Mugabe's new tenant farmers

By Julia Belluz - Thursday, December 23, 2010 at 1:20 PM - 4 Comments

Alexander Joe/AFP/Getty Images

Renting land to prop up a dictatorship: that’s how some see the return of a new group of about 120 white farmers to Zimbabwe’s contested agricultural land, where they are leasing plots from supporters of President Robert Mugabe. “These farmers handed Mr. Mugabe victory,” former Zimbabwe Tobacco Association president Andy Ferreira told London’s Telegraph newspaper.

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North Korean love affair

By Michael Barclay - Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 3 Comments

KELD NAVNTOFT/EPA/KEYSTONE PRESS

It was a friendly invitation from one paranoid dictatorship to another. In the lead-up to the World Cup in South Africa this month, Robert Mugabe’s government invited the North Korean soccer team to come to Zimbabwe to acclimatize and train before their big games. The North Koreans accepted the gracious offer in April, until they found out where exactly they would be training.

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CIDA's democracy promotion in Zimbabwe

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 4:55 PM - 9 Comments

Longtime visitors to this space have read me raging, like an increasingly maniacal King Lear on the heath, about the Canadian International Development Agency not answering an access-to-information request that I filed in 2007.  Last week, almost three years later, they did.

I had asked CIDA about a multi-million dollar democracy promotion program in Zimbabwe. At the time, back in 2007, I had recently returned to Canada from Europe, where I had reported from countries such as Georgia, Ukraine, and Belarus, where pro-democracy movements had tried to overthrow autocratic governments. In Georgia and Ukraine, these movements were successful; not so in Belarus. A factor in all three cases – and also earlier in Serbia – was the involvement of Western governmental and non-governmental organizations, such as the Soros Foundation and the National Democratic Institute, that promote political parties, civil society, and democratic governance.

This got me thinking about CIDA’s work in illiberal societies. CIDA’s self-described mandate says nothing about promoting democracy and good governance abroad, instead referencing the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, which in turn focus on things like child mortality, disease, and education. But CIDA spent millions in Zimbabwe on a “Rights, Democracy and Governance Fund” with explicitly political goals: “This project supported civil society organizations in demanding and promoting democratic governance and respect for human rights in Zimbabwe.” Continue…

Jacob Zuma: not so rotten after all

By Nancy Macdonald - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 4:29 PM - 2 Comments

By now, Jacob Zuma’s South Africa should be careening toward the ranks of failed African states. Eight months ago, after an election anointed him president of the continent’s proudest democracy, editorialists everywhere drew thinly veiled comparisons to Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, who turned Africa’s shining light into a country that rivals only Somalia for sheer dysfunction. Even the most generous assessments had Zuma—once described as an “embarrassment” by Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu—shackled by “suspicion” and “doubt” about his shambolic past, and fitness to lead Africa’s biggest economy. Yet under Zuma, South Africa has made pragmatic, positive strides in many areas, including health and the economy.

Early indicators were not good. Zuma, a former goatherd with no formal schooling and a stable of wives, has also twice stood trial. In April, the fraud, corruption and racketeering charges he’d been fighting for almost a decade were dropped, and in 2006, he was acquitted of rape (despite the acquittal, the case revealed “shocking” judgment, according to noted South African journalist Mark Gevisser: “He had unprotected sex with an unstable HIV-positive woman who regarded him as a ‘father.’ ”) To the chattering classes, Zuma seemed to embody the “rottenness” that famed novelist André Brink described as having befallen the country in A Fork in the Road, a memoir published in the weeks running up to the election.

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Standing up to Robert Mugabe

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 9:38 AM - 0 Comments

I spoke to Zimbabwean lawyer and human rights defender Beatrice Mtetwa while she was in Ottawa this week to deliver a convocation address at Carleton University. Mtetwa has bravely defended Zimbabwean and international journalists in her country who are often subject to arrest, abuse, and murder by forces loyal to President Robert Mugabe. Here is that interview.

'You get beaten sometimes. It's part of the territory.'

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, September 9, 2009 at 3:38 PM - 1 Comment

Beatrice Mtetwa is a human rights lawyer in Zimbabwe who specializes in defending journalists who have been harassed, jailed and abused by the government of President Robert Mugabe and his Zimbabwe Africa National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party. Mugabe recently agreed to a power-sharing deal with former opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who is now Zimbabwe’s prime minister. Mtetwa spoke to Michael Petrou in Ottawa, where she delivered the convocation address at Carleton University.

Q: What challenges do journalists in Zimbabwe face?

