New York Times
By MICHAEL
WINES
Published: December 25, 2005
JOHANNESBURG
ZIMBABWE, 2005
Agencies can feed the homeless - if they leave the city.
IN this season
of generosity, of morality plays about Scrooge and the Grinch
and the global
imperative to help those who are less fortunate, think a
moment about this
question: what if your gift could relieve Tiny Tim's
misery for now, but
risked perpetuating it - or even worsening it - in the
long run?
This
is no theoretical exercise, and there is no easy answer. Just this sort
of
dilemma is unfolding right now worldwide, in places like Zimbabwe.
In
Zimbabwe, more than a third of the 12 million population need donated
food
to avoid malnutrition, or worse. More than 700,000 urban Zimbabweans
lost
their homes this year as well.
The United Nations and nonprofit charities
with global reach are, as always,
rushing to help. The World Food Program
will distribute 331,000 metric tons
of corn and other staples in Zimbabwe by
2007, nearly a third of all the
donations it plans for southern Africa. The
United Nations is building 2,500
shelters in Harare, the capital, to house
the homeless.
Such generosity is welcome, but its subtext raises
wrenching ethical issues.
For in the view of critics, these humanitarian
gestures will not simply save
lives and ease misery, though they will surely
do that. The critics say that
the aid also will bolster Zimbabwe's
authoritarian regime, which razed and
burned the homes of those 700,000
citizens earlier this year, and commanded
them to move into the
countryside.
President Robert G. Mugabe calls the demolitions slum
clearance. Critics
call them a plot to disperse the same impoverished
Zimbabweans who pose the
greatest threat to Mr. Mugabe's 25-year
rule.
Most United Nations food aid is being funneled, at Zimbabwe's
insistence,
into rural areas. While that need is great, the effect is to
deny aid to
those poor who have lost their homes but who resisted being
relocated to
rural areas. Zimbabwe's rulers have also refused to let the
United Nations
erect tents or other temporary shelters that might make it
easier for those
whose homes were razed to remain in the cities.
The
world's aid to Zimbabweans is part of a devil's bargain, critics say:
save
the poor from hunger and exposure, but at the price of aiding the very
rulers who are making them hungry and exposed in the first
place.
Should such deals be struck? Implicitly and otherwise, they are
struck all
the time: In Darfur, relief organizations might be said to have
aided the
Sudanese government's ethnic cleansing merely by providing
assistance to
refugee camps set up by the victims of that cleansing. While
refugees are
fed and housed far away from their homes, the government can
consolidate its
hold on their former territory.
North Korea demanded
this month that international food donors leave the
country by year's end,
ratcheting up its leaders' efforts to stop outsiders
from monitoring the
delivery of food to its starving citizens. In Bosnia,
Rwanda and dozens of
other crises, humanitarian agencies have been faced
with the prospect that
their good deeds could redound to the benefit of
those who created the human
suffering they sought to address.
Such moral dilemmas hardly overshadow
the life-saving work that relief
agencies perform. But the dilemmas are not
trivial. Since the cold war
ended, humanitarian responses to wars and
political crises have mushroomed,
sometimes supplanting more muscular
diplomatic and military actions of years
past. Sending aid, it seems, is
easier, warmer and fuzzier than tackling the
root problems that led to the
crisis at hand.
As relief has become a preferred response to problems
like refugee crises,
dictators and warlords have become ever cannier at
exploiting that aid. And
the dilemmas have become more common and thornier.
"It's one of the
conundrums that humanitarian organizations face," Larry
Minear, the director
of the Humanitarianism and War Project at Tufts
University, said in a
telephone interview. Such tradeoffs, he said, have
provoked debate over
whether there are times when "one should withhold
assistance in the interest
of whatever overall objective there might be -
including an end to the
particular conflict that might be creating the
need."
Rarely, agencies do withhold assistance. After the Rwanda genocide
of the
mid-1990's, the International Rescue Committee pulled its workers out
of
refugee camps in the Democratic Republic of Congo after concluding that
soldiers behind the genocide were using the camps to regroup for further
attacks.
"We just decided we would not be complicit," George Rupp,
the organization's
current president, said in a telephone interview. But, he
acknowledged:
"That was a very complicated decision, one that continues to
reverberate
around the I.R.C. The result was that there were people with
real needs that
were not met."
In almost every case, agencies swallow
hard and offer help anyway, arguing
that the greater good of saving lives
and reducing suffering outweighs the
ignominy of being a handmaiden to
oppression. The real question, perhaps, is
how that ignominy might be held
to a minimum.
One option, experts say, is for relief agencies to
publicize their devil's
bargains - to show the world how such blackmail
works, and potentially to
shame those responsible for it. Another is to
press wrongdoers, publicly and
in private, to stop rights abuses that
humanitarians can document. Relief
agencies have historically been loath to
do that for fear that angry
governments will bar them from helping victims
of the abuses.
