countries to which it is not suited and who have not evolved it at their own speed and in their own way. Instead of having one relatively staid kleptocracy in permanent charge, says Masty, democracy is liable to replace that one kleptocracy with two or three competing kleptocracies. "Predator democracies", he calls these unfortunate countries. This is well worth a read, and a think. (Thanks to Patrick Crozier for the link.)

What I think is that Masty may be confusing the messenger (democracy) with the message (lots of people are now rowing about who gets to rule the country). An old fashioned monarchy, by definition, would put an end to the rowing, but can an old-fashioned monarchy survive in a country where so many more people want a slice of the action than in the old days?

UPDATE: This is the kind of thing Masty has in mind.

(1) (41)

Here are the first two paragraphs of a BBC report about a report, from a Commission:

The UK-led Commission for Africa has urged wealthy nations to double their aid to the continent, raising it by £30bn ($50bn) a year over 10 years.

African leaders need to root out corruption and promote good governance, the commission's final report says.

I cannot help suspecting that there may be something of a contradiction there, between paragraph one and paragraph two.

Is the way to root out corruption to double the amount of money you are chucking at it? This, it seems to me, might be problematic.

I mean, how do they intend to persuade Africans to refrain from being corrupt? Bribe them?

(0) (17)

I have long believed that Robert Mugabe, ruler of the hapless Zimbabwe, will die before he ever admits to having made a mistake. Yet the Telegraph now offers this report, about how Mugabe has admitted to making a mistake!

President Robert Mugabe confessed yesterday that millions of acres of prime land seized from Zimbabwe's white farmers are now lying empty and idle.

Confessed.

After years spent trumpeting the "success" of the land grab, Mr Mugabe, 81, admitted that most of the farms transferred to black owners have never been used.

Admitted.

But what did Mugabe actually say?

… in his home province yesterday, Mr Mugabe chided the new landowners for growing crops on less than half of their land.

"President Mugabe expressed disappointment with the land use, saying only 44 per cent of the land distributed is being fully utilised," state television reported. "He warned the farmers that the government will not hesitate to redistribute land that is not being utilised."

In other words, Mugabe admitted no wrongdoing at all. He made the right decision. It was the people who were charged with implementing the decision who did wrong, by failing to grow as much food as they should have.

Plenty of other people are saying that Mugabe made a mistake with this larcenous policy:

Critics said Mr Mugabe's admission exposed the land grab's "failure".

"It has been a phenomenal and absolute failure on every level," said Tendai Biti, secretary for economic affairs of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. "It has failed both in terms of production of crops and in terms of the occupation of the land."

And what is more, they seem to have supplied the Telegraph with a reason for the failure of the new farmers to farm successfully:

The new farmers are unable to raise bank loans because their properties are formally owned by the government and they have no individual title deeds. Without loans, they cannot buy seed, fertiliser or farming equipment and the regime has broken a pledge to supply them with tools.

Some farmers have resorted to using horse-drawn ploughs. Many have given up trying to produce anything at all.

So Mr Mugabe has made yet another mistake, this time in mishandling the arrangements for the new farmers with whom he has replaced the previous ones he stole from. But has he admitted it? No. Has he shifted the blame onto the hapless farmers? Yes. I would not want to be in their shoes now.

Par for the course. Mugabe is infallible. Reality is unworthy of him and has let him down.

But more importantly, this is a revolution that is starting to devour its own, to implode. Those "new farmers" are, or were, enthusiastic Mugabe supporters, were they not?. Now they are being blamed for the failure of a Mugabe policy. With luck, this means that this vile regime is now starting seriously to weaken itself, rather than merely to weaken its enemies.

If that is right, it might help to explain this:

Zimbabwe will hold parliamentary elections on March 31 and, for the first time in 10 years, Mr Mugabe is no longer holding out the offer of white-owned land as a vote-winner. Instead, his speeches are dominated by attacks on Tony Blair, who he claims is plotting to recolonise Zimbabwe.

I daresay many of his listeners are thinking: that sounds good. When is the Great White Blair due?

As I have said before, Robert Mugabe is now the leading spreader of the idea that Africa should be reconquered by white people.

(0) (12)

We curse and rage at the BBC here, a lot, but you have to admit that this is a great story.

Even Ghana's director of tourism may have to admit that Accra has its work cut out competing with other tourist destinations in Africa. Yet just outside the capital, is the suburb of Teshi and it is here that tourists are coming to look at a relatively new tradition – the fantasy coffin makers.

So how did this happen?

The story goes that in the first half of last century one Ata Owoo was well-known for making magnificent chairs to transport the village chief on poles or the shoulders of minions.

When Owoo had finished one particularly elaborate creation, an eagle, a neighbouring chief wanted one too, this time in the shape of a cocoa pod. A major crop in Ghana.

However, the chief next door died before the bean was finished and so it became his coffin.

Then in 1951, the grandmother of one of Owoo's apprentices died.

She had never been in an aeroplane, so he built her one for her funeral.

And a tradition was born.

The only bit of what might be BBC politically correct boringness that I could detect in this report came a few paragraphs before that last quote, where it said:

Many of their clients want to bury loved ones in something that reflects their trade.

Even if that means being buried in a Coca-Cola bottle.

Even? I suppose if you are the BBC, that is the ultimate horror. But, if being buried in an airplane or a car or a cockerel or a cocoa pod is okay, then what on earth is so wrong with being buried in a Coca-Cola bottle? (Not Diet Coke obviously. That would be stupid.)

Something tells me that in these post-Christian times, this might spread to other parts of the world. Our boring British death industry could certaionly do with a shake-up. What kind of giant object would you like to be buried it?

It is good to read some good news coming out of Africa. True, African people are dying, but they are mostly dying of natural causes and are going out in style.

(0) (7)

Further to this posting and previous postings involving Zimbabwe, the England cricket tour of Zimbabwe, etc., this story is the kind of reason why I am not that bothered about this apparently very stupid cricket tour that is now going ahead. No tour, and there would be that much less reportage of Zimbabwe and its disgusting ruler. What has happened is that about half the media have been banned from entering Zimbabwe, to write about the cricket! I suppose the fear is that they might wonder what all that shouting and screaming and people bashing is that goes on outside cricket grounds (and everywhere else – except in Safari parks apparently, see the comment on that previous posting) in Zimbabwe these days.

All the same, the ICC, cricket's global governing body, is making itself look ever more ridiculous:

For most countries, intervention from the government in this manner would be grounds enough for withdrawing from the tour but the ICC gave Zimbabwe special dispensation because of the situation in the country under the regime of president Robert Mugabe.

Well, exactly. A normal government cannot be allowed to behave like this. The Mugabe regime, on the other hand, must obviously be spared the interfering attentions of inquisitive journalists. How else can this disgusting regime grapple unhindered with all of the many, many problems caused by its own disgustingness?

(0) (2)

There was debate here about just how bad the situation is in Africa in general, just how corrupt African governments now are, and just how pointless and/or harmful it may now be to send them charitable aid, etc. But I take it that no one will claim that matters have improved very much, in particular, Zimbabwe during the last decade.

Up to 70 per cent of Zimbabwe's workforce, some 3.4 million people, has fled the country to escape the political oppression and collapsing economy under President Robert Mugabe's rule, according to research by an independent church study group.

The South African-based Solidarity Peace Trust said that most of them had crossed the borders into neighbouring countries, with an estimated 1.5 million skilled and able-bodied workers arriving in South Africa to seek work to support families left behind in Zimbabwe.

"An estimated 25 to 30 per cent of the entire Zimbabwean population has left the nation," the Peace Trust reported.

"Out of five million potentially productive adults, 3.4 million are outside Zimbabwe. This is a staggering 60 to 70 per cent of productive adults."

Zimbabwe's economy is in its most dire crisis since independence in 1980.

But do not worry. Some skilled workers are about to go to Zimbabwe, in the form of a visiting England cricket team.

Which might explain why someone thinks it worthwhile to place adverts featuring this website, next to the Telegraph piece quoted from above. I cannot think of any other reason to want to visit this dreadful place.

Looking for ZIMBABWE flights? Book your cheap holiday or business trip dates? Check availability for all airplane tickets and flights to ZIMBABWE airports, then compare discount airfare rates to find the cheapest airline tickets and ZIMBABWE air travel from Kelkoo UK.

Book your cheap holiday or business trip dates? That would be a real fun holiday. And business? What on earth business might that be? Nothing very civilised I should imagine. Selling cheap bus journeys out of the damn place, perhaps.

What a horror story. Death to Mugabe. Seriously, the sooner that stubborn old bastard drops dead the better, from whatever causes God (in the insurance sense of that much overused word) chooses, the better. This will probably be the next good thing that happens to this wretched country, and if he is as stubborn about clinging on to life as he is in clinging on to his idiotically destructive policies and damn the consequences, then the people of Zimbabwe could be in for a long wait.

I know that many who read this blog might feel that I ought to be angry about those cricketers, but honestly, I cannot see their visit making much difference one way or another. After all, nobody in a position actually to improve matters in Zimbabwe seems at all inclined actually to do that. In South Africa, for example, the big debate now seems to concern whether or not to be nasty to the millions of refugees from Zimbabwe, not about whether anything can or should be done to improve things in Zimbabwe itself.

(0) (23)

Reading several pages of interesting reports and discussion on the BBC's website about Somalia, I wonder:

Is Sudan a better country to live in than Somalia?
Do refugees travel between the two countries (probably via Ethiopia) and which is the better place to live?
How would Somalia score on a human rights questionnaire? Compared with say North Korea. I think of the official line from the worker's paradise about homosexual rights: "There is no homosexuality in the Republic of Korea, it is a bourgeois disease."
How obstructive are Somali warlords of international trade compared with say, the EU's regulatory of tariff restrictions on agriculture? Is it easier and cheaper for a Kenyan farmer to sell food to Somalia than to Sudan or Spain?

I also note that multiple currencies are operating in Somalia, with US dollars, private currencies and old banknotes being exchanged in markets. Are Somalis really so much more intelligent than Europeans who had to be protected from currency choice?

The BBC reporter makes the mistake of comparing Somalia today with Holland Park in London today (except that some types of crime are probably more frequent in Holland Park). He is appalled that guns are for sale and that the entry fees finance qat instead of state schools and state hospitals. I think it is much more interesting to compare Somalia today with neighbouring countries today. On the face of it anarchy seems a lot like Robert A Heinlein's depiction in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Ken Macleod's The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal. Despite my quibbles with the BBC on this issue, full marks for going to Somalia eyes wide open, if not quite minds wide open.

(0) (33)

A remake of Do They Know It's Christmas? has just been recorded.

Some of the brightest stars of British pop and rock music recorded a new version of Do They Know Its Christmas? yesterday, 20 years after the original became an international hit and raised millions for famine relief in Africa.

[…]

Chris Martin from Coldplay, Will Young, the Pop Idol winner, Justin Hawkins, frontman for The Darkness, Ms Dynamite and Joss Stone, the soul singer, were among the host of stars to attend.

It says everything about Band Aid, the original version, that what is still remembered as if it was yesterday are the various performances and pronouncements made by those pop stars, but that little attention is spared to even ask what exactly, if anything, was achieved with all that money.

Consider this, from a piece in the Spectator by Daniel Wolfe a few weeks back:

Geldof was the front man, and he has played his part to perfection, then and ever since. This is not to impugn his motives: Geldof is undeniably charming and sincere, but that does not mean that what he says is holy writ. He told the international media that agencies had to trust the representatives of the Mengistu government, thus seeming to deny, by implication, that the aid operation was being used by that same government. Yet the places where the aid was distributed, and the conditions under which it was distributed, were determined by Mengistu. There is something remarkably patronising in the assumption that an African dictator – as ruthless and cunning as they come, a survivor among survivors – might fail to see an opportunity when it was staring him in the face.

As it turned out, Mengistu knew a hawk from a handsaw. In 1984–85, up to a billion dollars' worth of aid flowed into Ethiopia. Thousands of Western aid workers and journalists flew in with it. The regime ensured that the visitors converted their Western dollars to the local currency at a rate favourable to the government: in 1985 the Dergue tripled its foreign currency reserves. It used this influx of cash to help build up its war-machine, it commandeered aid vehicles for its own purposes and, by diverting aid supplies, helped feed its armies. The UN in Addis Ababa, which was co-ordinating the aid operation, denied that the level of diversion was significant. Later on, it became clear that a significant proportion of the relief food in Tigray – the epicentre of the famine – was consigned to the militia. The militias were known locally as 'wheat militias'.

Above all, the government used the aid operation to support its military strategy: it saw food aid as both a tool for consolidating control over disputed territory and as bait for luring people from rebel-held areas into government territory...

And so on.

And now? Another war. Another famine. Another generation of popsters eager to help. I do not blame them, not the younger ones. They want to help. They like singing and playing their guitars, for this is what they do. If they are hoping for the best as a result of their efforts, rather than fearing the worst, this is hardly their fault. They mean well.

Geldof, on the other hand, ought to have learned something by now. Twenty years ago, he gouged a ton of money out of everyone, and became a secular saint. This time around, the assumption he still seems to be basing all his efforts on is that although flinging money at Africa may not do as much good as it might, it surely cannot do any great harm. But alas, if a lot of the 'aid' goes to the people who are causing a lot of the misery out there, then his 'aid' may indeed do some serious harm.

(0) (20)

I have no definite opinions about this alleged coup attempt that alleged Sir Mark Thatcher allegedly aided by alleged Jeffrey Archer (and alleged others) allegedly plotted. I have only now learned that the object of their disaffections was the government of Equatorial Guinea. But I have seen big headlines, and big pictures of Mark Thatcher looking furtive and ashamed. Thatcher himself now apparently denies having anything to do with the alleged plot, but then he would, now.

However, I cannot help noticing that it is being taken for granted that a coup in Equatorial Guinea would have been a self-evidently bad thing.

What kind of place is this? Well, I found some answers here.

The country's current president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, came to power in 1979 by leading a self-initiated coup that overthrew Francisco Macias Nguema, Obiang's uncle and the country's first president. In 1992, the government adopted legislation establishing a multiparty democracy. Since then, Obiang has been re-elected twice, most recently at the end of 2002, but both times amid opponents' allegations of election fraud.

Charming. You can see how this guy would be sensitive about coup attempts.

Despite rapid growth in real GDP, there is strong evidence that oil revenues have been misappropriated by the government. Furthermore, the government's failure to direct oil revenues toward development – especially to fund urgently-needed infrastructure improvements – has undermined economic and social progress in the country. Meanwhile, the rapid increase in public sector spending has increased inflationary pressures, translating into average growth of the consumer price index (CPI) of about 7% annually for the past few years.

Not exactly paradise on earth, is it?

All I am saying is: maybe a coup might have improved things.

(1) (14)

I am thinking of starting a campaign to establish an internationally-recognised system of 'War Prizes'. It may seem more than a trifle insensitive but, really, it is the perfectly rational thing to do. After all war is a difficult and dangerous business and I think it is only fair that its most skilled practitioners are accorded some due level of public acclaim. We could even have categories of award such as 'Most Devastating Air Strike' or 'Most Creative Use of Field Artillery'.

You may think I am being morbid but at least my 'War Prizes' would prove a darn sight more interesting than those wretched and depressing 'Peace prizes':

A Kenyan environmentalist and human rights campaigner has been awarded the Nobel peace prize, becoming the first African woman to win the prestigious award since it was created in 1901.

