Hama Saburi Deputy Editor-in-Chief
5/22/03
11:40:59 AM (GMT +2)
FINANCIAL institutions owed in excess of $7 billion
by the cash-strapped
Cold Storage Company (CSC) have given the
meat-processing concern the
choice to accept new loan conditions or risk
losing assets.
The five banks that were financing the debt-ridden
parastatal for the
past five years toughened their stance last month after
it became
apparent that the CSCs board of directors was jittery about
conceding
to their demands.
Genesis Investment, the Jewel Bank,
Kingdom Bank, Time Bank and Trust
Bank had put their act together by tasking
a syndicate manager to work
out solutions that would remedy their exposure
to CSC.
The syndicate manager, representing Time Bank, proceeded to get
all the
five banks into agreeing on a new loan regime and securing a
government
guarantee, but the CSC board has failed to move eight months down
the line.
A Ministry of Finance official, who declined to be named, said
banks are
unanimous that CSC should agree to the rescheduling of the
expensive
short-term debt into a long-term script that can be used for
liquidity
support.
"They have also asked the CSC board to elaborate
the turnaround strategy
for the parastatal among other things. We are
surprised that CSC did not
respond despite the looming danger," the official
said.
In an attempt to buy time, the board requested for an audit of the
meat
processing concerns operations and to validate loans owed to
individual
banks before signing the syndicated loan agreement
(SLA).
The audit has not even started, despite earlier promises by CSC to
complete it before the end of last year.
"As considerable time has
passed without significant progress being made
on this matter, the syndicate
held update meeting on Friday, 4 April 2002.
"It was unanimously agreed
that we request you to sign and return to
Time Bank the syndicated loan
agreement together with the signed bills
and debentures within twenty one
(21) days from the date of this letter.
"It was also agreed that should
this request not be met within the
stipulated period, individual creditor
banks will be free to take
whatever action they deem fit," read a letter
leaked to The Financial
Gazette.
Most of the banks are already in
possession of judgments in their favour
against the 66-year old parastatal,
which has a solid asset base
consisting six abattoirs, cannery, by-products
processing plants,
ranches and feedlots throughout the country.
The
pending judgments, which do not require the auditors report to
enforce,
constitute a major threat to CSCs survival.
The company, with capacity
to slaughter 600 000 cattle a year, is
supposed to be central in
governments quest to rebuild the depleted
national herd and foreign
currency generation.
CSC has fallen flat on its mandate because of the
heavy debt burden,
which has been ballooning at a cost of 60 percent
interest.
The suspension of export to the European Union because of the
outbreak
of foot-and-mouth disease dealt a heavy blow on CSC, whose
financial
health deteriorated after the company embarked on capital
developments
that were not matched by the provision of affordable resources
to see
them through.
"The only way available to avert such danger is
for CSC to reach a new
loan agreement and new repayment terms with banks as
creditors. Please
note that the government guarantee issued to banks does
not substitute
the need for a repayment programme from CSC.
"It is in
this context of trying to save CSC from such danger that the
syndicate of
banks sent you a new syndicated loan agreement for your
consideration and
adoption. Until such new loan agreement is signed
between CSC and the banks,
CSC is living under great danger of collapse
because as a company, any
creditor can place it under liquidation and
have its assets auctioned to
recover the outstanding debts. Please take
this point seriously. We have
come a long way on this matter," read a
letter sent to the acting CSC chief
executive officer, Ngoni
Chinogaramombe.
A senior manager with
Genesis said members of the syndicate were ready
to advance fresh funding to
CSC should it concede to the new requirements.
CSC, chaired by
distinguished industrialist, Anthony Mandiwanza, has
suggested that fresh
loans should better interest rates offered to
exporters and the productive
sector under Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ)
facilities.
Exporters and
companies in the productive sector are accessing loans at
between five and
15 percent interest.
CSC was established in 1937. Prior to 1994, it
operated as a commission
until its dissolution in September 1994 to pave way
for commercialisation.
Creditors have been growing impatient over CSCs
failure to clear
long-standing debt. At one point, Genesis secured a High
Court order to
attach its office furniture and other equipment over a $231.1
million debt.
