Democracy Has a Tentative Start in Kazakhstan
Fasten Your Seat Belt, Obama’s Driving Energy Policy
By Llewellyn King
If President Obama were driving an automobile the way he's driving energy policy, he'd be stopped and breathalyzed.
The president’s latest decision to defer a decision on TransCanada's Keystone XL oil pipeline is a sudden swerve to the left, after his sharp right turn in curbing the enthusiasm of the Environmental Protection Agency for limiting electric utility emissions.
Similarly Obama has supported some new drilling for oil, but not in all the areas the industry would like to drill. He's in the middle of the road on this one, and no one is happy.
On nuclear power, Obama signaled a right turn and veered left. He came to office endorsing the nuclear option, including loan guarantees. But in a tip of the hat to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, the president opposed the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, and undermined the case he was making for nuclear.
The mischief did not end there. Obama appointed Reid’s man, Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to end the Yucca project and entomb, in effect, the $9 billion to $15 billion (depending on who is counting) in its abandoned tunnels. But because the government has longstanding legal commitments to take the waste, and has taken the money charged utilities (about $900 million a year) and treated it like tax revenue, the whole project has torn up the commission and landed it in court.
Jaczko, a former Reid aide, has riled the other four commissioners and the NRC staff to such an extent that the four went to the then White House chief of staff to complain about the chairman. An act of frustration totally unprecedented and deeply damaging to the credibility of the commission. Nobody resigned and a damaged regulatory body is now passing on the safety of the nation’s nuclear fleet. To all appearances, the chairman’s remit was to tear things up in the commission; that he has done.
In particular, the issue of licensing of Yucca Mountain has caused ructions. Jaczko has stopped the licensing in what the quasi-judicial Atomic Safety and Licensing Board in the case considers an illegal act. According to Marvin Fertel, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry wants the licensing to proceed if only to establish that Yucca was the right way to go and that it can stand the scrutiny that the NRC would give it in licensing. Fertel says that it's a marker for the future.
Opponents of Yucca, presumably including Jaczko, fear that a license would pave the way for the Yucca project to come back to life under a different administration. Did Obama, a lawyer, not know that political brute force in a regulatory agency is bound to throw it into disarray, and to leave its decisions to be impugned in court later? So why did he do it?
When it comes to alternative energy, Obama positively drove on to the left shoulder. The administration has promised wonders from wind, solar and advanced coal combustion. It has thrown money at these as though it were rice at a wedding. The most conspicuous of this mind-over-matter exercise was, of course, Solyndra. But the spending has been lavish, indeed promiscuous, and the bankruptcies are filling up court dockets and right-wing Web sites.
Yet, the gods have smiled on the Obama administration. A boom in natural gas, brought on by new technologies, and enhanced oil production, fathered by the same technological improvements, have brought oil imports down below 50 percent for the first time in 20 years. Electricity supply is holding.
Environmental organizations, having been cold-shouldered on climate change by the world in a time of economic upset, picked on the Keystone pipeline with fury. Particularly apoplectic about it has been the Natural Resources Defense Council, which hopes that by canceling the project, Canada would stop developing its oil sands.
No, says Canada. I spoke with Canadian Natural Resource Minister Joe Oliver shortly before Obama's first decision to delay the pipeline. Oliver said that if the decision weren't favorable, Canada would build a pipeline across the Rockies to British Columbia and export to China.
The latest setback has infuriated Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government, which now says it will no longer rely almost entirely on the U.S. market for its hydrocarbon sales.
So Obama’s latest swerve has angered our best ally and good neighbor, denied American workers thousands of jobs and will oblige refineries on the Gulf Coast to buy oil from unfriendly places on the world market.
He has also given the Republicans a handsome gift in an election year. Masterful! – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
Winding Down the Nomination Show
Shakespeare Said It: ‘All That Glitters Is Not Gold’
“There's gold in them thar hills,” goes the old saying. There’s also human blood and nerve damage in that gold. And there's dying animals and destroyed rivers.