Mrs Maathai, 64, received international acclaim in 1998 when she stopped the then Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi from building a luxury housing project after he had cleared hundreds of acres of forest.

The green belt movement in Kenya, which she founded in 1977, has planted more than 10 million trees to prevent soil erosion.

Why, exactly, is this person getting a 'peace' prize? A horticultural prize? With pleasure. A landscape gardening prize? For sure. But how, precisely, does a lifetime of professional tree-hugging qualify her as a preventer of armed conflict? As far as I can tell, Mrs. Maathai is being rewarded for being a female, African version of George Monbiot.

And, excuse me, but surely the last thing that Africa needs is more sodding environment? They have got environment up the ying-yang. In fact, they have got bugger all except bloody environment and most of it is wild, dangerous, parasitical and extremely detrimental to human life. What Africa needs is machine tools and lathes and tarmac roads and heavy trucks and great, big smokestack factories turning the sky black with their belched-out fumes. Given her commitment to maintaining the untamed savagery of that continent, I would judge that the most suitable award for Mrs. Maathai is a Serious Pain in the Arse Prize. People who build tarmac roads and heavy trucks no longer qualify for prizes. They only qualify for taxes, regulations and internationally-recognised opprobrium.

Call me old-fashioned but I always thought that 'peace' means the absence of war. Now it appears to mean something entirely different. Just like the word 'liberal' (in the US context and, increasingly, in Britain too) has become a label to describe people whose ideas and attitudes are anything and everything but liberal, so too the word 'peace' has now become a synonym for anything which is suitably and loudly primitivist, anti-development, anti-prosperity, anti-progress, nihilist, communist or just plain nuts!

I suppose that is why the remaining children of Lenin and raggedy, ageing Che-worshippers can still march around the thoroughfares of Western cities masquerading as 'peace campaigners'. 'Peace' is the fig-leaf behind which they can try to hide their godawfulness and pretend that they are struggling for a better world.

'Peace' is a discredited bromide. All I am saying is give my 'War Prizes' a chance.

(0) (2)

One of the more shameful aspects of the British civil service is the contempt and indifference that it often shows towards former servicemen and women, often viewing their demands as an anachronistic embarrassment. This partially explains the lack of action given the foreseeable plight that over one thousand Commonwealth veterans now face in Zimbabwe.

This article in the Sunday Telegraph detailed the sad plight of veterans whose savings have been wiped out by Mugabe's hyperinflation, whose lands have been confiscated by the war veterans and whose very lives are subjected to intimidation by ZANU-PF'S thugs. Their cause has been taken up by Col. Brian Nicholson of the Royal Commonwealth Ex-Services League, who has observed the impoverishment of the middle classes under the Mugabe regime.

Mr Mugabe has already closed many of the best schools and forced most of the white farmers out of the country. Now Col Nicholson fears Zanu-PF supporters will turn on the British war veterans, ransacking their homes, intimidating and possibly killing them.

Some may argue that many of the veterans were supporters of Ian Smith's regime and UDI in the 1960s. As such, they deserve no further support or succour from HMG. These arguments have no bearing on the current vulnerability of this group who are now being targeted because of their origins.

Col Nicholson is circulating his report to senior military figures and other "influential people" and wants them to press the Government to offer immediate financial help and to implement an evacuation plan.

He said: "We are doing our best but we can't do it alone. If nothing is done these brave, elderly people who fought for the Crown in the Second World War, defending the freedoms we enjoy today, will die an ignominious death."

A Foreign Office spokesman said there were "no plans" to evacuate British war veterans in Zimbabwe. He added: "If people are impoverished we would offer the appropriate consular assistance on an individual basis."

(0) (15)

They are not artefacts, they are not animals, they are not a tourist attraction, they are people. They do not belong where animals do, they belong in settlements, villages, towns and cities like you and me. - Sydney Tshepiso Pilane

This is an account of my wildly fluctuating sympathies as I gradually found out more about a legal case launched by the Bushmen of Botswana.

I first saw the story on Ceefax. It's disappeared from there, so I can not quote, but I got the impression that the Bushmen had been evicted from the Kalahari game reserve and that the (possibly dishonest) reason the Bostwana government had given for evicting them was that it could not afford to provide services. Riiight. I powered up for Welfare Rant #2 on the way that welfare systems start by offering their clients services and end by making the 'services' compulsory and demanding that people live their lives in such a way as to allow the government to fulfil its side of the forced exchange with minimum inconvenience.

Then I thought, not so fast, Natalie.

Turning from Ceefax to the BBC Online story linked to above, it now appeared that the Botswanan government wasn't evicting the Bushmen but merely refusing on cost grounds to continue to provide services to remote places. Not the same thing at all. The Bushmen were free to continue to dwell in the same place and manner as their ancestors, they just had to jettison modern conveniences to do it. Well, said I, there is no reason why other Botswanans, themselves most likely poor, should subsidise the Bushmen's lifestyle choice, is there?

In the 1980s there was vast resentment here in Britain at the supine way in which mobile social security offices were set up to follow New Age traveller convoys to keep paying them their benefits; resentment redoubled when it was reported that the travellers seemed immune from many burdens that the state imposes on the rest of us. Their vehicles were frequently untaxed, and the drug laws and the requirement to be 'actively seeking work' if on benefits were left unenforced. (For something of the other side of the story, see the account by a traveller linked to further down.) The Bushmen seemed a similar case. They wanted it both ways: piped water even though they had chosen to live in the back end of nowhere.

But the ride was not over yet. My sympathies swung back once more to the Bushmen as I read another BBC account: 'Botswana's bushmen battle for land.' Maybe I had been revving up for the wrong rant. Now it seemed like a case of Welfare Rant #1: Dependency. Maiteela Segwaba, the old chief profiled here, presents a sad picture; a man for whom the first sip at a government-provided waterhole turned out to be almost the equivalent of the first injection of heroin.

Thousands of bushmen used to live traditional hunter-gatherer lives inside the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, but now there are just a handful. And few still wear their loincloths or use bows and arrows to hunt game.

The waterholes the government provided years ago changed them gradually into farmers - ironically the authorities' refusal to continue supplying that water is now driving the bushmen from their land.

Not ironically. Predictably. Furthermore this account says that my first impression was right after all: the Bushmen were forcibly evicted, with threats and violence, possibly because there may be diamonds under their land and certainly because the government wants to tidy them up and make them proper modern Botswanans. Rants #1 and #2 fused into one when I read this attempt at justification by a government official, Sydney Tshepiso Pilane. It is sickening.

"Every government in every country formulates a policy for the development of all its people. They are not artefacts, they are not animals, they are not a tourist attraction, they are people. They do not belong where animals do, they belong in settlements, villages, towns and cities like you and me," he said.

Doublethink is not dead: the use of force to make a minority live like the majority is dressed up as a pseudo-indignant declaration of their equality with that majority.

One of the myriad reasons for thinking that it is an evil for the government to lay on services for one is that when the services are withdrawn it hurts, just as part of the evil of drugs is that withdrawal from them hurts. The hurt has two components: first the fact that something you have come to depend on goes away at all, and secondly that the way that the end comes tends to be chaotic and acrimonious.

The reason that withdrawal is rarely phased and planned comes from the politics of the attempt to make services universal. At first the government provides some service or other to most people, those it can reach easily. Then it gets a little richer and has enough spare capacity to get logical. It makes strenuous efforts to provide the service to everyone, whatever the expense. Officials often display a sort of manic determination akin to that of a mother determined to ensure none of her children will ever have cause to complain of fewer ballet lessons or football coaching sessions than another. The first stirrings of resentment from the paying majority start now. They will be ignored because the principle of universality seems so important. But resentments ignored have a way of building up. The pressure rises and rises and then explodes. Suddenly politicians are clutching their parliamentary majorities. Something has to be done to appease the ordinary folk, and quick! But because the minister placed in charge of withdrawal does not wish to have his own universalist platitudes of ten months earlier quoted back at him he has a strong motive to avoid debate. Thus it is Cold Turkey when you are lucky, force and fraud (as seems to be going on in Botswana) when you are not.

Some of the same themes emerge in this account of the New Age travellers (pdf document) by a man who was and is proud to be one. (The author, known as "Tash", would very much dispute some of my interpretation below.) The traveller movement seems much reduced since the eighties. Do those mobile Social Security vans still trundle devotedly on? I doubt it - and that may have been the gentlest of the methods the State used to break up the peace convoys and the festivals. One does not have to be sympathetic to New Age stuff to feel disturbed by accounts of police brutality at the "Battle of the Beanfield."

'Tash' also contends that in the early halcyon days the travellers had a functioning mini-economy of their own that was broken up by government action, pushing them onto benefits. Frankly I do not believe that they kept going solely by handicrafts, barter and busking. I did not dream those mobile social security offices, and a Joseph Rowntree foundation study says a later generation of travellers are somewhat welfare-dependent - but perhaps not as much as the press make out.

On the one hand, state welfare, along with the indifference to trespass, undermined the travellers' claim to be living sustainably and independently. On the other hand, many travellers were liberated and sustained by the freedom to choose their own neighbours and live in their own way and who can argue with that? (Answer: loads of people, starting with Sydney Tshepiso Pilane, but not me.) I can well believe that politically-motivated disruption of the festivals circuit did push people who had been making something for and of themselves into complete dependency. Then that dependency was used to stoke up more anger against them and that in turn embittered the travellers.

Something like the traveller life ought to be an option. But for it to work it has to be visibly non-parasitical. It is not fair that this requirement should be so much stronger for them than for settled people - any libertarian worth his or her salt will point out that people in houses and boardrooms often have their noses in the government trough more deeply than the travellers. It is not fair, but it is true. Metaphorically, those mobile social security vans carried the riot police and the bailiffs within them. They rankled too much to last.

Turning to the Bushmen, perhaps their ancient way of life was doomed anyway by contact with modernity, but any slight chance it may have had to either adapt organically or fade away by consent was finished, and its end made more bitter, by government efforts to help.

(0) (9)

The odious dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, has long been able to rely on the lack of loud criticism from many of his neighbouring African neighbours, afraid perhaps that they are seen to be lining up with their old white colonial oppressors against Zimbabwe. Well, if this report at Reuters is any indication, the coyness on the subject may be changing. More and more African nations are speaking out at the murders, pillage and looting carried out by Mugabe's henchmen.

Zimbabwe is a humanitarian catastrophe, occuring in slow motion before our very eyes. The sooner that the more decent regimes in that troubled continent apply the necessary pressures to help bring this bastard down, the better.

(0) (35)

Surprise, surprise:

President Robert Mugabe's rosy forecast of a bumper harvest in Zimbabwe was contradicted by his own government yesterday, when an official report said 2.3 million people needed immediate international food aid.

The seizure of white-owned farms has combined with drought to cripple agriculture in Zimbabwe. But Mr Mugabe's official message is that his land grab has markedly increased production and made Zimbabwe self-sufficient. Last month, he refused help from the United Nations World Food Programme, saying: "Why foist this food upon us? We don't want to be choked."

He brushed aside the fact that Zimbabwe has lived on food aid since 2001 and that 6.5 million people, more than half the population, depended on international help last year. By contrast, his office forecast a maize crop for this year of 2.4 million tons, more than enough to meet domestic needs.

Yet a report from the Zimbabwe Vulnerability Assessment Committee provides a strong antidote to the president's optimism. It concludes that 2.3 million people in rural Zimbabwe "will not be able to meet their minimum cereal needs during the 2004/05 season".

The report adds that food aid "for the most vulnerable people" should be sought immediately. The UN, aid agencies and Zimbabwean government departments compiled the assessment based on a survey completed in April. Mr Mugabe's officials appear not to share his optimism.

Food aid be damned. Someone should invade the place. Almost anyone would now be an improvement. Handing food aid over to the existing regime will not feed the "most vulnerable". It will merely feed the existing regime, and allow them to shove some more people into the most vulnerable category.

(2) (3)

With the minds of the world's intervening classes fully occupied elsewhere, Zimbabwe is now a problem too small for those who might otherwise have done something about it to be bothered with, yet still too big and difficult for anyone else to be able to handle. So, Robert Mugabe's monstrous and murderous political machine will continue to churn its way through what remains of the country and its institutions.

If the anguish of the cricket world serves to draw some of whatever international attention is left over from Iraq to the anguish of Zimbabwe, then so much the better. Personally, I do not give a damn about cricket, or England cricket, or Timbuktooan cricket, as such. Cricket will stagger on, no matter how this Zimbabwe row plays out. But if cricket helps to keep Zimbabwe and its misgovernment in the headlines, then the more and more continuous is cricket's anguish, the better.

Cricket-wise – and this is the new development in this particular bit of the story – the state of the Zimbabwean cricket team has become so disastrous that even the International Cricket Council has started to worry about it. Until now, the ICC has only been concerned with (a) money, and with (b) making England's cricket administrators squirm, pretty much for the sheer fun of it (but also because of (a) money), by demanding that England send a touring team to Zimbabwe later this year, no matter what. But now, the Zimbabwe team is such an embarrassment, and the continuing schedule of so-called Test matches between the Zimbabwe also-playeds against Sri Lanka, and soon, even more embarrassingly, Australia (the best cricket team on earth just now), that even the ICC has realised that cricket as a whole is being, as sporting administrators like to say from time to time but usually only when someone cheats, Brought Into Disrepute. ICC administrators are thus inexorably being brought into personal contact with the people who now rule Zimbabwean cricket.

I do not know for sure what is going to happen any more than any one else knows for sure, but here, for what it is worth, is my guess about how events will now unfold.

Since the people who now rule Zimbabwean cricket are thugs operating under the personal orders of Robert Mugabe, contact between the Mugabe Cricket Thugs and the ICC can only be a good thing, and all the better because it is potentially so newsworthy. I expect the ICC people to discover (as they already sort of know) that these Mugabe Cricket Thugs are indeed Thugs, and what is more that they are Mugabe Cricket Thugs whose word is worth nothing from one day to the next and with whom it is impossible to do coherent business of any kind. Robert Mugabe does not care about the ICC, any more than he cares about the rights and wrongs of murdering people, and the Mugabe Cricket Thugs know this. All that Mugabe now knows or cares about cricket is that some uppity white people ("rebels") have been making a nuisance of themselves, and they must be taught a lesson, at no matter what cost to Zimbabwe.

Now some more damned foreigners are interfering in Zimbabwe, taking it upon themselves to tell Zimbabwe how to do things, and my guess is that they too will get a right messing around from the Mugabe Cricket Thugs, who are now far more terrified of Robert Mugabe's wrath than of a little thing like Zimbabwe being threatened with expulsion from Test Match Cricket. So, such expulsion will be duly threatened. And then, when whatever deal has been made between the Mugabe Cricket Thugs and the ICC has been solemnly sworn to by the Mugabe Cricket Thugs and then welshed on within a few hours, Zimbabwe will be duly expelled from Test Match Cricket. The more humiliating, public, dramatic, acrimonious and downright unpleasant this process becomes, the better, because the more humiliating (etc.) that it is, the more it will broadcast the vileness of the Mugabe regime to the world, and more to the point to parts of the world which have until now regarded England's imperial past as more important than Zimbabwe's mass murderous present. If the many cricket-lovers of India (which is a lot of people) could be persuaded, perhaps as a result of a slanging match between one of the Mugabe Cricket Thugs and one of India's ICC reps, to decide that Mugabe Should Go, well, then he will indeed go, a little tiny moment sooner than otherwise, and a few thousand lives may be spared.