Minutes of the meeting of April 4 this year indicate that
banks are not
willing to wait any longer for CSC to carry out its audit and
are also
unhappy with delays in finalising the issue.
"It has now
turned out that the auditors mandate includes doing an
audit of the entire
operations of CSC including all depots and such a
wide ranging audit had
nothing to do with the validation of CSC debt.
"Had the old and new debts
been separated from the outset, it would not
have taken more than two weeks
to carry out a validation of the old
indebtedness.
"This would have
allowed conversion of the debts and issuance of the
bills to proceed leaving
the banks with something to hold on to in the
form of script which could be
used for liquidity support for example,"
read part of the
minutes.
Banks have already lost out because the CSC bills are no longer
as
attractive as before hence it will be difficult to find any takers,
while the RBZ is not keen on accepting them as
security.
FinGaz
Meldrum’s suspension and Zim’s
image
Chido Makunike
5/22/03 8:57:09 AM (GMT +2)
OVER about the
past year, the government has made no secret of its
desire to be rid of
Andrew Meldrum, Harare-based correspondent of the
British paper the
Guardian.
Information Minister Jonathan Moyo had made it clear soon
after his
appointment that he did not agree with the concept of non-citizens
reporting for foreign news organisations, and foreign correspondents
were soon under siege from the government.
Armed with the Moyo-penned
Access to Information and Privacy Act, the
authorities have aggressively
sought to limit the damage to the
Zimbabwean governments’s international
image by attempting to control
what is written about it and by whom, in the
process earning a far worse
reputation for intolerance and
repression.
Moyo’s act has been widely condemned for its letter as well
as for its
spirit. While he argues that it is little different from similar
laws in
other countries that have not earned world opprobrium for repression
of
the Press, he has found few backers for his view.
Rather than
widen the horizon of information and freedom available to
the public, Moyo
and the government have aggressively used the
repressive law to clamp down
on the Press, compounding that government’s
many self-inflicted problems.
The many journalists who have been jailed
and harassed through Moyo’s act
have invariably been acquitted of
charges laid against them. It is now
widely considered to be the
spiteful work of one man against a critical
Press on behalf of a
government that has shown itself to be uniquely
incompetent at the art
of winning over opinion by the power of ideas and
persuasion.
While the law has been used mostly against Zimbabweans,
foreign
journalists have not been spared. Meldrum, an American citizen, has
been
a particular thorn in the flesh of a government that has been gifted at
making itself look bad in international opinion under Moyo’s tutelage of
the information ministry.
Meldrum’s reports of what is happening in
Zimbabwe are no different from
what the Zimbabwean private media reflect,
but they particularly rankled
the government for a number of
reasons.
Meldrum is a white foreigner reporting for a largely white
Western
audience at a time there are many things gone wrong in Zimbabwe.
This is
problematic to the government on several counts. The Mugabe regime
blames its poor image on demonisation by the West for dispossessing
white farmers of land, and believes Meldrum’s reports help to bolster
that perception.
Moyo has expressed the wish that foreign media
employ Zimbabweans as
their correspondents.
He has made plausible
arguments that the Western media rely on white
foreigners in Africa to a
greater extent than they do elsewhere.
In a country and region where race
has been central to a lot of the
recent and ongoing conflicts, I believe an
argument can be made that
apart from a government shooting itself in the
foot by plain old
repression and bungling, the nuances and
contexts
of a lot of happenings are missed by white Westerners, giving
their readers
a one dimensional, stereotypical view of Africans.
Those stereotypes
often feed off and are compounded by the racial
tensions of the countries
from which many of the Western correspondents
originate. During a long
sojourn in the US, I remember often being upset
by the poor research and
understanding of the societies they purported
to report on so
authoritatively of many Western correspondents in
Africa, even when their
facts were correct.
So if the argument for more locals to tell the story
of events in
Zimbabwe were made by someone more respectable and less
self-servingly
cynical than Moyo, I would say I agree with that for many
reasons.
Westerners I have said this to have often protested that they are
objective in their reports, and that cultural and racial bias do not at
all affect their outlook and hence their reports, but I find this a
silly, unconvincing argument, and one that it is not even necessary to
make.
