White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Chopstick Invasion of Africa Continues Apace

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Even the celebrated 19th-century scramble for Africa seems to pale compared to the huge and growing Chinese presence, which is roiling the continent.

For a decade, China has been buying its way into Africa to secure the fuel and raw materials it believes it will need for its economic expansion.

These Chinese moves in Africa are breathtaking in their scope. Whereas the European grab for Africa and its treasures in the l9th century was haphazard, and fed by rivalry in Europe as much as interests in Africa, the Chinese neo-imperialism has a thoroughness and a planning that no European power — not even Britain — ever aspired to.

China is reported to be active in 48 countries out of the roughly 53 real state entities on the continent, or on its offshore islands. The Chinese formula is simple: Buy your way in with soft loans and generous arms deals but, above all, a preparedness to overlook the excesses of dictators. No wonder Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe lavishes praise on his new best friends.

The same is true in many other African countries. All that is needed for Beijing’s embrace is a supply of raw materials — and especially oil.

From Cape Town to Cairo, China is on the march. From South Africa it buys iron ore, among other minerals; from Zambia, copper; and from Zimbabwe chrome, gold and iron ore.

In Zambia, the Chinese have promised $3.2 billion to revive the copper industry — an interesting development because Western mining companies pulled out, unable to deal with the wholesale and destructive corruption.

At a meeting of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation at Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt earlier this month, the Chinese pledged $10 billion in aid to Africa. Quietly, they also forgave a tranche of maturing loans.

But government-to-government loans are the least of the Chinese investment in Africa. Most of the investments, such as that in Zambia, are made by Chinese corporations — all state-sanctioned and some state-owned. It is a concerted effort.

While oil producers like Angola, Chad, Libya, Nigeria and Sudan are prime targets of the Chinese investment, the rapacious Chinese economic imperialism also extends to lumber and agriculture.

The ruling elites of Africa are ecstatic. The Chinese presence is, for them, heaven-sent. Polling, albeit rudimentary, reveals about 80-percent approval of China’s African role by Africa’s elites.

At the street level, these findings are reversed. The Chinese are roundly resented. They have no experience in the world outside of China; no curiosity about these strange African lands and their people; and a morbid indifference to Africa’s long-term future. Most Chinese workers, as opposed to executives, brought to Africa are poorly educated and ill-equipped to live in different cultures.

A study by Loro Horta, a visiting fellow at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, found deep unhappiness in a study conducted in many African countries.

First and foremost, Horta found, China does not employ local labor, preferring to import Chinese workers and to house them in “Chinatowns.”

Second, the indifference of Chinese enterprises to environmental damage is of concern.

And third, China is accused of dumping inferior goods and medicines on the African markets. Africa’s fragile but important textile industries are being killed off by a flood of cheap Chinese manufactures.

More, Chinese merchants are flooding in and displacing local traders.

Horta quotes a school teacher in Mozambique, “They (the government) say China is a great power, just like America. But what kind of great power sends thousands of people to a poor country like ours to sell cakes on the street, and take the jobs of our own street-sellers, who are already so poor?”

Then there is the Chinese language push. The Chinese government has set up schools in many places to teach Chinese to reluctant people who would prefer to improve their English and French skills, legacies of the last scramble for Africa.

But while China buys off Africa’s elites, and provides them with weapons to suppress their own people, the rape of Africa will continue. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Shut Up and Think of Something

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In early 1943, Britain’s Bomber Command had been wrestling with the thorny problem of how to breach two critical dams in the Ruhr valley, cutting electricity production and incapacitating industrial production. Taking them out was a high priority of the war cabinet and Bomber Command.

 

But the problems were daunting. The dams, the Eder and the Mohne, were heavily protected with anti-aircraft batteries, and bombing at the time lacked precision. Bomber Command knew that it had to deliver its explosives to the lower part of the dam walls, if they were to be breached.

 

The solution came from a scientist and engineer, Barnes Wallis, who watched children skipping stones on water: Drop the bombs well away from the dam walls and have them bounce to the wall, sink and explode. Simple technology to the rescue.

 

The bombs would be circular and would be rotated so they hit the water, spinning backward but with overall forward motion. Like a stone skimmed along the surface of a pond they would travel to the wall, sink and detonate at the foot of the dam.

 

The scheme was fiendishly clever and extremely dangerous. It was conceived in January 1943 and executed on May 17, 1943.

 

To avoid detection, waves of bombers flew across Holland into Germany, maintaining an altitude of 100 feet and making their runs at 60 feet above the water. Many aircraft and their crews were lost, but the Eder and Mohne were breached, wrecking havoc in the Ruhr Valley.

 

There is a lesson here in how to deal with nuclear proliferation: Call off the politicians and the commentators and send in the scientists and engineers.

 

With Iran and North Korea, the West is not only suffering huge frustration but its impotence is revealed, tempting every other aspiring nuclear power to forge ahead. Neither of the options on the table is any good at all. Sanctions don’t work and reigniting war on the Korean Peninsula by bombing North Korean nuclear installations is unpalatable. As should be further destabilizing the Middle East by bombing Iran, thus consolidating hatred of the West and pushing oil above $200-a-barrel.

 

So forget about bombing and sanctions. Bombing, even if it were to dent the nuclear development in the countries concerned, is clumsy, wrought with unintended consequences and calculated to produce years, if not centuries, of resentment.

 

Yet morally, those who are in the nuclear club are obliged to keep their awful institution small. Preemptive action is reasonable but it needs to be stealthy and, ideally, anonymous. In this case, the moral weight is on the side of intervention.