It would appear that this process of mutual recrimination – of deals and then withdrawn deals, of consultations and then recriminations – is well under way.

As I say, if all this foolishness serves to draw some more attention to the sorry state of Zimbabwe, then it will have done some good.

(2) (2)

I've been flagging up England versus Zimbabwe cricket here because I anticipated that the row about whether England ought to be playing cricket against Zimbabwe, given the state of Zimbabwe, was not going to go away. What I had not anticipated was that Zimbabwean cricket would itself be wrecked by the same processes which are destroying Zimbabwe in general. I should have, but I failed to.

The Zimbabwean cricket team (like Zimbabwe itself) is now a racially and politically polarised shambles:

Zimbabwean cricket will reach meltdown this morning when 15 rebel players and their lawyer draft a letter rejecting the board's offer of mediation and renewing their boycott. This time they will walk out for good.

"This will hopefully be our final letter," one of the rebels said. "We'll probably be set free in about 14 days when they fire us." The Zimbabwe Cricket Union will be forced to pick Test sides from the willing but hopelessly inexperienced young players who crashed and burned to a 5-0 one-day series defeat against Sri Lanka.

So what have these "rebels" been rebelling about. Well, their problem is that the Zimbabwe cricket team is now being selected, not by people who know their cricket, but by people who know their Robert Mugabe.

As Michael Jennings (who did see this coming a year ago) said on Ubersportingpundit about three weeks ago:

As far as I can see, any argument for continuing to play Zimbabwe is based on the idea that cricket and politics have been largely separated, and that the strongest team is being fielded. This is now manifestly not so, as players are being selected (or not) on racial and political grounds. …

And things have not got any better since then, as Scott Wickstein explained on Ubersportingpundit today.

Tony Blair has said that England "shouldn't" tour Zimbabwe in the autumn. But he isn't willing to decide the matter, and I can see his point.

The problem is that the ICC (International Cricket Council) has dug itself into a position of insisting that England must tour Zimbabwe, on the grounds that (now that South Africa has been sorted) politics and cricket must be kept separate, and the dominant ICC voices (i.e. India, and also Pakistan and Sri Lanka) are from countries whose citizens are extremely reluctant to admit to white people that they might have made a mistake. Although actually, they could change their policy now, on the grounds that Zimbabwean cricket has also changed. The Zimbabwean team used to be selected on cricketing merit. Now it is not.

(4) (17)

Kofi Annan has perfected the Holy Man style of public performance. He speaks very quietly, in that exquisitely enunciated African accent, and people just take if for granted that he is a Good Man and a Good Thing. But Per Ahlmark (linked to by Instapundit) shows him to be a less than perfect human being. He describes the inaction and treachery of the UN, as lead by Annan, in first promising, and then failing, to protect the Bosnian Muslims from the Serbs. But, he continues:

No one should be surprised by the UN's inaction, because only the year before it had demonstrated utter incompetence in facing the fastest genocide in history – the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda in just 100 days. UN forces in Rwanda in 1994 were Annan's responsibility before and during the crisis.

Annan was alerted four months before Hutu activists began their mass killings by a fax message from Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general commanding UN forces in Rwanda. Dallaire described in detail how the Hutus were planning "anti-Tutsi extermination". He identified his source "a Hutu" and reported that arms were ready for the impending ethnic cleansing.

Dallaire requested permission to evacuate his informant and to seize the arms cache. Annan rejected both demands, proposing that Dallaire make the informant's identity known to Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, even though the informant had expressly named the president's closest entourage as the authors of the genocide blueprint.

This is the man who is being seriously proposed as the next ruler of Iraq, because he would be an improvement.

Annan, Ahlmark makes clear, is an object of religious worship, a human repository of millenarian hopes, rather than a man who has earned the adoration he basks in.

A similar error of false adoration was made by the more elderly admirers of Kofi Annan, when younger, with that other African Holy Man of severe actual unholiness, Julius Nyerere. As with Nyerere, it is hard to tell what proportion of Annan's catastrophic blunders to attribute to sheer stupidity, and how much to actual wickedness. I suspect a combination of the two in the form of a murderously stubborn stupidity, which combines intellectual mediocrity with an immoral unwillingness to admit to error, possibly all floating in the same delusions as those that engulf the minds of his worshippers, but perhaps caused by mere vanity.

Robert Mugabe is another such. Although, having a slightly more severe and steely public persona, he is more readily identified as the mass murderer that he is. He should have gone to RADA. At the very least he should lose the Hitler moustache.

The vision Kofi Annan personifies with such theatrical precision is that of a single, infinitely benign World State, which will cure all ills, correct all injustices, right all wrongs, and put down the mighty from their seats. Allelujah. Especially those horrid Americans. That this same man might be an ill, a perpetrator of injustice, a wrongdoer and far too mighty one, and that the vision he personifies might be a road to ruin of our entire species, starting with its poorest and most unfortunate, and that those ghastly Americans may in fact be energetically rescuing the human race from a great and self-sacrificial folly with no good purpose to it whatever, is a thought that is simply not bearable to the World Statists. So they caste it aside. Mere evidence has nothing to do with it. To cease from the worship of Kofi would mean changing their entire way of thinking and believing and feeling, and that they will not do, no matter how much blood soaks their altar.

(0) (8)

Two news stories caught my eye today.

Firstly B.B.C. Radio 4's Today show reported that the authorities in the People's Republic of Scotland have noticed that sport is unfair - there are winners and losers and sometimes the winners win big.

To deal with this problem the local authority in Edinburgh has declared that if a team in a children's football match are winning by 5 to 0 (or more) at half time the ref should be allowed and encouraged to declare the score to be 0 - 0.

In this way the losing children can have another chance - and their self esteem will be protected.

Soon the careful minds of the Scottish authorities will work out that a better way of ensuring equality would be to declare that all matches end in the score 0 - 0.

Oh well, whilst the English taxpayers continue to fund the Scottish government (latest example - a 400 milion plus Paliament building that was supposed to cost "a maximum of 40 million") such sillyness will continue.

Also today I got to see this week's Economist... and I spotted a report on Somalia that I think will be of interest.

As is well known most of the nation of Somalia does not have a formal government. Now opponents of anarchism (or perhaps "anarchocapitalism" as "anarchism" is a word that is sometimes used to refer to some forms of collectivism) have pointed at Somalia and said "see anarchy - it really is vile, bloodsoaked chaos" and defenders of anarchy have claimed "no - Somalia does have a government (indeed it has multiple governments), the Warlords are all statists acting as warring governments".

The Economist report does not settle the dispute between anarchists and non-anarchists, but it does provide some information.

Firstly that paying the Warlords money to protect oneself and property does not work very well as (unlike the "protection agencies" of anarchist or anarcho-capitalist theory) the Warlords will take the money - but their men will tend to rob and murder you anyway.

However, hireing and organising one's own troops seems to work better (as does owning, and learning how to use, weapons oneself).

Also, as there are now about two dozen warlords and none of them (up until recently anyway) has a very well equiped force, a troop of even ten men can give one security against most road blocks and other such (the Warlord gangs just see it as just two many armed people to fight - and the armed guards tend to be fairly trustworthy).

This is clearly not much good for very small business enterprises or (POOR) private individuals. But some large companies are actually prospering in Somalia.

For example the largest mobile phone company may employ 300 armed guards on top of its 500 working staff, but neither the company or its employees have to pay taxes to anyone or obey any regualtions. They just have to respect the property of other people and keep their agreements with them (otherwise the reputation, and therefore the profits, of the company would go down the drain).

Although many of the working (or perhaps "non security workers" would be more polite - after all the armed guards are doing a job) staff consider it wise to own weapons themselves and to know how to use them (which is a cost - in both money and time), for added security.

And, the Economist (no friend of corrupt business folk)reports, the company provides charitable gifts to the local people (schools, hospials, roads and so on).

Sadly neither the American government or the "International Community" are interested in this.

The Americans are supplying favoured Warlords with money and weapons (in return for help in hunting terrorists) and the International Community is obsessed with a "peace process" in which the various crimial gang bosses, or proto governments (or whatever you want to call the Warlords) are gathered together in the hopes they will form a formal government for the area of Somalia that does not have one. In which case (of course) the Warlords would be strong enough to rob and murder as much as they liked.

Almost needless to say, the private companies are not invited to these talks. Perhaps if the private companies robbed and murdered people they would be invited.

(0) (2)

One reason for not wanting England to go ahead with its projected cricket tour of Zimbabwe this winter is that the despotic ruler of that unhappy land, Robert Mugabe, will undoubtedly regard such a tour as proof of his own international magnificence, and of the indifference of all people in Britain to his many murders and other atrocities.

Things in Zimbabwe are so bad that even the UN has noticed, and wants to throw other people's money at the problem.

The United Nations is appealing for more than $94 million to provide urgent humanitarian aid to Zimbabwe. The United Nations says economic mismanagement has brought Zimbabwe to the brink of a serious humanitarian crisis.

Yes. Things are about to get really bad out there. Hurry. Give money, before people start to die.

The United Nations says Zimbabwe's economy is a shambles and getting worse. It says inflation has shot up from 100 percent in 2000 to 600 percent this year. And, last year, it says, the Gross Domestic Product dropped by 13 percent.

When I say throw other people's money at the problem, I actually mean throw other people's money at Robert Mugube, for it is undoubtedly he who will hoover it all up.

Money isn't going to solve this problem. In fact that kind of money is the damn problem, or at any rate a big slice of it. Serious international pressure, on Mugabe's version of Zimbabwe, and on all the scumbag politicians in other countries who are protecting Mugabe's version of Zimbabwe, might make some small difference by speeding the collapse of that disgusting regime by a few months and hence saving a couple of hundred thousand lives, or whatever it would be. Anything which might draw attention to this horror story, such as a nice little row about the England cricket tour, is all to the good.

But now here is another reason to hope that the England cricketers cancel their trip. If they do, it may mean that London will not get the 2012 Olympics.

If England boycott their tour of Zimbabwe this winter, it could have a knock-on effect on London's prospects of hosting the Olympic Games in 1912...

... and they seem to have lost a century there, but never mind...

...according to a report in Friday's edition of The Guardian. What is more, the potential costs to the England & Wales Cricket Board are spiralling by the day, and if they are suspended by the ICC for their moral stance, they could lose up to £50 million in gate receipts, sponsorship, and TV revenue.

"The ECB is once again in an invidious position because of the utterly tragic situation in Zimbabwe," said John Read, the board's director of communications. "A one-year ban would cost the ECB tens of millions of pounds, and would have a devastating effect on all aspects of the game, including our ability to help nurture and develop the two million schoolchildren that play cricket up and down the country. It is difficult to envisage a more serious scenario facing cricket in England and Wales."

The ECB's stance has also caused widespread distrust among African IOC members, whose votes will be crucial when it comes to deciding which city is awarded the 2012 Olympics. It has been noted that there was no such opposition to Zimbabwe's participation in the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, partly because of a fear of an African boycott.

Rejoice David Carr.

Maybe the ECB should start a "Boycott the Tour" fund, to cover the cost to them of pulling out of this abominable expedition. I agree that it is tough on them to be used as a political stick to beat Mugabe with. So, all those of us who think their tour should be used as a stick anyway, because every stick helps, should be asked to pay for their opinion. One thing is for sure. Money spent that way will do a whole lot more good than UN "humanitarian aid". Plus, it would publicise the whole disgusting mess very satisfactorily.

Armed humanitarian aid, that went in there and actually helped all the afflicted Zimbabweans and cut out the middle man (Mugabe), preferably by apprehending him (dead or alive), would be a different matter.

(0) (13)

The way to tell what is really happening by reading newspapers – which is not always very easy, is it? – is to look for what both sides in arguments agree about. And in Africa the reports which I read from time to time all seem to agree that educational standards are falling. The only argument is about whose fault that is.

Take this report, which I found on a google hit list from typing in, as is my occasional wont, "education":

Principals in secondary schools in Ebonyi State have been identified as responsible for the falling standard of education in Post-Primary schools as they contribute significantly to examination malpractices in the state.

This was the view of members of State House of Assembly who spoke when the planning committee on the forthcoming Ebonyi State educational summit paid advocacy visit to the House in Abakaliki on Monday.

The House members frowned at the prevailing situation where many principals allegedly collect money from students and aid them during NECO and WASC examinations and even negotiate deals between the students and examination supervisors.

Sounds like Nigerian business as usual is proceeding as usual. I do not know anyone with direct experience of Nigeria who does not regard the place as the world capital of anarcho-capitalism, in a bad way. In London – which is now, like the Internet itself, infested with dishonest Nigerians – our default attitude is: crooks the lot of them, until an individual can prove himself an exception to the rule. Anyone not totally prejudiced against Nigerians, from the trust point of view, is totally ignorant.

At first the link to this report didn't work, and my immediate inclination was to blame a Nigerian somewhere for taking a bribe instead of doing his job, but that may have been somewhat unfair. (And when I checked the link again before posting this, it was back to not working again. Bloody Nigerians!)

Not that those "House members" who "frowned" at all this are going to do anything about it. They are just higher up in the bribery chain.

My solution: make Nigeria anarcho-capitalist in a good way. Stop trying to have a government that does anything, because whatever government there is will be totally corrupt. Make the system that everything is for sale and everything negotiable official, including law and order. Then the place might work semi-reasonably.

But then again it still might not.

(4) (6)

It will come as no surprise to anyone with a 100+ IQ and a modicum of knowledge about how the world works that Robert Mugabe and his murderous kleptocrats have appropriated more that £100 million (US $190 million) in aid sent to Zimbabwe by Britain and the EU.

As that was only to be expected, I cannot say it adds significantly to my loathing of the Mugabe regime. What does fill me with utter contempt is that the people responsible for this utterly predictable outcome still allowed the money to be sent in the first place.

As I have previously argued many times before about foreign aid, to send money for ostensibly humanitarian aims to a nation governed by a tyranny is to become the logistic support arm of that tyranny: insulating the regime from the economic (and hence political) consequences of its actions and thereby indirectly, but in a very real sense, making the regime more likely to survive than would otherwise be the case. That is true even if the humanitarian aid does indeed reach the people and projects it is targeted at.

This however is even worse than that. To send aid to Zimbabwe is to underwrite the tyrannical Mugabe regime directly as according to the latest report, 89% ends up in the pockets of Zimbabwe's rulers rather than being spent on the humanitarian objectives for which it is intended. Thus not only can the people who sent the money not bask in their delusions that they have at least done good for those who benefit from the worthy projects, they might as well be buying weapons for Mugabe's police and paramilitaries, not to mention making the bankers and shopkeepers in Zürich rather happy. They are directly supporting the tyrants with large cash injections.

As I disinclined to believe that the people in charge of the governments and agencies in question do not know full well where the money is going to end up, that makes them knowingly supporters of the regime. Which means they are supporting this:

Hilary Andersson, of the BBC's Panorama programme, reveals how thousands of youths are being taught to rape, maim, torture and kill in Zimbabwe's terror training camps - and now Robert Mugabe intends to make the camps compulsory for all the country's young men and women

[...]

A former official with the Ministry of Youth, Gender and Employment Creation that oversees the camps, explained the government's thinking. "You are moulding somebody to listen to you, so if it means rapes have to take place in order for that person to take instructions from you, then it's OK," he said. He was so horrified that he left his job with the ministry in disgust. Rape is just one of the ways camp commanders are able to turn their charges into unquestioning automata. The training methods vary from camp to camp, but the pattern is consistent.