The greatest gold rush in all of human history is on. It's not a pretty, a romantic or a benign business. Indeed, it's a catastrophe for the environment and for human and animal health.
The high price of gold – it has tripled since 2000 – is such that every gold-bearing plot of land and river is being ravaged in more than 70 countries. As many as 50 million of the world’s poorest people now depend on this kind of plunder for a living.
It's the mining equivalent of subsistence farming, but it's lethal in the cruelest ways. Mercury is used to identify the gold (2 grams of mercury for 1 gram of gold) to which it adheres. With each use, some of the mercury is washed away and vapor escapes into the air. In another variant of this practice, cyanide is used to leach gold out of ore in vats or ponds. Either way, two deadly substances are released without control into the environment.
The problem isn't with the deep mines of Australia, Canada, South Africa and the United States – the hard-rock mines. It's with two other categories of mining that use mercury or cyanide: alluvial and artisan.
Alluvial is working a river with pans and sluice tables, which are primitive devices that trap gold granules in a blanket or grease. Artisan – a term used by the United Nations and environmental groups — uses bigger machines and expensive “shaker tables,” which process earth by the ton rather than the bucket. These can be found in surface gold deposits in rivers and farther away. This is a mechanized version of finding gold that is not deep in the ground.
While artisan mining may conjure images of dedicated craftsmen coaxing gold out of rock with love and skill, don’t be deceived. The activity is savage and brutal; the plundered rock and soil is left to wash away, causing death and destruction over many years.
The Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, and its cohorts at the U.N. Development Program and the World Bank, consider cyanide to be the lesser of the two threats. Maybe. But I've seen great piles of mining spoil which the cyanide has rendered lifeless. Nothing lives in it or grows on it.
Certainly, mercury is the largest of the real-and-present danger of subsistence mining. In Indonesia, men stand in rivers with their hands in buckets of water, muck and mercury, according to one Associated Press report. The BBC also has reported promiscuous use of mercury in Indonesia and Peru.
From China to Romania, in much of Latin America and throughout Africa, there is extensive mining on the surface — and that means mercury use. Miners in these countries are well aware of the dangers — miners often are. But the economics of their lives dictate that they mine until it kills them, or the food chain collapses and their families are poisoned, or the operation has to move to a pristine area to be repeated.
The economic life that sustains also destroys.
The United States and the European Union have restricted the export of mercury. But that's only increased the price, while there appears to be plenty in international trade – enough for the nomadic miners of those 70 or so countries.
I have to declare a personal interest in alluvial gold mining at its simplest: panning and sluicing. My father, whenever his many little business endeavors failed, headed for the beautiful Angwa River in Zimbabwe, both before and after World War II, to look for gold. He mined it with picks, shovels, pans and sluices. The activity was so minor it left no lasting mark. In those days gold fetched $35 an ounce, hardly enough to sustain him and his family, but better than nothing. Now it's about $1,600 an ounce.
My father loved that river. He often spoke about its beauty and tranquility. I've been reviewing photographs of it today: a ravaged moonscape of pits and waste piles. Crime is unchecked, murder is common.
Shakespeare said it: “All that glisters is not gold.” Indeed not. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
Nuclear Power’s Undeserved Bad Year
The great event of the nuclear calendar for 2011 was the earthquake and tsunami that hammered three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan.
If you are a nuclear power believer, these sturdy old machines proved their mettle. They withstood all that nature could throw at them; although terrible damage resulted from the loss of external power and the swamping of the emergency diesel generators. The result was core melting and trouble in the used fuel storage pools.
If you are doubtful about nuclear power, or you are simply a political opportunist, this event was the final nail in the coffin, the proof that the end had arrived. For you, it provided more evidence that nuclear power is inherently unsafe and that its use, as American scientist Alvin Weinberg once said, is a Faustian bargain. (It was a remark that Weinberg wished he had not made and which his staff and supporters tried to justify by explaining that in the German legend, Faust finally gets his soul back, having foolishly pledged it to the devil.)
