| Tuesday, July 01, 2008 |
| If Zimbabwe had oil... |
... the African Union wouldn't have been the only ones greeting Robert Mugabe as a liberator...
For all the condemnation of Zimbabwe, Foreign Policy in Focus reminds us that the world, and the U.S., are much more tolerant when it comes to thuggish leaders of countries that have vast natural resources, including "Swaziland, Congo, Cameroun, Togo, Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, Rwanda, Gabon, Egypt, and Tunisia. None of these countries holds free elections, and all have severely suppressed their political opposition."
And the worst of all? Our good friends, Equatorial Guinea. My take here, FPIF's take as follows:
Among the worst of these African tyrannies has been the regime of Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea. Obiang has been in power even longer than the 28-year reign of Mugabe and, according to a recent article in the British newspaper The Independent, makes the Zimbabwean dictator “seem stable and benign” by comparison. Obiang originally seized power in a 1979 coup by murdering his uncle, who had ruled the country since its independence from Spain in 1968. Under his rule, Equatorial Guinea nominally allowed the existence of opposition parties as a condition of receiving foreign aid in the early 1990s. But the four leading candidates withdrew from the last presidential election in December 2002 in protest of irregularities in the voting process and violence against their supporters. In that election, Obiang officially received more than 97% of the vote (down from 99.5% in the previous election.) Though the U.S. State Department acknowledged that the election was “marred by extensive fraud and intimidation,” the Congress and the administration devoted none of the vehement condemnation that was so evident after the recent, similarly marred election process in Zimbabwe. One major reason for the difference in response is oil. The development of vast oil reserves over the past decade has made Equatorial Guinea one of the wealthiest countries in Africa in terms of per capita gross domestic product. Virtually all of the oil revenues, however, goes to Obiang and his cronies. The dictator himself is worth an estimated $1 billion, making him the wealthiest leader in Africa; his real estate holdings include two mansions in Maryland just outside of Washington, DC. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the country’s population lives on only a few dollars a day, and nearly half of all children under five are malnourished. The country’s major towns and cities lack basic sanitation and potable water while conditions in the countryside are even worse. During his most recent visit to Washington in 2006, Obiang was warmly received by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who praised the dictator as “a good friend” of the United States. Not once during their joint appearance did she mention the words “human rights” or “democracy.” At the same press conference, Obiang praised his regime’s “extremely good relations with the United States” and his expectation that “this relationship will continue to grow in friendship and cooperation.” None of the assembled reporters raised any questions about the regime’s notorious human rights record or its lack of democracy, instead using the opportunity to ask Secretary Rice questions about the alleged threat from Iran. In 2002, the dictator met with President George W. Bush in New York to discuss military and energy security issues. He followed up in 2004 with meetings with then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and then-Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham. Cozy Relations Equatorial Guinea receives U.S. government funding and training through the International Military Education and Training Program (IMET). In addition, the private U.S. firm Military Professional Resources Incorporated – founded by former senior Pentagon officials who cite the regime’s friendliness to U.S. strategic and economic interests – plays a key role in the country’s internal security apparatus. Furthermore, as a result of Obiang’s understandable lack of trust in his own people, soldiers from Morocco – one of America’s closest African allies – have served for decades in a number of important security functions, including the role of presidential guards. Maintaining close ties with such a notorious ruler has led even conservative Republicans like Frank Ruddy, who served as President Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Equatorial Guinea in the mid-1980s, to denounce the Bush administration for being “big cheerleaders for the government – and it’s an awful government.”
Though the Chinese have also recently begun investing in the country’s oil sector, U.S. companies ExxonMobil, Amerada Hess, Chevron/Texaco, and Marathon Oil have played the most significant role. A report by the International Monetary Fund notes that U.S. oil companies receive “by far the most generous tax and profit-sharing provisions in the region.” Congressional hearings recently revealed how U.S. oil companies paid hundreds of millions of dollars destined to state treasuries directly into the dictator’s private bank accounts. A Senate report faulted U.S. oil companies for making “substantial payments to, or entering into business ventures with,” government officials and their family members.