If all that was happening was that the Guardian reading classes were getting a warm fuzzy glow because they were supporting British tax money going to 'help stamp out poverty in the third world', then that would be bad enough, given the reality of what this distorting flow of cash really does. But as Zimbabwe slowly morphs into an inept 'North Korea Lite', the platitudes and wilful ignorance of some are now directly funding truly monstrous horrors and misery because they are too damn lazy to think the whole issue through.

Of course if our political masters did not know this was going to happen when they decided to send huge chunks cash to a place like Zimbabwe, then they are naive to the point of idiocy and have no business being in charge of vast amounts of other people's money to begin with.

So which is it?

(0) (10)

Whilst undertaking a major reorganization of my house and all the junk accumulated over many years, I have been constantly rediscovering little treasures at the bottom of boxes or at the back of seldom visited closets which have not seen the light of day for many years.

One of the most interesting items to emerge today was a pristine £1 note issued by the Bank of Biafra: a poignant reminder of a truly savage war which raged between the Nigerian Federal Government and Ibo Separatists from 1967 until 1970. I acquired the banknote during a trip I took to Nigeria in the late 1970's with my grandfather. A business associate of my grandfather was a former Biafran soldier and gave it to me after we had a very interesting chat when we visited his home in Port Harcourt.

click for bigger image

The daily images of starving children with beri-beri during the dying days of the Biafran Republic was one of the first things I saw on television as a child which I recall having made a real impact on me. That was also what started both my fascination with Africa and my abiding cynicism towards it. I find objects like this bank note a fascinating bit of not-so-far-off history that one can hold in one's hand and finding such things is one of the reasons I have always so enjoyed travelling.

(2) (4)

Do you remember Liberia? There was a big fuss about it awhile back. Yeah, that one, the place in West Africa. The one with the bridge surface scattered with enough brass to build a Napoleonic cannon. The one with the guys who couldn't hit a barn door at point blank range with a full AK47 clip.

It seems the post-Taylor era is working out as well as could have been expected. The violence has subsided, bands of marauding 'rebels' are disarming, loads of aid is flowing in and the new government is in place. Unknown to most of us, due to lack of media interest, US President Bush found time to keep on top of the affair and meet with Liberians.

Colin Powell says the former 'President' of Liberia will eventually pay for his crimes.

You can catch up on it here. You have not been hearing much because without doom and gloom, where is the story?

If you believed the media you would think there were no place in the world without a dead body or two casually laying about.

(0) (51)

As the economy of Zimbabwe continues its steady collapse into a Mad Max like wasteland under the thuggish tyranny of Robert Mugabe, perhaps we are seeing the first signs of resistance.

The rebellion by 6,000 black workers is the first in nearly four years of state-sponsored terror on the country's white-owned farms. Kondozi's 1,500 profitable acres provide huge quantities of runner beans, mange tout and red peppers for stores including Safeway, Sainsbury's and Tesco.

But the minister for agriculture, Joseph Made, wants the business for himself. A few weeks ago, he arrived at the farm with colleagues and ordered out the workers and the white owners. A fortnight later, scores of ruling Zanu-PF party loyalists were sent in but around 200 women workers fought back with broken tiles, stones and broken bricks. Shots were fired, apparently by pro-government thugs, but they were forced to flee. Mr Made was not available for comment.

As I have suggested before regarding the Logistics of Tyranny, if the 'aid lobby' was actually serious about the welfare of people in the Third World generally, and places like Zimbabwe in particular, they would do better to call for ending 90% of all aid payments to the kleptocratic governments that rule them and in place of the remaining 10%, send an equal value of weapons and ammunition to people who actually oppose the regimes keeping Africa from sharing the vast economic improvements elsewhere in the Third World.

One would think that because the vast majority of Mugabe's victims are not white land owners but are in fact the common black people of that woeful nation, this might move even the chattering classes in Islington, Berkeley and Grenwich Village to feel a spot of indigestion over their morning bowl of Muesli and hense to demand 'something be done', but I guess that only applies when the designated 'bad guys' are Jews (or Donald Rumsfeld), not black African socialists.

The only message people like Joseph Made understand weighs 55 grains and moves at about 3,100 feet per second. I do not lightly wish for bloodshed anywhere, but the occasional grimaces of the Guardian reading classes have not stopped the long nightmare of the people of Zimbabwe.

Arm the workers of Kondozi!

A couple truck loads of ammo and one for
these each of the workers of Kondozi and you
will have a real rebellion

(0) (35)

I learned long ago not to hang my rhetorical hat on anything as unreliable and insubstantial as a scientific report, especially when they are described as 'surveys'. It always conjures up visions of earnest researchers scurrying about with clipboards asking random people multiple-choice questions about household detergents.

However, that said, it would not surprise me in the least to discover that this does, in fact, have some substance to it:

Millions of Africans believed to have HIV/Aids are free of the disease, according to research published yesterday.

The survey will dismay those who claim the West is ignoring a pandemic so acute it could wipe out the populations of entire African states.

I know exactly who those 'dismayed' people are. They are the lobbyists, charity scammers, tranzi office-holders, preachy celebrities and other assorted NGO-fodder who have turned AIDS into an international fund-raising and foreign junkett circus. Joining them will be a host of African kleptocrats who know only too well that 'AIDS' is the magic word with which to open the purse-strings of Western treasuries.

Africa still has that 'dark continent' quality about it that makes it impenetrably mysterious to gringos in the West. So when we are told by talking heads with august-sounding titles that squinty million zillion trillion people are dying of AIDS in Africa every four minutes, very few of us (if any) have sufficient knowledge of the situation on the ground to raise so much as a batsqueak of doubt. By the same token, it would all look the same if the figure-compilers lumped in deaths from all manner of other maladies and diseases in order to inflate the victim-toll.

I remember so clearly when AIDS became a big public health issue in Britain in the mid-80's. From out of nowhere came legions of 'experts' to assure us that it really was the new 'Black Death' and it was poised to wipe out the civilised world. Resistance was futile. Most of us would be dead before breakfast.

It never happened in the West and maybe it is never going to happen in Africa either.

(0) (3)

I completely missed this posting at Freedom and Whisky on Boxing Day, until F&W supremo David Farrer rang me on another matter of mutual concern, and he mentioned it. I forget why, but I'm glad he did. (He also gave me some very helpful tips in how to use my Canon A70 camera. He now has a Canon A80, which is the same only rather more so.)

To tickle your fancies, and to ensure that a decent number of you do investigate, try this:

It was all part of this terrible attack on people by those who had nothing better to do than to give advice on all sorts of subjects. These people, who wrote in newspapers and talked on the radio, were full of good ideas on how to make people better. They poked their noses into other people’s affairs, telling them to do this and to do that. They looked at what you were eating and told you it was bad for you; then they looked at the way you raised your children and said that was bad too. And to make matters worse, they often said that if you did not heed their warnings, you would die. In this way they made everybody so frightened of them that they felt they had to accept the advice.

Who do you reckon says that? Clue: look at the categories for this posting.

As an F&W commenter points out, we spend half our lives telling, if not everybody, then at least a great many people how they should be behaving better, so maybe we're as bad … But, if we don't, who will interfere with the interferers, meddle with the meddlers, nanny the nannies? Anyway, go there, and enjoy.

(1) (4)

Robert Mugabe, that noted expert on the alleviation of Third World poverty, has been holding forth at a UN meeting in Geneva about the Internet. He may have left the Commonwealth, but he hasn't lost any of his certainty of his own rightness and wonderfulness.

Here is my favourite bit of this BBC report:

He said there was no point in providing poor people with computers unless they were also given electricity and a phone network to run them.

Good point. And come to that, what's the point in people having computers if they are starving to death or being beaten up or killed by government thugs?

I also liked Mark Doyle's nicely ironic final paragraph, inviting comparisons between the monster Mugabe and all the other tyrants down the years who have also been rather bad people …

Opposition leaders in Zimbabwe may condemn Mr Mugabe for acting oppressively at home; but here in Geneva, many delegates – whether they agreed with him or not – were impressed by a lively speech.

… but who have likewise softened their various blows by making lively speeches which impressed everyone, whether they agreed with them or not.

(0) (0)

It scarcely counts as news:

Herbert Ndlovu, 43, who retired from the Zimbabwean National Army in August after 23 years service, said he had been ordered to put a cross against Mugabe's names on ballot papers that should have been sent to soldiers.

Instead, the papers were resealed in envelopes and driven to Harare where they were used to support claims that Mugabe won the controversial presidential poll in March last year.

There were numerous secondhand accounts of vote rigging and gerrymandering, but the statement in Johannesburg by Ndlovu, who was tortured by the regime and has fled Zimbabwe fearing for his life, is the first personal account.

Accusations of electoral fraud were so convincing that the Commonwealth expelled Zimbabwe, and the United States and the European Union imposed travel and financial sanctions on Mugabe and his cronies.

Mr Ndlovu, said: "I filled in hundreds of ballot papers, maybe thousands. There were six of us working from early in the morning."

The real shock would have been if this kind of thing had turned out not to have been happening. If Mr Ndlovu has said: "I know everyone assumes there was cheating, but there wasn't. I know. I was directly involved. Everything was done correctly, with no shady business." If he'd said that, and been believed, that would have been a story. But "yes there was cheating"?

Put it this way. I don't know where this story was in the paper version of the Telegraph, but not on page one would be my guess.

(0) (6)

Time for me to take a break from all this lofty philosophising about the state of the world and indulge in a little bit of schoolboy humour, made possible by this BBC report on the death of the former Zimbabwean President, Canaan Banana:

A former Methodist minister, professor of theology and diplomat, he was 67 years old. He leaves four adult children and a wife with whom he separated in 2000.

The Bananas Split!

(1) (17)

In Zimbabwe, things are just getting worse and worse:

An estimated three million Zimbabweans are seeking sanctuary in neighbouring South Africa, while 400,000 have gone to Mozambique. Anything from 10 to 20 per cent of the Zimbabwean population have left their homes to seek job security and wages in neighbouring lands.

Trains, buses and lorries have been used by the South African authorities to deport 498,321 since the crisis began in 2000, according to official figures, although it is believed that only one in six illegal immigrants is caught.

Even desperately poor Mozambique is now attracting Zimbabweans. Thousands have streamed over the mountainous eastern border into Manica province, hoping to be paid in any currency other than the Zimbabwean dollar.

Ironically, many black Zimbabweans are leaving for Mozambique to work on farms being run by the same white farmers kicked off their land by Mr Mugabe.

Zimbabwe may hate the white farmer, but scores have been welcomed into Mozambique by the authorities keen to lure agricultural specialists, especially in the tobacco sector.

Botswana, too, has also been inundated. A rare African economic success story, it is now under threat from hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants. It is dramatic proof of the regional chaos caused by Mr Mugabe's chaotic rule.

So is anything being done about this horror story? According to Zimbabwe "Information" Minister Jonathan Moyo, something is being done:

"Britain, America, Australia ... and New Zealand are truly and seriously committed to regime change, they seek a regime change in Zimbabwe," he said.

"They are pursuing it through acts of economic sabotage and they use weapons of mass deception, (under the cover of) instruments of democracy, human rights rule of law, good governance, to sound reasonable," Moyo said.

"They steal our foreign currency earnings, they attack even our own currency to the point of saying it's scarce, to blame the government, to seek regime change, and they drive the parallel market," he told top government, economic and civic officials seeking solutions to the economic malaise.

We can hope, I suppose. But you get the feeling that although lots of people know what's going on out there, nobody important in the world has this horror story near enough to the top of their to-do list for anything to be done about it at all soon. Only when, having destroyed Zimbabwe itself, the Mugabe regime destroys itself, as it presumably will when there's nothing else left to destroy, will this horrible chapter in human affairs draw to a close.

The final paragraph of this second story, originally from Agence France-Presse, is a classic of Gallic gallows humour:

The two day conference convened by government and business heard yesterday that Zimbabwe's economy was being undermined by contradictory and ineffectual government policies, corruption, greed and the country's negative image abroad.

Yes how true. Government policy isn't being imposed nearly firmly enough. If government officials were murdering people selflessly and ungreedily, instead of how they're doing it now, and if Zimbabwe could shed its negative image abroad, all would be well.

(0) (23)

For some people, Africa is the conscience of the world. For others, its a land of milk and honey:

Kenyan women with mixed-race children claim activists encouraged them to lie about British soldiers, reports Adrian Blomfield in Nanyuki

Human rights activists have encouraged Kenyan prostitutes to submit fake rape claims against British soldiers, according to allegations made to The Telegraph. They were allegedly promised a share in any compensation payments.

At least three witnesses claim that representatives of Impact, a Kenyan organisation working with a British lawyer to prepare the lawsuit against the Ministry of Defence, have approached impoverished prostitutes in the town of Nanyuki, in central Kenya, with a tantalising proposal.

Angela Muguri, 24, claims three Impact activists sought her out and promised to make her a millionaire. All she had to do was pretend that British soldiers raped her - and then give them a cut of any forthcoming compensation.

Those 'human rights activists' are just concerned, caring people who are fighting for social justice and a better world.

(0) (6)

According to the Independent, Robert Mugabe is being bought out of office by President Bush.

Robert Mugabe will relinquish his leadership of Zimbabwe's ruling party by December, paving the way for his exit as President and new elections by June 2004, the South African President Thabo Mbeki has told George Bush.

The Independent has established that Mr Bush has pledged a reconstruction package for Zimbabwe worth up to $10bn (£6.2bn) over an unspecified timeframe, if a new leader takes over.

Unwrapping the delicate wordage of the Independent story, Mbeki told Mugabe to go, and now he's going (which obviously has something to do with this). But why? What's in it for Mbeki?

Privately Mr Bush is said to have exerted pressure on the South African President by indicating that South African companies would benefit from the aid package for Zimbabwe, since many of them would be well placed to bid for contracts. South African firms are owed huge amounts of money by Zimbabwe, mainly for fuel and electricity supplies.

Ah.

Oh well. Better than nothing being done at all. I think. I hope.

(0) (4)

Just when you think that the world could not possibly get more insane:

President Robert Mugabe's regime pulled off an extraordinary diplomatic coup yesterday when it was given a senior position within the African Union, the grouping set up to promote good governance in Africa.

What are the odds on Mugabe being appointed as the next UN Commissioner on Human Rights?

(0) (37)

George W Bush has agreed to send up to 1,000 troops to Liberia. CNN reports that he took the decision after a meeting of his National Security Council. An announcement was expected, possibly today, that the US troops will head an international peacekeeping force.

Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary-general, had urged the UN Security Council to dispatch a force "to prevent a major humanitarian tragedy" in an upsurge in fighting between factions engaged in a 14-year conflict that has killed a tenth of Liberia's population.

Apart from embassy protection detachments, the marines will be the first American soldiers deployed in Africa since the withdrawal from Somalia nearly a decade ago. Britain, France and some African countries had called on America to lead it because of its historical links with Liberia, founded in 1822 as a settlement for freed American slaves.

Comments by White House press secretary Ari Fleischer that Bush was considering sending troops provoked a nearly instantaneous reaction in Monrovia, where thousands of people gathered outside the U.S. Embassy to cheer a possible American presence. One man said:

We feel America can bring peace because they are the original founders of this nation, and secondly, they are the superpower of the world.

Strange, Liberians do not seem to have a problem with that...