Such nonsense aside, the extraordinary thing about Fukushima is that although almost 25,000 Japanese died as the result of the earthquake and tsunami, no one died directly from the nuclear accident or from the release of radioactivity. The buildings and containment structures survived as they were designed to 40 years ago. This, despite a wall of water 45 feet high with incalculable force.
Each year, thousands of people are killed in coal mine accidents around the world. In 2010, 2,433 people were killed in China’s mines, the world’s deadliest.
Yet it was nuclear that had the world holding its breath. As with all accidents or even incidents, nuclear is held to a standard of safety orders of magnitude stricter than is applied to any other industrial activity, including other big energy undertakings, like oil refining, chemical production and transportation, and aviation.
The suspicion that falls upon nuclear technology is not only unfair – it is uneven.
The peace has been kept for five decades by the U.S. nuclear navy. In home waters and ports, nuclear ships and submarines sail without criticism.
Even the two organizations which appear to make their livings from relentless attacks on nuclear, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, have not dared to attack the nuclear navy. They do not protest, say, the USS Enterprise, when the great aircraft carrier sails blithely into domestic ports with eight reactors at work.
No one raises issues of waste, terrorist attacks or the consequences of military action. Those who make a living out of opposing nuclear power do not have the temerity to go after nuclear propulsion in warships. The public would not tolerate the disarmament that that would entail.
So the opponents go after nuclear’s soft underbelly: civilian power. It is hard to imagine that it is more dangerous to operate a nuclear facility built to be safe on land than one built for war-fighting on the high seas and in ports and harbors.
There are times in history when triumph is recorded as failure. The British and the Prussians finished off Napoleon in the Belgian town of Waterloo. But in the English Language, “Waterloo” — a British victory – is a synonym for catastrophic defeat. Americans believe the Tet Offensive was the turning point in the Vietnam War, even though the combined forces of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army were roundly defeated by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces.
Fukushima, a once-in-history accident, was a victory of design and construction for its time. Even the radiation releases are now found to be lower than expected, even those in the exclusion zone are surprisingly low. Despite eager attempts to find a surge in new cancers around the plant, none has shown up.
The lessons are to incorporate more passive features, better power supply and to protect the emergency generators. Newer designs already incorporate some of these features — and all will going forward. The industry has reacted with unusual alacrity in the past to new lessons, something uncommon across the broad range of industrial endeavor from aircraft to automobiles. As with aviation, nuclear safety is always a work in progress, a striving.
To my mind, after 40 years of chronicling nuclear power, the industry makes a mistake in rushing to advertise the safety of nuclear power plants. That way the seeds of doubt are sown.
Aircraft makers learned that lesson back in the 1930s. They learned that the trick was to shut up and do better.
If nuclear plants are unsafe, they should be closed down. Now. Today.
If not, their virtues should be trumpeted. Now. Today. Where are the trumpets? – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
A Cotton Wool Christmas
It wasn’t the Grinch who stole Christmas; it was Northern Europe.
As a child born and raised in Central Africa, I was very aware of this confiscation. It outraged my mother, who was also born and raised in Africa.
We lived in British colony of Southern Rhodesia; and we were dominated by British immigrants who insisted on “dreaming of a white Christmas.” Well, tough luck.
As my mother liked to point out, not one more flake of snow fell in Central Africa than fell in the Holy Land, where Jesus Christ was born.
But we were — indigenous Africans and settlers alike — in the thrall of snow imperialism.
Being so close to the equator, snowfall was a meteorological impossibility. So those under the European cultural thumb decorated everything in sight with cotton wool. We could only dream of a cotton-wool Christmas.
Unlike my mother, my father felt no pressure from the European and North American inauthentic portrayal of Christmas as a white, cold affair. He didn't mind that the retailers edged their windows in cotton wool or that the Anglican Church went along with the Northern Hemisphere’s implication that Joseph and Mary struggled through the snow to get to the manger in Bethlehem.