The Bush administration can, in essence, rant and rave about Zimbabwe all it wants, with no consequences. The Bush administration gets to pretend it means business with all this talk of "democracy," even as they know that South Africa, Russia and China will likely block any serious sanctions against Zimbabwe in the U.N. Security Council. And they get to keep on ignoring and playing ball with the vicious governments of places like E. Guinea and Nigeria, where so long as the oil keeps flowing, the U.S. could give a damn.
| Labels: Africa, Big Oil, dictators, Equatorial Guinea, U.S. foreign policy, Zimbabwe |
posted by JReid @ 11:23 AM   |
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| Mugabe's 'victory,' Africa's shame |
 Robert Mugabe was received as a hero this week by fellow African leaders following his blunt-force victory in a no-contest poll in Zimbabwe, where he remains dictator. The venue was the African summit, where the heads of the continent's 53 nations gathered just after Zimbabwe's phony elections. Many of the African "presidents" share Mugabe's methods, so I guess they do really understand him:
President Omar Bongo of Gabon, who has held power for 41 years and won a series of widely criticised elections, gave his public backing for Mr Mugabe as leaders met in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. "He was elected, he took an oath, and he is here with us, so he is President and we cannot ask him more," said Mr Bongo. "He conducted elections and I think he won." Mr Bongo added that African leaders would not allow Western governments to dictate their view of Zimbabwe. "We have even received Mugabe as a hero," he said. "We understand the attacks but this is not the way they should react. What they've done is, in our opinion, a little clumsy, and we think they could have consulted us first."
But the real shame is that the few real democrats (small d) in Africa, like South Africa's Thabo Mbeke, couldn't find the strength to do much more than complain:
Mr Mugabe has faced fierce criticism from his fellow Africans. The AU's election observers ruled that Zimbabwe's presidential contest did not meet democratic "standards", the first time they have ever denounced an African poll. Raila Odinga, Kenya's prime minister, urged the AU to respond by taking punitive steps against Mr Mugabe. "They should suspend him and send peace forces to Zimbabwe to ensure free and fair elections," he said. While many are deeply unhappy about Zimbabwe's crisis, African leaders are unlikely to snub Mr Mugabe or pass judgement on his country's crisis at this summit. Instead, they will probably confine themselves to urging Mr Mugabe and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change to negotiate. South Africa's foreign ministry said that talks on the creation of a "transitional government" to cope with Zimbabwe's "challenges" were needed. The private frustrations that President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa has felt towards Zimbabwe's regime have now emerged. In 2001, he wrote a 37-page "discussion document" for Mr Mugabe's Zanu-PF party setting out a series of stark warnings and recommendations. "Of critical importance is the obvious necessity to ensure that Zimbabwe does not end up in a situation of isolation, confronted by an array of international forces she cannot defeat, condemned to sink into an ever-deepening social and economic crisis," wrote Mr Mbeki.
The British have taken to targeting Mbeki for criticism, (they're not alone. In early June, a pre-election article in the New Yorker called Mbeki:
... a lame-duck President, required to step down next year, and he has lost control of the A.N.C. party apparatus to his chief rival, Jacob Zuma. But his coddling of Mugabe has made him complicit in Zimbabwe’s devastation. So perhaps there is some justice in the fact that the Zimbabwean crisis he denies threatens to become the defining crisis of his Presidency. After all, the recent mayhem in South Africa only serves Mugabe, creating a distraction as he bleeds Zimbabwe in the final stretch of the election, with forebodings of greater slaughter hanging over the outcome. ...
... though to be fair, the Brits don't do much themselves beyond complain, for fear of looking like the colonial power trying to butt back in. Nor has the United Nations been much help (surprise, surprise...) And the Bush administration? Put it this way: like the late Saddam Hussein, Mugabe is a thug, who holds pretend elections and terrifies his own people into knuckling under (his militias burned a political opponent's wife alive this election cycle.) Unlike Saddam, he has no oil that Bush and Cheney's friends in the Industry want to exploit for their own gain...