Who we are, where we come from, our personal and group experiences
cannot but influence our perspectives. It is important not to let those
factors override attempts at objectivity, and the best journalists from
anywhere in the world will work at this.
Yet for instance, two
people, one a white American and the other an
African American, might both
report the facts of a racial incident
identically, but their interpretation
of it will necessarily be very
much influenced by their different
experiences of being black or white
in a racially charged society.
So
from this perspective I know where Moyo is coming from., and do not
find his
stance particularly controversial. The idea is not for African
correspondents to give a sanitised view of life and events on a troubled
continent to Western and other audiences, but to hopefully give a
factual and yet more holistic picture. It is the difference between
merely being an observer of happenings, and being both an observer and
one who is immersed in them.; an integral part of the society/culture
that is being reported about. But given Moyo’s extreme hostility to the
media he does not control, it would not at all be surprising if his real
reason for wanting foreign media houses to use local correspondents is
the hope that they would be more amenable to his control, and to
intimidation by him.
Meldrum was harder to stereotype than other
foreign correspondents. He
came at independence, and chose to make Zimbabwe
his home, earning
residency status. He has lived in Zimbabwe since 1980,
developing deeper
roots and a more sophisticated understanding of the
society than the
typical short term correspondent. His residency status made
him less
amenable to intimidation on the grounds of fear of willy-nilly
deportation, at least in the ancient, pre-Moyo, pre-minister of
"justice" Patrick Chinamasa days when there was more of a semblance of
the rule of law than there is now.
In countries that respect the rule
of law, it is sacrosanct that once
you have been granted residency, you have
certain rights that cannot be
withdrawn on the whim of a minister,
or
because you say and write things unpopular with the ruling
authorities.
But then again, this is Zimbabwe in 2003!
After he was
acquitted of contravening a clause of Moyo’s AIPPA last
year, there was an
attempt to deport him, which failed on his appeal to
the High Court. He
continued to file the
reports of happenings in Zimbabwe that merely
reflected what many others
saw and experienced for themselves, but that so
enraged Moyo and the
authorities. They continued to
look for pretexts
under which to hound him out of the country, becoming
more frustrated and
reckless in the process. That recklessness
culminated in his expulsion last
week in defiance of a High Court order
to release him from the unlawful
detention of the immigration
authorities and to prresent him before Justice
Charles Hungwe.
Last Saturday, on hearing foreign media reports that
Meldrum had been
expelled, despite that morning’s local press reports about
Hungwe’s
order the night before, I called Meldrum’s house to find out what
the
situation was. I assumed that even if there had been some later change
that over-ruled the judge’s order, making his deportation lawful, he
would have been given the days or weeks that are the norm in such
situations. After all, I reasoned to myself, someone who has not been
found guilty of any crime, and a twenty three year resident of the
country, would be given a reasonable, humane amount of time to wind up
his affairs.
I was startled on talking to his wife Dolores to find
that he had been
bundled on to an Air Zimbabwe plane to London the night
before! This is
therefore not a Face to Face account, although I was able to
talk to him
on the phone when I went to ask his wife what happened. Early on
the
Saturday afternoon, while I was at his home, he called his wife from
London soon after getting there, the first time they had spoken since
they parted on Friday morning, when she dropped him off at the
immigration department’s offices for what they had mistakenly thought
would merely be more another session of routine harassment.
Said Mrs.
Meldrum " I did not see him at all from the time I dropped off
him off at
Linquenda House (where the immigration department’s offices
are) on Friday
morning to when he was put on the evening flight to
London. We didn’t even
know for sure that when he was seen being forced
into a vehicle outside the
immigration offices he was being taken to the
airport. Fellow journalists,
American embassy officials and well wishers
called me to say they suspected
he was being taken to the airport," she
said.
"After they had decided
to deport him, they would have lost nothing by
telling me of his
whereabouts. I was extremely worried about his well
being. Throughout the
day, the only link that made us suspect that he
was being held at the
airport was a tan coloured car parked there that
had also been seen outside
Linquenda House," she related. I was
surprised by how relatively calm she
seemed after the virtual kidnapping
of her husband in defiance of a High
Court judge’s order. The phone rang
every few minutes with friends offering
support, and others wanting to
find out what had happened.