The one thing my parents agreed upon was that Christmas began on December 24 and lasted for the traditional 12 days.
Not only was no snow substitute allowed in our house, but also no commercially produced ornaments; flowers and greenery were fine. As a result the whole family would go to a marshy area, known as a vlei, on Christmas Eve and cut great quantities of ferns which would be strung along the picture rails.
Decorations could be added to the green frieze, but only if we made them out of painted paper. Mostly, we stuck fresh flowers in it. It was a green Christmas.
When it came to food, my mother relented completely and we made English Christmas pudding (boiled for hours in muslin), fruit cake and pies made with mincemeat (an all-fruit mixture).
We weren't a drinking family, but a bottle of sweet sherry appeared at Christmas. My mother — who otherwise drank only tea and sometimes coffee (no water, milk, alcohol or sodas) — would take, ostentatiously, a very small glass of sherry. Having downed this half-ounce or so of fortified wine, she'd announce that she wasn't responsible for her actions, that she could feel her legs getting heavy and that she was drunk.
My brother and I watched Christmas after Christmas to see if there was any sign that there had been a physiological or psychological change in Mamma, but none was recorded.
We then ate a very English meal and listened to very English Christmas carols, like “The Holly and the Ivy” and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” My mother, who hadn’t signed her separate peace treaty with Germany, wasn’t too keen on “Silent Night.”
It wasn't until I had turned 20 and was working in London at United Press International that I saw real snow. Sorry, Mamma, it beats cotton wool and it makes for a splendid Christmas, even if things were a bit different in Royal David’s City two millennia ago.
Now for some wassail. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
Anatomy of the Underclass in Britain
Societies, like soup, need to be stirred from time to time. Britain has erupted into rioting and looting because of too much welfare, too little opportunity, too few jobs, too little education, but mostly because of a kind of social calcification.
While the old British class system, born of land aristocracy and later incorporating business-derived money, exerted downward pressure on all the levels, modern Britain, which has been forming since the end of World War II, is a more liberal place.
Aspiring Britons are no longer despised by other Britons by the way they speak, as George Bernard Shaw said. Upward mobility is easier than ever, though probably less so than in the United States where it is almost a constitutional right.
However, the new liberalism in business and the arts has been at odds with a different liberalism at play in government policies. It is the liberalism of providing for the needy. The result has been the growth of a new social order: the underclass.
The state, under both Labor and Conservative governments, has sought to save ever-larger numbers of people from all the agonies of life at the bottom. But instead of achieving this it has created a new citizen, tethered to the state in all aspects of life, including health and child care; job training instead of a job; unemployment income that can last a lifetime; plus money for having babies, and arguably money for not getting a job.
Where this liberalism has failed is the one thing that it is reasonable to ask of the state: to educate the children. Public education in Britain is as ramshackle and as fraught with problems as it is in America.
If you fall through the cracks in Britain kindly hands will comfort you, pay your rent, give you money, pretend to educate you and pretend to retrain you. They will also possibly trap you at the bottom, but they will certainly trap your children.
Life at the bottom is survivable in Britain — more so than most countries, including the United States. But it is corrosive and it has produced a culture of sloth, vulgarity, casual parenthood and celebrity adulation. The life is coarse and fueled by relentless television-viewing and boozing.
These are the people who have been rioting across Britain, producing television images not reminiscent of Britain but of the intifada on the West Bank: hooded youths stoning the police and torching cars and buildings.
What to do? Liberals will call for more of what has not worked: more social initiatives, more youth centers, more a job training and remedial education. Conservatives will call for harsher treatment: more better -armed police, longer prison sentences and talk about family and morals.
More difficult to address is why so many of what was the working class have fallen to the bottom, and why society continues to stratify.
First, there is the loss of the Empire. The British were always able to change their luck by going “out to the Empire.” At one time, young people could remake themselves in distant British lands, from Kenya to Burma or Canada to New Zealand. There were incentives not to stay put but to go forth. It was a great social safety valve.
