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I wanted to write something about this tale earlier, but have been rushed off my feet with work. Anyway, I think it notable that in an age marked by preening Hollywood celebs and British thespian luvvies spouting peacenik garbage about Iraq, it is heartening that in another aspect of life – sport – there are real examples of folk willing to take a stand where it matters.
Nasser Hussein, captain of the English cricket Test side, will not go down in history perhaps as a victorious cricket captain like Len Hutton or even David Gower. He will, however, go down as a man who stood on an issue of principle over Robert Mugabe’s vile regime in Zimbabe. Defeated, mabye, but not with dishonour.
Addendum: for our American friends who haven’t a clue about cricket, my apologies.
Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, has arrived in Paris to take part in a Franco-African summit despite European Union sanctions against him.
France obtained a waiver to allow Mugabe to enter Europe as sanctions were formally extended for a further year on Tuesday. Mugabe will be joinig around 45 other African heads of state, Jacques Chirac and Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, as part of French attempts to forge closer ties with Africa.
His arrival has prompted protests from Britain and other EU countries and human rights groups are planning a series of protests during Mr Mugabe’s visit.
Given the company Jacques Chirac likes to keep, I would be deeply concerned to see him getting along with Tony Blair and George Bush.
Or perhaps it’s not personal. It is worse. Philip Delves Broughton’s excellent analysis of France’s hang-ups and downs shows a burning desire to emulate de Gaulle and restore France’s glory. Chirac’s years of political hackery and alleged expense fiddling and kickbacks as Paris mayor will be forgotten as the echoes of General de Gaulle are ringing louder and louder:
The Franco-African summit that convenes in Paris tomorrow has long been one of his favourite events. In years of diminished French influence, this bi-annual get-together of African leaders was a chance for French presidents to stand tall. But this week’s summit will be especially satisfying.
It will mark the triumphant conclusion of phase one of the Chirac Doctrine, a foreign policy that has enraged America and large parts of Europe, but delighted the French and made M Chirac popular beyond his dreams.
M Chirac ignored Britain’s objection to the invitation to the Zimbabwean leader because he believed far more was at stake than antagonising the Foreign Office or pleasing the Zimbabwean opposition. He sees France extending its reach into Southern Africa, once a British preserve. France believes it can bring peace to Congo, for which it needs Zimbabwean help, and expand its political and economic interests in the continent.
Despite the continuing unrest in the Ivory Coast, worsened by a recent French-brokered peace deal, M Chirac is confident France can display its full diplomatic plumage in Africa and demonstrate to Washington that it has a sphere of influence too.
He may even not be worried about missing a post-war carve-up of influence in Iraq. It just could be that France, he believes, is now the leader of the anti-American world and with that come dividends and responsibilities appropriate to the grand ministries of Paris and far exceeding those in one corner of the Middle East.
I hope the United States does not forget French crude attempts at the realpolitik game. I hope that the important players in the international arena will not let France usurp more influence that it deserves and make it face the consequences of its actions. Or is it too much to hope for?
The Cricket World Cup started today with the opening game, in which the West Indies narrowly defeated South Africa. However, as the Guardian reports, the big story for many concerns whether or not England will play their opening fixture in Harare next Thursday.
[England] Captain Nasser Hussain was said to be opposed to playing the game for fear of violent protests, according to a source accompanying the team. Vice-captain Alec Stewart is understood to be leading a minority ‘pragmatist’ faction, a group of players keen to go ahead.
The threats, issued by a previously unknown group called the ‘Sons and Daughters of Zimbabwe’ have pledged violence against the players and their families if they fulfil their fixture against the Zimbabwean national side.
Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe and of the nation’s cricketing body, is anxious to see the game played. A successful World Cup will be widely seen as an endorsement of his regime. Tomorrow Zimbabwe are due to play Namibia
This is all extremely depressing. These “Sons and Daughters of Zimbabwe”, by threatening violence to the England players (rather than merely disruption to the event) may perhaps have achieved their own purposes, but so far as British public opinion is concerned, they have done themselves no favours. At one stroke they may have turned the Zimbabwe issue, in British eyes, from “vicious dictator murders millions of his own people” to “those Africans, they’re all as bad as each other”.