So far, the African leader most willing to stand up to Mugabe has been Kenya's prime minister, Raila Odinga, who has called for Zimbabwe's suspension from the AU:
Earlier, Odinga broke ranks with other Africa leaders following Mugabe's widely discredited re-election as the Zimbabwean president.Speaking from Nairobi, he said: "The African Union should not accept or entertain Mugabe. "He should be suspended until he allows the African Union to facilitate free and fair elections between him and his opponent." Yesterday, Odinga called for AU peacekeepers to be sent to Zimbabwe and the UN urged the union to negotiate a political settlement. But Odinga is largely alone, and few other African nations have the strength or stability to challenge the status quo. And with South Africa being the strongest country, economically and politically, in sub-Saharan Africa, it will continue to bear the brunt of criticism for Africa's collective inaction. That same New Yorker article, written by Philip Gourevich, concluded:
To watch the intertwined agonies of South Africa and Zimbabwe today is to see what Frantz Fanon meant when he wrote, in “The Wretched of the Earth,” that “the last battle of the colonized against the colonizer will often be the fight of the colonized against each other.” Mbeki and Mugabe belong to a generation of liberation fighters who seem incapable of seeing the world through any lens beyond that of anti-colonial struggle, and who invoke their revolutionary bona fides as immunity against all political criticism and all challengers. Their time has passed. Pity no one has told the dictators.
Meanwhile, back at the AU summit, Mugabe tells his critics to "go hang."
| Labels: Africa, dictators, international news, news and current affairs, Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe |
| posted by JReid @ 10:52 AM |
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| Tuesday, January 01, 2008 |
| Kenyans burned to death in church |
Post-election violence is spinning out of control in Kenya.
(BBC) Thirty Kenyans including many children have been burned to death in a church, after seeking refuge from the mounting violence over last week's elections.
A mob set fire to the church in Eldoret where many people from President Mwai Kibaki's Kikuyu tribe were sheltering.
A Kenyan government spokesperson has accused supporters of opposition leader Raila Odinga of carrying out "ethnic cleansing" against the Kikuyu.
Both President Kibaki and Mr Odinga have called for the killing to stop.
President Kibaki, who was sworn in on Sunday following an election that opponents claim was rigged, said political parties should meet immediately and publicly called for calm.
But Mr Odinga said he would only hold talks once the re-installed president "publicly owns up that he was not elected".
Pressure is growing on the Kenyan government both inside and outside the country to accept an international review of the election.
EU observers said the poll "fell short of international standards", and four Kenyan election commissioners have joined calls for an independent judicial body to re-examine the process. ...
Happy New Year. As to the church burning, the BBC reports:
About 400 people were said to be taking refuge in the Kenya Assemblies of God church when the attack took place at about 1000 (0700 GMT).
A pastor from the church, Jackson Nyanga told the BBC that many of the people were beaten before the building was set on fire.
"After torching the church, children died - around 25 in number - four elderly people. And our men and our people who tried to confront them were injured," he said.
Eldoret, in the Rift Valley, has witnessed some of the worst violence since last Sunday's controversial poll and has a history of inter-ethnic tension.
Correspondents say that over the past few days hundreds of Kikuyus in the Eldoret area have been taking shelter in churches and around the town's police station.
Eldoret resident Bernard Magamu told the BBC News website that many houses and businesses have been torched, and that roads in and around the town have been closed.
And TIME reports that the inter-ethnic tensions in Kenya could lead to tribal war:
Tribal violence erupted across Kenya Monday, claiming the lives of at least 124 people, after widespread accusations that President Mwai Kibaki rigged an election to defeat opposition candidate Raili Odinga.