A: Zimbabwe has some of the most repressive laws in the world. And if you want to practice as a journalist, that depends entirely on the government. The government has to approve that you can be accredited as a journalist. The publication that you work for has to be approved by the government. And when you are lawfully accredited, you are still subject to various other restrictions. Lots of journalists get arrested for writing stories that do not go down well with the ZANU-PF leadership. Even if you’re legally doing your job, what you write about may result in you being imprisoned.

Q: It is virtually impossible for foreign journalists to report from inside Zimbabwe. Why does the Zimbabwean government see foreign media as such a threat?

A: The ZANU-PF does not want the outside world to know exactly what is happening inside Zimbabwe. Because foreign journalists know that they will be leaving at the end of their story, they will be able to dig deeper than local journalists. Once they’re out, there will be no consequences for them if they tell the truth.

Q: What happens to local journalists who dig where the government doesn’t want them?

A: A lot of Zimbabwean journalists have had to leave the country because of various threats. They get arrested. They get locked up. We’ve had printing presses bombed. We’ve had journalists killed. It’s not just a matter of losing your livelihood. There’s a real threat of physical harm.

Q: Who are responsible for the beatings, the bombings and the threats?

A: They are state players. There can be no question. But who exactly they are, these are clandestine activities, so one cannot point fingers. But from recent abductions where we have had the government file affidavits admitting that the abductions were carried out by state security agents, there can be no doubt that all other similar activities before would have been done by the same agents.

Q: How is Robert Mugabe able to command the loyalty of his supporters?

A: He has control over virtually all the important security services and ministries. He appoints all the service chiefs in the army. He appoints the commissioner of police. He appoints the chief justice. He appoints all the judges. If you’ve got control of these major institutions, you will have control over everything else. If the police are under his thumb, the army, the judiciary, who is there to stop him doing what he wants to do?

Q: But there are still Zimbabwean journalists who stand up to this intimidation. What motivates them?

A: The truth. It’s their job to ask the truth. It’s the duty of journalists to express what they see on the ground. It can only be bravery, because they dangers are many.

Q: You defend them, at some personal risk. Why?

A: I’m a great believer in free media and freedom of expression. I believe very strongly that you cannot talk of democracy, the rule of law, without a free media. Those who talk of governance, rule of law, democracy—they can only achieve true democracy if there is a free media.

Q: What have you suffered as a result of your work?

A: What other civil society workers face. Harassment, here and there. You get followed from time to time. You get beaten sometimes. It’s part of the territory. You do have your income affected. Lots of clients don’t want to deal with you because you are seen as anti-government, and they fear the consequences of dealing with you.

Q: What has changed since the power sharing agreement between Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai?

A: The supermarket shelves are now heavily laden with goods imported from South Africa. But those goods must be paid for with foreign currency, and the majority of Zimbabweans don’t have that. The courts still operate exactly as they did before. The police have not changed in any way. They still arrest first and ask questions later. We still have activists who are facing trial, journalists who are facing trial. And these arrests happened after the signing of the political agreement. The attorney general continues to practice selective prosecutions. Members of the independent media, members of political parties outside the ZANU-PF, are subject to being arrested on a daily basis. Nothing has changed in that sector.

Q: Is that because Tsvangirai and the Movement for Democratic Change have so little power?

A: The Movement for Democratic Change has little room to maneuver. Whatever they may want to do, they don’t have the capacity to do it without Mugabe agreeing.

Q: Should they have not entered into the power-sharing deal?

A: I think they should have gone in with a more defined document. There obviously was the belief that there was good faith on both sides. And it’s unfortunate that they thought like that; because good faith is something that Mugabe doesn’t understand. So I think the decision to go in probably was the right one, but it was based on a document that was flawed because it didn’t have enough checks and balances.

Q: Should Canada and other countries give aid to Zimbabwe?

A: I feel very strongly that assistance that will cascade down to the ordinary Zimbabwean should be given. I don’t believe that assistance should mean government-to-government engagement. There must be ways of ensuring that assistance is given that will benefit the people of Zimbabwe without putting that through the government.

Q: The counter-argument is that aid that bypasses the government will still do the government’s work for it and alleviate social pressure and discontent that might otherwise be directed against an oppressive regime.

A: It depends what you want to do. Do you want to make the Zimbabwean government look bad, or do you want to help the people of Zimbabwe? For me, I’m looking at it from a humanitarian perspective. We should not look at how the government will look. We should look at how the ordinary people of Zimbabwe will benefit.

Q: How might Robert Mugabe’s government be removed?

A: He signed an agreement that says there will be elections. The problem is—are we going to have those elections? If so, when, and under what constitution? And who will be in control of what at the time? If President Mugabe still controls the security services, he will have the power to subvert the election anyways.

