Author: Mick Hartley

ontinues to print money to meet its obligations it could well drive inflation into quadruple digits by year’s end. Manufacturing has shrunk by 51% since 1997 and exports have fallen by half in the past four years. Almost every major economic indicator has declined significantly since 2001. The investment and operating environment is dismal. Foreign direct investment has evaporated from US$444 million in 1998 to US$9 million in 2004.

Agricultural production – the mainstay of the economy – has collapsed under violent implementation of a necessary but badly thought through land reform. The government, or officials of government acting on their own authority, have continued to expropriate commercial farms without compensation and to distribute these farms in a non-transparent manner to ruling party insiders even though it formally declared the end of the process earlier this year. Not only the commercial farm owners have been affected. This misguided and ill-fated land grab also displaced over a million farm workers and their family members.

The human cost of Zimbabwe’s economic crisis has been extraordinarily high. The estimated proportion of the population living below the official poverty line has more than doubled since mid-1990s – it is now about 80 percent of the population. At least half the country faces food shortages. The country’s human development indicators, once the envy of Sub-Saharan Africa, have sunk to the lowest fifth percentile in the world. Well over a quarter of the population has fled the country according to the last national census

It was more than dismaying to read a paper published in July by the Center for Global Development in Washington on the Costs and Causes of Zimbabwe’s Crisis. It estimated that Zimbabwe’s economic crisis has set the country back more than half a century. The paper calculated that the purchasing power of the average Zimbabwean in 2005 had fallen back to the same level as in 1953 when the Confederation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was established. That’s an astonishing reversal of 52 years of progress in only a half dozen years.

The flood of economic bad news has been continuous. Most recently, the World Economic Forum published its assessment of the state of Zimbabwe’s competitiveness. Alarmingly, it ranked Zimbabwe as the least competitive of all 117 economies studied. […]

What has been the cause of Zimbabwe’s unprecedented economic descent?

The answer is really quite simple, as well as quite shocking: Neither drought nor sanctions are at the root of Zimbabwe’s decline. The Zimbabwe government’s own gross mismanagement of the economy and its corrupt rule has brought on the crisis.

The government-controlled press have responded by accusing Dell of being a sexual pervert, visiting “unseemly” areas.

This is worth a read, though it’s now five years since the programme was screened. Richard Webster, author of “The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witch Hunt“, resurrects an old piece of his:

On Sunday, 8th October [2000] at 9pm, BBC1 transmitted a sensational play, Care, about abuse in a children’s home. Presented as a fictional drama, and described by Polly Toynbee, as ‘a fine film in the great old BBC tradition of Cathy Come Home’, it was written by former That’s Life presenter, Kieran Prendiville. Unusually for a programme of this kind it attracted an audience of 4 million and resulted in 6,000 phone calls.

Prendiville’s gruelling ninety-minute drama followed the fate of a young man, Davey Younger, who finds that a police investigation in North Wales brings back memories of the abuse he suffered while in care as a young teenager. In a series of nightmarish scenes the residential workers entrusted with the care of Davey at a home called Glenavon, are shown both physically abusing him and subjecting him to a series of sexual assaults.

The play was universally praised. Although fictional, it was based on real events. But the true facts were very different from the those portrayed in Prendiville’s play, and show investigative journalism – in particular that practised by the Independent – in a very poor light. An interesting look at the way facts become twisted to accommodate accepted “truths”.

Metafilter – where the consensus is overwhelmingly that Bush is a criminal and the overthrow of Saddam was a disaster – have had a couple of recent posts to shake their readers up a bit. First there was this sad little saga:

For more than a year, former Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey has been telling anybody who will listen about the atrocities that he and other Marines committed in Iraq.

In scores of newspaper, magazine and broadcast stories, at a Canadian immigration hearing and in numerous speeches across the country, Massey has told how he and other Marines recklessly, sometimes intentionally, killed dozens of innocent Iraqi civilians.

Among his claims:

Marines fired on and killed peaceful Iraqi protesters.

Americans shot a 4-year-old Iraqi girl in the head.