Meanwhile, although the England players who don’t want to go may be having their doubts because of the support that they fear they may be giving to the detestable Mugabe, what they are actually saying is that his regime is insufficiently repressive. Their objection, or at any rate their excuse for objecting, is that their own safety can’t be guaranteed, because protestors may turn out to be insufficiently under the control of the Zimbabwean ‘authorities’, i.e. roaming gangs of murderous thugs.
Anything that keeps Zimbabwe on the front pages is worth something. But this muddle of messages, together with the preoccupation of the rest of the world with Iraq, could hardly have turned out better for Mugabe. His days in power will surely soon end, but how many other Zimbabweans will have to die before that end comes?
I can’t help believing that it was the British decision to abolish and thereafter actively campaign against the slave trade that first introduced moral concepts into foreign policy.
Whether or not that is the case, it is the popular expectation that all foreign policy will be at least partly based on moral imperatives as opposed to the uncomfortably amoral calculations of national interest.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Europe where the various heads of state are forever delivering nauseatingly self-righteous lectures to the rest of the world from their bully pulpit in Brussels. Aside from switching off whenever I am so able I have also taken refuge in the suspicion that M’lady doth protesteth too loudly, a view which has been in some small sense vindicated by news of the French extending a hand of welcome to Robert Mugabe.
“France has confirmed that it is inviting Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe to take part in a summit of African Heads of State next month.
Mr Mugabe is currently banned from entering the European Union because of doubts about the legitimacy of his re-election last year.”
I suppose it would be bad form to have ‘doubts’ about his democidal marxist policies. And that is rather the point, for whilst I do not expect the enarques in Paris to rain down ‘Les JDAM’s du Francais’ on the former Rhodesia, it is nonetheless a reasonable expectation that the foreign policy decisions they make should reflect the ‘humanitarian’ principles they claim to live by.
Instead the French continue to do what the French have always done and pursue their own national interests in Africa under a cloak of Sartrean altruism:
“But French President Jacques Chirac was convinced that the Zimbabwean leader’s presence at the summit would help promote justice, human rights and democracy in his country, foreign ministry spokesman Francois Rivasseau told journalists.”
When the language of ‘human rights’ can be employed with such spectacular mendacity in an attempt to mask a nefariously machiavellian agenda then we know that it is a coin which has become irredeemably debased.
But this move by the French tells us that the mask is beginning to slip and, whilst I daresay the language of Brussels (which is not synoymous with France but heavily influenced by it) will not change in the short term or even the medium term, the polite fictions which underpin that language are close to being unsustainable.
The ugly, old ogre of national interest is being prodded awake from its slumber and invoked to stalk the world again. To accompany it on its travels we will need not just a whole slew of new ideas but a whole new language in which to express them.
Although attention is focused on the nightmarish regime in Iraq, please spare an angry thought for the vile rulers of Zimbabwe, who are still starving and murdering sections of the population felt to be ‘disloyal’ to Robert Mugabe.
George Bush, supported by Tony Blair, will clear up Daddy’s (and Donald’s) mess in Iraq by spending several billion dollars and sending a few hundred thousand troops to see the end of Saddam Hussain… Blair could do something about tyranny in Zimbabwe for a fraction of that price if he had the moral fortitude. For all his many and varied sins, Saddam is not (currently) killing and dispossessing British subjects, which cannot be said for Robert Mugabe.
Will the British state please stop spending my appropriated tax money on funding the comforts of former Taliban asylum seekers and, given that I suppose it is too much to expect my money back, start sending crates of rifles and ammunition to opposition groups in Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe is in the news, and so it should be. Several million Zimbabweans are probably going to die of starvation in the next few months. What’s more, this is, despite what President Robert Mugabe will tell you, a classic Communist-type famine, a state mass murdering its people, in this case all the people who dared to vote against Robert Mugabe in his recent election.
Now is the time for something to be done about this, not in a few months time, and to the credit of all sorts of people, not including me until now, this seems to be widely understood. Various efforts are being made to kick up a fuss about this horror. Last night, for example, British TV news had lots of Zimbabwe stuff, despite the imminent prospect of a war that our Prime Minister is having difficulty convincing anyone in Britain about who isn’t, like me, already convinced.
Peter Oborne, for example, did a Channel 4 documentary which went out last Sunday night, of him travelling around Zimbabwe, surreptitiously photographing Zimbabweans describing what remains of their abject daily diet, or warehouses where maize imported in order to feed the starving but immediately stolen by the government is being allowed to rot, or else is being corruptly sold in tiny amounts at extortionate prices by organisations headed by Zimbabwean Cabinet Ministers. Oborne has also written a piece for the Spectator about his journey.
