Tag: Zimbabwe

Congressional Black Caucus Lied about Zimbabwe Vote

Speaking of honesty, I was doing some research about Zimbabwe when I came across this press release from the Congressional Black Caucus about last year’s vote on a sanctions bill against Zimbabwe. The first paragraph didn’t make any sense to me,

Yesterday, Members of the Congressional Black Caucus unanimosly voted in favor of the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001 in an attempt to formulate a US policy initiative to support a resolution to the current political instability and on-going land conflict that has long plagued the country.

Huh? Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and she is on record as opposing that bill. What gives?

So I checked the roll call on the bill (technically, the House voted on a resolution to suspend its rules and pass the bill, which is common when there is overwhelming support for a bill)– McKinney is listed as not voting on the resolution.

Apparently McKinney’s defense of Mugabe was even too embarassing for the CBC, but why lie?

Now We Know Why Cynthia McKinney Liked Mugabe So Much

Last week I noted that Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga) was the only (to my knowledge) national politician to stand up and defend Zimbabwean strongman Robert Mugabe. In her statement opposing sanctions against Zimbabwe, McKinney defended Zimbabwe’s corrupt and rigged elections as commendable as compared to what she sees as the wholesale sellout of democracy over what happened in Florida in 2000.

But McKinney’s supporters have a very odd idea of what counts as fair electioneering practices. Somebody has been making tape recorded calls in Georgia targeted at Republican voters telling them that they could be arrested if they vote in the Democratic primary.

The web site for WXIA-TV reports that the message says,

This is an official notice for Republican voters. It is a violation of state and federal law to attempt to vote in a Democratic primary without proper documentation. State and federal enforcement officials will be monitoring the polling places closely tomorrow for violations of the law. Do not risk violating the law by trying to vote in a Democratic primary without the proper documents.

Georgia, like many states, has an open primary system so any registered voter can vote in either the Democratic or Republican primary. The only thing any voter needs to vote in either primary is just some sort of legal identification such as a driver’s license. In McKinney’s case since there’s no way the Republicans are going to win the seat in her district, Republicans have been urging their voters to vote for McKinney’s opponent in the Democratic primary. Apparently somebody’s afraid that strategy might work.

The phone messages themselves are likely a violation of federal and state laws against voter intimidation.

Just the sort of thing that Robert Mugabe would try to discourage opposition voters.

Cynthia McKinney Is Robert Mugabe’s No. 1 Fan

Zimbabwe, as regular readers of this site are aware, is in the midst of famine due to the corrupt leadership of Robert Mugabe who has done everything from seizing land from white farmers, instituting strict censorship, fixing elections, etc.

Indepundit has a brief snippet from a speech from Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) defending this despot, but here is the full text of McKinney’s statements in opposition to a bill that imposed sanctions against Zimbabwe,

SPEECH OF HON.
CYNTHIA A. McKINNEY OF GEORGIA IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Tuesday, December 4, 2001

* Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, at the international Relations Committee meeting of November 28, 2001, which considered the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001, I asked a question of my colleagues who were vociferously supporting this misdirected piece of legislation: “Can anyone explain how the people in question who now have the land in question in Zimbabwe got title to the land?”

* My query was met with a deafening silence. Those who knew did not want to admit the truth and those who didn’t know should have known–that the land was stolen from its indigenous peoples through the British South Africa Company and any “titles” to it were illegal and invalid. Whatever the reason for their silence, the answer to this question is the unspoken but real reason for why the United States Congress is now concentrating its time and resources on squeezing an economically-devastated African state under the hypocritical guise of providing a “transition to democracy.”

* Zimbabwe is Africa’s second-longest stable democracy. It is multi-party. It had elections last year where the opposition, Movement for Democratic Change, won over 50 seats in the parliament. It has an opposition press which vigorously criticizes the government and governing party. It has an independent judiciary which issues decisions contrary to the wishes of the governing party. Zimbabwe is not without troubles, but neither is the United States. I have not heard anyone proposing a United States Democracy Act following last year’s Presidential electoral debacle. And if a foreign country were to pass legislation calling for a United States Democracy Act which provided funding for United States opposition parties under the fig leaf of “Voter Education,” this body and this country would not stand for it.

