Still paying the consequences

I sometimes wonder whether Jimmy Carter (whose brand of utter incompetence boggles the mind) ever feels guilty about the incredible number of disasters his policies have caused or at least inflamed. One example is the violent misrule of Zimbabwe by Robert Mugabe. James Kirchik goes over the history briefly in the Wall Street Journal to remind us of a litte known fact: the Rhodesian civil war would have reached a peaceful and democratic conclusion, if not for Carter's obtuseness.

The events of the past few months echo those of nearly 30 years ago, when Zimbabwe was a rebellious British colony called Rhodesia. In April 1979, three million blacks (64% of the native population) voted in the country's first multiracial election in hopes of putting an end to its brutal civil war between the white-led government and black liberation groups. After five days of balloting, the black Methodist bishop Abel Muzorewa was duly elected prime minister of the newfangled Zimbabwe-Rhodesia.
Under the plan agreed to by the white government and moderate black leaders, whites would get 28 out of 100 parliamentary seats and retain control over some government agencies for 10 years. This was hardly a perfect compromise, but Zimbabwe-Rhodesia's "internal settlement" offered the best opportunity to end white supremacy and establish multiracial democracy.
Mugabe, the Chinese-funded, Marxist-Leninist guerilla leader, threatened to kill anyone who participated in that election. Militias led by him and Joshua Nkomo of the Zimbabwe African People's Union killed 10 people. While he claimed that the "internal settlement" was a "bourgeois" swindle, Mugabe really wanted to rule the country by force.
In solidarity with Mugabe and Nkomo, the administration of President Jimmy Carter refused to send election observers. Two weeks after Mr. Muzorewa was elected, the Senate overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for the administration to lift sanctions on Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, which President Carter ignored.

It's heartbreaking to think what might have been if the US had defended Zimbabwe's democratically elected government when it counted.

Mugabe's transformation?

James Kirchik has an interesting essay in the Los Angeles Times revisiting what has become conventional wisdom about the Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, namely that he "was a promising leader who became corrupted over time by power." This is clearly nonesense, and only serves to assuage the conscience of the "enlightened" elites who enthusiastically supported him at the time of his struggle for power. Kirchik explains:

But this popular conception of Mugabe -- propagated by the liberals who championed him in the 1970s and 1980s -- is absolutely wrong. From the beginning of his political career, Mugabe was not just a Marxist but one who repeatedly made clear his intention to run Zimbabwe as an authoritarian, one-party state. Characteristic of this historical revisionism is former Newsweek southern Africa correspondent Joshua Hammer, writing recently in the liberal Washington Monthly that "more than a quarter-century after leading his guerrilla army to victory over the racist regime of Ian Smith in white-minority-ruled Rhodesia, President Robert Mugabe has morphed into a caricature of the African Big Man."
But Mugabe did not "morph" into "a caricature of the African Big Man." He has been one since he took power in 1980 -- and he displayed unmistakable authoritarian traits well before that. Those who were watching at the time should have known what kind of man Mugabe was, and the fact that so many today persist in the contention that Mugabe was a once-benign ruler speaks much about liberal illusions of African nationalism.
[...]
All the participants in the Rhodesian war used vicious tactics. But Mugabe displayed a particular ruthlessness that ought to have indicated what sort of ruler he might one day become. In 1978, four black moderates announced that they had reached an "internal settlement" with the white regime, paving the way for democratic elections. One of these leaders, Ndabaningi Sithole, dispatched 39 envoys to meet representatives of Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, another guerrilla leader. The envoys were captured, murdered and, according to Time magazine, "their bodies were then laid out by the guerrillas in a grisly line at the side of the road as a warning to local tribespeople."
The following year, in protest of the election that then-Premier Ian Smith had organized with black leaders willing to lay down their arms, Mugabe's organization released a death list naming 50 "Zimbabwean black bourgeoisie, traitors, fellow-travelers and puppets of the Ian Smith regime, opportunistic running-dogs and other capitalist vultures." During those elections, Mugabe and Nkomo's forces killed 10 black civilians attempting to vote. Mugabe's men also blew up a Woolworth's store and massacred Catholic missionaries.
Mugabe was clear about his preference for authoritarian rule. Years before taking office, asked what sort of political future he envisioned for Zimbabwe, Mugabe expressed his belief that "the multiparty system . . . is a luxury" and that if Zimbabweans did not like Marxism, "then we will have to re-educate them."

Do read the whole thing.