... While both sides pleaded for calm, there were fears the violence could aggravate an enduring national tribal split between Luos, who support Odinga, and Kikuyus, who back Kibaki. The two groups co-exist in an uneasy rivalry in Kenya. On Monday, crowds of Kikuyus in the west of the country were reported to be fleeing across the border to Uganda, while six Kikuyus were hacked to death in the popular tourist port city of Mombasa. Police, given orders to shoot rioters on sight, imposed a curfew at locations across the country and barred people from leaving the slums, a tactic which may have contained the violence but also kept innocent people from fleeing. KTN, the national broadcaster, said 124 people had been killed, but other media tallies put the death toll closer to 150. ...
The rift is not atypical for Africa, unfortunately:
The chaos represents Kenya's biggest domestic political crisis since independence from Britain in 1963. It was also a major disappointment for a country that had been considered a bright spot in the troubled region of East Africa. The economy, particularly tourism, is booming and Kibaki was considered to be an improvement over his predecessor, Daniel arap Moi, whose Kanu party regime was seen as autocratic and corrupt. Five years ago when Kibaki won election as head of the Democratic Party on promises to clean up the massive corruption of the Moi era, crowds of close to 1 million cheered at his swearing-in ceremony.
Since then his image has slipped from that of a capable reformer to an aging and fragile stereotypical African "big man." The 76-year-old was sworn in Sunday in a hasty ceremony attended by party loyalists, less than an hour after the Electoral Commission of Kenya pronounced he had beaten Odinga, 62, by just 230,000 votes. (Odinga had led most pre-election polls in the weeks leading up to the election.)
Kibaki banned live television and radio broadcasts Sunday, and on Monday afternoon, at the height of the crisis, KTN aired children's shows in which smiling children sang "Paddycake, Paddycake." Political activist and anti-corruption campaigner Mwalimu Mati said: "It was really one man swearing in himself and using his presidential appointees to do it. That's the scary bit — our institutions have failed us." Democracy is not having a good run these days...
Labels: Africa, democracy, elections, Kenya |
| posted by JReid @ 3:13 PM |
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| Thursday, June 21, 2007 |
| Circling the vultures |
As if I needed yet another reason to detest Uncle Rudy... Greg Palast has the latest dirt on "Mr. 9/11" and his nefarious friends. Reports Palast:
Paul Singer is a vulture. And a billionaire. And, with his underlings at Elliott Associates, the number one sugar-daddy donor to the presidential campaign of Rudy Giuliani, dropping $168,400 so far and, according to secret campaign documents, committed to raise $10 million for Rudolf the Great, Emperor of 9/11.
So who is this bird of prey Singer who holds Rudy in his beak?
Unlike feathered predators, Singer preys on the living. Singer figured out a way to siphon off funds intended for debt relief to some of the poorest countries in the world. Nice guy.
And by the way, I didn't come up with the moniker "vulture." Just about everyone, from the new Prime Minister of Britain to the World Bank, calls Singer and his ilk "vultures."
Here's how a vulture operation works. The vulture fund buys up the debt of poor nations cheaply when it is about to be written off and then sue for the full value of the debt plus interest -- sometimes more than ten times what they paid for it. Singer, for example, paid just $10 million for Congo Brazzaville's debt and is now suing for over $400 million.
Singer knew he'd turn a 1000%-plus profit on his $10 million investment with George Bush's help.
Bush convinced the US Congress to forgive the money Congo owes the US taxpayer, but once the US taxpayer forgives Congo's debt, the vulture, Singer, swoops in with lawyers to claim, "Congo now has the money to pay ME."
But wait a minute - the debt money given up by US taxpayers wasn't supposed to go to Rudy's predator Singer. In fact, the US Constitution provides power to the President to stop vultures from suing a foreign country in a US court if the President states such a private lawsuit interferes with America's foreign policy.
Singer, by suing Congo for the taxpayer money meant for debt relief and medicine, is interfering with US foreign policy. Yet Bush has done nothing.
While the President has made big speeches about debt relief for Africa and has even had his picture taken with a Bono, he won't get in the way of Singer's talons. One wonders if the President is influenced by Mr. Singer's strong support for debt relief, that is, debt relief for the Republican Party. The world's top vulture has become top donor to the GOP in New York.