Q: He’s quite elderly, though. One way or the other, it’s unlikely that he’ll be around for much longer. What will happen when he’s gone?

A: He’s left this legacy that will be very difficult to shake off. He’s shaped the way Zimbabwean politics goes. And he doesn’t do these things on his own. The people in his party are absolutely certain that they are entitled to rule forever. So there will be somebody to step into his shoes who has been schooled in his way of doing things. What would probably change is that a new person would not cause the same sort of fear that Mugabe does. But the culture of doing things in this way is a culture of the party, and it will probably continue, albeit in a more diluted manner.

Q: You don’t sound very hopeful for your country.

A: I would love to be hopeful and believe that things will change quickly. But on the ground I haven’t seen anything to make me think that this will come on a platter. There are many hurdles. Some changes will come, but not as easily as most people think.

Q: Some people talk of a violent revolution or even a regime change from outside. What do you think about that?

A: I don’t think a revolution would help the people of Zimbabwe. It would decimate a population that is already very severely decimated. And also on the ground, I can’t imagine who would want to be involved in that. A revolution requires leaders who would advocate that. I can’t imagine anyone doing so successfully. And I don’t think Zimbabweans would buy that anyway, because of the entrenched fear that is already there.

Q: And regime change from outside?

A: It probably wouldn’t work. And I don’t think it would really be the solution for Zimbabwe.

Tarivona Asher Mutsengi 1983-2009

By Rachel Mendleson - Thursday, August 20, 2009 at 2:00 PM - 6 Comments

Tarivona Asher Mutsengi was born on March 8, 1983, in Bulawayo, a city in southwestern Zimbabwe, the first of five children to Philip Gilbert, a businessman, and his wife, Martha. As a child, Asher, as everyone called him, spent most of his time in the nearby town of Plumtree, where Philip owned a gas station, and the family had enough land to grow watermelons and maize. During holidays, cousins, aunts and uncles would descend on their garden. With his wide smile and quick wit, Asher was always “the centre of attention,” says sister Rumbidzai, naturally assuming the leadership role in childhood games, pretending he was a priest (the family were devout Catholics) or a doctor. Whenever one of the kids had a loose tooth, he insisted that the new one would grow in faster if they let him remove it—which they did. “We believed everything that he told us because he was so convincing,” says Rumbidzai.

In addition to their fields in Plumtree, the family had a farm in Gutu. At the time, they could have afforded to hire farmhands, but “my father preferred us doing it, so that we experienced it,” says Rumbidzai. Philip rewarded his children for good grades, and Asher had no trouble meeting those expectations; he was once given a bicycle for his academic achievements, and would let Rumbidzai ride it—as long as she paid him in chocolate. A member of the debate club, Asher held firm to his convictions. The only time he didn’t make the top spot in his class was on purpose, after an argument with his father. Says Rumbidzai, “He liked stressing his point, even if it was a losing side.” Continue…

Hope for Zimbabwe’s hellish jails

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 1:20 PM - 2 Comments

Conditions within Zimbabwe’s prisons are so horrific that the International Committee of the Red Cross has stepped in. The Swiss-based organization announced last Friday that it is distributing food to 6,300 inmates and has set up therapeutic feeding programs for the severely malnourished. The help can’t come fast enough. On March 31, an undercover South African documentary titled Hell Hole showed emaciated detainees in rags. And the prison system is so overcrowded that the diseased and starving are forced to share cells with healthy prisoners. So many were dying that the bodies were crammed into makeshift mortuaries.

Lucky prisoners get one meal a day and salty water. Roy Bennett, a leading opposition politician who is now deputy minister of agriculture in the coalition government, was noticeably thinner after being freed on bail in March after a few weeks behind bars. He called his detention, on banditry and terrorism charges many believe were politically motivated, a “harrowing experience” that “I don’t wish on my worst enemy.” While he was in jail it took authorities up to two days to remove five bodies. A Zimbabwean newspaper reported that more than 50 per cent of the inmates in one prison died in 2008.

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The End of Democracy?

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, March 3, 2009 at 12:40 PM - 84 Comments

Earlier this month a Russian court acquitted three men accused of involvement in the 2006 murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Politkovskaya’s writing had exposed Russian human rights abuses in Chechnya, and she had been detained on occasion by the Russian military as a result. The end of that court case followed the murder of Stanislav Markelov, another critic of the Russian government who had represented many victims of Russia’s security services. He was gunned down on the streets of Moscow in January. Anastasia Baburova, a 25-year-old student and journalist with Novaya Gazeta, a newspaper that is often critical of the Kremlin, and for which Politkovskaya also wrote, was shot dead when she tried to help. She was the fourth Novaya Gazeta journalist murdered since 2000.