(1) (26)

Paul Staines ponders the grim events unfolding in Liberia and wonders who is going to support what action... if any

The Left seems strangely quiet about Liberia. Bad things are happening in that inappropiately named land, Liberians themselves are calling for intervention - US intervention. Various European foreign ministries hint that they think US intervention might be a 'good thing'.

The UN offices and food programs have come under attack form Liberian government forces. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan urges the Security Council to dispatch a multinational intervention force to Liberia to prevent 'a humanitarian catastrophe'. Annan hinted a strongly worded letter to the Security Council president, that this should be led by the United States. He also said it should be authorised under chapter Vll of the UN Charter which permits the use of force to restore order. (Why didn't we use that in Iraq?)

Even France urged Washington to take the lead on military intervention in Liberia. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which is brokering peace talks between the Liberian government and rebels in the Ghanaian capital Accra, has also urged the United States to take a leading role in the dispatch of peacekeepers.

French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, said during a visit to Ghana on Saturday that Britain and France had "assumed their responsibilities" in two of Liberia's neighbours, Sierra Leone and Cote d'Ivoire, where they had led recent military interventions to halt civil war. Villepin said it was now time for the United States to do the same in Liberia, which was founded by freed American slaves in the early 19th century.

The Left here faces a tricky dilemma - unable as 'anti-imperialists' to ever give the US the benefit of the doubt they prefer, I suspect, to let Liberia go up in flames rather than sanction a US led intervention.

Paul Staines

(3) (32)

Some further evidence for that buzz I thought I detected a while ago in favour of re-conquering Africa.

A consortium of mercenary groups has made the UN a deceptively simple proposal: give us $200 million, and we'll help bring an end to the war in the Congo.

Tribal militias are running rampant in the eastern part of the central African nation, slaughtering hundreds of villagers at a time. Since 1998, the violence there has claimed 3.3 million lives.

The world's response has been, to say the least, underwhelming. A few thousand UN peacekeeping troops have been stationed there since 2001. But these brave souls watched helplessly last month as the militias murdered 430 innocents in the provincial capital of Bunia.

The killings shamed the European Union into sending 1,400 French and British soldiers into the area. But they'll operate only in Bunia -- no matter how bloody things turn in the countryside. And on September 1, the troops are going home. End of story.

What happens then? The UN Security Council is trying to decide that now. …

Personally I would be amazed if anything as sensible and humane as this were actually to happen in the near future.

I mean, think of the embarrassment that would be unleashed if such an operation were to be triumphantly and quickly successful. The private sector, even if only as a World Government contractor, succeeding where the World Government itself had failed? This would never do. Next thing you know, they'll be cutting out the middle man, and just going around rescuing countries anyway, whether the UN approves or not, and then just bullying the UN into approving it afterwards. Unthinkable. Couldn't happen.

And since most of that money would eventually come from the Americans, why not ask them to pay for it direct, instead of if being fed through all those sticky fingers at the UN? And although two hundred million dollars is quite a lot compared to what I have in the bank, it doesn't sound like much for liberating and pacifying an entire resource-rich country. Before you know it, regime change could become a profitable business, financed, as they say at the RNLI (a not entirely dissimilar operation by any means), "entirely by voluntary contributions".

Impossible. Couldn't have that. Far better to let the Africans go on killing one another and spray the mess with bank notes and food parcels, paid for by the resigned taxpayers of the West.

So it may all stay at the level of talk for some time yet, but I can see all sorts of people getting behind such talk and bouncing it around, if only to embarrass the United Nations.

(2) (30)

This from today's (well yesterday's now – I was trying to get something up before midnight) Telegraph:

Robert Mugabe is considering stepping down as Zimbabwe's president within a year under "certain conditions", South African government sources said yesterday.

His demands include the right to nominate his successor and international and local recognition that he remains the country's properly elected founding president to enable him to enjoy "honourable retirement", they said.

The 79-year-old autocrat, whose obsession with clinging to power has brought his once-prosperous nation to the edge of economic collapse and political chaos, is said to have assured President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa of his retirement plans in a telephone call last week.

Mr Mbeki sees Mr Mugabe as a major impediment to his dream of successfully launching Nepad - the "new partnership for Africa's development" under which African nations commit themselves to good governance in return for international financial aid.

Mr Mbeki was said to have been enraged by images emerging from Zimbabwe of Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change being hauled before court in chains to face a second charge of high treason for organising protests against the Mugabe government.

According to sources, Mr Mbeki told Mr Mugabe of South Africa's "displeasure".

What a world of misery and sleaze is captured in these few paragraphs.

And how about Nepad? Don't they realise that "Nep" is the start of other words, which suggest anything but "good governance", but which instead involve such practices as nominating one's successor from within the ranks of one's own family?

This whole Zimbabwe mess makes me think that actually something much bigger may be going on than merely the struggle between these bad guys (in power) and these good guys (not yet in power). What if things in Africa just keep on getting worse and worse, and what if the decision that we all, in our nice safe countries, have eventually to make about Africa is not which ones are the nice Africans whom we should be helping, but whether to try to rescue the entire place by conquering it, again.

We're decades away from any such plan emerging in all seriousness, but I can see us starting to think about this sort of thing, any year it now. Regime change, is, after all, now on the menu of things that are thinkable. The USA and the UN would have to be more in tune than they are now, but I can see that happening.

South Africa, from what I've read, is losing its professional classes inexorably. This article was published in 1998, and according to a piece by R. W. Johnson in the last Prospect but one (paper only), things haven't improved any since, in this respect. The haemorrhaging of professionals of all colours from that increasingly unhappy country continues relentlessly, which at least counterbalances the refugees now flooding in from Zimbabwe. And as for the Congo …

Many might say that to even hint at the notion of a future reconquest of Africa is cruel and frivolous. But I think that such talk might actually do some good. The present line taken by the likes of Mugabe is that the problems he is facing now are all caused by white interference in the past, and by continuing white interference now, and that any black Zimbabwean who protests against him is just a tool of imperialism. Yet the truth is that one of the men now doing most to revive the idea of another wave of imperialism in Africa is Mugabe himself, and telling him this just might stir up a bit of embarrassment around him. Best of all, it might make the bastard suffer:

Mr Mugabe, people are saying that Africa ought to be reconquered by White Men, partly because of how you do things. Any comment on that?

And the opposition to Mugabe could say that because of Mugabe, White Men are talking of reconquering Africa. He's the friend of White Imperialism, not us. And it would be true.

On the other hand maybe Kim du Toit has a clearer fix on what we should do.

(0) (40)

Thousands were slaughtered on the streets of Liberian capital of Monrovia during the intermittent civil war in the mid-1990s. Now there is more killing as clashes between troops loyal to President Charles Taylor and the well-armed rebels have intensified. The French military commanders based in nearby Ivory Coast felt they had no option other than to order an evacuation of United Nations staff and foreign diplomats from Monrovia.

But unlike in Sierra Leone in 2000, when British troops remained in large numbers on the ground for months, the French commanders ordered their men to leave Liberia as soon as the foreign passport holders had been rounded up.

Our sole mission is to proceed with the evacuation of Europeans and other foreigners upon the demand of the French government.

The rebel groups now fighting for control of Liberia have been accused of voodoo-driven atrocities that have almost become the norm in west Africa - with prisoners cut to pieces so rebel soldiers can eat their vital organs.

For Liberians who did not have the option of being rescued, the immediate future looked grim and thousands of Monrovians continued to gather around the city's main soccer stadium desperate for sanctuary. Fanny, a Liberian refugee who had trudged for two days to reach the stadium said:

There's no food anywhere. People are dying. The Americans must come. We want peace.

Thanks to Dissident Frogman for the link.

(2) (15)

Just watching the cricket between Zimbabwe and England today, I have a couple of further comments to add to what Brian was saying on Thursday.

The background to all this is that Henry Olonga in the recent World Cup wore a black arm band to mourn the death of democracy in Zimbabwe. (Olonga incidentally was in 1995 the first non-white player to play top level cricket for Zimababwe, although there have been many others since) Although he was a member of the Zimbabwe squad for the rest of the World Cup, he was not selected in any further matches in the tournament. Off the record, the team management admitted that they would have liked him to have played, but they were under pressure from the Mugabe government not to select him. The final stages of the tournament were played in South Africa, and it was revealed at the end of the tournament several members of the Zimababwean security forces had travelled to Zimbabwe to "escort" Olonga back to Zimbabwe after the last game so that he could be charged with treason. The South African government should have screamed in outrage at this violation of its sovereignty but didn't. Apparently good relations with the Mugabe regime are still important there.

Unsurprisingly, Olonga went into hiding and left South Africa, eventually turning up in England. Many of us thought that this was so outrageous that cricketing ties with Zimbabwe should be ended, at least for now. Over the past ten years, Zimbabwe had gone to some effort to build up a good cricket team, but by this point things had reached something of a sad, depressing joke. (Of course, the situation with the game of cricket was unimportant compared to the indignities being suffered by the people of Zimbabwe in general, but it was sadly symptomatic of it).

However, the Zimbabwe team's present tour of England went on as scheduled. The England Cricket Board (which isn't in a great financial state) needed the money. The Australian board, which is in a perfectly good financial state, also confirmed a tour for October, so the English board are not alone. The first game between Zimbabwe and England (which goes for five days) is presently being played.

As Brian said, there have been some protests against the game. Brian reported that Channel 4, the advertising funded but technically state owned television network that covers English cricket, used the rain delays in the match to provide some discussion of Mr Mugabe's vile regime, and to interview Henry Olonga.

However, turning on the match this morning, I discovered it was even better than this. Henry Olonga is actually working for Channel 4 as a commentator. I don't know if this is just for this match, or he will be doing it for the whole summer. Like Brian, I was very impressed by him. Olonga is very articulate and knowledgeable, and was doing an excellent job. Many television channels would just cover the sport and pretend that any political controversy was not happening. However, Channel 4, while still providing good cricketing coverage, has not done this at all. Not only have they given the state of Zimbabwe some attention, but they have actually given Henry Olonga some work. This is sporting coverage and not news coverage, so they haven't been overt about it, but in a nicely understated way that doesn't take anything away from the sporting coverage, they have made a statement. This is deeply classy.

(2) (5)

We in England have been neglecting Zimbabwe. There have been very few postings on the subject here lately, just this from me since the Iraq war, unless I missed something in my backtracking.

That is now changing. Today is day one of the test match cricket series between England and Zimbabwe. The first test is a Lords, the St Peter's Rome of cricket, and frankly the cricket has been fairly dreary. In a rain interrupted first session England, in the persons of Trescothick and Vaughan, managed 28 without loss. While I wrote what follows, England got to about 100 for the loss of Vaughan. (I could explain, but if you don't know what that means, you almost certainly don't care.)

But of course the real story is off the pitch, and frankly this aspect of the situation is proving a whole lot more satisfactory and less embarrassing than I for one had dared to hope.

Take the TV coverage so far, on Channel 4 TV. There has been some play, so that has focussed some attention on the situation. But the rain interruptions mean that Channel 4 have been wheeling out all their if-it-rains plans, and one of them concerns the matter of the, er, regime in Zimbabwe, and any demonstrations against and reactions to that regime.

There have already been demonstrations, both inside (one gutsy demonstrator made her point and got herself shepherded out) and outside the ground. And more to the point, much more to the point, Channel 4 have pointed their cameras at some of this.

If you know anything about TV sports coverage, you'll know that it can be very misleading when a real world news item erupts in its midst. The tiresome habit of certain English exhibitionists invading sports events in the nude was inflamed by the promise of TV coverage, and is now being suppressed by TV coverage of these idiots also being suppressed. When British soccer fans behave really, really badly, they don't always make it to the TV shows either. What actually happens between rival fans at Celtic v Rangers soccer matches in Glasgow, for example, is nobody's business, and certainly never gets to be the business of TV viewers in anything like its full lack of glory. All of which means that the Channel 4 recognition of the "regime problem" is very significant. An enthusiastic pro-Mugabe-ite watching the TV coverage here today would not be a happy bunny.

Pitch invader, demos outside the ground, mainstream news coverage of demos outside the ground, above all the prospect of this relentless drizzle of media focus going on and on throughout the tour, destroying all attempts to suggest that things out there are in any way normal – it's looking a lot worse than such a person would have been hoping for.

It may even be that the tour going ahead, but surrounded by the ever louder claim that it shouldn't have, is the worst possible media outcome for the "regime". I surely hope so.

Above all, there is Henry Olonga.

Olonga it was who, along with Andy Flower, wore a black armband in protest at the policies of his country's government in the first Zimbabwe game of the cricket World Cup, recently concluded in South Africa. It cost both of them their international cricket careers, certainly for the time being.

Olonga has just himself been interviewed on Channel 4, by TV pinup boy and cricket commentator Mark Nicholas, and he came across both as a formidably articulate critic and as a shrewd media operator. He thinks the tour shouldn't be happening at all, but now that it is, he is going to make as much media fuss around it as he can.

It turns out that Olonga is very British educated, having been born middle class in Zambia, brought up middle class in Kenya, and only arriving in Zimbabwe in the mid nineties. He is going to make an impact in England, I'm sure of it, if only because he's a character, his hair being African street but his voice being English posh.

Olonga is also a musician, which will add to whatever media fusshe manages to stir up. I really, really don't want this to be embarrassing. Embarrassing or not, if we want to piss off Robert Mugabe, we can all buy Henry Olonga's CDs. We don't have to listen to them, any more than we had to read The Satanic Verses.

(0) (8)

Well it seems to be kick-Mugabe-until-he's-down time here at Samizdata, and I'd like now to add my little thousand Zimbabwe dollars' worth of additional reportage. There's nothing to link to, because I found out what follows for myself.

A few years ago I and two other persons were cooperating on a project of mutual concern to us. One of my colleagues, the boss of the enterprise, was and still is a good friend of mine. The other, a black lady friend of my friend, I'd not met before. But her face seemed familiar as soon as I met her. Who was it? Some film star? Then … bingo. Robert Mugabe. She was the spitting image of Robert Mugabe.

Mugabe wasn't her name. She had an English married name and had been in England for the last twenty years or so. So far as I knew, there could be a whole tribe of Mugabe lookalikes out there, and maybe she and he were not in any direct way connected or related. But it turned out, I can't remember how, that she was Robert Mugabe's niece. She was in no way responsible for or in involved in the present horrors being suffered by Zimbabwe. She had a life of her own in England. She was also a most likeable, attractive and decent person. But she was also very – how shall I put it? – determined. Once she was set on a course of thought or action, that was it, that was what she was going to think and to do, no matter what.

Such determination as hers can be a virtue in all kinds of circumstances, and I'm sure that many times in her life it was. Wherever events are too uncertain and too fluid for comfort, an individual who knows exactly what he or she is doing and who sticks to it can be a great blessing. Such people can radiate security and safety and certainty like the rays of the sun, especially if what they have decided upon is good in other ways also, but often just because it is at least certain.

But in other circumstances such determination can be a real problem. In the project the three of us were working on, it became a serious liability, for the simple reason that what she had decided upon was wrong - not wicked wrong, you understand, just foolish and mistaken wrong. No matter how much trouble her determination to do things her way and in no other way seemed to the two of us to be causing, and in defiance of the expert guidance we were all getting, she never deviated from - as we and those experts all saw it - folly. That she might be mistaken simply never entered her head. She did things her way and that was it. Nothing could stop her short of overwhelming force, in the form of the refusal of her colleagues to work with her any longer, which is eventually what we had to inflict upon her. At which point she remained convinced that she was the only one in step. She was genuinely baffled at the foolishness of the world in failing to see the wisdom of or to fit in with her preferred methods.