A tractor-trailer was filled with the bodies of civilian men, women and children killed by American artillery.

Massey’s claims have gained him celebrity. Last month, Massey’s book, “Kill, Kill, Kill,” was released in France. His allegations have been reported in nationwide publications such as USA Today, as well as numerous broadcast reports. Earlier this year, he joined the anti-war bus tour of Cindy Sheehan, and he’s spoken at Cornell and Syracuse universities, among others.

News organizations worldwide published or broadcast Massey’s claims without any corroboration and in most cases without investigation. Outside of the Marines, almost no one has seriously questioned whether Massey, a 12-year veteran who was honorably discharged, was telling the truth.

He wasn’t.

Each of his claims is either demonstrably false or exaggerated – according to his fellow Marines, Massey’s own admissions, and the five journalists who were embedded with Massey’s unit, including a reporter and photographer from the Post-Dispatch and reporters from The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal.

The “Kill, Kill, Kill” book (love that title! – has he been reading Pinter’s poetry, I wonder?) seems to be going down pretty well with the French. Massey obviously knew just how to massage those preconceptions. From “Un Lecteur de Paris”:

[O]ui, les révélations du sergent Massey confirment la brutalité du corps d’élite américain mais il va beaucoup plus loin : il décrit parfaitement la banalisation de l’acte de tuer, la déshumanisation des soldats et leur nécrophilie car tuer est devenu un sport pour eux — un peu comme les tortures d’Abu Ghraib.

Trans: Yes, Massey’s revelations confirm the brutality of the elite US troops, but they go much further: they describe perfectly the banalisation of the act of killing, the dehumanisation of the soldiers, and their necrophilia, because killing has become a sport for them – a bit like the tortures of Abu Ghraib.

The other reviewer is less complimentary: only the totally naive would treat an account like this as a revelation. That US troops are brutal thugs will come as no surprise to a person of sophistication.

And then there was a link to Norman Podhoretz’s piece in Commentary, which effectively nails a few of the “Bush Lied” myths. Didn’t go down too well.

So – it’s 28 days.

Prime Minister Tony Blair has lost the key House of Commons vote on plans to allow police to hold terror suspects without charge for up to 90 days.

MPs rejected the plans by 322 votes to 291 – a bigger than expected majority of 31. It is Mr Blair’s first defeat since Labour came to power in 1997.

The defeat will be seen as a blow to the authority of Mr Blair, who said MPs had a “duty” to support the police.

MPs later backed a compromise detention time limit of 28 days.

I wonder – if Blair had originally pushed for 28 days instead of 90, would he have got it?

The BBC vote results are currently showing 41% supporting 90 days, 6% 42 days, 24% 28 days, and 29% for keeping it at 9 days. That’s 71% supporting an increase. Surprising.

Losing the debate about Intelligent Design being science? Just redefine science to mean whatever you want it to mean.

Risking the kind of nationwide ridicule it faced six years ago, the Kansas Board of Education approved new public-school science standards Tuesday that cast doubt on the theory of evolution.

The 6-4 vote was a victory for “intelligent design” advocates who helped draft the standards. Intelligent design holds that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power.

Critics of the new language charged that it was an attempt to inject God and creationism into public schools, in violation of the constitutional ban on state establishment of religion. […]

The new standards say high school students must understand major evolutionary concepts. But they also declare that the basic Darwinian theory that all life had a common origin and that natural chemical processes created the building blocks of life have been challenged in recent years by fossil evidence and molecular biology.

In addition, the board rewrote the definition of science, so that it is no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena.

(via Panda’s Thumb)

From CBC (via ArtsJournal):

Afghan poet Nadia Anjuman has been beaten to death and her husband and mother have been arrested.

The United Nations condemned the killing Tuesday as a symptom of continuing violence against Afghan women four years after the fall of the Taliban.

It is common for women to be beaten by their fathers, brothers or husbands and “honour” killings in which women are murdered to save the family from disgrace are still accepted in Afghanistan.

Anjuman, 25, was widely praised for her first book of poems, titled Gule Dudi, or Dark Flower. She had a large following among students in Afghanistan and neighbouring Iran.

