The events in that article are truly appalling and sickening. My brother in Zimbabwe recently told me that he’d had unconfirmed reports that white farmers had also been forced to drink a poisonous substance but I’ve seen nothing about it. Why don’t the local press print articles like the one in this blog?

I’d love to see Mugabe have a painful lingering death or get shot but he’s almost a puppet now. The Joint Operational Command are now running the country, so those leaders would take over and also need to be taken out. The only internal options I now see are if economic conditions for the lower ranks of the army and police get so bad that they rebel with a counter coup. South Africa has the power to remove them but won’t.

The one thing all South Africans are looking forward to is the 2010 soccer world cup. If they lost that due to external pressure it would be a major embarrassment and might just prompt them to do something. As it is, most ex-Rhodesians/Zimbabweans are totally despondent and feel there is no justice in the world, not only for them but especially for those like Mrs Chigoro.

Certainly the old Rhodesian SAS could have done the job but they’re all old men now and there is no safe base to operate from in Africa.

You’ve got some good comments in that blog Jim. Thanks for letting me know

WASHINGTON, July 7, 2008 – Defense personnel have completed the transfer of 550 metric tons of Iraqi uranium ore to Canada, Defense officials said here today.

The Iraqi government asked the United States to help transfer the yellowcake — as the ore is known — from Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center near Baghdad to its buyer in Canada, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said today.

Yellowcake is a uranium ore that can be processed to become nuclear fuel. State and Energy Department personnel also participated in the transfer.

“This was material that was discovered when we initially went in to Tuwaitha,” Whitman said. “It was under the control of the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency since that time.”

Whitman stressed that yellowcake is not of direct use in a nuclear weapon. “It is a commodity that is traded routinely in the global nuclear energy sector,” he said. “It can be used as a feed material for nuclear weapons if a country has access to the necessary fuel technology.”

Appeal to reason: Don’t fall for British lies—again—on Zimbabwe

When George Bush and Dick Cheney deliberately lied to justify the biggest diplomatic/military blunder in our time—the Iraq war—remember who it was who fed them the key “intelligence” used to make the case: the British.

It was Tony Blair and the British who “sexed up” the Iraq dossier, which enabled Bush to claim that 1) Saddam was buying yellowcake uranium from Niger, and 2) Saddam’s weapons-of-mass-destruction could be deployed to attack Britain within 45 minutes.

The British weapons expert who exposed the British lies, David Kelly, later turned up dead, ostensibly by suicide.

Five years later, over one million Iraqis have been killed, five million displaced, and the claims of the real weapons inspectors, that Saddam had no WMDs, have been confirmed.

Now, the British are at it again, this time targeting Zimbabwe with a propaganda offensive calculated to cast Robert Mugabe as the next Saddam Hussein, and hence justify outside interference into the nation.

What is the background to the crisis in Zimbabwe?

Zimbabwe was formerly Rhodesia, the jewel in the Crown of the British Empire in Africa, claimed, and named, in 1895 by Cecil Rhodes, the bankroller of the British Roundtable, who boasted of his intent in his writing titled Confession of Faith:

“I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings; what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence; look again at the extra employment a new country added to our dominions gives. I contend that every acre added to our territory means in the future birth to some more of the English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence… Africa is still lying ready for us, it is our duty to take it. It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes: that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race, more of the best, the most human, most honourable race the world possesses.” [Emphasis added.]

Eighty-five years later, when those “despicable specimens of human beings” won independence for Zimbabwe, two percent of Zimbabwe’s population, the white descendents of “the finest race in the world”, controlled over 70 percent of the land. The British pledged to assist in solving the obvious problem of land redistribution at the Lancaster House negotiations that established independence. For 18 years, effectively nothing happened, and then in 1997 Tony Blair reneged on the pledge. It was when Mugabe was forced to take matters into his own hands, that Tony Blair’s government unleashed the diplomatic assault on Zimbabwe, including crushing economic sanctions, that continue to this day.