In
relating the evening’s events, she said at one point she asked the
state
prosecutor, Loyce Matanda-Moyo, "Is my husband dead?" to which she
claims
the prosecutor looked at her, paused and smirked before
answering, "I don’t
know." After knowing he was safe and sound in
London, this sounds almost
like an over-dramatisation of events, but not
when you consider the
inexplicable stonewalling of the authorities on
Meldrum’s whereabouts, hours
after they had
detained him, it does not seem so paranoid of her to have
wondered if
the worst had been done to him..
Said Mrs. Meldrum, also
an American citizen and a permanent resident of
Zimbabwe who has resided
here for the last 18 years, "I have the feeling
that different parts of the
State were
working together to make sure he was deported, regardless of
the
legalities. The prosecutors’ office, whose role is supposed to be
limited to proving a defendant broke one law or another, as well as Air
Zimbabwe worked together to ensure Andy was expelled from Zimbabwe. Air
Zimbabwe had been served with a court order, along with the immigration
department not to deport him, but they went ahead and did so anyway.
"
"Why where they so inhumane not to tell me even after he had been put
on
the plane?" she wondered. She and friends accompanying her had had a
glimpse of him in the departure lounge of the airport just before he was
put on the plane, the last time she saw him, and the first confirmation
they had of their guess that he had indeed been taken to the airport
when he left the immigration department’s offices that Friday
morning.
After being tipped that he was likely being taken to the airport
for
deportation, she had put together some clothes and other personal
effects for him. When she got there, she told airport and Air Zimbabwe
officials of this, requesting that if they knew where he was, or if he
was eventually brought to the airport pending deportation, she be
allowed to give him at least basic toiletries and a change of clothes.
Every official she talked to denied seeing him or knowing where he
was.
In retracing the events of the previous 10days, Dolores Meldrum
repeatedly mentioned how Evans Siziba, the senior immigration officer
who has gained particular notoriety in this saga for so aggressively
seeking to deport Meldrum, was the same official who handed him last
July’s initial deportation order that was over-turned then by the High
Court. She seems to feel Siziba had an almost personal vendetta against
her husband, an uppity foreigner who dared to defy his efforts by
successfully challenging deportation orders before the courts! The judge
himself had mentioned the "willful contempt of court by the immigration
department, and the lack of good faith of the respondent."
On talking
to him on the phone last Saturday, he said what he since
repeated in many
other media :"My experience is but a small example of
what many other people
in Zimbabwe have gone through. The Zimbabwean
government is trying to scare
me and others in the press, but they are
not going to intimidate me. This
will just ensure more bad publicity for
them. The process was illegal, and
they have just shot themselves in the
foot. I will not be
silenced."
Indeed, he has become even more the focus of world wide
media attention,
at the expense of yet another knock in the already tattered
reputation
of the Mugabe reputation.
Whatever glee the immigration,
information and other government
departments may derive from getting rid of
Meldrum, at what cost has
this been done to Zimbabwe’s interests? Can they
not see that far more
harm is done to Zimbabwe’s protestations that it does
adhere to the rule
of law? Is it not obvious that Meldrum will now become a
cause celebre
whose writings will carry
more weight in the very
countries the Mugabe government is
surreptitiously sending its ministers to
plead for understanding, credit
and handouts?
I posed these questions
to Beatrice Mtetwa, Meldrum’s lawyer. "I think
they simply got desperate,"
she answered, "and they simply no longer
care how they are perceived. They
could not have handled Andrew
Meldrum’s case any worse than they did. They
could have done it all so
much more decently than this if they had chosen
to.The government lawyer
was part and parcel of the deceit in delaying to
bring Meldrum to the
court on Friday afternoon at 3:30 as Justice Hungwe had
ordered," she
charged. "The furtive way that all the officials behaved,
including the
Air Zimbabwe officials at the airport, shows that everyone
knew what
they were doing was unlawful," she continued.
Mtetwa is
going ahead with contempt proceedings against officers of the
immigration
department in their personal capacities and the responsible
ministry. "They
should be locked up until Meldrum is produced in court
like they pledged to
do to the judge, and the fines should be directly
deducted from their
salaries," she continued.