* There are many de jure and de facto one-party states in the world which are the recipients of support of the United States government. They are not the subject of Congressional legislative sanctions. To any honest observer, Zimbabwe’s sin is that it has taken the position to right a wrong, whose resolution has been too long overdue–to return its land to its people. The Zimbabwean government has said that a situation where 2 percent of the population owns 85 percent of the best land is untenable. Those who presently own more than one farm will no longer be able to do so.

* When we get right down to it, this legislation is nothing more than a formal declaration of United States complicity in a program to maintain white-skin privilege. We can call it an “incentives” bill, but that does not change its essential “sanctions” nature. It is racist and against the interests of the masses of Zimbabweans. In the long-run the Zimbabwe Democracy Act will work against the United States having a mutually beneficial relationship with Africa.

That’s really amazing. Politicians in South Africa understand that Mugabe is a despot — the African National Congress actually went to the trouble of explicitly saying it would never try to enforce the sort of theft of land from white farmers that Mugabe has forced on Zimbabwe.

But McKinney has no problem at all defending one of the worst contemporary African dictators. Her paragraph about the elections and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change are laugh out loud hilarious and could have easily come from Mugabe-controlled newspapers.

It is ironic that McKinney gave her remarks about Zimbabwe’s laudable democracy on Dec. 5, 2001. According to Human Rights Watch, in Dec. 2001 in Zimbabwe there were 7 politically motivated murders, 22 kidnappings/disappearances, 14 unlawful arrests/detentions and 119 cases of torture carried about by the government or government supporters.

It’s hard to believe a woman this ignorant and oblivious can hold a national office.

Source:

ZIMBABWE DEMOCRACY AND ECONOMIC RECOVERY ACT
OF 2001 (Extensions of Remarks – December 05, 2001. Cynthia McKinney, December 5, 2001.

The Corruption/Famine Chart

Glenn Reynolds has an observation about Swaziland’s purchase of a $55 million jet . . . at the same time the UN is appealing for foreign aid to prevent famine in Swaziland. Here’s a handy chart of countries in Africa currently experiencing “food insecurity” along with a brief highlight of corruption in each country. For the continent as a whole, estimates of money lost annually to corruption in Africa are typically in excess of US $100 billion.

Country

Corruption

Food Insecurity Problems
Angola US $1 billion in 2001 oil revenues “missing”(FAO appeals for $5.2 million
aid) 		1.4 million people need “urgent assistance” (FAO)
Malawi Corrupt government officials sold 160,000 tons of grain last Fall; $8 million
in European Union aid diverted — EU demanded return of the money in July
2002 (FAO appeals for $1.6 million aid)		 168,000 families at risk (FAO)
Swaziland $2 million aid diverted for down payment on $55 million presidential jet (FAO
appeals for $1.4 million aid)		 21,000 families at risk (FAO)
Zambia Ranked as one of the most corrupt countries in the world by Transparency
International; hundreds of millions stolen in the 1990s (FAO appeals for
$2.6 million aid)		 62,000 families at risk (FAO)
Zimbabwe President orders seizure of white-owned farms, causing food crisis; millions $ US aid money missing (FAO appeals for $16 million
aid)		 600,000 families at risk (FAO)

Measles Vaccination Works in the Developing World

A study published this month in The Lancet should settle once and for all whether or not vaccination of disease is a worthwhile goal to achieve in the developing world. There has been some skepticism over whether or not poor nations possessed the infrastructure to carry out large scale vaccination programs.

The study looked at World Health Organization efforts to vaccinate for measles in Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, South AFrica, Swaziland and Zimbabwe.

Over four years, WHO and national health agencies vaccinated almost 24 million children in those seven countries. The study found that as a result of the vaccination programs, total cases of measles in those countries fell from 60,000 in 1996 to less than 200 in the year 2000. Total deaths dropped from 160 in 1996 to zero in 2000.

Vaccination can work even in extremely poor countries.

Source:

Measles vaccine’s African success story. Corrine Podger, The BBC, May 3, 2002.

Zimbabwe Arrests Correspondent for British Newspaper

The BBC reports that a Zimbabwean correspondent for The Daily Telegraph was arrested and charged with “publishing false information.”

Peta Thornycroft, 57, was apparently arrested because she was investigating alleged acts of violence carried out by government supporter against Zimbabwe’s opposition parties.

Anything which might be critical of Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe is now officially a crime under that nation’s laws.