Zimbabwe

LONDON – After the downs of 2006 surely 2007 can only be up? Don’t be so sure but there is one thing we can all do to save the planet from mankind’s excess – a little more walking. In the days when the International Herald Tribune was on the Rue de Berri, off the Champs Elysees, I would often walk there from my pension in the Marais, three or so miles down the Seine. It is quite remarkable that one can conveniently traverse the length of one of the world’s major cities without having to leave a towpath or back alley, except for the last 500-yard dash up from the river. The same is true in London. Setting off from the hotel on the edge of Kensington Gardens where the guerrilla chiefs of the patriotic Front stayed during the London constitutional conference on Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, it was possible to...

LONDON – Fifteen white Zimbabwean farmers, their land taken from them in one of the most badly conceived land reform programs ever enacted, announced recently that they have been invited to start farming in Nigeria where land is both plentiful and, by tradition, reasonably fairly distributed. Land reform has been given a bad name in Zimbabwe where the most modern and productive farmers have been summarily stripped of their titles for no other reason than the color of their skin. In Venezuela, likewise, a typical Latin American country still mired in its feudal division of land, its mercurial president, Hugo Chávez, is stirring the issue of land seizures, a policy that is more beholden to his short term electoral needs than to any long term thought-out policy for diminishing rural poverty and inequality. Yet careful land reform is an absolute must in many countries – in Nepal where a dangerous...

London – It sometimes takes a lot of faith to believe it, but most of Africa is going slowly in the right direction. Once again the pessimists have been confounded. The run up to last weekend’s parliamentary election in Zimbabwe seemed to be African despotism at its worst with President Robert Mugabe blatantly calling on his supporters to “axe” opposition activists. But the heroism of the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, and his supporters paid off. Although they did not win, they secured a handsome vote that gives them a great deal of leverage in the new parliament to argue not just for political reform but for economic change too. Mr Tsvangirai is now well placed to topple Mr Mugabe in the presidential election in two year’s time. There may not be the political “renaissance” that presidents Bill Clinton and Thabo Mbeki once spoke of. There are too many wars tearing up...

LONDON – Memories are short, too conveniently so. The life and death drama now being played out in Zimbabwe in southern Africa is a tragic illustration of this human weakness that knows no colour line. Thirty five years ago the then named Rhodesia, a British colony, ruled by a white minority, made its unilateral declaration of independence. The break with the mother country had come after an acrimonious period of resisting pressure from London to modestly widen the franchise. For fourteen years Rhodesia was a pariah state, boycotted by order of the UN Security Council, yet finding ways to circumvent the embargo and prosper in a way that, if it had happened today, would make Saddam Hussein green with envy. Even the big British oil companies, Shell and BP, connived in the sanctions busting with, if not a nod, at least a wink from Britain’s Labour government. That was Britain’s mistake...