There are now signs that it is a classic British dirty tricks operations behind the election violence being used to demand Mugabe’s overthrow: African military sources told the Executive Intelligence Review news service that the brutality and professional, execution-style nature of the killings in the lead-up to the June 27 presidential run-off had all the hallmarks of a British-style counterinsurgency “third force”, like the Rhodesian special forces Selous Scouts (named after Cecil Rhodes’ friend Frederick Courteney Selous) used against the freedom fighters in the 1970s, which were a more advanced form of what the British had deployed against Kenya and Malaya (Malaysia) in those countries’ respective struggles for independence from the British Empire.

At the June 23 United Nations Security Council meeting, Britain conveniently blamed Mugabe for the violence which was making a fair election impossible, to demand the UNSC name MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai President.

Zimbabwean Ambassador Boniface Chidyausiku countered that “there have been numerous cases of MDC-T supporters going around dressed in Zanu-PF regalia and beating up people. This is an outdated strategy used by the Selous Scouts during the liberation struggle, and with the predominance of Selous Scouts in the MDC-T, it is obvious what is going on.”

Morgan Tsvangirai was supported in the 2005 election by Ian Smith, Rhodesia’s last leader under whom the Selous Scouts carried out their murderous campaign; one of the veterans of Smith’s Rhodesian Front, Roy Bennett, is the MDC’s chief fundraiser, criss-crossing British Commonwealth countries rattling the tin for the overthrow of Mugabe.

This is the background that is well known by Zimbabwe’s neighbours, like South Africa—hence their resistance to Britain’s agenda.

It is clear that the British are using the crisis they set up in Zimbabwe, to overturn the key principle of international law which established the sovereignty of nation states, the Treaty of Westphalia, in their drive to shore up their globalisation empire, in the face of a global economic breakdown crisis which is forcing national governments to assert their national interests, in areas like food and fuel, against the demands of the British for more free trade.

The architect of Zimbabwe’s chaos, Tony Blair, confessed to this objective in a March 5, 2004 speech:

“So for me, before Sep. 11 [emphasis added], I was already reaching for a different philosophy in international relations from a traditional one that has held sway since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648; namely that a country’s internal affairs are for it, and you don’t interfere unless it threatens you, or breaches a treaty, or triggers an obligation of alliance. I did not consider Iraq fitted into this philosophy…”

I agree with this, there is no guarantee that a replacement will be better, Mugabe has descended to such a level of depravity it would be difficult to envisage worse, but that is no guarantee that worse does not exist.

The South African laws appear to be part of a policy that has been mentioned of “Africanization.” As such it is highly likely that it will be the precursor of wide spread nationalization of private assets.

I visited South Africa not too long ago and talked to an old ex-Rhodesian man I met on the plane who was convinced South Africa would go the way of Zimbabwe. Reading Jim’s comment # 29 reminded me of that guy.

In regards to private assassination attempts, I think they are a “do at your own risk” thing. I don’t see how you can expect any government to sanction this from private parties. However in the case of Zimbabwe, I reckon you’d probably avoid prosecution from outside countries. As long as you could get out of Zimbabwe first.

National borders are more often used to bolster government power than limit it. Indeed, as Samuel Johnson famously said, patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Particularly when the scoundrel purports to speak on behalf of the nation.

I like Orwell’s quote, “Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.”

Most national boundaries in the world started as lines on a map drawn in the cities of Europe when colonisation was all the rage. As a result they bear little relationship to ethnic, cultural or economic considerations. They have certain utility in terms of international relations, but should not be taken too seriously.

To rely on a national boundary to deny offering assistance to your fellow man is obscene. If there is a bushfire disaster in South Australia with many people hurt and homeless, we might expect our governments to provide some assistance (in conjunction with private charity). But it would be offensive to decline such assistance purely because South Australia was legally another country rather than just another State. National boundaries ought to be much lower on the totem pole than that.

Some will say it is a misuse of taxes to spend it on people in another country. I say if it’s OK to spend it on people in our own country (and generally I’m not in favour of that very much), why is the national boundary given such significance? There are often good reasons not to spend money on people in other parts of the world (that it often doesn’t help them being a good one), but the fact that they are within different national boundaries is not one of them.

I can’t think of any way in which national borders constrain government action, except for avoiding military conflict. They do not define private property and are not analogous to other rights except in a communal sense. I can think of many instances in which inflated threats to national boundaries have been used by governments to increase their power and reduce individual rights.