Is this a realistic hope? "I doubt they will
bring him back," she
conceded. "They cannot afford to because Justice Hungwe
has impeccable
legal credentials and is also an ex-combatant as well as a
founding
member of the War Veterans Association, so they have no hope of
leaning
on him to get a favourable judgement by casting the aspersions .of
being
a tool of imperialists, like they try to do with others. They can’t
call
him names."
When I asked her what keeps her going in the face of
such bad faith by
the State, she replied , I feel it is important to have a
chronology of
evidence. The court order can be effected up to five years
from now.
There has to be a record of what is going on."
The final
result of the whole incredible saga of Meldrum’s expulsion by
the government
is another own goal, making any of its representations of
normality and
adherence to the rule of its own laws a wasted effort.
This incidence of
petty bureaucrats making and effecting unjust laws,
and then failing to even
enforce those with any shred of consistency, is
but an example of how a
desperate government tries to score points at
the expense of the national
interest.
Meanwhile, according to Dolores Meldrum, "my husband is doing
the media
rounds in London." Thanks to the Mugabe government, he has
attained a
far greater prominence with which to influence world opinion
against it,
the exact opposite of what it hoped to achieve by kicking him
out of the
country!
BBC
Zimbabwe Test starts after
protests
|
Some Mugabe protesters made their point on a red
open-top bus | Exiled
victims of President Robert Mugabe's regime staged a noisy protest at
Lord's cricket ground as play began in the first match of the
England-Zimbabwe cricket Test series.
Dozens of demonstrators played and sang in the rain while they held
placards outside the north London ground on Thursday.
Nearly 100 MPs have accused the England and Wales Cricket Board of
"putting profit before principle" by allowing the tour to go ahead.
Human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, leader of another protest
group, the Stop The Tour campaign, has said his group felt under no
obligation to "show restraint" as encouraged by the MCC cricket board.
'End to violence'
And despite a ban on protests inside the ground, one campaigner was
escorted off the pitch after walking on waving a banner saying "Bowl out
killer Mugabe".
Mr Tatchell said the woman, in her 30s and from London, had been
arrested and taken to Marylebone police station after reaching the
outfield. A man was also led off as he stepped onto the pitch.
Fellow protesters got on board an open-top bus and were aiming to
deliver a letter to the Zimbabwe Embassy, calling for an end to
state-sponsored political violence.
Protesters outside the ground made their message with music and dance.
They carried banners with the slogans "Say no to state terrorism in
Zimbabwe" and "Wake up world! Zimbabwe is dying!".
A small police presence was visible near the demonstrators.
'Day for Zimbabweans'
Protest organiser Washington Ali stressed the intention from his group
was to stage a peaceful demonstration.
He said: "We do not support pitch invasions or other attempts to
disrupt the match.
"This is a day for Zimbabweans to draw the world's attention to the
crisis afflicting our country. It is not a day for headline-grabbing
stunts by individuals.
"The protest is intended as a show of solidarity with our brothers and
sisters who are suffering back home."
Many of the MPs who signed up to the opposition motion had urged
England to boycott their games in Zimbabwe during the World Cup earlier
this year because of human rights abuses under the Mugabe regime.
Members of the Commons foreign affairs select committee met on
Thursday, calling for Mr Mugabe to be stripped of his honour as a Knight
Commander of the Order of Bath.
This was bestowed on him by the Queen in 1994.
The MPs said: "He is not the first bearer of that honour to fail to
deserve it." |
Support for Mugabe Brings SA No Benefit
Business
Day (Johannesburg)
OPINION
May 22, 2003
Posted to the web May 22,
2003
Rhoda Kadalie
Johannesburg
THERE is nothing more sickening
than to see Zimbabwean President Robert
Mugabe popping up all over the place,
enjoying the largesse of our country
and the adulation of our political
leaders when he should be standing next
to Slobodan Milosevic before the
International Court of Justice. Staying at
the luxurious Westcliff Hotel,
while millions in Zimbabwe starve, was
obscene. His attendance at the funeral
of Walter Sisulu, a man whose very
essence he defies, was a
disgrace.