The other loss was national service — even more important to the well-being of the body politic in Britain than in America. Lacking our social and geographic mobility, the draft provided skills and launched careers. Also for stratified Britain, it reminded people in one social strata about the existence of people in other strata.
A very distinguished musicologist, Bernard Jacobson, has always benefited as a writer by his superior touch-typing skills. He was taught these by the Royal Air Force, which quickly realized that this dreamer from Oxford should not be allowed near an aircraft.
John Adams, a management and public affairs savant in Washington, was serving with British forces in Korea when word came through the radio on a tank that Winston Churchill had won the election of 1951. Bravo! Adams cheered, but the rest of his squad booed. He looked at them with new eyes. They were all Brits fighting in a foreign land, but they were of different backgrounds.
Denis Nordin, popular here on the BBC radio program “My Word,” credited World War II for liberating young Jews — cockney accented Jews like himself — to have a career in the theater. Vidal Sassoon, the hairdresser and cosmetics mogul, said the same thing.
As the underclass of Britain, modern only in that they have cell phones, rampage, the question is what will stir the pot this time? What will bring the bottom to the top the next time? – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
Mysteries of Europe
Magazines, newspapers, even the television, are urging me to get to a
beach and to read mysteries. Actually, I don’t go to the beach much; and I
can’t say I read more when I’m there.
But I do read mysteries. This has been a year when I’ve had difficulty
putting them aside.
It’s the politics of times that has driven me to the mystery section of a
bookstore: a magic larder of easy escapism where the shelves are never
bare. One reaches a point where the White House’s assertion that green
energy jobs are going to refloat the economy and cut unemployment is
certifiably fiction. Or the Tea Party’s belief that if you cut economic
activity by slashing the budget, you will, yes, create jobs as far as the
eye can see. Or, the Ayn Rand-derived idea that greed is akin to
godliness; that markets alone will cure all the ills of the human
condition, from broken hearts to stillborn children.
But what to read? Robert Ludlum, Michael Connelly and James Patterson,
the most successful mystery writers of the moment, don’t really do it for
me — although I like the idea of “The Lincoln Lawyer,” a Connelly
creation.
My real escape this year has been to Europe – but Europe through the eyes
of three skilled, American mystery concocters. I want adventure, sheer
escape, but I also want a little more: As with journalism, I want to know
a little something that I didn’t know before.
First among equals is Alan Furst whose mysteries, set largely in eastern
Europe between 1933 and 1944 (“Spies of The Balkans,” “The Spies of
Warsaw” and “The Foreign Correspondent,” among others) are on a level with
John le Carre. He gives us history in a time of foreboding, with sinister
forces at play.
If your passion is for a gutsy, sexy private eye carrying on in her
father’s tradition as a Paris flic, and you also desire a little French
slang (Did you know that “mec” is slang for “guy”?) and a lot of French
bistro life, pick up any one of a slew of novels by Cara Black. She’s the
most prolific of my three authors — all of whom were teachers before they
succeeded as novelists.
My favorite at the moment is Donna Leon, whose protagonist, Commissaro
Guido Brunetti, is with the police in Venice. Like Black, she shares the
local architecture, food and a soupcon of ancient Roman literature, as
Brunetti humors his ghastly boss, spars with his well-born wife and,
through dogged police work, unearths evil and corruption. He doesn’t do
big violence or acts of derring-do. He does solid questioning, local
travel and is sustained by grappa and coffee.
Black gives us Aimee Leduc, the very sights and smells of Paris, and plots
that are almost believable. You know she’s going to do things against big
odds; and you so want her to come out unscathed, which she does.
Leon does for Venice what Black does for Paris: complete immersion. Of
course you learn things about Venetian cuisine and the climate. But you
also learn about the diversity of regional speech in Italy; and how the
characters from Venice, or Naples, will speak to each other in their
dialect and break into “Italian” with people from other regions, or on
formal occasions.
