Xenophobia hits a high in Zimbabwe

[dArKeR]

By Basildon Peta

Zimbabwe's government has launched a crackdown against foreigners as the paranoia increased over 70 suspected South African mercenaries.

Air Zimbabwe and department of immigration officials said scores of foreigners, especially East and West Africans, were being rounded up and deported as part of Operation Dzokera (go back).

Many foreigners were being denied entry into the country as President Robert Mugabe's government fears that it might itself fall victim to "mercenary activities" such as those the 70 men were allegedly plotting in Equatorial Guinea.

All passenger lists of commercial aircraft landing in Zimbabwe were being submitted to the Central Intelligence Organisation.

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=68&art_id=vn20040325035853611C331770&set_id=1

I'm so shocked this could happen!!! NOT. Just following Bush's democratic policy.

[AP]

1. US did the same thing -- even worse -- after 9/11, and the press didn't

call it xenophobia.

I guess it's all a matter of perspective. If you're a country which isn't playing according to the rules of neoliberalism, don't expect the media to treat you fairly.

[mobuto]

2. No comparison AP

You really don't seem to understand what's happening in Zimbabwe. We're not talking about isolated incidents, we're talking about a case of collective national insanity.

If you're a country which isn't playing according to the rules of neoliberalism, don't expect the media to treat you fairly.

But I guess its all a matter of perspective. As long as you whine about imperialism, some self-proclaimed "leftists" will let you get away with pretty much anything including, in the case of the good Mr. Mugabe, mass murder. Rhetoric over substance.

[AP]

3. The CIA announced that they're giving money to groups to destabilize the

gov't.

Mercenaries flew into their country recently.

Taking the threat of having your government toppled seriously isn't xenophobia. It's vigilance.

There was NO chance the US gov't was going to be toppled after 9/11 -- and I'm not so sure that the US gov't really cares a tremendous lot about American's safety. I think they put politics and profits first (look at the way they deal with BSE!). So you could argue that 9/11 isn't as serious as what Zimbabwe's confronting. But only the far left would call it xenophobia. The papers certainly didn't sell it as xenophobia.

[AP]

5. In fact, just read the article. It's only the headline which is silly.

What it describes in not xenophobia at all. It's vigilant policing in proportion to a legitimate threat.

[DulceDecorum]

11. Zimbabwe and the international right-wing

In both deals the middleman between Goosen and the "foreigners" was a right-winger and retired SADF Major-General associated with the CCB named Tai Minnaar, who in 1989 established a private company called Military Technical Services (MTS) that had links with the powerful South African mercenary recruitment agency Executive Outcomes (EO).<69> Shortly after the collapse of the second deal Minnaar suddenly died, officially of a heart attack. According to his girlfriend, however, his peculiar discoloration and bloating symptoms prior to death suggested that he may have been assassinated with some sort of poison, but this cannot be confirmed since relatives asked that his body be cremated and no autopsy was performed.<70> These two examples may represent only the tip of a much larger iceberg of secret efforts by foreigners to acquire South African CBW materials.

Project Coast and the International Right-Wing
Perhaps even more troubling is the possibility that Basson or other Coast personnel may have transferred dangerous CBW materials or know-how to elements of a loose international network of right-wing extremists. Some civilian Afrikaner paramilitary groups, whose pro-apartheid members remain violently opposed to black majority rule, have publicly threatened to attack their enemies with chemical and biological agents.<71> Investigative journalists are currently following certain leads in an effort to determine if former members of the SF or various SADF- and SAP-sponsored "death squads" may have subsequently collaborated with the civilian paramilitary right inside South Africa, which in recent months has again begun carrying out terrorist attacks.<72> Others have expressed fears that Basson and other Coast scientists were associated with an even broader international right-wing network, purportedly known as Die Organisasie (The Organization), among whose members are said to be expatriate Rhodesians and South Africans who emigrated to other countries both during the apartheid era and as the apartheid system was collapsing.<73>
If an organization of this sort actually exists, which remains to be substantiated, it may turn out that the American doctors Larry Ford and Jerry Nilsson, an outspoken white supremacist, were among its members. According to a pair of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informants, in the mid-1980s Dr. Ford transferred a suitcase full of dangerous "kaffir-killing" pathogens to Surgeon-General Knobel at the Los Angeles residence of the South African trade attaché, Gideon Bouwer.<74> It has also emerged that Nilsson fought as a volunteer against nationalist guerrillas during the Rhodesian civil war, that Ford and Nilsson repeatedly visited South Africa, that Knobel consulted with Ford on CBW matters and personally introduced Ford to Basson, that Basson arranged to have secret accounts opened in Ford's name, and that at Knobel's request Ford lectured Coast scientists about the contamination of household items with biological agents.<75> In the wake of Ford's March 2000 suicide, which transpired just as he was beginning to be implicated in the attempted assassination of his Irvine business partner James Patrick Riley, the police discovered an arsenal of small arms and explosives, Christian Identity militia literature, and over 260 containers of biological materials on his various properties. (For unknown reasons, the FBI has yet to divulge the contents of all but 20 or so of those containers.) Patients and former mistresses have testified that Ford secretly poisoned them, and a jar of ricin toxin was found in a refrigerator in his garage.<76> The fact that one of ex-Selous Scout and EMLC armorer Philip Morgan's "special applicators" was also found among Ford's possessions is itself indicative of what appears to have been a close relationship between the American doctor and key Project Coast personnel.
http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/SAfrica/Chemical/index_2426.html