What is more worrying is how President Thabo Mbeki and the
foreign affairs
office are scurrying about trying to give legitimacy to a
dictator who
should be consigned to the dustbin of history.
In his
weekly letter (ANC Today, May 9-15), Mbeki incredulously claims
that
"(c)ontrary to what some now claim, the economic crisis currently
affecting
Zimbabwe did not originate from the actions of a reckless
political
leadership or corruption" and blames Zimbabwe's ills on abstract
historical
forces and economic inevitability, not on Mugabe's rotten
leadership.
No, according to Mbeki, Zimbabwe's economic decline has to do
with a racist
negotiated settlement with London, that " quarantined the
matter of land
redistribution because of agreements reached" and that "sought
to
counterbalance the principle of black liberation with the protection
of
white property, inserting into the settlement the racist notions of
black
majority rule and white minority rights".
This is racist
reductionism at its very best and Mbeki attributes no agency
to black people
for their own liberation from oppression. According to this
logic,
post-colonial societies and their liberation leaders will remain
forever the
victims of colonisation. Liberation from colonisation, yes, but
never
liberation towards a democracy that is sustainable.
Pulled by the rapids
of history to destinations not of our choosing, we may
as well give up as
there is no control over this "internal logic of various
processes in society
(that) compels all of us to be carried along by events
to destinations we may
not have sought".
By delinking Mugabe's reckless economic agenda from his
growing dictatorial
tendencies, Mbeki is able to rationalise Zimbabwe's
decline. This is as
deliberate as it is flawed. Mbeki knows that an economic
agenda that is
devoid of an equally ambitious agenda for democracy and human
rights is
bound to end up in a sociopolitical and economic morass, as
Zimbabwe is
today, but on this score he prefers to remain in
denial.
The Zimbabwean disaster is entirely man-made, despite Mbeki's
explanations
to the contrary. The war veterans, the draconian media laws, the
harassment
of independent judges, illegal land seizures, the theft of state
assets were
all politically and racially inspired by a president demanding to
stay in
power for life. Patronising in its tone, Mbeki's letter is a veiled
warning
to those who dare to ask questions, who, according to him "pose as
high
priests at the inquisition, hungry for the blood of the accused, as
though
to condemn, demonise and punish".
This dangerous political
standpoint becomes even more threatening when world
leaders like the UK's
Prime Minister Tony Blair and his lapdog, Jack Straw,
cosy up to Mbeki for
their own selfish political agendas.
Reeling from severe criticism from
within his own cabinet for sidelining the
United Nations and support for the
unilateral invasion of Iraq, Blair is
losing his moral authority over foreign
policy concerns such as sovereignty
and human rights. Disillusionment with
his role internationally is made
worse by his promise to soften his stance on
Mugabe, ease the anti-Mugabe
"media frenzy" and loosen restrictions on the
Commonwealth ban.
With the inauguration of Nigerian President Olusegun
Obasanjo looming, Mbeki
is being wooed to pave a reconciliatory path to
African Commonwealth
members, to ease what would otherwise be an awkward
celebration with Mugabe
supporters.
Why do world leaders from western
countries, in particular, tolerate
dictators simply because they are black?
Colonial guilt and its corollary
racial oppression have become so entrenched
that both sides are unable to
snap out of what have become continental
pathologies.
Why should we make do with lower standards of
democracy?
When world leaders retreat from holding Mugabe accountable for
their own
selfish reasons, they implicitly support the tendency of African
leaders to
rule ad infinitum and with impunity.
Kadalie is a human
rights activist based in Cape Town.
National
Review
May 22, 2003, 10:50
a.m.
Hitler's
Control
The lessons of Nazi
history.
By Dave Kopel & Richard
Griffiths
his week's CBS miniseries Hitler: The Rise of Evil
tries to explain the
conditions that enabled a manifestly evil and abnormal
individual to gain
total power and to commit mass murder. The CBS series
looks at some of the
people whose flawed decisions paved the way for Hitler's
psychopathic
dictatorship: Hitler's mother who refused to recognize that her
child was
extremely disturbed and anti-social; the judge who gave Hitler a
ludicrously
short prison sentence after he committed high treason at the Beer
Hall
Putsch; President Hindenburg and the Reichstag delegates who (except for
the
Social Democrats) who acceded to Hitler's dictatorial Enabling Act
rather
than forcing a crisis (which, no matter how bad the outcome, would
have been
far better than Hitler being able to claim legitimate power and
lead Germany
toward world
war).