Singer's not alone. He's joined in tearing at the flesh of the Congo's poor by a Washington operator named Michael Francis Sheehan. Sheehan is also known as "Goldfinger."
Besides joining Singer in attacking Congo, Goldfinger has also taken a piece of the debt relief earmarked for AIDS medicine for Zambia. Goldfinger paid $4 million for the right to collect on Zambia's debt - and just won $22 million from Zambia in a UK court, half that nation's debt relief. Goldfinger was able to seize that money because, he boasts in an email, he secretly paid $2 million to the "favorite charity" of Zambia's president. (That former President, Frederick Chiluba, is now under arrest for taking bribes ... but Goldfinger can still collect his pound of flesh.) ... Hear Palast's report on the Rhandi Rhodes show here. More on our friendly neighborhood Bush pioneer and Rudy 'raisin vulture, Paul Singer, from Public Citizen here. Apparently, he has the hots for Peru's debt, too... One wonders whether Rudy -- who has made fear and 9/11 his carrion just as sure as his fundraisers have done with Africa's poor -- should add a thirteenth " commitment" (not one on his marriage, because we all know how much he values commitments of that sort...) to his presidential "to do" list: this one to hedge fund managers everywhere: "I will help you to get even richer, probably at the expense of some black or brown kid with flies in his eyes... just as I have enriched myself on the graves 9/11."
Thank you, Uncle Rudy!
Labels: 2008, Africa, GOP, presidential candidates, Republicans, Rudy, Rudy Giuliani |
| posted by JReid @ 4:02 PM |
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| Thursday, March 01, 2007 |
| Quick take headlines: Thursdays in the park with Cheney |
There will be no indictment against the white woman who pointed out 14-year-old Emmit Till to her husband and brother in law, who later murdered the boy and threw his body into the Tallahatchee River. Even 50 years later, the case is chilling. And while the jury found "not enough evidence" of Carolyn Bryant Donham's guilt, she knows that guilt full well. The good news is that God will deal with her.
Speaking of evil, Dick Cheney is back in the news following his Afghan brush with death. And apparently, he isn't good at being an anonymous source...
Take the person who briefed reporters aboard Vice President Cheney's plane after his secret stay in Afghanistan. He didn't want his name used when he talked to reporters, but he kept using the words "I" and "me" as he referred to Cheney and to the reason for the vice president's visit.
For example, the source said, "The reason the president wanted me to come, obviously, is because of the continuing threat that exists in this part of the world."
And when it comes to the reports that Cheney went in to "beat up on" the Pakistani president and to get him to crack down on al-Qaida and Taliban fighters on the border with Afghanistan, the official said, "That's not the way I work."
Howard Kurtz of the WaPo asks in his column whether reporters should have refused to go along with Cheney's "anonymous source" fakery, and he lambastes blog commenters who seemed to wish that suicide bomber had succeeded. Earth to Kurtz! People were joking, and let's recall that it was right wingers who started us down this path to hating the president of the opposite party...
Meanwhile, the poster child for the Sovietization of America, Jose Padilla, has been ruled competent to stand trial. Padilla's case is an embarassment to the now quaint notion that the United States is a nation of laws, where the president is prevented from wielding dictatorial power over helpless citizens.
Over to Iraq, where U.S. troops are moving out of fortified bases, and into the violent, chaotic neighborhoods they usually patrol. Sounds like a recipe for more U.S. casualties. And the U.S. continues to insist that no children were killed in a soccer field bomb blast in Ramadi this week. But a local sheikh says differently.
Meanwhile, Africa has become a key transit point for illegal drugs, particularly cocaine and heroine trafficking. Just what they need.
And just what do we know about North Korea's nuclear program? Apparently, not much more than we knew about Iraq.
Happy Thursday!
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Labels: Africa, Bush administration, Dick Cheney, Emmet Till, news, news and politics, North Korea, U.S. history |
| posted by JReid @ 8:30 AM |
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