 

There are many ways of enriching uranium, which involves concentrating the fissionable isotope, uranium 235, by stripping away the dominant isotope, uranium 238. The preferred way is using gas centrifuges, which is the way Iran has chosen, To understand the technology, think of a cream churn: Rather than being filled with milk these vessels are filled with a gas, uranium hexafluoride, and spun at 1,500 revolutions a second in batteries of hundreds of centrifuges.

 

These machines have two important vulnerabilities: They are so highly engineered that supposedly a fingerprint can throw them off and initiate failure, and they consume a lot of electricity.

 

Electric systems are vulnerable to cyber-attack, if they are computer- controlled (almost certainly the case in Iran and probably not in North Korea). Iran, which is apparently working toward a highly enriched uranium weapon, is vulnerable through its centrifuges–a cyber-attack on its electricity supply, causing wild functions in voltage, could be damaging, as could harmonic resonance and vibration, if these can be delivered secretly.

 

North Korea is more problematic because they already have a weapon and it is unclear whether they stuck with their original plan to use plutonium from a Soviet-era reactor or whether, as they said, they switched to uranium enrichment. These are the two paths to making a weapon: plutonium or highly enriched uranium.

 

With North Korea–so paranoid and insecure–their vulnerability is with their delivery rockets. The West’s imperative: find a way of messing with their guidance systems. If surreptitiously their rockets could be destroyed early in flight, or redirected back towards their launch pads, the Pyongyang military might rethink their whole program.

 

Bombs skittering across the surface of German dams in 1943 point to the potency of technological solutions–and a third way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Men Who Should Stand in the Dock with Mugabe

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It is easy to work up a head of hate against Robert Mugabe, the cruel president of Zimbabwe. He has destroyed a beautiful country and inflicted untold suffering on his people. He has so mismanaged the economy that the country’s inflation rate is the world’s highest–over 100,000 percent. He has expelled the productive people from the country and others have fled. He has given choice land and accommodations to his family of thugs.

 

More, he is a murderer. In the early part of his reign of terror, he killed tens of thousands of the Matabele people in southern Zimbabwe, around the city of Bulawayo.

 

It is not hard to vilify Mugabe, who may now be at the end of his bloody reign. But there are other guilty men who should be named. They are the de facto co-conspirators up and down the continent of Africa, who lead countries, enjoy influence and have, to a man (the arrival of a woman leader in Liberia is recent), remained silent as Mugabe has become more maniacal.

 

The guiltiest are those in the frontline states that surround land-locked Zimbabwe. They are the leaders of Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia. Each one of them has some of the blood Mugabe has shed on his hands. Because of the silence that they have assiduously maintained, their complicity has been absolute. All four leaders have been the enablers of Mugabe.

 

Each country has suffered from the implosion of Zimbabwe. Each country has felt the pain from the lack of trade; unsatisfied debt; and the surge of people fleeing from the privations of Zimbabwe–once one of the richest countries in Africa, and the breadbasket of the southern region.

 

Botswana, on Zimbabwe’s southwest border, is currently the showplace of Africa. It is a functioning democracy, with a healthy economy based on mining and tourism. But Botswana could have used its economic leverage, as the host of the principle rail line carrying exports out of Zimbabwe into South Africa, and from there to the world, to put pressure on Mugabe. But it did not.

 

To the east, Mozambique hosts many of Zimbabwe’s exports and imports through the port of Beira on the Indian Ocean. If there had been some tightening of this relationship, Mugabe would have listened. Instead, there was silence.

 

Then there is South Africa and President Thabo Mbeki. If there is a judgment day, Mbeki will have much to answer for his connivance in tolerating Mugabe. Mbeki’s guilt extends beyond the suffering of the people to his north to his own people. More than 2 million refugees have fled from Zimbabwe to South Africa, where they have been no more popular than illegal aliens anywhere. The really hapless live on such charity as they can find; while those who are more capable of organization, particularly deserters from the Zimbabwe armed forces, have formed sophisticated criminal gangs, specializing in bank and armored car robbery.

 

Finally, Zambia has shouldered the burden of watching over the giant Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River, which provides electricity to both Zambia and Zimbabwe. Zambia has kept essential goods flowing into Zimbabwe, against the international sanctions; and it has seen its own Victoria Falls tourism plummet because of conditions on the Zimbabwe side of the falls. Yet, Zambia’s leaders have said nothing.

 

If Mugabe is forced from power by the ongoing election, and if he leaves without trying to annul the results of the election, milk and honey will not flow again in the country between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers. Too much has been destroyed in 28 years of his rule. The infrastructure has been destroyed; soil erosion has carried away an incalculable amount of earth from the fragile plain that once produced corn for all of southern Africa; the professional class is scattered around the world, in what they refer to as the Zimbabwe Diaspora; and the people of Zimbabwe have lost confidence in the future. The most optimistic country in Africa has traded hope for fatalism.

 

Assuming Morgan Tsvangirai really has won the election in Zimbabwe, he will have to preside over a massive reconstruction, which will last decades simply to get the country back to where it was when Mugabe destroyed it through racism, megalomania, and economics so primitive that he thought he could print money and it would have value.

 

Tsvangirai will have to turn to the world for economic aid and technical assistance. But he will have to turn to Zimbabweans for goodwill and to resist corruption. And he will have to turn to another silent partner, China, for a better deal on the contracts Mugabe signed with Beijing.

 

Not since Idi Amin was feeding his opponents to the crocodiles has there been such a catastrophic head of state in Africa. And not since Amin’s days, have the leaders of Africa remained so quiet in the face of such palpable evil.