What is to be done? If the South African government greeted Zimbabwean refugees with food camps instead of barbed wire rolls that would help, ditto if they pressurised Zimbabwe by threatening to cut off its supply routes. If Britain pressured all concerned a bit more publicly, that would help. If the Belgium government were to be swallowed up by a giant fireball, excellent. That would mean “Europe” being a lot less despicable about all this. If President George Bush could make the time to refer to this thing more loudly in among his Iraq preparations than he has so far, that would also save some lives.
And although it might not be practical in the immediate future, some of us could at least put the wind up your Average Sub-Saharan African Despot and his Many Apologists Worldwide by saying that all this black-on-black murdering does rather strengthen the case for the reconquest of Sub-Saharan Africa by, you know, white people. (Please understand that I’m trying to insert some more heat into this row, rather than just to shine a little more light on it.)
There’s half a book I could write about all this, but let me end with a word about cricket. The cricket point is that there is a cricket tournament coming up, a few of the matches of which are scheduled to be played in Zimbabwe. This is the Cricket World Cup next month. As atrocities go, the fact that these cricketers are probably going to play their games in Zimbabwe and be photographed not being very bothered about the fact that the government there is busy murdering about a quarter of its citizens doesn’t rank very high on the scale of human badness. It’s not their fault. And frankly, I don’t care one way or the other whether this tournament is deranged to the point of serious derangement by protests about the mass murdering in Zimbabwe or not. If I had a button to push that would do it, I’d probably dig up every tournament pitch now, and fly a plane over the mess with the slogan (thank you Peter Tatchell) “Berlin 1936 Zimbabwe 2003” attached to it. Or something. But the bigger point is, this cricket tournament has turned a very boring little report about Africans murdering one another – and what’s newsworthy about that? – into an already noisily singing and dancing Major Western News Story. The opening ceremony for this World Cup will be on February 8th, and the timing is good.
So, blogospherists, if you are looking for a hook, use cricket to spice up this story, which I very much hope that you will tell to each other and to anyone else you can interest. Say how much you loath and despise cricket, and how completely you would normally be ignoring it, but … Or like me, say how much you love cricket, except that in this case … Or say that cricket isn’t the point; mass murder on the other hand … (That’s what Oborne did at the start of his Spectator story.)
One way or another, please spread this news. It already is news. Please help to make it bigger news, before too many more people die.
I have visited Kenya several times over the last thirty years and have always regarded it as one of the few outposts of relative sanity in that part of the world. Over the last fifteen years however it has grieved me to see one of the brighter sparks on the continent gradually sink into the kleptocratic morass that generally characterises African nation states.
So I really do hope that the fall of President Daniel arap Moi and his corruption riddled Kanu party spells a new beginning for Kenya. I am far too cynical to automatically assume that Mwai Kibaki and his victorious National Rainbow Coalition will not succumb to the ‘African Disease’ but I suppose the mere fact that the passing of the old political order was so painless is grounds for a little cautious optimism.
I clearly recall that first time I attended a meeting of the Libertarian Alliance here in London. The guest speaker, a very earnest but rather monochromatic fellow (whose name, I must confess, I cannot now recall) was issuing forth on the subject of the purpose of the Libertarian Alliance and what its goals should be.
His conclusion was that those goals should, at the very least, include ‘the spreading of good ideas’. That sounded like a worthwhile project and, indeed, it is one in which I am engaged to this day.
But, how to do it? That’s the real trick. Marketing is dead simple when you’re peddling, say, luxury motor cars. But if you’re peddling the kind of ideas that make luxury motor cars both possible and widely available then you tend to find that you’re butting your head against a brick wall of indifference.
Perhaps we should take a leaf out of the book of those people who spread bad ideas because they seem to be enjoying no end of success, especially in Southern Africa:
“South Africa’s ruling African National Congress yesterday effectively gave its backing to President Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe, cheering a speech by a Zanu-PF loyalist attacking “western imperialists”.
Now one would think that the experience of a lunatic marxist regime transforming a neighbouring country from a relatively prosperous bread-basket into a ‘Year Zero’-type hellhole would provide a pretty stark lesson in ‘How Not To Do Things’. But, such is the seductive power of those bad ideas, that they can trump even the most graphic and immediate realities.