If Uncle Robert Mugabe is anything like Niece Never-you-mind, then any plan for sorting out Zimbabwe that is in any way dependent upon Mugabe coming around to seeing even tiny glimpses of the many errors of his ways is doomed, utterly doomed.

This thought occurred to me as soon as I became acquainted with the Niece and learned who she was, so to speak. Her Uncle has since done nothing to change my understanding of his character. I'm open to persuasion, of course, in the face of evidence to the contrary, but I now believe that he isn't. Only overwhelming force is going to stop this man.

Death, for example. That would do the trick, whether by natural or artificial causes. An invading army, that would be good. But such things as economic sanctions or condemnation from the Commonwealth, or any other diplomatic attempts at persuasion that are at all diplomatic - forget it.

(0) (6)

While I am on the subject of Mugabe, it is worth illustrating what he and his warped, psychotic ideology have actually done to the former Rhodesia.

We bandy around words like 'tyrant' and 'dictator' and 'undemocratic' but there comes a point when these words, in isolation, no longer have the power to move in the way they should. Altogether more moving, nay profoundly upsetting, is this graphic description from the UK Times of what African marxism is actually doing to this particular corner of Africa:

Zimbabwe is a country rich in resources and with great potential. It used to have a well-oiled infrastructure that even South Africa, with its far bigger economy, envied. It was robust enough to withstand the first two decades of President Mugabe’s rule but it has now reached the point of collapse. An advanced society is returning to the primitive.

It may be too late to reverse or even halt this process now. The damage has been done and, once again, the world is going to be assailed with a stark object lesson in the consequences of state kleptocracy and forced collectivisation. And, once again, those lessons will be rudely ignored, I'll wager.

In fact, I'll go further. I'm willing to bet that, even with the pictures of starving Zimbabweans rooting around in the dirt for a few berries are beamed into our homes, our own political leaders will continue to devote their energies to ever-more creative and unscrupulous ways of traducing our property rights and confiscating our earnings. Under the mendacious rubric of 'social democracy' Western 'intellectuals' will kid themselves that there is a world of difference between their economic philosophies and those of Mugabe. But the difference lies only in degree and the end result differs only in terms of timescale.

But we must neither forget nor forgive. Even while Mugabe is being glad-handed and back-slapped in Paris, we can exact vengeance on behalf of the society he has destroyed. We can do that by committing ourselves single-mindedly to a ferocious and relentless war against the people who would do to us by increment what Mugabe has done to Zimbabweans in swathes.

(0) (1)

You can institutionalise kelptocracy on a grand scale. You can ethnically cleanse your minority white citizens. You can employ gangs of vicious thugs to intimidate and even murder your political opponents. You can rig elections and disregard the law. You can use the apparatus of state to deliberately starve your own citizens. You can take a prosperous country and reduce it to a debilitated ruin. But, forcefully ejecting a Guardian journalist from your country puts you beyond the pale:

The Guardian's Zimbabwe correspondent, Andrew Meldrum, was deported last night even though three separate court orders were made prohibiting his expulsion.

After spending 23 years reporting on the country, Meldrum was manhandled into a car outside the offices of Zimbabwe's immigration service, driven to the airport and put on a plane to London.

Bearing in mind the melancholy fate of others who have displeased Mugabe, Mr.Meldrum might want to consider himself fortunate.

The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, led worldwide condemnation, saying: "I'm very concerned at this case. Petty and vindictive actions like this simply expose the Zimbabwe regime for what it is."

Well, I must say I am shocked! Up until now I have been labouring under the apprehension that Mugabe was an admirable African leader.

Michael Ancram, the shadow foreign secretary, said: "This is yet another disgraceful action showing the lack of respect for freedom of expression and speech of Robert Mugabe's evil regime. This is the act of a dictator."

As opposed to all the previous acts which were the hallmarks of a reasonable and decent man.

The editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, said: "The deportation of our reporter Andrew Meldrum from Zimbabwe is a political act which should invite the strongest possible condemnation from the international community.

Oh now steady on, Mr.Rusbridger. Let's not be too hasty now. We wouldn't want to say anything in a fit of temper that we might regret in the cold light of day.

To be fair to Mr.Meldrum he has been meticulously recording and reporting on the horrible predations of Mugabe's marxist regime not to mention the transformation of a bread-basket economy into a year-zero hellpit. You do not have to be a rocket-scientist to figure out why he is now being unceremoniously bundled out of the country. But is there any chance that any of Messrs. Straw, Ancram or Rusbridger actually read any of the reports? I only ask because they all sound as if they are somewhat taken aback.

(2) (36)

Next time you run into a bunch of eco-loonies howling from the rooftops about the number of innocent Iraqi children killed by Anglo-American sanctions or the number of Africans whose lives are blighted by the alleged predations of globalisation, you might want to take some comfort from the realisation that what is really going on here is a massive exercise in guilt-displacement.

Green campaigns, you see, are not just a laughable manifestation of Western illiberal neurosis. They actually kill real people in the real world. There is no better illustration of this than their the long-standing (and shameful) war against DDT, an extremely useful chemical spray that has a proven track record in stopping the spread of malaria but which the greenies regard as a 'toxin' that must be eradicated in order to 'improve' the environment.

Using their customary formula of junk-science, scare-mongering, moral blackmail and religious fervour, the enviro-mentalists have managed to persuade Western governments to lean on the governments of developing countries to prohibit the use of this life-saving bit of technology.

This is neo-imperialism of the worst kind. Western greenies seem to regard the Third World as a sort of benevolent plantation where they can administer their muddle-headed, quasi-mystical, do-goodery to the poor, benighted fuzzy-wuzzys.

The results have been disastrous but the good news is that the 'noble savages' have had just about enough of this crap:

Kenya's leading research center has come out in favor of using DDT to stem the toll of malaria in the country, reigniting a bitter debate between those who want to protect the environment and those who favor saving African children.

With the announcement, Kenya is poised to join a handful of other African countries, which are disregarding donor-nation admonitions that the chemical is an environmental disaster.

Proof (as if any more were actually needed) that one can afford to play along with these self-indulgent parlour games and humour the participants until such times as actual lives are on the line as a result. The Kenyans have rudely (and justly) reminded the world that they are critically vulnerable to the consequences of fashionable clap-trap in a way that over-stuffed and ridiculously coddled Western metropolitan elites are not.

"DDT is not the only weapon against malaria, but given its success in other parts of Africa, it would be of great benefit for malaria control in Kenya," Richard Tren, director of Africa Fighting Malaria, in Johannesburg said yesterday. "Not using DDT, in effect, condemns Africans to die."

Dr. Davy Koech, director of KMRI, said DDT is one of the most effective pesticides against the anopheles mosquito, which transmits malaria. He said malaria in Kenya has reached epidemic proportions.

Every person engaged in this campaign of prohibition should hang their heads in shame and ignominy.

Cheap and effective, DDT was once considered a modern miracle for dealing with malaria and insect pests in agriculture. It was used during World War II, when entire cities were sprayed to control lice and typhus. DDT was used to eradicate malaria in the United States, but it was also used by the ton for agriculture, where it killed birds. DDT was named the culprit and vilified by Rachel Carson in her 1962 book "Silent Spring," leading to its ban in the United States in 1972.

I wonder if that book has even been objectively scrutinised?

Zambia recently decided to reintroduce the chemical for malaria control, and Uganda announced that it would begin using DDT again.

"In Europe, they used DDT to kill anopheles mosquitos that cause malaria," Ugandan Health Minister Jim Muhewezi told the Monitor newspaper in Kampala. "Why can't we use DDT to kill the enemy in our own camp?"

Because, Mr.Muhewezei, some Westerners regard ideology as being more important than life itself.

I sincerely hope that this outbreak of common sense continues to spread. I also hope that this episode goes some way to persuade sensible people in the Third World that their lives will not improve until they dismiss the idiotic ravings of Western socialist cranks and start to embrace the enlightenment of technology, capitalism, progress and property rights.

And, if there is any justice in this world, Western enviro-mentalists will all be rounded up and prosecuted for crimes against humanity.

[My thanks to Chris Cooper for flagging up this issue on the Libertarian Alliance Forum]

(4) (11)

Della writes in with something that proves Saddam Hussain and Ba'athist Socialism are not the only ghastly regime around

Robert Mugabe, refereshed from his meeting with M. Chirac in February annouced March 21st that "I am still a Hitler". He clarified this by saying "let me be Hitler ten-fold and that's what we stand for."

In unrelated news the leader of the Zanu-PF party said late November 2002 "We would be better off with only six million people".

The current population of Zimbabwe is 12 million.

Nice Mr. Chirac's favourite African mass murderer

Editors note: When the British forces are finished in Iraq, perhaps they need to return home via Harare...

(0) (4)

I wanted to write something about this tale earlier, but have been rushed off my feet with work. Anyway, I think it notable that in an age marked by preening Hollywood celebs and British thespian luvvies spouting peacenik garbage about Iraq, it is heartening that in another aspect of life - sport - there are real examples of folk willing to take a stand where it matters.

Nasser Hussein, captain of the English cricket Test side, will not go down in history perhaps as a victorious cricket captain like Len Hutton or even David Gower. He will, however, go down as a man who stood on an issue of principle over Robert Mugabe's vile regime in Zimbabe. Defeated, mabye, but not with dishonour.

Addendum: for our American friends who haven't a clue about cricket, my apologies.

(0) (9)

Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, has arrived in Paris to take part in a Franco-African summit despite European Union sanctions against him.

France obtained a waiver to allow Mugabe to enter Europe as sanctions were formally extended for a further year on Tuesday. Mugabe will be joinig around 45 other African heads of state, Jacques Chirac and Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, as part of French attempts to forge closer ties with Africa.

His arrival has prompted protests from Britain and other EU countries and human rights groups are planning a series of protests during Mr Mugabe's visit.

Given the company Jacques Chirac likes to keep, I would be deeply concerned to see him getting along with Tony Blair and George Bush.

Or perhaps it's not personal. It is worse. Philip Delves Broughton's excellent analysis of France's hang-ups and downs shows a burning desire to emulate de Gaulle and restore France's glory. Chirac's years of political hackery and alleged expense fiddling and kickbacks as Paris mayor will be forgotten as the echoes of General de Gaulle are ringing louder and louder:

The Franco-African summit that convenes in Paris tomorrow has long been one of his favourite events. In years of diminished French influence, this bi-annual get-together of African leaders was a chance for French presidents to stand tall. But this week's summit will be especially satisfying.

It will mark the triumphant conclusion of phase one of the Chirac Doctrine, a foreign policy that has enraged America and large parts of Europe, but delighted the French and made M Chirac popular beyond his dreams.

M Chirac ignored Britain's objection to the invitation to the Zimbabwean leader because he believed far more was at stake than antagonising the Foreign Office or pleasing the Zimbabwean opposition. He sees France extending its reach into Southern Africa, once a British preserve. France believes it can bring peace to Congo, for which it needs Zimbabwean help, and expand its political and economic interests in the continent.

Despite the continuing unrest in the Ivory Coast, worsened by a recent French-brokered peace deal, M Chirac is confident France can display its full diplomatic plumage in Africa and demonstrate to Washington that it has a sphere of influence too.

He may even not be worried about missing a post-war carve-up of influence in Iraq. It just could be that France, he believes, is now the leader of the anti-American world and with that come dividends and responsibilities appropriate to the grand ministries of Paris and far exceeding those in one corner of the Middle East.

I hope the United States does not forget French crude attempts at the realpolitik game. I hope that the important players in the international arena will not let France usurp more influence that it deserves and make it face the consequences of its actions. Or is it too much to hope for?

(0) (16)

The Cricket World Cup started today with the opening game, in which the West Indies narrowly defeated South Africa. However, as the Guardian reports, the big story for many concerns whether or not England will play their opening fixture in Harare next Thursday.

[England] Captain Nasser Hussain was said to be opposed to playing the game for fear of violent protests, according to a source accompanying the team. Vice-captain Alec Stewart is understood to be leading a minority 'pragmatist' faction, a group of players keen to go ahead.

The threats, issued by a previously unknown group called the 'Sons and Daughters of Zimbabwe' have pledged violence against the players and their families if they fulfil their fixture against the Zimbabwean national side.

Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe and of the nation's cricketing body, is anxious to see the game played. A successful World Cup will be widely seen as an endorsement of his regime. Tomorrow Zimbabwe are due to play Namibia

This is all extremely depressing. These "Sons and Daughters of Zimbabwe", by threatening violence to the England players (rather than merely disruption to the event) may perhaps have achieved their own purposes, but so far as British public opinion is concerned, they have done themselves no favours. At one stroke they may have turned the Zimbabwe issue, in British eyes, from "vicious dictator murders millions of his own people" to "those Africans, they're all as bad as each other".

Meanwhile, although the England players who don't want to go may be having their doubts because of the support that they fear they may be giving to the detestable Mugabe, what they are actually saying is that his regime is insufficiently repressive. Their objection, or at any rate their excuse for objecting, is that their own safety can't be guaranteed, because protestors may turn out to be insufficiently under the control of the Zimbabwean 'authorities', i.e. roaming gangs of murderous thugs.

Anything that keeps Zimbabwe on the front pages is worth something. But this muddle of messages, together with the preoccupation of the rest of the world with Iraq, could hardly have turned out better for Mugabe. His days in power will surely soon end, but how many other Zimbabweans will have to die before that end comes?

(0) (7)

I can't help believing that it was the British decision to abolish and thereafter actively campaign against the slave trade that first introduced moral concepts into foreign policy.

Whether or not that is the case, it is the popular expectation that all foreign policy will be at least partly based on moral imperatives as opposed to the uncomfortably amoral calculations of national interest.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Europe where the various heads of state are forever delivering nauseatingly self-righteous lectures to the rest of the world from their bully pulpit in Brussels. Aside from switching off whenever I am so able I have also taken refuge in the suspicion that M'lady doth protesteth too loudly, a view which has been in some small sense vindicated by news of the French extending a hand of welcome to Robert Mugabe.

"France has confirmed that it is inviting Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe to take part in a summit of African Heads of State next month.

Mr Mugabe is currently banned from entering the European Union because of doubts about the legitimacy of his re-election last year."

I suppose it would be bad form to have 'doubts' about his democidal marxist policies. And that is rather the point, for whilst I do not expect the enarques in Paris to rain down 'Les JDAM's du Francais' on the former Rhodesia, it is nonetheless a reasonable expectation that the foreign policy decisions they make should reflect the 'humanitarian' principles they claim to live by.

Instead the French continue to do what the French have always done and pursue their own national interests in Africa under a cloak of Sartrean altruism:

"But French President Jacques Chirac was convinced that the Zimbabwean leader's presence at the summit would help promote justice, human rights and democracy in his country, foreign ministry spokesman Francois Rivasseau told journalists."

When the language of 'human rights' can be employed with such spectacular mendacity in an attempt to mask a nefariously machiavellian agenda then we know that it is a coin which has become irredeemably debased.

But this move by the French tells us that the mask is beginning to slip and, whilst I daresay the language of Brussels (which is not synoymous with France but heavily influenced by it) will not change in the short term or even the medium term, the polite fictions which underpin that language are close to being unsustainable.