If you want your mind to travel far away from Barack Obama, Harry Reed,
John Boehner, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, et al., try reading a good
mystery: The characters are so much better formed and more believable. You
can even take the book to the beach, if you like that sort of thing.
Prime Ministers and Publishers: An Unholy Alliance
Lord Northcliffe
British newspaper publishers love prime ministers. Conversely, prime ministers love publishers. That is, if the publisher in question owns a national newspaper with a big circulation (often in the millions).
You cannot get into the club if you only own, say, the Lewisham Borough News. This is an exclusive club for those who wield real, palpable power: Witness the scandal of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in Britain today.
The club has been operating for more than 200 years. But it was at the turn of the 20th century, with ever-expanding voter rolls, that the intimacy became really intense. Victorian prime ministers had to put up with editors and owners of journals of opinion, like The Spectator or Punch, and sometimes The Times.
Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and his Liberal rival, William Gladstone, bargained with the media of their day. But these did not sway huge swathes of the electorate in the way that was to come. General education produced millions of avid readers and improved printing technology, notably the Linotype machine, made large mass- circulation newspapers possible.
Two brothers, Vere Harmsworth and his more colorful sibling, Alfred, were the first big-time press barons. In time, they were rewarded with titles: Alfred became Lord Northcliffe and Vere, Lord Rothermere.
It is unlikely that all of the prime ministers — and all of them had to deal with the press barons — really liked the intimacy. These men mostly had huge egos, daunting agendas, and their friendship always came with a price. So, of course, did the friendship of the politicians. They sought support in elections and freedom from scrutiny in governing.
Part of the price was usually the peerage, but then there were other considerations. Lord Beaverbrook, a Canadian, wanted prime ministers to endorse his campaign for “Empire Free Trade.” Others had other interests; but the tariffs on newsprint, the subsidy of cable traffic (which made getting news from overseas cheaper), and subsidized postal rates for newspapers and periodicals were common to all.
Northcliffe lectured World War I Prime Minister Lloyd George on how to run the war — and everything else. Beaverbrook treated Lloyd George’s successor, Bonar Law, a fellow Canadian, as his surrogate in government and campaigned for him relentlessly.
After that, Beaverbrook turned his demonic energies to supporting Winston Churchill — even though Churchill was at a low period during much of the1930s. Not only was the man who was to be Britain’s greatest prime minister out of power, he was also out of money.
The newspaper proprietors, in surprising unity, came to Churchill’s aid. Churchill boasted that he made 1 million pounds from his articles in one year and retired his debts. That was an astounding amount of money, and it reflected the fact that the newspaper bosses were overpaying him enormously, according the historian A.J.P. Taylor.
The leading paymasters were Beaverbrook, who owned the Daily Express and the Evening Standard, and Brendan Bracken, the Irishman who owned the Financial Times. In Churchill they saw potential, a lively contributor, and someone who gave the best dinner parties in England. Bracken even encouraged rumor that he was Churchill’s illegitimate son, although he knew this was nonsense.
The cultivating of prime ministers was an ecumenical affair. Cecil Harmsworth King, who ran Mirror Group Newspapers in the 1960s, lectured Prime Minister Harold Wilson on everything, including his own somewhat ridiculous idea that Britain needed a bipartisan national government — as in wartime — to get it out of his its financial difficulties. Rupert Murdoch went all out for Margaret Thatcher. But he turned against her successor, John Major, and supported the Labor Party and Tony Blair. Gordon Brown failed to get Murdoch’s nod, but current Prime Minister David Cameron did. The rest, as they say, is history.
When television came along, the proprietors had a new incentive to cultivate prime ministers: licenses. The big winner here was the least pushy of the publishers, Roy Thomson, another Canadian, who owned The Times. He got the license to run commercial television in Scotland and became Lord Thomson. Like Murdoch, Thomson did not crave the company of prime ministers. He was happy to let others carry his requirements to the men in power. Murdoch has used various intermediaries, including the American economist and free-market ideologue Irwin Stelzer.
