Tag: Zimbabwe

If Mugabe Can’t Go to Europe, Europe Will Go To Mugabe

Yet another example of just how pointless multilateral action with Europe is. As I noted awhile ago, the European Union imposed a travel ban on Zimbabwe officials as punishment for the government’s increasingly authoritarian ways. But they weren’t enforcing it. Zimbabwe officials were being allowed to travel to Europe to attend international conferences.

So the Europeans came up with a two-pronged approach in response to criticism. Apparently they are now going to enforce the ban, but move international conferences to non-European nations.

According to this story in the Daily Telegraph (UK),

EU foreign ministers were supposed to hold a meeting with the Southern African Development Community in Copenhagen on Nov 7 and 8. But several delegations from the 14-nation African bloc hinted that they would boycott the gathering unless the Zimbabwean government was included.

Rather than cancelling the summit – or simply going ahead regardless – the European Union agreed to move the entire meeting to Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, making a mockery of the travel ban. The decision to switch the location is a slap in the face of the European Parliament, which passed a unanimous resolution last month demanding that Mr Mudenge be banned from the meeting.

Appeasment will apparently be the EU’s official pastime.

Source:

EU talks moved so Zimbabwe can attend. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Daily Telegraph (UK), October 24, 2002.

Mugabe Blocks Food Aid to Opponents

Late last week the United Nations confirmed what had been rumored for the past couple weeks — Zimbabwe has ordered Oxfam and Save the Children to stop distributing food aid in areas that Robert Mugabe’s ruling party believes are hotbeds of opposition support.

In a Mail & Guardian (Johannesberg) story”>http://allafrica.com/stories/200210170594.html”>story, UN FAO representative Tony Hall is quoted as saying,

This is political obstruction of desperately needed food aid at a crucial point. If people do not get food now, many will die . . . Government officials confirmed they will not allow those NGOs to distribute food aid for political reasons, because the government views them as loyal to the opposition party. I said that is unacceptable. They are major international organisations with fine reputations for non-partisan activity.

I guess that puts Zimbabwe up to stage 7 in Genocide Watch’s warning of Zimbabwe’s path to politicide.

Source:

Zim Bans Food Aid Charities. Andrew Meldrum, Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg), October 18, 2002.

Europeans Cannot Even Enforce Their Own Travel Ban

In response to the increasingly dictatorial nature of the Zimbabwe regime, the European Union early this year enacted a number of sanctions against Zimbabwe, including a ban on travel by members of Zimbabwe’s government.

But, of course, they didn’t mean it. This month Zimbabwe’s Trade Minister was allowed to travel to Brussels, Belgium — which houses the headquarters for the European Union — for a series of talks related to issues in developing nations (previously Zimbabwean officials made trips to France and Italy). An article on the row in the British newspaper The Independent noted that,

Zimbabwe’s élite has already taken advantage of a loophole in the EU’s travel ban to attend UN-sponsored or international meetings in Italy and France. However critics argue that, by travelling to the EU’s headquarters in Brussels, the minister is exposing the sanctions to particular ridicule.

Something making a mockery of the EU? Imagine that!

Source:

Anger over visa for Zimbabwe minister. Stephen Castle, The Independent, September 26, 2002.

Kenneth Adelman Takes Down Yet Another Pointless UN Summit

Former UN Ambassador Kenneth Adelman wrote a searing attack on the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. Adelman finds it a bit obscene for the UN to spend $55 million to talk about poverty while several million people are on the verge of starving due to said poverty (apparently the United Nations believes if it holds enough conferences it can talk poverty to death).

But the best part of the columns is Adelman’s observation that the United Nations wants to deal with poverty but only if it can keep it at arm’s length,

Since Rio, there have been four U.N. preparatory conferences — PrepComs, in the vernacular, which are U.N. conferences to prepare for this jumbo U.N. conference. The last “PrepCom” was in Bali, with some of the finest beaches in the world.

The other dirty little secret of United Nations conferences on poverty is that they never meet where there’s much poverty. Hence, Bali rather than Jakarta, and Johannesburg rather than Soweto.

Adelman also notes that among other expenses the delegates will ring up this week are literally hundreds of dollars spent per page to translate every speech into English, French, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese. Just the money from a single page could mean the difference between life and death for a family in Zimbabwe. Much better, though, to make sure that documents that will never be read again are at least unread in multiple languages.

Source:

A Summit Hard to Stomach. Kenneth Adelman, FoxNews.Com, August 28, 2002.

Zimbabwe, Genocide and AIDS

Glenn Reynolds links to an article speculating that Zimbabwe might be on the verge of heading down the same path that Idi Amin’s Uganda took. But the scary thing is that even without that sort of problem, the long term result of Robert Mugabe’s tyranny is going to be unbelievably high numbers of deaths in Zimbabwe due to something that’s been a bit overlooked — the AIDS crisis.

Yes, millions of people in Zimbabwe are at risk of starvation and political violence is likely to rise, but even if those two outcomes are averted, Zimbabwe is headed toward an HIV Holocaust.

In July the United Nations released a report on AIDS in Africa claiming that by 2020, more than 68 million people in Africa will likely die from AIDS. And Zimbabwe is the poster child for the epidemic.

In 1997, an estimated 25 percent of all adults in Zimbabwe were HIV positive. While Mugabe fiddled about with seizing white farms and jailing opposition parties and journalists, that figure jumped to an estimated 33 percent of all adults in Zimbabwe being HIV positive.

Other countries, such as Botswana, have larger estimated rates of infection, and certainly places like South Africa have dragged their feet at dealing with the epidemic, but at the moment Zimbabwe seems the leading candidate for the nightmare scenario where AIDS all but wipes out a large nation. If Mugabe is able to hold on to power like Mobutu did in Zaire and Amin did in Uganda, by the end of the decade Zimbabwe will likely be looking at HIV infection rates in excess of 50 percent of the adult population and with no end or solution in sight.

UN: AIDS Epidemic Still Growing

UNAIDS released a report in July claiming that the AIDS epidemic is still in its initial phases, and that the total deaths to AIDS in the developing world will grow to horrific heights over the next few decades.

In the 45 countries where HIV prevalence is the highest, UNAIDS estimates that as many as 68 million people will die from AIDS-related causes between 2000 and 2020. From 1980 to 2000, roughly 13 million people died from AIDS-related causes in those countries.

There was some hope that AIDS prevalence rates might begin to stabilize, but in many of the hardest hit countries they show no such signs. In Zimbabwe, for example, HIV rates jumped from 25 percent in 1997 to 33 percent in 2001. In Botswana, HIV prevalence jumped from 36 percent in 1999 to 39 percent in 2001 — and, as a result, life expectancy in that country is below 40 years for the first time since 1950.

UNAIDS executive director Peter Piot told Reuters, “We haven’t reached the peak of the AIDS epidemic yet. It’s an unprecedented epidemic in human history.”

While Africa will be the main focal point of the deaths, with an estimated 55 million dead, Asia will also suffer major losses of more than 10 million AIDS-related deaths. The main fear is that Asia’s HIV epidemic may explode like Africa’s has. UN AIDS expert Sandra Calvani told NewScientist,

The trend [in Asia] looks like the same as the beginning of the epidemic in Africa. One million infections [in 2001] means 3,000 per day, or 120 per hour. These are shocking figures.

Sources:

UN: AIDS will claim 70 million by 2022. Reuters, July 2, 2002.

Global AIDS epidemic “in early phase”. Emma Young, NewScientist.Com, July 2, 2002.