Russia isn’t the only country where it is dangerous to oppose the government these days. China has recently arrested dozens of dissidents as part of a crackdown on free speech on the Internet, which it says is necessary to protect its children from “vulgarity.” Censored websites include those of the BBC and Voice of America. Kyrgyzstan has similarly removed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Kyrgyz-language programs from its national, government-owned TV and radio networks. Kyrgyz authorities said the programs were too critical of the government and would not be broadcast unless they are submitted to and approved by government censors in advance. And Syria last fall sentenced 12 pro-democracy dissidents to 2½ years in prison. The activists had called for greater freedom of expression and an end to the ruling Baath party’s monopoly on power.

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One emergency at a time, please

By selley - Friday, November 28, 2008 at 1:56 PM - 7 Comments

Must-reads: John Ivison, Chantal Hébert, Dan Gardner, Jeffrey Simpson and Thomas Walkom, on the fiscal update.

Bad timing, at best
If you were as smart as Stephen Harper, then you’d know what he’s up to.

“There are valid reasons for the government to keep its powder dry” on stimulating the economy, Chantal Hébert argues in the Toronto Star—namely, that “in the absence of a definitive course from the new American administration, dealing with the crisis from Ottawa is a hit-and-miss affair.” But there was no valid reason to announce in yesterday’s fiscal update that political parties would be removed from the federal dole, she insists, suggesting such a move might better follow “a debate on electoral reform.” This is nothing more complicated than the Conservatives sacrificing the “goodwill in the House of Commons … on the altar of partisan self-interest,” she insists, which threatens to turn this parliament “even more toxic than its predecessors” at precisely the time it would be most damaging.

The National Post’s John Ivison, too, believes there’s a compelling case to be made to wean parties off the public teat, and insists “the Liberals only have themselves to blame for the fact that it still costs them 50¢ to raise $1 and that their donor base is only one-quarter the size of that of the Conservative Party.” But the timing, he argues, is indefensible. The public has “a reasonable expectation that Parliament should deal with one emergency before embarking on another,” he writes, “especially one of its own making.”

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Megapundit: Deutschland über Ottawa!

By selley - Tuesday, July 15, 2008 at 3:21 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: Henry Aubin on the Order of Canada; Graham Thomson in Kandahar; Vaughn Palmer on BC’s emissions targets.

The pan-Canadian smorgasbord
Margaret Somerville, Omar Khadr, John McCain, Rick Salutin and a bunch of heroin addicts—together at last!

In the Montreal Gazette, Henry Aubin says controversial McGill University bioethicist Margaret Somerville’s exclusion from the Order of Canada proves the investiture committee is infected with the political correctness virus, when it should be working for a cure. From abortion to gay marriage, Quebec nationalism and even the banality of municipal politics, Aubin argues, Canadians are often subjected to the “either you’re with me on my terms, or you’re a son of a bitch” (in the words of Quebec playwright René-Daniel Dubois) mentality, the result being a lack of “sharp debate that makes for thoughtful public policies.” The OOC should “encourage the intellectual diversity that is the strength of this or any society,” he believes.

Asking the Toronto Sun‘s Peter Worthington about Omar Khadr is normally a little like taking a sledgehammer to an aquarium—all of a sudden you’re surrounded by flopping, twitching, rapidly dying arguments, none of which have anything to do with each other except that they somehow found themselves in the same tank. To wit, he begins today: “It is now seems almost inevitable that Omar Khadr … will be returned to Canada”—which is more than a little bizarre, given the Canadian government’s repeatedly-stated indifference. In fairness, however, Worthington today eventually lands at a somewhat logical argument about Khadr: that “fighting and killing invaders” is an act of war, not a crime, and as such he should be treated as a prisoner of war until the conflict’s conclusion. This makes perfect sense if you ignore all the other “prisoners of war” released from Guantanamo, and as long as the words “child soldier” mean nothing to you.

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Megapundit: Conrad Black and the "feline" French

By selley - Monday, July 7, 2008 at 1:51 PM - 0 Comments

WEEKEND ROUNDUP

Must-reads: Rosie DiManno on the US Army deserter “refugee”; Rex Murphy on the Order of Canada; Conrad Black on the French; Doug Saunders on the G8; Scott Taylor on Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum; Dan Gardner on the chemical peril.

Give Elizabeth May back her carbon tax!
What Stéphane Dion risks with his Green Shift, what he stands to gain, and what the Green Party’s already lost.