Acquainting a
new generation of television viewers with the monstrosity of
Hitler is a
commendable public service by CBS, for if we are serious about
"Never again,"
then we must be serious about remembering how and why Hitler
was able to
accomplish what he did. Political scientist R. J. Rummel, the
world's
foremost scholar of the mass murders of the 20th century, estimates
that the
Nazis killed about 21 million people, not including war casualties.
With
modern technology, a modern Hitler might be able to kill even more
people
even more rapidly.
Indeed, right now in Zimbabwe, the Robert Mugabe
tyranny is perpetrating a
genocide by starvation aimed at liquidating about
six million people. Mugabe
is great admirer of Adolf Hitler. Mugabe's
number-two man (who died last
year) was Chenjerai Hunzvi, the head of
Mugabe's terrorist gangs, who
nicknamed himself "Hitler." One of the things
that Robert Mugabe, "Hitler"
Hunzvi, and Adolf Hitler all have in common is
their strong and effective
programs of gun control.
Simply put, if not
for gun control, Hitler would not have been able to
murder 21 million people.
Nor would Mugabe be able to carry out his current
terror
program.
Writing in The Arizona Journal of International &
Comparative Law Stephen
Halbrook demonstrates that German Jews and other
German opponents of Hitler
were not destined to be helpless and passive
victims. (A magazine article by
Halbrook offers a shorter version of the
story, along with numerous
photographs. Halbrook's Arizona article is also
available as a chapter in
the book Death by Gun Control, published by Jews
for the Preservation of
Firearms Ownership.) Halbrook details how, upon
assuming power, the Nazis
relentlessly and ruthlessly disarmed their German
opponents. The Nazis
feared the Jews - many of whom were front-line veterans
of World War One -
so much that Jews were even disarmed of knives and old
sabers.
The Nazis did not create any new firearms laws until 1938. Before
then, they
were able to use the Weimar Republic's gun controls to ensure that
there
would be no internal resistance to the Hitler regime.
In 1919,
facing political and economic chaos and possible Communist
revolution after
Germany's defeat in the First World War, the Weimar
Republic enacted the
Regulation of the Council of the People's Delegates on
Weapons Possession.
The new law banned the civilian possession of all
firearms and ammunition,
and demanded their surrender "immediately."
Once the political and
economic situation stabilized, the Weimar Republic
created a less draconian
gun-control law. The law was similar to, although
somewhat milder than, the
gun laws currently demanded by the American
gun-control lobby.
The
Weimar Law on Firearms and Ammunition required a license to engage in
any
type of firearm business. A special license from the police was needed
to
either purchase or carry a firearm. The German police were granted
complete
discretion to deny licenses to criminals or individuals the police
deemed
untrustworthy. Unlimited police discretion over citizen gun
acquisition is
the foundation of the "Brady II" proposal introduced by
Handgun Control,
Inc., (now called the Brady Campaign) in 1994.
Under the Weimar law, no
license was needed to possess a firearm in the home
unless the citizen owned
more than five guns of a particular type or stored
more than 100 cartridges.
The law's requirements were more relaxed for
firearms of a "hunting" or
"sporting" type. Indeed, the Weimar statute was
the world's first gun law to
create a formal distinction between sporting
and non-sporting firearms. On
the issues of home gun possession and sporting
guns, the Weimar law was not
as stringent as the current Massachusetts gun
law, or some of modern
proposals supported by American gun-control
lobbyists.
Significantly,
the Weimar law required the registration of most lawfully
owned firearms, as
do the laws of some American states. In Germany, the
Weimar registration
program law provided the information which the Nazis
needed to disarm the
Jews and others considered untrustworthy.
The Nazi disarmament campaign
that began as soon as Hitler assumed power in
1933. While some genocidal
governments (such as the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia)
dispensed with lawmaking,
the Nazi government followed the German
predilection for the creation of
large volumes of written rules and
regulations. Yet it was not until March
1938 (the same month that Hitler
annexed Austria in the Anschluss) that the
Nazis created their own Weapons
Law. The new law formalized what had been the
policy imposed by Hitler using
the Weimar Law: Jews were prohibited from any
involvement in any firearm
business.