And so British libertarians are left wrestling with the puzzle of how we capture that magic driver for impelling bad ideas and turn it to good use.
It is a thorny and will-sapping problem but one of far less magnitude than the one facing those South Africans of European or Asian descent. As far as they are concerned, all I can say is that I sincerely hope that they have an exit strategy because the day that they’re going to sorely need one appears to be getting closer.
Someone tried to shoot down an airliner full of Jews, not in Israel but in Africa…
Jew on holiday. Legitimate target
anywhere in the world, apparently.
But Jews = Israel and Israel = bad, in fact very bad as it is not just ‘Jewish’ but also ‘White’. Therefore the people who did this must be misguided ‘Islamic activists’. Terrible but ‘understandable’ to idiotarians and other sundry folk who take Noam Chomsky seriously. You know, the sort of people who say “Who are we do judge the value of other cultures?” and “Of course I deplore terrorism, but…”
Kikambala in Kenya is ripped apart by the same people who tried to shoot down the passenger jet and slaughtered Kenyans are photographed in the ruins of the resort which used to bring much needed foreign money into Kenya’s economy…
Vanquished capitalist tools perhaps? CIA agents maybe?
Black people in the Third World lie dead, therefore people who did this must be capitalists, um, imperialists, errr, Americans, no, Mac Donalds, um, er, ah…
I see pictures like those and I am soooooo sick of the people who say “It is all about Israel!” or “It is all about oil!” or “It is all about US policy!“… those dead Kenyans are not in Israel, I rather doubt they owned shares in any oil companies and they did not get to vote for who became the President of the United States.
What “it is all about” is that there are people using violence who advocate coercive pan-Islamic collectivism and who wish to force submission on everyone else. Once this is understood, all that needs to follow is to determine the best way to exterminate them as expeditiously as possible.
Graphic from ‘Blue Skies of Freedom’ blog (click)
People across Europe are digging bomb shelters in their back gardens and staring skyward fearfully for the first signs of the mighty Namibian airforce.
No, not really… Afro-socialist bigot President Sam Nujoma of Namibia has added all the nations imposing the flimsy and ineffective sanctions against his good buddy Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe to the list of his usual targets for incoherent invective (i.e. homosexuals, capitalists, white people).
“I just want to make it categorically clear that if the EU does not lift the sanctions against Zimbabwe, the whole African Union will also impose economic sanctions against Europe. Either there is peace or war and we don’t want a war. Change your attitudes. If you don’t change, we are going to get you.”
I am quaking in my boots. 
The British news media are harumphing about Tony Blair being publicly upbraided by a pair of African autocrats, overshadowing the British Prime Minister’s ‘passionate’ calls for African development and increased ‘aid’ to Africa by the West.
But therein lies part of the problem. The media seems shocked that a bunch of brutal tyrants are actually sounding like, well, tyrants… ungrateful tyrants at that.
Yet the very existence of thugs like Mugabe is underwritten by Britain (to media applause) to the tune of a billion pounds a year, stolen from UK taxpayers by the British state and given to African countries, or more accurately the ruling elites of African countries. This sort of behaviour is tantamount to Britain circa 1938 offering to give British tax money to common Germans (to be disbursed by the Nazi state or pro-Nazi NGOs) and thereby relieving the German National Socialist Workers Party’s leaders of the political consequences of their own economic policies, in effect subsidising the induced cost of fascist economics.
Tony Blair and the host of other national and NGO Tranzi cheerleaders are nothing less than the logistic support system for tyranny in the ‘Third World’.
So when you read of calls for an ‘answer’ to Mugabe, please realise that the even the most sound replies to the rhetoric on offer still skirts around the real truth. The only reply to the likes of Robert Mugabe is to meet violence with violence. If just 10 percent of that aid budget was spent sending arms to Robert Mugabe’s political enemies, including the white farmers of Zimbabwe, Mugabe and his supporters would be doing the only thing they can do by way of suitable recompense to the soil of Zimbabwe’s ruined farmlands.
Of course for this to happen would require an understanding by Blair et al of their indictable role in Africa’s ruin. The effects of the legacy of British and European colonialism pales in comparison to the here-and-now effects of Western statist support for homegrown African statism.
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