She died Friday in a hospital in the western city of Herat where she lived. She had been studying at university.

Her husband has confessed to slapping her after an argument, said Nisar Ahmad Paikar, chief of the city’s police crime unit. Her mother has also been arrested, but no charges were immediately filed. […]

Thousands of people attended Anjuman’s burial in Herat on Sunday. “Students everywhere are so upset over this. She was such a prominent poet in Afghanistan,” said Homayan Ludin, a student at Kabul University.

From Wall and Piece:

After sticking up the picture I took five minutes to watch what happened next. A sea of people walked up, stared and left looking confused and slightly cheated. I felt like a true modern artist.

Banksy on his placement of “Discount Soup Can” – a picture of a Tesco Value can of cream of tomato soup, a la Warhol, which lasted six days on the walls of New York’s MOMA.

People either love me or they hate me, or they don’t really care.

ose who have tried to build a life on the basis of a little bit of Islam and a little bit of Western modernism are made uncomfortable by Ahmadinejad — who is forcing everyone to take sides.

Seen in that context, his pledge to wipe Israel off the map like “a stain of shame” is an attempt to force everyone to take sides. He is asking everyone to decide the nature of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Is it only about statehood, borders, security, sharing of water, settlements and diplomatic relations? If so, it cannot, should not, be treated as a religious conflict, Muslim vs. Jew. It would be a political conflict, one of countless such throughout history — and all the religious energy injected into it over the past half-century must be regarded as misplaced.

But if we face something other than a political conflict, there can be no question of ever accepting the existence of Israel as a state within any frontiers. Treaties signed with Israel become documents not of political expediency but of apostasy.

In 100 days, Ahmadinejad has shaken many mullahs on their pulpits and more monkeys up their trees — by asking everyone to be honest with themselves. He believes the world is heading for a clash of civilizations in which Islam is the only credible alternative to Western domination. And he is convinced that Islam will win.

It is now up to everyone to decide whether to take that analysis seriously, or dismiss it as the juvenile illusions of a novice who will, in time, learn that the real world is different.

But the dilemma that Ahmadinejad has created for Islamists inside and outside Iran remains. He says Islam is not just a flavor to add to policies that are not, indeed cannot be, Islamic. Either we go the whole way and abolish politics as a space distinct from religion, or we stop using religion as a device to give our policies the legitimacy they do not deserve.

Posing such questions is no mean feat.

iginal or profound:

“Milgram’s study demonstrated with brutal clarity that ordinary individuals could be induced to act destructively even in the absence of physical coercion, and humans need not be innately evil or aberrant to act in ways that are reprehensible and inhumane. While we would like to believe that when confronted with a moral dilemma we will act as our conscience dictates, Milgram’s obedience experiments teach us that in a concrete situation with powerful social constraints, our moral sense can be all too easily overwhelmed.”

Milgram’s interest in the study of obedience partly emerged out of a deep concern with the suffering of fellow Jews at the hands of the Nazis and an attempt to fathom how the Holocaust could have happened.

Open any psychology textbook on Milgram and you’ll see the same basic story. Which suggests that this is more a question of sloppy editing than of stealing someone’s ideas.

Now if Persaud had wanted to take a more interesting contrarian view of Milgram – not, admittedly, a likely scenario – he could found all he needed here and here. [For reasons known only to Typepad, you have to scroll down to read the posts.]

(via Norm)

A remarkable gesture (via lgf):

The organs of Ahmed Ismail Khatib, 13, the Palestinian boy shot Thursday by IDF soldiers in the West Bank town of Kabatiya near Jenin, will be donated to six Israelis.

Ahmed was shot after soldiers mistook his toy gun for a real one. Still, his parents decided to donate the organs “for the sake of peace between the two people.”

Meanwhile, the boy’s father said he was invited to meet with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who offered to apologize for the killing, Palestinian news agency Ma’an reported.

According to the Palestinian report, Ismail Khatib said that “if this would serve the Palestinian problem and advance a just peace, I will meet with Sharon and bring him a message of peace.”