On November 9, 1938, the Nazis
launched the Kristallnacht, pogrom, and
unarmed Jews all over Germany were
attacked by government-sponsored mobs. In
conjunction with Kristallnacht, the
government used the administrative
authority of the 1938 Weapons Law to
require immediate Jewish surrender of
all firearms and edged weapons, and to
mandate a sentence of death or 20
years in a concentration camp for any
violation.
Even after 1938, the German gun laws were not prohibitory.
They simply gave
the government enough information and enough discretion to
ensure that
victims inside Germany would not be able to fight
back.
Under the Hitler regime, the Germans had created a superbly trained
and very
large military - the most powerful military the world had ever seen
until
then. Man-for-man, the Nazis had greater combat effectiveness than
every
other army in World War II, and were finally defeated because of
the
overwhelming size of the Allied armies and the immensely larger
economic
resources of the Allies.
Despite having an extremely powerful
army, the Nazis still feared the
civilian possession of firearms by hostile
civilians. Events in 1943 proved
that the fear was not mere paranoia. As
knowledge of the death camps leaked
out, determined Jews rose up in arms in
Tuchin, Warsaw, Bialystok, Vilna,
and elsewhere. Jews also joined partisan
armies in Eastern Europe in large
numbers, and amazingly, even organized
escapes and revolts in the killing
centers of Treblinka and Auschwitz. There
are many books which recount these
heroic stories of resistance. Yuri Suhl's
They Fought Back (1967) is a good
summary showing that hundreds of thousands
of Jews did fight. The book
Escape from Sobibor and the eponymous movie
(1987) tell the amazing story
how Russian Jewish prisoners of war organized a
revolt that permanently
destroyed one of the main death camps.
It took
the Nazis months to destroy the Jews who rose up in the Warsaw
ghetto, who at
first were armed with only a few firearms that had been
purchased on the
black market, stolen or obtained from the Polish
underground.
Halbrook
contends that the history of Germany might have been changed if
more of its
citizens had been armed, and if the right to bear arms had been
enshrined it
Germany's culture and constitution. Halbrook points out that
while resistance
took place in many parts of occupied Europe, there was
almost no resistance
in Germany itself, because the Nazis had enjoyed years
in which they could
enforce the gun laws to ensure that no potential
opponent of the regime had
the means to resist.
No one can foresee with certainty which countries
will succumb to genocidal
dictatorship. Germany under the Weimar Republic was
a democracy in a nation
with a very long history of much greater tolerance
for Jews than existed in
France, England, or Russia, or almost anywhere else.
Zimbabwe's current gun
laws were created when the nation was the British
colony of Rhodesia, and
the authors of those laws did not know that the laws
would one day be
enforced by an African Hitler bent on mass
extermination.
One never knows if one will need a fire extinguisher. Many
people go their
whole lives without needing to use a fire extinguisher, and
most people
never need firearms to resist genocide. But if you don't prepare
to have a
life-saving tool on hand during an unexpected emergency, then you
and your
family may not survive.
In the book Children of the Flames,
Auschwitz survivor Menashe Lorinczi
recounts what happened when the Soviet
army liberated the camp: the Russians
disarmed the SS guards. Then, two
emaciated Jewish inmates, now armed with
guns taken from the SS,
systematically exacted their revenge on a large
formation of SS men. The
disarmed SS passively accepted their fate. After
Lorinczi moved to Israel, he
was often asked by other Israelis why the Jews
had not fought back against
the Germans. He replied that many Jews did
fight. He then recalled the sudden
change in the behavior of the Jews and
the Germans at Auschwitz, once the
Russian army's new "gun control" policy
changed who had the guns there: "And
today, when I am asked that question, I
tell people it doesn't matter whether
you're Hungarian, Polish, Jewish, or
German: If you don't have a gun, you
have nothing."
- Richard Griffiths is a doctor of psychology with
research interest in gun
issues. Dave Kopel is a NRO contributing
editor.