Mid-1980s
Dr. Larry Ford, an American infectious disease specialist and CBW expert who had worked for the US government after graduating from high school, makes several trips to South Africa. In some cases he accompanies his American surgeon friend, Dr. Jerry Nilsson, an avowed white supremacist who had previously fought with the SAS during the Rhodesian civil war. Other trips are undertaken at the invitation of South African Army Surgeon-General Niel Knobel, who had befriended Ford due to their mutual interests in fertility drugs, AIDS prevention, and CBW. Ford later boasts on several occasions that he helped wiped out an entire village in Angola . He also claims that he parachuted into southern Africa to take blood samples from dead guerrilla fighters in order to help the US government determine which BW agents the Soviets had vaccinated them against.
—Stephen Burgess and Helen Purkitt, The Rollback of South Africa's Biological Warfare Program (USAF Academy, Colorado: USAF Institute for National Security Studies, 2001), pp. 35-6; Edward Humes, "The Medicine Man," Los Angeles Magazine (July 2001), p. 167.


1986
Dr. Larry Ford hands over a briefcase to Army Surgeon-General Knobel at the Beverly Hills mansion of the South African trade representative in Los Angeles, Gideon Bouwer. Bouwer unwittingly confides to an FBI informant, Peter Fitzpatrick, that the briefcase was filled with samples of virulent designer strains of cholera, anthrax, plague, and botulinum toxin-producing bacteria and "malaria" , as well as a pigment-specific "kaffir killing" bacterium.
http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/SAfrica/Biological/2435_2436.html

I wonder why on earth, people who have been exposed to toxins created by foreigners intent on stealing their land and natural resources would no longer welcome such foreigners into their nation.

1980
In "Operation Winter," with the collusion of British government monitors in Rhodesia, Rhodesian special operations assets are reportedly transferred covertly to South Africa. These assets supposedly include the Rhodesian SAS, the CIO and its agents, and the Selous Scouts, as well as black "mercenaries" and "the poisoners and their poisons," all of which are incorporated into the appropriate South African departments. British and American planes may have taken part in the transfer of men and equipment.
—Jeremy Brickhill, "Zimbabwe's Poisoned Legacy: Secret War in Southern Africa," Covert Action Quarterly 43 (Winter 1992-93), pp. 58-60.
http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/SAfrica/Chemical/2446.html


And as for their president Robert Mugabe, ......

1979
The Rhodesian CIO reportedly activates a plan to assassinate either Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) leader Robert Mugabe or Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU) leader Joshua Nkomo in London. An expatriate former British Special Air Service (SAS) member, "Taffy", is recruited by the CIO. After performing successful tests on dogs, he opts to use a rifle to shoot Mugabe with a dum dum bullet into which ricin is inserted, but the operation is aborted at the last minute. The ricin had been prepared as an assassination weapon, along with thallium and parathion, by Professor Symington of the University of Rhodesia.
—Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg, Plague Wars: The Terrifying Reality of Biological Warfare (New York: St. Martin's, 1999), pp. 224-7.
http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/SAfrica/Chemical/2446.html

Robert Mugabe should take the advice of Wolf Blitzer and simply
"get over it."
And give the foreigners what they want, you kaffir.

[AP]

12. It's so xenophobic to be extra vigilant in the face of fascism.

[DulceDecorum]

4. Oh I dunno

I will wait until they start launching missiles at quadriplegics in wheelchairs before I call the good people of Zimbabwe xenophobic.
And even after they have smashed cripples into the dust, I will pointedly refrain from criticizing them. After all, they are only making pre-emptive strikes to assure their national security.

[mobuto]

6. Ah the poor quadraplegics

because Israel just chooses to kill random persons with disabilities, right? Its not like they target the kind of guy who'd strap a bomb to a twelve year old...

[AP]

8. Oops. Selective outrage.

That'll kill credibility every time.

[mobuto]

9. Hear no Evil, See no Evil...

Hear the word "imperialist" used perjoratively and all is forgiven.

[AP]

10. Hear the word "profits" and all is fair.

Oh, and I love all those POSITIVE uses of the word 'imperialist' by the way.

Funny that you feel the need to qualify it the way you do.

[AP]

13. I'd love to hear one of your "non-perjorative" uses of word imperialism

by the way.

If you have a second, perhaps you could lay them out.

Maybe in the way the French gloriously defeated the Algerians in 1960-61? (But let's ignore July 2, 1962.)

[mobuto]

15. I imagine you think this is me

on my last visit to the Continent.

One dimensional anti-imperialism, especially decades after independence, is just as non-sensical and just as anachronistic as one-dimensional imperialism. Mugabe's a dictator and a mass murderer who has managed to destroy his country. That you would praise him because his rhetoric suits your purpose is quite telling.

[AP]

16. That's not an argument. If you have an argument about the good side of

imperialism, I'd love to hear it.

By the way, I've never praised Mobuto, but I think it's perfectly obvious what's really going on there.

I think you do too, and that's why you make "arguments" like the one you just made rather than engage with the truth.

[DulceDecorum]

14. And speaking of twelve year olds

How old was the daughter of Donald Woods when she was sent a poisoned t-shirt by pro-apartheid right-wingers?

Why should Mugabe allow such vermin to contaminate his nation?

[AP]

7. Read the article and tell me where Zimbabwe is overstepping bounds.

They check the names of passengers who fly in to the country. The US does that too now.

They're sending people back who fit the profile of potential mercenary. At least the article suggests that. It doesn't give any examples of that happening -- no names, not interviews with people who were sent back.

Is this xenophobia?