A recently released report by Human Rights Watch about the situation in Zimbabwe before the second round of a presidential election makes for grim reading. The eyewitness reports of brutal beatings, torture and mutilations of suspected supporters of the oppositional Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) show in sickening detail how president Robert Mugabe is unleashing a campaign of terror on his own people to scare them into re-electing him, especially in rural areas that used to be bastions of support for the ruling ZANU-PF party.

28 years after Zimbabwe gained independence from Britain under black majority rule, Mugabe has squandered the respect and admiration that he had earned as a fighter against Apartheid during the 1960s and 70s. Now he is only fighting to preserve power and privileges for himself and his cronies in the army and police. His wife is known as “Gucci Grace” or the “First Shopper”. Many farms taken from commercial farmers were distributed to senior members of ZANU-PF.

It all could have been so different. At Independence, Zimbabwe had one of the best infrastructures in the region and had a well-developed agricultural and mining industry. There was racial reconciliation and many whites stayed on after Apartheid ended. Now one quarter of the population has fled abroad (mostly to South Africa), inflation is sky-high and people are starving.

Already a few years after Independence a brutal counter-insurrection campaign in the southern region of Matabeleland known as Gukurahundi was a first ominous sign how unscrupulous Mugabe could act if he saw a challenge to his power. At least ten thousand people were killed when former members of the ZIPRA guerilla force of rival nationalist party ZAPU and other members of the southern Ndebele tribe were hunted down by the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade of the Zimbabwe Army, given carte blanche to violate human rights on a massive scale with impunity. The campaign ended in 1987, when ZAPU leader Joshua Nkomo agreed to his party effectively being swallowed up by ZANU.

What I find most disheartening about the situation in Southern Africa is the hands-off attitude of fellow African leaders such as South African president Thabo Mbeki. When black democracy activists were persecuted by the white Apartheid regime in South Africa, all of Africa provided support to their brothers and sisters in need, often at great cost to themselves (such as in Angola and Mozambique, where South Africa supported rebel groups to destabilize these countries). Now that Africans are being tortured, beaten and killed by fellow Africans, many of these African leaders are turning a blind eye.

The victims of torture and violence at the hand of Mugabe’s gangs of thugs deserve solidarity every bit as much as the victims of the South African police and army did before Liberation. By betraying powerless Zimbabwean victims, the current leadership in South Africa and other nations in the region is betraying the ideals of the generations who fought and eventually brought down Apartheid.

What you can do: Find the address of the embassy of the Republic of South Africa in your country and write a letter or a fax to the Ambassador to urge President Thabo Mbeki to use his influence with the government of Zimbabwe to get them to halt the violence now!

Further reading:

• “Bullets for Each of You”
  State-Sponsored Violence since Zimbabwe’s March 29 Elections (HRW)
• Confessions of a Zimbabwe torturer (BBC)
• Mandela Envy (Slate)

For months there has been talk about an Obama-Clinton or Clinton-Obama “dream ticket” (in the words of its proponents), that supposedly would draw in strong support from all the electoral groups that supported either Democratic candidate. It now looks unlikely to happen, for a number of good reasons.

As former President Jimmy Carter points out, it would be more likely to combine the perceived weaknesses of both candidates than their strengths:

“That would just accumulate the negative aspects of both candidates,” Carter told the Guardian, saying that both candidates’ vulnerabilities could overshadow that the ticket if the two team up together.

“If you take that 50 percent who just don’t want to vote for Clinton and add it to whatever element there might be who don’t think Obama is white enough or old enough or experienced enough or because he’s got a middle name that sounds Arab, you could have the worst of both worlds,” he said.

In late 2007 Hillary Clinton was widely seen as by far the most likely choice of the Democrats for the presidential election. Then came the primaries and she stumbled. Clinton would have us believe that she was ready for the highest office in the US “from day one”, but she wasn’t ready when Super Tuesday didn’t deliver a knockout blow to Obama as she had expected.

Despite being accused of lacking in political experience, Obama had managed to recruit and build an effective organisation that delivered a string of 11 victories in a row and he out-fundraised Clinton.

After she hit her drought, Clinton kept reinventing herself until she finally managed to find an image that resonated with enough voters. Meanwhile Obama remained himself.

What’s more, he showed class and character thoughout those months, from when he addressed racial issues after the Pastor Jeremiah Wright controversy to partially accomodating Clinton in her unreasonable demands about the disputed primaries in Florida and Michigan. I shook my head in disbelief when Clinton claimed all the Michigan votes for herself, even though voters in Michigan had not even been able to vote for Obama, as he had not been on the ballot, following rules agreed upon by all candidates beforehand.

She was fighting to win at all costs, prepared to take no prisoners. Even when Obama had reached the majority of pledged delegates and super delegates, she did not have the grace to concede his victory and join hands for November. She had to be pushed by senior party leaders.