The ugly, old ogre of national interest is being prodded awake from its slumber and invoked to stalk the world again. To accompany it on its travels we will need not just a whole slew of new ideas but a whole new language in which to express them.

(0) (6)

Although attention is focused on the nightmarish regime in Iraq, please spare an angry thought for the vile rulers of Zimbabwe, who are still starving and murdering sections of the population felt to be 'disloyal' to Robert Mugabe.

George Bush, supported by Tony Blair, will clear up Daddy's (and Donald's) mess in Iraq by spending several billion dollars and sending a few hundred thousand troops to see the end of Saddam Hussain... Blair could do something about tyranny in Zimbabwe for a fraction of that price if he had the moral fortitude. For all his many and varied sins, Saddam is not (currently) killing and dispossessing British subjects, which cannot be said for Robert Mugabe.

Will the British state please stop spending my appropriated tax money on funding the comforts of former Taliban asylum seekers and, given that I suppose it is too much to expect my money back, start sending crates of rifles and ammunition to opposition groups in Zimbabwe.

(4) (10)

Zimbabwe is in the news, and so it should be. Several million Zimbabweans are probably going to die of starvation in the next few months. What's more, this is, despite what President Robert Mugabe will tell you, a classic Communist-type famine, a state mass murdering its people, in this case all the people who dared to vote against Robert Mugabe in his recent election.

Now is the time for something to be done about this, not in a few months time, and to the credit of all sorts of people, not including me until now, this seems to be widely understood. Various efforts are being made to kick up a fuss about this horror. Last night, for example, British TV news had lots of Zimbabwe stuff, despite the imminent prospect of a war that our Prime Minister is having difficulty convincing anyone in Britain about who isn't, like me, already convinced.

Peter Oborne, for example, did a Channel 4 documentary which went out last Sunday night, of him travelling around Zimbabwe, surreptitiously photographing Zimbabweans describing what remains of their abject daily diet, or warehouses where maize imported in order to feed the starving but immediately stolen by the government is being allowed to rot, or else is being corruptly sold in tiny amounts at extortionate prices by organisations headed by Zimbabwean Cabinet Ministers. Oborne has also written a piece for the Spectator about his journey.

What is to be done? If the South African government greeted Zimbabwean refugees with food camps instead of barbed wire rolls that would help, ditto if they pressurised Zimbabwe by threatening to cut off its supply routes. If Britain pressured all concerned a bit more publicly, that would help. If the Belgium government were to be swallowed up by a giant fireball, excellent. That would mean "Europe" being a lot less despicable about all this. If President George Bush could make the time to refer to this thing more loudly in among his Iraq preparations than he has so far, that would also save some lives.

And although it might not be practical in the immediate future, some of us could at least put the wind up your Average Sub-Saharan African Despot and his Many Apologists Worldwide by saying that all this black-on-black murdering does rather strengthen the case for the reconquest of Sub-Saharan Africa by, you know, white people. (Please understand that I'm trying to insert some more heat into this row, rather than just to shine a little more light on it.)

There's half a book I could write about all this, but let me end with a word about cricket. The cricket point is that there is a cricket tournament coming up, a few of the matches of which are scheduled to be played in Zimbabwe. This is the Cricket World Cup next month. As atrocities go, the fact that these cricketers are probably going to play their games in Zimbabwe and be photographed not being very bothered about the fact that the government there is busy murdering about a quarter of its citizens doesn't rank very high on the scale of human badness. It's not their fault. And frankly, I don't care one way or the other whether this tournament is deranged to the point of serious derangement by protests about the mass murdering in Zimbabwe or not. If I had a button to push that would do it, I'd probably dig up every tournament pitch now, and fly a plane over the mess with the slogan (thank you Peter Tatchell) "Berlin 1936 Zimbabwe 2003" attached to it. Or something. But the bigger point is, this cricket tournament has turned a very boring little report about Africans murdering one another – and what's newsworthy about that? – into an already noisily singing and dancing Major Western News Story. The opening ceremony for this World Cup will be on February 8th, and the timing is good.

So, blogospherists, if you are looking for a hook, use cricket to spice up this story, which I very much hope that you will tell to each other and to anyone else you can interest. Say how much you loath and despise cricket, and how completely you would normally be ignoring it, but … Or like me, say how much you love cricket, except that in this case … Or say that cricket isn't the point; mass murder on the other hand … (That's what Oborne did at the start of his Spectator story.)

One way or another, please spread this news. It already is news. Please help to make it bigger news, before too many more people die.

(0) (0)

I have visited Kenya several times over the last thirty years and have always regarded it as one of the few outposts of relative sanity in that part of the world. Over the last fifteen years however it has grieved me to see one of the brighter sparks on the continent gradually sink into the kleptocratic morass that generally characterises African nation states.

So I really do hope that the fall of President Daniel arap Moi and his corruption riddled Kanu party spells a new beginning for Kenya. I am far too cynical to automatically assume that Mwai Kibaki and his victorious National Rainbow Coalition will not succumb to the 'African Disease' but I suppose the mere fact that the passing of the old political order was so painless is grounds for a little cautious optimism.

(0) (11)

I clearly recall that first time I attended a meeting of the Libertarian Alliance here in London. The guest speaker, a very earnest but rather monochromatic fellow (whose name, I must confess, I cannot now recall) was issuing forth on the subject of the purpose of the Libertarian Alliance and what its goals should be.

His conclusion was that those goals should, at the very least, include 'the spreading of good ideas'. That sounded like a worthwhile project and, indeed, it is one in which I am engaged to this day.

But, how to do it? That's the real trick. Marketing is dead simple when you're peddling, say, luxury motor cars. But if you're peddling the kind of ideas that make luxury motor cars both possible and widely available then you tend to find that you're butting your head against a brick wall of indifference.

Perhaps we should take a leaf out of the book of those people who spread bad ideas because they seem to be enjoying no end of success, especially in Southern Africa:

"South Africa's ruling African National Congress yesterday effectively gave its backing to President Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe, cheering a speech by a Zanu-PF loyalist attacking "western imperialists".

Now one would think that the experience of a lunatic marxist regime transforming a neighbouring country from a relatively prosperous bread-basket into a 'Year Zero'-type hellhole would provide a pretty stark lesson in 'How Not To Do Things'. But, such is the seductive power of those bad ideas, that they can trump even the most graphic and immediate realities.

And so British libertarians are left wrestling with the puzzle of how we capture that magic driver for impelling bad ideas and turn it to good use.

It is a thorny and will-sapping problem but one of far less magnitude than the one facing those South Africans of European or Asian descent. As far as they are concerned, all I can say is that I sincerely hope that they have an exit strategy because the day that they're going to sorely need one appears to be getting closer.

(1) (48)

Someone tried to shoot down an airliner full of Jews, not in Israel but in Africa...

Jew on holiday. Legitimate target
anywhere in the world, apparently.

But Jews = Israel and Israel = bad, in fact very bad as it is not just 'Jewish' but also 'White'. Therefore the people who did this must be misguided 'Islamic activists'. Terrible but 'understandable' to idiotarians and other sundry folk who take Noam Chomsky seriously. You know, the sort of people who say "Who are we do judge the value of other cultures?" and "Of course I deplore terrorism, but..."

Kikambala in Kenya is ripped apart by the same people who tried to shoot down the passenger jet and slaughtered Kenyans are photographed in the ruins of the resort which used to bring much needed foreign money into Kenya's economy...

Vanquished capitalist tools perhaps? CIA agents maybe?

Black people in the Third World lie dead, therefore people who did this must be capitalists, um, imperialists, errr, Americans, no, Mac Donalds, um, er, ah...

I see pictures like those and I am soooooo sick of the people who say "It is all about Israel!" or "It is all about oil!" or "It is all about US policy!"... those dead Kenyans are not in Israel, I rather doubt they owned shares in any oil companies and they did not get to vote for who became the President of the United States.

What "it is all about" is that there are people using violence who advocate coercive pan-Islamic collectivism and who wish to force submission on everyone else. Once this is understood, all that needs to follow is to determine the best way to exterminate them as expeditiously as possible.

(0) (3)

People across Europe are digging bomb shelters in their back gardens and staring skyward fearfully for the first signs of the mighty Namibian airforce.

No, not really... Afro-socialist bigot President Sam Nujoma of Namibia has added all the nations imposing the flimsy and ineffective sanctions against his good buddy Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe to the list of his usual targets for incoherent invective (i.e. homosexuals, capitalists, white people).

"I just want to make it categorically clear that if the EU does not lift the sanctions against Zimbabwe, the whole African Union will also impose economic sanctions against Europe. Either there is peace or war and we don't want a war. Change your attitudes. If you don't change, we are going to get you."

I am quaking in my boots.

(0) (1)

The British news media are harumphing about Tony Blair being publicly upbraided by a pair of African autocrats, overshadowing the British Prime Minister's 'passionate' calls for African development and increased 'aid' to Africa by the West.

But therein lies part of the problem. The media seems shocked that a bunch of brutal tyrants are actually sounding like, well, tyrants... ungrateful tyrants at that.

Yet the very existence of thugs like Mugabe is underwritten by Britain (to media applause) to the tune of a billion pounds a year, stolen from UK taxpayers by the British state and given to African countries, or more accurately the ruling elites of African countries. This sort of behaviour is tantamount to Britain circa 1938 offering to give British tax money to common Germans (to be disbursed by the Nazi state or pro-Nazi NGOs) and thereby relieving the German National Socialist Workers Party's leaders of the political consequences of their own economic policies, in effect subsidising the induced cost of fascist economics.

Tony Blair and the host of other national and NGO Tranzi cheerleaders are nothing less than the logistic support system for tyranny in the 'Third World'.

So when you read of calls for an 'answer' to Mugabe, please realise that the even the most sound replies to the rhetoric on offer still skirts around the real truth. The only reply to the likes of Robert Mugabe is to meet violence with violence. If just 10 percent of that aid budget was spent sending arms to Robert Mugabe's political enemies, including the white farmers of Zimbabwe, Mugabe and his supporters would be doing the only thing they can do by way of suitable recompense to the soil of Zimbabwe's ruined farmlands.

Of course for this to happen would require an understanding by Blair et al of their indictable role in Africa's ruin. The effects of the legacy of British and European colonialism pales in comparison to the here-and-now effects of Western statist support for homegrown African statism.

(0) (0)

Fear and self-loathing in Johannesburg.

This deeply concerned man was going about his usual business of saving the poor and oppressed of the Earth when one them mugged him. His response?

"He had not laid a charge because he believed the muggers were the very people who needed to be helped by the summit".

(0) (0)

Things in Zimbabwe are going from worse to even worse than that and I think it is safe to assume that Robert Mugabe is really not kidding around. Zimbabwe surely must qualify as Evil Central combining marxist year-zero policy with a highly illiberal dose of ethnic cleansing. Yummy!

White farmers are now being arrested for defying Chairman Mugabe's edict and, in due course, they will either be expelled or killed. Mugabe has had, to all intents and purposes, the green light from the Tranzis who have been far too pre-occupied with bringing down the Great Satan (USA) and Little Satan (Israel) to waste any valuable hectoring time with the likes of Brother Mugabe whose odds of seeing the inside of the Hague are considerably longer than my odds of seeing the inside of Gwyneth Paltrow's bedchamber.

Still, the Tranzis might live to regret it. Comrade Mugabe is in the process of setting a precedent and precedents tend to get followed. That's why they're called precedents. Trouble is, a whole load of other people might live to regret it as well.

(0) (0)

To more or less complete indifference by the so called human rights champions of the left, Robert Mugabe continues the 'ethnic cleansing' of white farmers and brutal murders of black political opponents in Zimbabwe.

Insignificant sanctions have not saved a single life from Mugabe's thugs nor prevented the theft of land than is leading inexorably to mass starvation in that unhappy country.

Yet it is no more a 'political' question that dealing with a marauding wolf attacking one's sheep is. Commentators should not be calling for 'harder sanctions' or 'robust diplomacy' but rather for the violent overthrow of Mugabe. There is no material difference between the Mugabe's and Saddam Hussain's of this world and the more murderous Mafia families of Corleone in Sicily and you don't see the Italian state negotiating with Mafia dons but rather sending para-military police with guns after them.

There is only one reasonable way to deal with murderous tyrants and that is to kill them. As I have said before, until someone puts a bullet through Mugabe's head and that of any who would emulate him, Zimbabwe will continue its spiral towards complete societal meltdown. The 'heads' of all such governments belong on pikes in a public square and any government who has civil dealing with such people are part of the problem. The world is awash with morally ambiguous issues but this is not one of them. Sic semper tyrannis.

(0) (0)

Quite why so many people write about Nelson Mandela in such a hagiographic manner baffles me. This is a man who is going out of his way to give aid and succor to Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the man convicted of murdering 270 people in the air and on the ground when he blew up a Pan Am Jumbo Jet full of people over Lockerbie, Scotland.

One of the angry relatives, who lost their 19 year old daughter, asks:

If Mr Mandela is truly concerned about the conditions Megrahi is suffering, then perhaps he should visit and represent other convicts in Britain's prisons who are serving their sentence for their crimes in worse conditions than Megrahi will ever have to experience.

Back when I was at school, I reall seeing some people wearing tee-shirts saying 'Free Nelson Mandela'... Now whilst I abominated the apartheid regime in South Africa, it seemed to me that replacing white tyranny with the ANC was just going to be a case of changing not that country's tyranny but merely that tyranny's colour. I also happen to recall seeing other folks, 'Young Conservatives', in the 1980's wearing a tee shirt which said 'Hang Nelson Mandela'... hmmm...

Perhaps marketing those tee-shirts again might be a nice business opportunity!

Better late than never?

(0) (0)

As everyone knows by now, US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and U2 frontman Paul "Bono" Hewson just completed a week-long tour of Africa. While the unlikely pair seem to play off each each other well on stage, and seem to be getting along well offstage, it is not entirely clear how Mr. Bono has suddenly emerged as a power-broker. Several news sources attributed this quote to the man with the wraparound shades:

"[O'Neill] is the man in charge of America's wallet ... and it's true, I want to open that wallet."

None of the news sources I saw chose to elaborate on this comment's obvious falseness. The treasury cannot release any funds until the proper appropriation and authorization bills have made their way through Congress. (I will cut Mr. Hewson some slack because he is not an American; but if certain members of the press need a refresher course in this area, I would recommend that they review their Schoolhouse Rock.) At any rate, it makes you wonder why we should take anything else the guy says seriously.

Bono's cause is third-world debt relief. He argues that the heavy external debts of foreign governments are the principal obstacle to their emergence from poverty. We shall examine those claims briefly. How effective are official debt-relief programs in improving economic performance? Well, we can let history be the judge, since we have tried this before. In the late 1980s, the US treasury department began a debt-relief program called the Brady Plan, in which creditor banks were encouraged (through the stick / carrot of the federal tax code) to refinance debt at subsidized rates and reduce principal levels by allowing banks to replace severely discounted loans with new debt at levels closer to par value.

Was the Brady Plan a success? It depends on how you define success. If the objective was debt reduction as an end in itself, then the Brady Plan looked good -- more than $60 billion in foreign debt was forgiven, by one estimate. But did the Brady Plan succeed on a larger scale, i.e. did it promote economic growth and encourage more responsible borrowing by third world governments? Sorry, Bono, but the track record there is not so good.

In his book International Debt Reexamined (unfortunately no longer in print, though I have a copy from my grad-school days), economist William R. Cline demonstrates that the economies of Brady Plan participants did not outperform those of nonparticipants with similar debt levels in the 1990s. So much for the argument that debt relief is a sine qua non of future economic growth.