Lorne Gunter, writing in the Edmonton Journal, thinks Garth Turner’s remarks about  “losers” in Alberta and Quebec were “a typical (if more extreme) Liberal response to complaints that Dion’s Green Shift punishes the West”—and to just about any policy of the day, for that matter. The basic strategy, in Gunter’s view, has long been to “equate Liberal policy with the national interest so that anyone who disagrees can be portrayed as an enemy of national unity and not merely an opponent of Liberal ideas.” Dion deserves credit for taking his Green Shift caravan to the West, Gunter argues, but any unfriendly faces he meets will be the result of his own party’s previous approach to governance.

Besides “exacerbat[ing] the polarization between Western and Central Canada,” the Toronto Star‘s Chantal Hébert sees other risks for Dion: that the carbon tax, combined with record-high oil prices, “will turn many Canadians off the fight on climate change”; that Canadians might instead be united “against a common federal enemy”; and that it “will divide the pro-Kyoto camp between advocates of a carbon tax and supporters of a different approach.” In these and other ways, Hébert argues, Dion’s approach is a replay of his advocacy for the Clarity Act—it’s more likely to win him fans in Toronto than where the policy has the most effect, and it suffers from very bad timing.

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Megapundit: In search of "genuinely shared values"

By selley - Friday, July 4, 2008 at 1:06 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: Colby Cosh, Chantal Hébert and John Robson on Henry Morgentaler; John Ibbitson on Obama’s rightward drift.

All this over a little snowflake?
More mercifully intelligent discussion over Henry Morgentaler’s Order of Canada, and some of the other kind too.

The Montreal Gazette‘s Janet Bagnall believes Morgentaler deserves the award because “when a woman wants to terminate a pregnancy, she should have access to safe, legal abortion services,” and he was “instrumental” in making that a reality. (H.W. Fowler himself would struggle to find a superior example of begging the question, but never mind.) And she accuses pro-choicers who oppose Morgentaler’s investiture of hoping that “by not calling attention to [him] or abortion, a troublesome issue would stop causing division, maybe even that it would just go away.” It won’t, she assures us, and indeed, threats to abortion rights are all around. Well, all around the Maritimes, anyway: you can’t get an abortion on Prince Edward Island, apparently, and New Brunswick doesn’t pay for abortions performed in private clinics. Either of these, Bagnall says, citing the National Abortion Federation, “might lead to recriminalizing abortion.”

Canadians unsure if “a life of activism” should itself justify the award should consider Morgentaler’s “contribution to turning [the Charter of Rights] into a living document,” the Toronto Star‘s Chantal Hébert suggests, referring to 1988′s landmark R. v. Morgentaler decision. “It is hard to think of a Charter ruling that is as prominent in the annals of Canadian women’s rights,” she argues—but at the same time, neither that decision nor Morgentaler himself is responsible for Canada’s abortion regime. Indeed, Hébert rather cleverly suggests, if the OOC committee had really “wanted to celebrate our unrestricted abortion regimen,” it would have honoured “the anti-abortion lobby and its all-or-nothing approach to the issue” that shouted down the last attempt to recriminalize abortion, in 1993.

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Megapundit: Zimbabwean regime change for dummies

By selley - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 at 12:46 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: John Ibbitson on education in America; Christie Blatchford on Momin Khawaja.

It’s not easy being green
What carbon taxation means for oil companies and their CEOs, Gordon Campbell, and Stéphane Dion’s reputation, such as it is, in Quebec.

If Alberta’s oil executives really believe that the burden of fighting greenhouse gas emissions should be “shared across the country” and across other industries, The Globe and Mail‘s Jeffrey Simpson says they better think twice before “they shoot off their mouths” about the federal carbon tax, as has been the provincial government’s “knee jerk reaction” so far. The alternative, after all, is “a cap-and-trade system that targets the producers almost exclusively and mostly lays off any direct lifestyle change or contribution to greenhouse reductions by consumers.” Strangely absent from this analysis is anything to suggest the oil companies are, in fact, unhappy with the carbon tax as compared to a cap-and-trade scenario. In fact, Simpson claimed in a recent column that they like the idea. Colour us confused.

And from the other side of the aisle, here’s the Financial Post‘s Terence Corcoran excoriating those same executives, plus those in carbon-consuming industries like the airlines, for failing “to live up to their responsibilities to protect shareholders” and “feeding the [climate change] beast with Boy Scout responses—carbon offsets, green programs and public relations gambits—that actually do nothing more than reinforce the idea that their products and services are part of the climate problem.” What good has it done them? he asks. Not much. This week, he notes, James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said they “should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.”

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