DEAR HUGO: With friends like that you'll get enemies... by Howard

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DEAR HUGO: With friends like that you'll get enemies...

POSTED BY: HOWARD
UPDATED: Saturday, October 22, 2005 00:29
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Saturday, October 22, 2005 12:29 AM

As I have posted a number of Hugo Chavez articles I feel ethically bound to post this.This week Dear Hugo screwd-up and lost his judgement.
I hope someone explains to Chavez that Robert Mugabe is no friend of the ethics and ideas that
he, Chavez, is genuine and most sincere about.

DEAR HUGO
from South Africa's MAIL&GUARDIAN ON-LINE

One of the most depressing events of the political week was the photograph of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez embracing Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe under the sneering headline “Brothers in arms”. Chavez -- a genuine anti-imperialist leader with a genuinely popular programme and genuine popular support -- deserved the sideswipe. He should know better than to make common cause with that brutal old charlatan on the strength of his anti-imperialist rhetoric.

The incident bears out a point the Mail & Guardian has made repeatedly: a pernicious side effect of United States President George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq is that it has enabled Mugabe to project himself as a parallel victim of American and British imperialist aggression. But Iraq is not Zimbabwe, and Chavez should note the hostile stance of both Zimbabwean and South African trade unions towards Mugabe’s government.

Chavez suggests Mugabe has been pilloried for “taking land from those who were not using it and giving it to those who need it”. This is a curious way to describe the destruction of commercial agriculture in Zimbabwe, a direct cause of the chronic foreign exchange shortages that now prevent the country from meeting the basic needs of its citizens -- fuel, electricity and food. It takes no account of the 200 000 farm workers thrown on to the streets by land grabs, or the urban hawkers robbed of livelihoods by Operation Clean Up Trash. It also takes no account of the beneficiaries of “land reform”, many of them senior party bigwigs, army generals and party-connected business magnates. Far from passing from rentier drones to productive small farmers, much land formerly under cultivation now lies idle.

Mugabe likes to pretend that the hunger stalking his country -- aid organisations say nearly half of Zimbabwe’s 12-million people will need food aid this year -- stems from Anglo-American sanctions. In fact, the only sanctions in force are “smart sanctions”, which restrict the travel and other freedoms of the Zimbabwean elite, imposed by the US and the entire European Union. In addition, there are the interminable violations of human rights and democratic and governance norms, including the state licensing and regular prosecution of journalists, the banning of newspapers, the routine banning of opposition rallies and the rape, assault, abduction and murder of opposition supporters by ruling-party militia.

Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair deserve to be publicly flayed for launching a war in breach of international law, in defiance of the United Nations, on a lying pretext, and which has only deepened the misery of Iraqis. But Mugabe is not well placed to point this out, given his large role in the immiseration of his own people.

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