Is it all over now? Will prime ministers shun the company of media barons?
Will the sun rise in the East tomorrow? — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
Mugabe, the Jeweled Raptor
Diamonds are a dictator's best friend. Just ask Robert Mugabe, president and dictator of Zimbabwe. When things seemed to be at their worst for Mugabe, diamonds were discovered at Marange, in eastern Zimbabwe. The old monster was saved because he got enough money to pay his thugs. One of the first lessons of dictatorship: Keep the thugs happy. Mugabe, who had destroyed his currency, starved his people and turned the breadbasket of Africa into yet another begging bowl, looked as though he was through, when in 2006 diamonds were found in an unexpected place. Thousands of itinerants flooded into Marange to lay claim to the riches, under the colonial-era mining laws. They had few tools, but they had hope. Sadly, they also had Mugabe. He sent in his military to evict the miners. They used helicopter gunships; at least 200 miners were slaughtered and the rest were driven off. The army took over the diamond fields and Mugabe was renewed in power. There has been enough money (about $1.7 billion a year), through official and unofficial diamond sales, not only to keep the thugs in power and their Mercedes-Benzes fueled. But there also may have been enough money quiet Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change and impotent prime minister. When I asked two very brave women, who have cycled in and out of jail because they tried to do something about the pitiful condition of women in Zimbabwe, whether they were hopeful about Tsvangirai and the opposition, one of them snorted: “Government in Zimbabwe is about who gets a Mercedes-Benz.” Peter Godwin, who was born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1957 and who has been a fearless chronicler of the decline and fall of his homeland in books and articles, has pointed out the evil of these “coalition” governments. It is, he has said, a spoils system where elections are negated when the contestants decide they both won; and in a united government, they can just divide up the spoils instead of fighting over them. In Zimbabwe the fear is that Tsvangirai, rather than resolving to get rid of the Mugabe government apparatus, if he ever becomes president, will keep it and perfect it. Mugagbe preserved the most repressive colonial laws to use at will himself, while blaming the white settlers for them. One of Mugabe's gambits, detailed by Godwin, is particularly cruel: How you appear to win elections fairly when you have coerced the electorate cruelly. Suspected opposition supporters are seized by the police and the military in the rural areas and then are taken to torture centers -- located in schools -- where they are beaten and maimed. Often, their feet and legs are pulped. The children of dictatorships learn their lessons early. The victims are sent back to their villages as a perpetual reminder of what happens if you vote against the “Big Man.” Even so, it should be noted the Mugabe lost the last election and simply stayed. His concession to the winner, Tsvangirai, was to stop bringing treason charges against him and to make him prime minister. Not so much power-sharing as loot-sharing. Watch for more of it as faux democracy continues in Africa, south of the Sahara and possibly north of it. Like Godwin, I was born in Rhodesia. Like many young people at the time, inside and outside of the country, we dreamed of a free, multi-ethnic Africa -- the whole continent a kind of Garden of Eden. Our template for that was Rhodesia of the time: peaceful, prosperous, idyllic, but in need of extending the franchise genuinely to all the people -- de facto ensuring black government. Instead, we got Ian Smith: a brave fool who tried to extend the status quo and brought on a race war which brought Mugabe to power. In his first days as president, while Mugabe was feted around the world and showered with honors, he sent his dreaded 5th Brigade into Matabeleland; the stronghold of his opponent Joshua Nkomo, later to be incorporated into the Mugabe system of government, but not before 20,000 of his Ndbele people had been killed by the Mugabe men. For 31 years, the government of Mugabe and his “security” men has reduced Zimbabwe to ruin, driving maybe as many as 3 million people into refugee status in neighboring countries, starving and beating the people of my childhood. The tears of Africa, like diamonds, seem to be forever. -- For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- …
- 29
- Next Page »