Moreover, there is evidence that the Brady Plan (and other official debt relief programs) merely crowded out private debt relief efforts such as debt-for-equity and debt-for-nature swaps, which had commendably been on the rise throughout the mid to late 1980s. The announcement of the Plan itself had the effect of encouraging further profligacy -- if your mortgage banker announced that it might be forgiving or substantially reducing your mortgage debt in the near future, wouldn't you think twice before mailing in your next payment?

Bono's line of reasoning on third-world debt would have found a favorable audience with economists a generation ago, but has long since fallen out of respectability. The new generation of development economists, spearheaded by the Peruvian economist and think-tank chairman Hernando de Soto, argues that the people of the third world already hold the solution to their poverty. This makes things difficult for would-be celebrity messiahs like Bono. Sorry, pal, but the world is ready to move on, with or without you.

(0) (0)

I applaud the finding that Somalia is clear of al Qaeda, reported by the Washington Post and the article is itself interesting reading. It was the quote at the end which caught my eye though:

A defense official says Somalia's lack of a central government or adequate security forces makes it "a potential haven for some al Qaeda terrorist members."

Really shows the Statist thought patterns doesn't it? Poor savages don't have a Big Brother State to take care of them like us Fortunates.

Perhaps Jim Davidson had the right idea in moving there...

(0) (0)

Todays newspapers give us two contrasting images. Thabo Mbeki, South Africa's ANC leader smiling as he poses with his friend Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's ZANU-PF leader, sticking by him in the face of world wide (but not African) criticism of Zimbabwe's descent into collective nihilism.

 

It also gives us a picture of the dead body of Zimbabwean farmer Terry Ford, murdered by Mugabe's ZANU-PF thugs. It shows his distressed Jack Russell terrier, Squeak, who lay curled up next to his dead friend, refusing to leave his side.

And so now we read that Commonwealth Leaders meeting in London today will delay their 'verdict' on the farcical 'elections' in Zimbabwe and whether to suspend that country from the Commonwealth, a trivial matter of suspending a murderous tyrant from a trivial organization.

Yet clearly if the Commonwealth is serious about democracy then surely nations with governments which do not adhere to the social values of the majority of the Commonwealth must be expelled.

Therefore, I call on the Commonwealth's leadership to expel The United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India forthwith as being grossly unrepresentative of the murderous kleptocratic regimes which characterize the majority of the Commonwealth.

Next time they want a Foreign Aid hand out, let the murdering sons of bitches ask their good friend Thabo Mbeki for South African taxpayers money.

Update: Kill white landowners, kill black political opponents, destroy a nation's economy and plunge it into a nightmare and what happens? Does the Commonwealth demand the overthrow of the tyrant and his government? No. Does the Commonwealth demand Zimbabwe's expulsion whilst ZANU-PF remains in power? No. The Commonwealth has in fact decided to suspend Zimbabwe for one year. Read that again. ONE YEAR. The fact even this pathetic gesture has been so long coming is an indictment of the moral bankruptcy of the Commonwealth as an institution.

John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister stressed: "The committee expressed its determination to promote reconciliation in Zimbabwe between the main political parties."

Reconciliation? Mugabe is a tyrant and murderer and any rational society should be urging that he be summarily put up against a wall, shot and then thrown in a garbage dump, not 'reconciled' with. Well I guess we should look on the bright side: things will not be so violent in Zimbabwe one year from now as all Mugabe's opponents will either be dead or Mugabe will be hanging on the meat hook that he deserves by then.

(0) (0)

The British International Development Secretary Clare Short did a bit of off-message, and hence truthful, commentary by pointing out that the French state is one of the primary obstacles to Africa's economic development due to their insistence on Europe-wide protectionist trade policies.

Now whilst I usually regard Short as a subjectivist economic ignoramus and thus part of the problem, not the solution, she is quite right in her remarks in this subject. The fact is that French policy in African being aimed at maintaining French control rather than fostering African development. My family has had quite a lot of first hand experience of doing business in Africa and I know this to be true on many levels.

Socialists have the gall to claim to be the people who care about the impoverished Third World and yet put duty on African goods which can run as high as 300% in order to protect the EU's grotesque Common Agricultural Policy. The EU are in truth the architects of misery, poverty and starvation if Africa and France is the ring leaders of this ignominious association of the statist, regarding their preposterous concepts of Francophone prestige in Africa as being more important that African prosperity.

Clare Short is just another statist clod but she is quite right that France's strong presence in Africa is a truly malign influence. I could have told her that 20 years ago. Who cares of people are living in abject poverty in Chad just so long as things are status quo on the Quai d'Orsay.

(0) (0)

The ubiquitous Mommabear writes in with a rant about Amnesty International's selective conscience

Where is Amnesty International when someone really needs help? If an individual is truly in jeopardy but not held by the "big, bad, Satan America", forget about it.

Those NGOs who bleat and wail about The United States of America, with far too much support from biased and political media groups, should be held accountable for any detrimental or deadly results in this particular case. For openers, they should be stripped of their tax-free status; when they start lobbying from a political position, they violate the laws by which they are permitted to function. They need to be exposed, over and over, for what they really are: poseurs with political bias.

Here is a legal case that cries out for worldwide condemnation. If Amnesty International and other like groups fail to perform, castigate, or at least condemn this judicial situation, then they expose the truth about themselves, which belies their current posturing completely. They should be ashamed.

MommaBear

(0) (0)

A picture is worth a thousand words.

(0) (0)

USS Clueless gives a series of baffling remarks about Somalia. As far as I can figure, Steven seems to think the USA was the primary aggrieved party in 1993 when it tried to carry out the UN's behest and help impose a central government on Somalia at gunpoint. Forget the daft movie, read the excellent book for a more balanced view.

So if the Somali government is now to be the next target, where exactly is this 'Somali' government? Exactly why is Somalia about to be attacked and in what manner? Somalia does not have an army like the Taliban did, it is just a heavily armed society. Does the US attack everyone with a gun? Well, that is pretty much everyone. I expect they will tend to shoot back unless a great deal of political finesse is used.

Unqualified Offerings wrote an article a while ago pointing out why the UN/US actions pretty much guaranteed a fight with the so called 'warlords' in Somalia. I have always thought this part of his analysis was spot on

No, the racism of the Somali intervention had more to do with the familiar liberal/left "soft racism of low expectations." Because the reason some Somalis were starving was that other Somalis, with guns, wanted them to starve. Starvation was a weapon of war. "Warlords" were the root cause of starvation, and starvation was a means to an end, and that end was power. "Warlords" are nothing more nor less than politicians; if the claim offend thee, call them "politicians of a type." By making it its business to "prevent starvation" the Bush administration put itself in the business of thwarting warlord ambitions. That's not the racist part. The racist part is that, as was clear at the time, the idea that the warlords would take exception to this took the US government, media and public completely by surprise. Then the US announced its plan to disarm the warlords, which is to say, turn them into non-warlords, which is to say, vitiate their claims to power. Again, it wasn't racist to try to disarm the warlords as such. But one could only imagine the warlords not objecting to this, and violently, if one somehow couldn't imagine that these swarthy foreigners took themselves and their own ambitions seriously. One had to believe either that the warlords were attempting to shoot and starve their enemies into submission by mistake, and would be grateful when shown the error of their ways, or that they had made the decision to try to shoot and starve their way to power lightly, and that once US attention turned like the gaze of a stern yet kindly parent upon these errant children, they would cast their little eyes down, mutter "Sorry, mom," and go play right. In US perceptions, the warlords could have been idiots, children or cowards. What US policy could not have been based on was a sober appreciation that the US was setting itself against serious, adult power brokers who cared more for their own plans than American ones.

Yes indeed. This may have come as a shock, but folks do tend to act in what they think are their own interests, even black folks in Africa. How about that?

(0) (0)

I was watching the news on the television this afternoon when Bono, the Irish singer for U2 came on to opine on issues of third world debt, AIDS and trade, with reference to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit in Blantyre, Malawi.

For one brief shining moment I thought that a universal law of thermodynamics (that when entertainers talk about anything other than the entertainment business, their voices can be heard to emanate from their posteriors) was about to be spectacularly falsified. He remarked that it was appalling that Africans are denied access to US and EU markets due to disgraceful protectionist measures and how this was crippling the entire continents' ability to develop economically... well, that certainly made me sit up: a singer who actually understands real world economics and genuine liberty? Surely not!

Alas cruel reality quickly reasserted itself. He then went on to rail against how banks were putting 'profits before people' because of the crippling levels of debt in Africa. Naturally he did not mention that this debt was not forced on Africa's governments at gunpoint but was freely entered into by the purported leaders of various African nations. Somehow the actions of African borrowers of money result in Western banks 'putting profits before people'. Interesting. I wonder if Bono also takes a neo-colonialist view that as African leaders are presumably not competent to make sound economic decisions, they should not be allowed to borrow money in the first place? Just curious.

And then, Bono deliverers the rhetorical coup de grace designed to impress upon the Western viewers how urgent the situation is:

After September 11, people cannot just ignore Africa any more. This is a problem that must be dealt with now by America and the West

Now please, will someone out there correct me if I am mistaken, but I was not aware that anyone from Zambia or Congo or Nigeria or Burundi or Mozambique or Senegal or Zimbabwe or Angola or Ghana had hijacked some American airliners and crashed them in to the Pentagon and World Trade Centre towers. What the hell does September 11^th have to do with African poverty?

Perhaps someone should point out to Bono that the way the US responded to September 11^th was not to shower Afghanistan with largess but with an earth shaking hail of 2000 lbs laser guided bombs and the forceful destruction of the Taliban government.

Then again...

...given that most of Africa's economic problems are clearly derived from government malfeasance, perhaps my fleeting first impression of Bono as an astute observer was correct after all and that is indeed what he wants for Africa's ghastly kleptocratic regimes: obliterate most of Africa's governments, remove all Western trade barriers to African goods and services, declare victory and then go home to leave the formerly oppressed African man-in-the-street to get on with their lives unhindered by the likes of Robert Mugabe or Jose Eduardo dos Santos.

Cool, that works for me.

(0) (0)

The US has made it clear that acts of terrorism involving Americans will not be tolerated and will be met with military action. Anyone doubting US resolve has but to look at Afghanistan to see the truth. Tony Blair stands with George Bush on this issue, supporting and indeed participating in US military actions with both Royal Navy sub-launched cruise missiles and Britain's peerless special forces. Clearly where the US is concerned, tyranny and murder will not be tolerated by Her Majesties Government, and quite right too I might add.

What a pity the many British citizens who own land in Zimbabwe are not instead US citizens...because if they were, rather than threatening tyrant and mass murderer Robert Mugabe with expulsion from the Commonwealth, something which no doubt has him quaking in his boots, the UK Government would be planning military action against him. However it appears Tony Blair is only willing to fight for American interests, not British ones.

Perhaps Blair will send his precious friend Peter Mandelson to Harare to meet with Mugabe. No doubt he will be invited to join the British government if only he will agree to stop murdering people. After all, that seems to have been the approach favoured by Mandelson in Northern Ireland, so why not try it in Zimbabwe?

(0) (0)

Breathtaking, mind boggling, abject stupidity as well.

In today's London Evening Standard, Labour Members of Parliament Glenda Jackson, Tony Colman, Jeremy Corbyn, LibDem Members of Parliament Jenny Tonge and Vince Cable and Oxfam Campaigns Officer Rajinder Dadry write in to say.

Together with Oxfam, we are concerned that the Government has given permission for the export of an air-traffic control system with military capabilities at the cost of $40 million. [...] We are disturbed that one part of the Government has, rightly, played a full part in the cancellation of debt for Tanzania, but that another part of the Government has played a part in increasing the debt on an unnecessary project...

So let us analyse what is being said:

1. The statist MPs and their NGO cheerleader applauds the British Government for cancelling foreign debts on behalf of the Tanzanian Government... debts that the Tanzanian Government freely entered into in the first place by borrowing money from western banks.
2. The same chorus of MPs plus NGO cheerleader deplore that the Tanzanian Government is acting irresponsibly and therefore it is the responsibility of the British Government to prevent the duly constituted Government of Tanzania from acquiring military air-traffic control radar that they obviously think they need.

Now read that again, gentle reader, before we continue... are you making the causal links that elude this chorus of clowns?

The Tanzanian Government entered into loans with Western and Japanese Banks in the 1980's and 1990's. This money financed years of highly inefficient socialist centrally planned spending (plus a bonanza for the Swiss bankers working for a few inexplicably wealthy 'retired' Tanzanian ministers) that resulted in far less of an increase in Tanzania's ability to produce wealth than was required to service the debt on the funds borrowed. Years later, well meaning and largely socialist elements in the West decide that somehow the actions of an African sovereign government are a 'stain on Western capitalism' and a large chunk of the debts are written off (at Western tax payers expense).

And the lesson that we have taught the Governing classes in Tanzania is...?

• Borrow as much as you can get banks to lend you because the consequences for imprudent economic decisions are, well, there aren't any.

The Tanzanian Government is not acting foolishly in buying this radar, they are just playing by the rules of the game we have written. Have I missed something here or is Glenda Jackson MP and her ilk really as obtuse as I think they are?

(0) (0)

Today I have read of outrage amongst the chattering classes in Britain over the UK government allowing Tanzania to purchase a £28 million (about $40 million US) air traffic radar system with some fascination. Now I must confess I have no opinion whatsoever on whether or not Tanzania actually needs such a system and the last time I was there was 20 years ago so I am rather out of touch with the realities on the ground. But what is astonishing to me is that statist British pundits and their NGO cheerleaders with Christian Aid, Oxfam etc. have directed their ire primarily at Britain.

Now I am rarely one to come to the defense of any government purchasing baubles with their stolen tax monies, but last time I looked, Tanzania was a sovereign state, a member of the Commonwealth and their government presumes to speak for the people of that nation. Surely the question of Tanzanian need is a matter for Tanzania to determine.

Might I suggest that what NGOs and sundry mouthing politicos really mean is "Africans are too stupid to decide what is in their own national interests and thus 'we' must save them from themselves and prevent their governments from actually governing." To put it bluntly, the white bwana knows better.

Of course it may well be that the government of Tanzania is venal, foolish and corrupt, highly likely in fact... but does that give the British government the right to block it from purchasing a radar from a private British company? Of course not. Argue with the Tanzanian government that the money is better spent elsewhere by all means, but where do these people get off attempting to get the British state to coerce them 'for their own good'?

(0) (0)

Some people ask:

"Why shouldn't our government keep out products from third world countries? We don't owe them a living.

That is right, we don't. What we owe to them, and to our own people too, is the ordinary right to buy and sell what they please, along with all the other ordinary rights to life and respect for property. Tariffs against African imports mean that we in Britain pay more than we ought and the people in Africa are arbitrarily forbidden from bringing their wares to our attention - it's up to British individuals whether they buy or not.

So the European Union, having stopped Africans making a respectable living as producers and traders by denying them access to us, then bestows a lesser largesse via 'Third World Aid'. Adding insult to injury, the EU then expects gratitude from the very people they have discriminated against. Of course what happens is that Africans, now being dependent on largesse rather than their own efforts, take on the character of beggars, whiny when desperate and sullen when temporarily a little better fed. We in our turn take on the character of patronising social workers-cum-lords of the manor. What a pity, when we could be interacting as equals and fellow human beings.