Making aid work

I'm not a regular reader of the New York Review of Books (there is only so much lefty-establishment bile and rubbish one can take on a sustained basis, although - as far as I know - it's still more palatable than the truly appalling London Review of Books). However, every now and again one comes across something interesting there, and at the recommendation of a friend I read a review from the current issue, a balanced and very interesting piece by Nicholas Kristof (of the New York Times) on foreign aid: Aid: Can it Work?.
He makes several points which demonstrate both a healthy skepticism of many current arrangements, and a noble desire to ensure that poor people's lot across developing countries is improved, realistically and efficiently:

Still, on the arguments about the effectiveness of aid, Easterly makes a better case than Sachs—and if Easterly can stimulate a sensible rethinking of aid, he will save lots of lives, too. To begin with, he casts doubt on the very notion of a "poverty trap," where countries need outside resources to generate economic growth. Certainly it's well known that some of the countries that have battled poverty most effectively —like China, Singapore, Malaysia, and others in Asia—have received very little aid per capita. The median ratio of aid to GDP of the ten countries with the highest per capita growth rates between 1980 and 2002 was just 0.23 percent. In contrast, as Easterly shows, the ten countries with the lowest per capita growth rates in that period, all negative rates, had a median aid-to-GDP ratio of 10.98 percent. That says nothing about causation, but it's still not very encouraging.
When it comes to the effects of large-scale aid programs in Africa, Easterly's argument is worth quoting:

Jeffrey Sachs and co-authors previously predicted that large aid increases would finance "a 'big push' in public investments to produce a rapid 'step' increase in Africa's underlying productivity, both rural and urban." Alas, we have already seen this movie, and it doesn't have a happy ending. There is good data on public investment for twenty-two African countries over the 1970–1994 period. These countries' governments spent $342 billion on public investment. The donors gave these same countries' governments $187 billion in aid over that period. Unfortunately, the corresponding "step" increase in productivity, measured as production per person, was zero. Perhaps part of the reason for this was such disasters as the five billion dollars spent on the publicly owned Ajaokuta steel mill in Nigeria, begun in 1979, which has yet to produce a bar of steel.

Even in the poorest countries you see some signs of available money that could be used for investment, and is not. In Kisangani, in the heart of poverty-stricken Congo, wrenching malnutrition exists side by side with brothels, beer joints, and cigarette stands. If one could get the men who spend their money in those places to invest in the simplest of businesses or in their children's education, they could begin to escape the so-called poverty trap.
[...]
If Easterly is generally sensible, there's one matter where I think he's catastrophically wrong. That is his hostility toward military intervention. It's true that in the past, military interventions have often been foolish and ended up hurting the people we claimed to be helping. The long American proxy war in Angola was a disaster for everyone. But it's also true that the single most essential prerequisite for economic development is security: no one will invest in a shop or factory if it is likely to be burned down soon. And insecurity is immensely contagious.
The Western failure to intervene early in Rwanda allowed the genocide in 1994 that claimed perhaps 800,000 lives. But that was only the beginning. That chaos in turn infected Burundi and especially Congo, which collapsed into civil war. Some 4.1 million people have died because of the Congo war, mostly from hunger and disease, making it the most lethal conflict since World War II.
Something similar happened in West Africa. Upheavals in Liberia were allowed to fester and spread to Sierra Leone and then Ivory Coast; and now Guinea may be on the precipice as well. Because nobody was concerned to stop the killings in Darfur when they began in 2003, the genocide there is now spreading to Chad as well, and even to the Central African Republic.
So one of the most crucial kinds of foreign aid is simply security. And when we have provided that kind of aid, it has made a huge difference. The most successful single thing the US ever did in Asia, for example, was probably Truman's decision in 1950, after the Korean War began, to send the Seventh Fleet to protect Taiwan. Otherwise China would very likely have invaded Taiwan sometime in the 1950s, hundreds of thousands would have died, and Taiwan wouldn't have existed as a free economy in the 1980s and 1990s to provide both an economic model and investment for the Chinese mainland. The cost to the US of that deployment was negligible, and the benefit to the world was enormous.

Do read the whole thing.

Protesting for Darfur in London

On Sunday a friend of mine and I went to the Day for Darfur protest in London. It started in front of the Sudanese embassy which is just off the end of Pall Mall; there was some chanting and several interesting (but occasionally unintelligible) speeches. After that we walked towards Downing Street, taking the long route along Piccadilly. Here are some pictures I took while walking down Whitehall, looking back towards Trafalgar Square:

and forward towards Westminster:

There were more people than I expected, and despite my cynicism the worldwide protests may be having some small positive effects:

Sudan is expected to withdraw its deadline for African Union peacekeepers to leave the war-torn western region of Darfur at the end of this month, when AU foreign ministers discuss the mounting crisis in New York today, according to senior officials in Khartoum.
Sudanese president Omar al Bashir's ultimatum for an AU troop pull-out threatened to leave the huge area with no international monitors and provoke a major escalation of a three-year war which has already left a quarter of a million people dead.
A special "global day for Darfur" yesterday saw protesters in several dozen cities around the world call for an end to the fighting and warn of impending genocide.

