AHI: United States » Zimbabwe http://affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us Affordable Housing Institue Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:50:54 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Doing something, even if small http://affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/2005/11/doing_something.html http://affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/2005/11/doing_something.html#comments Fri, 25 Nov 2005 17:56:43 +0000 David Smith http://69.89.27.248/~affordc6/blogs/us/?p=299 All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

–Edmund Burke (1790)

 

 

Zim_demolition_050630 

A mother and her child walk through what once was her bedroom and is now burning after her house was set on fire by Zimbabwe police at Porta farm in Harare on June 30. (Photo: STR / AFP-Getty Images)

 

Give the Administration credit for taking another step in isolating Robert Mugabe’s criminally kleptocratic slow-genocidal dictatorship:

 

President Bush is targeting the U.S. accounts of leading government officials in Zimbabwe, saying those who work with President Robert Mugabe must restore democracy or face sanctions.

 

The White House announced Wednesday that Bush had signed an executive order Tuesday blocking all property and financial holdings in the United States owned by 128 people and 33 institutions in Zimbabwe.

 

It also bars U.S. citizens from having financial dealings with them.

 

However small, this step is in the right direction.

 

Bush already had issued sanctions against Mugabe and 76 other officials under an executive order signed in March 2003. Tuesday’s order added 53 people and applied to their immediate family members. It also allows the secretary of state and treasury secretary to expand the list without a presidential order.

 

Zimbabwe_map

 

What is the connection between Zimbabwe and housing?  Simply that:

 

1.       Mr. Mugabe’s pogrom is being conducted through destruction of homes and communities, however humble.

2.       With magnificently cunning hypocrisy, he has cloaked it by hijacking the language of urban revitalization and market renewal. 

3.       The housing community has been mute, allowing Mr. Mugabe’s offensively nonsensical claims to stand unrefuted, and hence to clutter up stories that ought to be commendatory and instead ‘give both sides.’

 

I am appalled at the silence, embarrassed for the housing community, and disappointed in the press for swallowing it.

 

Bush said that since the first order, conditions in Zimbabwe had continued to deteriorate.

“The government continues to suppress opposition groups and civil society, undermine the independent media, ignore decisions by its courts, and refuse to enter into meaningful negotiations with other political actors,” Bush wrote in a leader to congressional leaders.

“Zimbabwe’s parliamentary elections in March 2005 were not free or fair. Recent demolitions of low income housing and informal markets have caused 700,000 people to lose their homes, jobs, or both. Additional measures are required to promote democratic change.”

 

About 4 million Zimbabweans, or a third of the population, urgently need food aid, according to U.N. estimates.

 

Zim_znca_arrested_051105

Zimbabwean National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) members are arrested by police after demonstrating for a new constitution and a boycott of the upcoming senatorial elections in Harare November 5, 2005.

 

Recent constitutional changes in Zimbabwe will prevent white owners from recovering confiscated farms and could be used to strip critics of their passports and right to travel.

 

The European Union has imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe that include banning Mugabe and other government officials from traveling to EU countries.

 

By themselves these small gestures will make minimal change, but they are symbolic and significant. 

 

In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.  Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.  Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.  Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.  Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.

– Martin Niemoller, 1946 (or so)

 

Martin_niemoller_time_cover_1940 

Martin Niemoller, U-boat captain in World War I, imprisoned by Hitler 1938-45

 

Good for you, Bush Administration.  Now take the next logical step:

 

Analysts in Zimbabwe say that extension of U.S. travel sanctions to include more senior members of President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party are welcomed but do not go far enough.

 

John Makumbe, veteran political scientist from the University of Zimbabwe said the travel sanctions irritated senior members of ZANU-PF. He said he was pleased that sanctions included central bank governor Gono. But, he said, the measures do not go far enough and the United States should ensure that no children of ZANU-PF leaders should be given visas to travel to the United States on holiday or for study.

 

Veteran economist Tony Hawkins said the travel sanctions may have annoyed senior ZANU-PF leaders, but are largely ineffective in helping change government policy.

 

He said if they were extended to all children of ZANU-PF leaders, who mostly study in the United States, it might make a significant difference.

 

Faster, please.

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]]> http://affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/2005/11/doing_something.html/feed 0 Zimbabwe: call it dictatorship http://affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/2005/08/zimbabwe_call_i.html http://affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/2005/08/zimbabwe_call_i.html#comments Wed, 31 Aug 2005 16:29:56 +0000 David Smith http://69.89.27.248/~affordc6/blogs/us/?p=234

What makes the atrocity in Zimbabwe so horrifying is that Mr. Mugabe and his kleptocratic cronies find entirely consistent ways to mock the forms of government even as they officially steal, loot, and pillage what remains of a beautiful country.  As today’s Washington Post reports:

 

JOHANNESBURG, Aug. 30 — Zimbabwe’s parliament voted Tuesday to give President Robert Mugabe new constitutional powers to seize farmland and to restrict travel by government opponents in a country whose government is already regarded as among the most repressive in Africa.

 

There is no plausible reason why restricting travel could have any link to any public policy except that by coupling them, Mr. Mugabe can once again cloak his tyranny in the guise of ‘land reform’:

 

The parliament, flush with new members from Mugabe’s ruling party after a March legislative election that was denounced by many international observers as rigged, cast 103 votes for the constitutional changes, enough for the two-thirds majority needed in the body of 150 members. News reports from Harare, the Zimbabwean capital, said ruling party lawmakers began singing and dancing over the victory.

 

The practical effect of the changes was hard to predict in a country where the government has already endorsed violent land invasions, demolished hundreds of thousands of homes, shuttered independent newspapers and threatened would-be protesters with arrest and attack.

 

But opposition leaders predicted that Mugabe, who is expected to swiftly sign the changes into law, would soon revoke their passports, making it more difficult for them to lobby for international pressure against Mugabe’s autocratic leadership.

 

Come on, Washington Post!  Please stop calling it ‘autocratic leadership’! 

 

Call it dictatorship, call it a military junta, call it a tyranny, but don’t debase the language by calling it autocratic leadership.

 

WaPo_Mugabe_new_powers_050831 

Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, has been increasingly isolated by the United Nations and most developed countries because of his autocratic rule. 

[No, because of his theft, repression, pillage, dictatorship, and slow genocide by bulldozer. -- Ed.]

 

Mr. Mugabe’s cronies continue to practice Orwellian doublethink by labeling famine bounty, tragedy celebration:

 

“Today is a happy moment,” Charamba said, according to the Reuters news service. “This gives us an opportunity as Zimbabweans to be the true owners of the land and to be truly independent.”

 

Faced with hyperinflation, 70 percent unemployment and a paralyzing shortage of fuel, Mugabe has recently sought financial assistance from friendly countries, including South Africa and China.

 

Agricultural production in Zimbabwe, once regarded as the region’s breadbasket, has plummeted so dramatically that millions of Zimbabweans now rely on international food donations each year.  The economy also has contracted by at least one-third in [the last five years].

 

George Orwell saw it all, as he wrote in 1984:

 

“To know and not to know:


 


·         To be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies


·         To hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them


·         To use logic against logic


·         To repudiate morality while laying claim to it


·         To believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy


·         To forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all,


·         To apply the same process to the process itself.


 


That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.’”

 

Meanwhile, those outside dither:

 

A team from the International Monetary Fund, meanwhile, has been making a final evaluation before deciding whether to expel Zimbabwe for failing to pay $295 million in debt.

 

What could the IMF possibly be waiting for?

 

Write to them (directly at eastafritac@imf.org) and ask,

 

“Why haven’t you expelled Zimbabwe yet?   What are you waiting for?”

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