A theologian in Geneva, Hugo Slim, believes that this fear
is overrated;
even evil rulers, he says, are usually reluctant to do much
more than hector
those who bring aid. Mr. Slim, the chief scholar at the
Center for
Humanitarian Dialogue, said in an interview that relief agencies
can be
creative in expressing themselves, perhaps by persuading moral
authorities
further removed from the crisis to speak for them.
In
Zimbabwe, for example, the World Food Program and the United Nations
Development Program have said little about the constraints imposed on them.
But top United Nations humanitarian and housing envoys have been scathingly
critical of Mr. Mugabe's slum-demolition program and have demanded that
relief agencies be given wider leeway to aid its
victims.
Humanitarian organizations can also be subversive. Even if they
are sharply
limited in their own efforts, relief workers can strike quiet
alliances with
local activists, leverage their influence with sympathetic
government
insiders and educate those they are helping about their
rights.
If all else fails, Mr. Slim, Mr. Minear and others agree, the
last resort -
halting aid and withdrawing - remains. Even then, Mr. Slim
said, it is vital
to explain the decision to the needy and seek their
"informed consent." Such
efforts shield aid agencies from charges of
desertion, and preserve the bond
between benefactor and recipient that is at
the heart of humanitarian
efforts.
All those are long-term
strategies. But they hold the prospect of reducing
the humanitarian world's
complicity in long-term problems.
Sunday Nation, Kenya
Publication Date: 12/25/2005
As a Kenyan who lived under the bad
old single-party days, and
who is today enjoying freedom of speech and
rising economic prosperity in
our pluralistic democracy, I am angered by
Africa's reluctance to speak out
against Zimbabwean President Robert
Mugabe.
Dictatorship has been the principal factor keeping
Africans
poor. It is no longer any good for Africa to pretend that openly
criticising
an African dictator is somehow betraying the "black race". After
all it's
the black Zimbabweans who are suffering the most, and starving the
most.
It's not a race matter but a right versus wrong
issue.
If anything civil liberties are in retreat in the West
and I
feel sorry for them. For example, detention without trial is back in
force
in Britain and the US is now spying on its own citizens without court
warrants.
If I was charged with instituting land reform
in Zimbabwe,
instead of destroying productive farms that are now lie fallow
(waiting for
the fertile topsoil to be washed away forever), I would have
turned the
farms into companies and given the landless black peasants shares
in them
that they would not be allowed to sell for at least 10 years (say a
50-50
split so that both sides must work together for either side to
profit).
That way white Zimbaweans could retain an incentive
to keep on
farming, whilst black Zimbabweans would get the money to send
thier children
to school and have the time to learn, accumulate capital and
eventually farm
for themselves.
That would have been a
much more constructive way of moving
forward than destroying the nation's
economy. Talk about cutting off your
nose to spite your face. If the African
Union is ever going to be better
than the OAU, and if Thabo Mbeki's "African
Renaissance" is ever going to be
more than yet another empty slogan, then we
must not be afraid of denouncing
Mugabe's dictatorship.
A. Gombe,
Nairobi.
SABC
December 25, 2005,
16:30
With thousands of motorists crossing the Zimbabwe border in both
directions,
filling stations are now congested at Musina and the Beitbridge
border post
in Limpopo.
Many drivers were filling up empty containers
with petrol, citing the high
cost and lack of fuel in Zimbabwe.
Eric
Libert, a filling station owner in Musina, welcomes the added demand.
"We
are all profiting from them. I think this is a big input in Musina and
our
business community, especially with the fuel situation in Zimbabwe. They
are
filling up containers and cars and our business is booming this time of
the
year."
IOL
December 25 2005
at 10:16AM
Harare - Twelve prison officers have appeared in court
in Zimbabwe on
charges of assaulting 18 South African mercenaries released
from jail
earlier this year, state radio reported Sunday.
The
18 were part of a group of 70 South Africans arrested in Harare en
route to
Equatorial Guinea in March 2004. The men were accused of plotting
to
overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea and sent to jail.
Sixty-nine were released in May, but ringleader Simon Mann remains in
prison
in Harare.
The 12 prison officers have been charged with common
assault, the
radio said.
"The allegations are that three of the
suspects were in a hall at the
prison when the officers assaulted them using
open hands and batons,
inflicting injuries," the radio
said.