Those who know me won't be surprised to learn that I favour a more vigorous approach:

Led by the United States, the UN security council has called for international forces to replace the AU troops with better equipment and a stronger mandate. Although the resolution says the troops require the consent of Sudan's government, President Bush hinted at the weekend that they should go in regardless.
"What you'll hear is, well, the government of Sudan must invite the United Nations in for us to act. Well, there are other alternatives, like passing a UN resolution saying we're coming in with a UN force in order to save lives," he said.

I doubt that will happen, but I firmly believe that if the international community is any more conciliatory than that, it will be condoning the continuation of genocide (once again).

Africa

There has been a lot of talk recently about Africa: debt-relief, increased aid, the G8 summit, the Live 8 concert and so on. The increased focus on this problem is very positive as it represents a scandal of the modern world that an entire continent lives under such dire circumstances. Unfortunately, these things are not as simple as most people think ("the West has cruelly exploited Africa for centuries, and should now do the right thing and give more money"). There is plenty of evidence that not only is all this money not being spent appropriately, but that it might even be counter-productive.
The Spectator has an excellent article on how the money is spent. This, at any rate is really comforting:

Take, for example, Malawi's 'Benz Aid' scandal. In the year 2000 Bakili Muluzi was hailed as a paragon of African 'good governance' following the demise of Life President Hastings Kamuzu Banda. The Economist rated Blantyre as the best city to live in in the world. Britain promised to increase its aid from £30.8 million to £52.4 million in a single year specifically to help the 65 per cent of Malawians existing on less than 50 pence a day. Malawi's government celebrated by purchasing 39 top-of-the-range S-class Mercedes at a cost of £1.7 million. In the furore that followed, Clare Short, then international development secretary, ruled out a ban on aid to Malawi, explaining that the money used for the car purchases had not been skimmed off British aid but some other donor's.
Last year King Mswati III of Swaziland went against the grain. He passed over Mercedes and went for a £264,000 Maybach 62 for himself plus a fleet of BMWs for each of his 10 wives and three virginal fiancées selected annually at the football stadium ‘dance of the impalas’. Imagine if he continues buying BMW for his wives; his dad collected 50 spouses and 350 kids. In May southern Africa’s Mr Toad changed his mind about Mercedes and roared up to his rubber-stamp parliament in a new S600L limo. The total bill for his car purchases alone will be about £750,000, or three quarters of the annual figure for British assistance. Of the £14 million Swaziland gets in foreign aid, £9 million goes on the king’s balls, picnics and parties — and cars. Yet 70 per cent of Swazis languish in absolute poverty and four out of ten have HIV/Aids, the highest rate in the world.

Do read the whole thing. And see this excellent article in openDemocracy with an alternative suggestion. See here and here for further comments.
Even more worryingly, it seems that it isn't only states that foul things up - NGO's also create problems. Additionally the African leaders themselves often spread rumours and falsehoods that exacerbate problems: denying that HIV causes AIDS, claiming that Western donated vaccines are ploys to make Africans infertile; government sponsored AIDS education programs in South Africa teach that fat people do not contract AIDS. What is one to say to that? Help comes to those who help themselves.
Clearly what is needed is significant aid and debt-relief, with extensive follow-up on the money's use, only for those countries which can prove that they are not genocidal, repressive and corrupt. This should have the double benefit of helping the poor people there and giving strong incentives to the other countries to shape up.
The problem with this idea is that it will be hard to find suitable candidates for this largesse. Even Kenya, a relatively advanced country is terribly corrupt:

One of the most flagrant abuses of 'good governance' in Africa today is occurring in Kenya — original home of the WaBenzi. After decades of dictatorship voters in December 2002 swept Mwai Kibaki to power at the head of his NARC rainbow coalition on an anti-corruption ticket. 'Corruption will now cease to be a way of life in Kenya,’ Kibaki promised. The very first law Kibaki's parliament passed rewarded politicians with a 172 per cent salary increase. MPs’ take-home pay is now about £65,000 per annum (compared with a British MP's £57,485 gross) and the Kenyan MPs' fat package of allowances includes a £23,600 grant to buy a duty-free car, together with a monthly £535 fuel and maintenance allowance.
[...]
Take a look at Kenya's 2005–06 budget, read out by finance minister David Mwiraria to a cheering parliament in Nairobi on 8 June. According to the local Daily Nation, the government has allocated £3 million for the purchase of a fleet of new vehicles for the Office of the President. A further £2.9 million has been set aside for the maintenance of the existing car-pool of vehicles. One has to wonder if this expenditure of nearly £6 million, no doubt a lot of it on Mercedes-Benzes and far in excess of the sums involved in Malawi's 'Benz Aid' scandal, has anything to do with the increased aid supply.

And these are the elected leaders - imagine the dictators! How depressing.