If there is one thing Barack Obama is good at, it is listening to advice from experienced people. I trust he will listen to those who understand it’s time to turn a new page for a Democratic party no longer under the spell of the Clintons and their political and personal baggage.

Links:

• Carter says unity ticket would be ‘worst mistake’
• Even In Defeat, It’s All About Her

When Japanese suicide pilots (known as kamikaze in Western countries or tokkōtai in Japanese) bid farewell to their comrades before their final missions, they would say: “See you at Yasukuni!”

A bronze statue of a tokkōtai pilot at Yasukuni commemorates the numerous young men who died this way during the final months of the already lost war.

For close to 140 years, Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo has been a place where the souls of dead soldiers were venerated. Neither a secular war memorial like numerous tombs of the unknown soldier or national cemeteries, nor a Shinto shrine like any other, it is a place of hero worship and historical white-wash. A museum on the shrine grounds promotes a revisionist version of history, claiming that Japan was not an aggressor but was fighting in self-defence and to liberate Asia from Western colonialism. In the parallel universe of that museum, the rape of Nanjing in China that cost 100,000-300,000 lives never happened. The more than 2.4 million souls whose names on the shrine’s books also include the names of 14 class A war criminals sentenced to death in the Tokyo trials after World War 2. These criminals were originally excluded, but then enshrined decades later. It was at that point that Emperor Hirohito (referred to as “the late Emperor Showa” by the Japanese) stopped visiting the shrine. His son, the present emperor has not visited it either.

In 1945 the Occupation administration issued a ban against the Japanese government forcing citizens to attend state -sponsored Shinto rituals and against promoting militarism. Four years later the Japanese government then issued a ban against school excursions by public schools to Yasukuni and other Shinto shrines for the purpose of worship.

On May 23, 2008 the Japanese government declared this ban null and void, explaining that the original occupation ban had expired when Japan regained its sovereignty in the 1952 San Francisco peace treaty and that it was now OK for schools to organize trips to Yasukuni.

In other words, because an American prohibition against violating the separation of church and state and against militaristic propaganda was no longer in force, both were now apparently acceptable as far as the Japanese government was concerned.

On occasion of some spring cleaning in my office I stumbled across an old copy of The Economist (April 5-11, 2003) published as the US forces were marching on Bagdad during the invasion that eventually swept Saddam Hussein from power.

I was opposed to that war at the time (it’s not hindsight, you can ask my wife!) and still am, but with the benefit of five years of experience of how things actually turned out it is interesting what the editors had to say then. I still respect the Economist as (overall) a relatively unbiased source of information though I’m no longer a subscriber.

The defect of these comparisons [with Vietnam and Palestine] is that Iraq is nothing like Vietnam, not much like Palestine or Afghanistan, and, on present evidence, no quagmire. (…) In Vietnam the Americans fought for ten years. The Soviet army spent ten years in Afghanistan. This war entered its third week with the Americans battering through Iraq’s Republican Guard divisions to the gates of Bagdad. At this rate, it will be a surprise if the Americans have to fight for ten weeks, let alone ten years. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has lasted for 36 years. If America has its way, its occupation of Iraq is more likely to last for fewer than 36 months. And there is no reason why America should not have its way: unlike Israel and the Palestinians, America and Iraq have no territorial quarrel. America’s stated aim is to remove the regime and its mass-killing weapons, allow the Iraqis to replace their dictatorship with a representative government, and then depart.

Well, those 36 months (3 years) already expired more than two years ago and no departure is in sight yet. Even someone who would (if elected to the highest office in the country) withdraw the troops after roughly twice that time has to face accusations of wanting to “cut and run”, while John McCain is talking about staying in Iraq for a hundred years.

Not only the time scales have shifted: Before President Bush decided to invade Iraq, his country was the only remaining superpower, having lost the Vietnam war but won the cold war. Following September 11 his people and country had an enormous amount of good will on its side from people and governments all over the world. Now the country is bleeding hundreds of billions of tax dollars and hundreds of lives every year in an undeclared war it can’t win. The Iraq war is deeply unpopular at home and abroad, not to speak of Iraq, where tens of thousands have died in the resulting civil war and “ethnic cleansing”.

The biggest winner of the US effort in Iraq so far has been the unfriendly regime in next door Iran, which saw one of its biggest enemies destroyed at the hands of the US, allowing its closest friends and allies to take over in Iraq.

I am looking forward to a new leadership in the White House that will have the courage to face reality: When you’ve taken a wrong turn you don’t then “stay the course”, especially when you’re heading into a dead end.

Recommended reading:

• Cut and Run? You Bet. (Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, Foreign Policy, May/June 2006)