Fifteen mercenaries were assaulted on another
occasion, it added. The
report said the prisoners were forced to take off
their clothes before they
were beaten. - Sapa-dpa
San Francisco Chronicle
Reviewed
by John Freeman
Sunday, December 25, 2005
Time
Bites
Views and Reviews
By Doris Lessing
HARPERCOLLINS; 376 Pages;
$27.95
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
These past few years have been tough ones for humanists. Torture, war, tax
cuts for the wealthy, corporate greed, drilling in the Arctic, rampant
consumerism and a cutback in certain civil liberties have all been defended
as key ingredients to keeping "the American people" safe from an unseen
and -- to this day -- still uncaught enemy. In such an environment, it would
seem there is nothing quite so decadent as a collection of old book
reviews.
And yet to pick up Doris Lessing's "Time Bites" is to remember why
a mere
whiff of that hoary liberal humanism is so compelling. Here are
Lessing's
essays on Tolstoy and Austen, on the wholesale rape of Zimbabwe's
economy by
Robert Mugabe, and the traditions of Sufism. In different
circumstances,
this jumble would send a red flag -- the sign of an older
writer clearing
her desk, which she is doing. But running through each essay
is a passionate
belief that humans can overcome their ignorance and cruelty
if they simply
compassionately apply their minds to the task.
Lessing's roundabout pathway into becoming a writer seems to give this
idea
greater ballast. Born in 1924 in what would later become part of the
"Axis
of Evil" (now Iran, then called Persia), she grew up on a farm in
southern
Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where her father had moved the family in
hopes of
making a living from tobacco and corn. By the time she moved to
London in
1949 with her young son, she had been twice married and divorced,
once a
secretary, now a writer.
None of the pieces in "Time Bites" date back
quite this far, but the pinch
of postwar poverty hangs about them. Lessing
takes nothing for granted,
including the luxury of having something to read
at all. In "Books," a short
piece published to mark the opening of a library
in Cairo, she writes about
a trust that sends donated novels and volumes of
poetry to villages in
Africa. The response is astonishing.
"These
villages may have no electricity, telephone, running water, but
they beg for
books from every visitor. ... In a bush village far from any
big town, or
even a little one, such a trestle with 40 books on it has
transformed the
life of the area. Instantly study groups appeared, literary
classes --
people who can read teaching those who can't -- civil classes,
and groups of
aspirant writers. A letter from there reads 'People cannot
live without
water. Books are our water and we drink and we drink from this
spring.'
"
One might say the same about Lessing. Ornery in her dislikes,
comfortable
with the imperfect, she possesses the open-minded curiosity of
an
autodidact. "Time Bites" contains essays on Woolf, Austen and Simone de
Beauvoir, as one might expect, but there are also reviews of lesser-known
work such as "The Past Is Myself," by German writer Christabel Bielenberg, a
new translation of the Arabic classic "The Story of Hai bin Yaqzan," and
"The Ice Palace," by Norwegian novelist Tarjei Vesaas.
Like John
Updike, Lessing never frets over whether or not she is
entitled -- or well
enough informed -- to enter these texts. Political
correctness to her is a
language experiment gone awry, and reading the
equivalent of a passport; it
can take you just about anywhere. As does
Lessing's prose, which limps and
grumbles along with all the grace of a 1974
Volvo -- sturdy and inelegant,
but trustworthy because it is so homely.
She is not one for humor,
though. The one chuckle-making moment in the
book comes when Lessing is
forced to be self-conscious, which is a different
thing than writing about
one's self. A biographer has tracked her down and
will not let go, at least
from afar:
"It is evident from the letter's tone, which is that of a
happy chipmunk
who has just found a stash of hallucinogenic mushrooms, that
it has not
crossed her mind her victim might not welcome spending what is
bound to be
weeks if not months in the company of someone she has never met
and
certainly would not have chosen, sharing intimate details of her past
and
deep thoughts about life in general."
Given her matter-of-fact
tone, Lessing is sometimes at her best when
addressing not books but the
world at large with the chop-chop rhythm of an
opinion columnist. A series
of pieces written after Sept. 11 address the
attacks with an empathic
equanimity that was often lacking during those
strident times. " 'Ignorant
armies' like the Taliban are not terrorists,"
Lessing writes. "Saddam
Hussein is not a terrorist, he is a brutal dictator.
... Terrorists are
those highly trained ruthless groups waiting in the
United States and the
countries of Europe to murder, poison and destroy. Let
us catch them, if we
can. In order to understand them we must learn the laws
that govern cults,
and brainwashing."
It is strange here that Lessing neglects to mention
terrorists in Latin
America or the Middle East, who have been just as
lethal, if not more so --
especially on their own populations. The lesson,
one supposes, is that we
all have our blind spots. Overcoming them, one book
or experience at a time,
is what Lessing celebrates in this thoughtful and
engaging collection.
Whoever said that humanism couldn't fight
terrorism?
John Freeman lives in New York. His reviews have appeared in
the Wall
Street Journal, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe.