An Editorial note?

Although always leftist in his views, and not surprisingly so, as he was part of the youth of the 1970s, Meles Zenawi has never been more academic and intellectual in his articulation of his challenge to what he considers is the failing policy prescriptions of global neoliberalism, market fundamentalism, in Africa.

Although veiled in a disclaimer that his doctoral thesis on the subject (to the University of Rotterdam) does not reflect policies of the government that he leads, it was obvious that it was a matter of time before the tenet of his arguments would creep into official documents of the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF)-led government.

In his own admission, his was the paper that tried to repackage his party’s ideological conviction of so long into an academic challenge.

The role of the state in providing the push to overcome poverty in a developing nation is indispensable the intellectual Meles believes. The state thus needs to be a “developmental state” which ought to be democratic at the same time.

The politician Meles has embarked upon a bold project of making this state not only developmental and democratic (often unlikely bedfellows) but also ensuring continuity of political power to its leaders and cadres through a form of guarantee that is a “one party dominant state.”

For a political party with a history of centre-left ideology, as in the EPRDF, this appears to be a very pragmatic compromise. Unlike its forbearers in the leftist camp, it allows limited and strictly controlled room for other pillars of power and influence to exist and lets a tightly monitored marketplace of ideas emerge. However, this ought not reach the extent of a contesting political power to share or control the state.

The Revolutionary Democrats see the state as a useful instrument not only in steering economic growth but also as a powerful mechanism to help in the reengineering of society, in a manner that they see it fit, of course. Achieving economic growth is only a means to an end.

This end appears to evolve into a complete transformation of the country’s political economy to what is suitable for the ruling party. The one party state, which is apparently different from a single party system, aspires to form a boarder social base, including different interests of Ethiopian society under the umbrella of a governing movement. If at all there is a social group which the Revolutionary Democrats are reluctant to bring onboard, it is the private sector.

The space that the private sector seeks and how much of it governments are willing to concede is always debatable, both ideologically and academically, and varies from country to country.

Where the role of the state in society is defined as an institution that serves the common good - in its delivery of public goods such as collective security, administration of justice, and building of infrastructure - the private sector enjoys more space to thrive. This is an environment whereby a governing party that assumes political power involves liberalisation, privatisation, and deregulation.

The idea behind this is not without merit. A private sector that is less taxed and given much space to operate in the market creates jobs and wealth (for the private sector is considered to be more efficient in utilising resources than the public sector).

In addition, the embedded ideological conviction is that society could also be sheltered from the abusive dominance of the state apparatus. A state with fewer resources and as small a role as possible would have limited ability in intruding in the private affairs of citizens, ideally.

The mistrust between governments and businesses is nothing new; neither is it a phenomenon exclusive to former socialist regimes. Following the laissez-faire form of capitalism - which considers governments’ interference in the market a taboo - Western governments, particularly the United States (US), were convinced of the inevitable involvement of the state in the management of national economies. This view was, of course, reinforced by the historic crash of the world economy following the great Depression in the US in the early 1930s.

Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” was a policy prescription of Maynard Keynes, a British economist who was behind the formation of the Bretton Wood institutions: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB). He is also credited with developing the theory of “demand management,” a policy that encourages governments to use physical and monetary policy instruments to stimulate economic growth and reduce unemployment.

What Meles has introduced recently as the Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP) sounds very similar to the consensus that was reached in the Western world after World War I, the Keynesian-led New Deal. A document, in the sketch stage and yet to be developed into a proper plan, that is, from the political expression of goodwill, the Revolutionary Democrats appear to be treading along the same lines as the capitalists of the 1930s in the US and Europe.

Here too, they swear on their desire to build a capitalist society in Ethiopia down the road when they help its population earn a per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of 1,000 dollars. They aspire to have Ethiopia included on the list of middle-income countries by 2025. Their prescription of a policy that sounds very much like demand management clearly makes them “neo-Keynesians.” Perhaps, deceived by their leftist background, it would be misleading to think that they are the only political powers that have turned to the Keynesian model of macroeconomic management.

After the collapse of the global financial system and subsequent meltdown of the world economy in 2008, even the monetarist government of the US turned its face to Keynes. Dubbed by some as “Obanomics” and the “New-new Deal” by others, the US government and many of its peers in the West were seen bailing out their mega companies and trying to stimulate their national economies by injecting hundreds of billions in taxpayer money into them. With some of the companies that were "too big to fail," these governments took measures that barely stopped short of nationalisation.

Following these crises, leaders of the G-20, who held a meeting to which Meles had the privilege of being invited, took the advice of Keynes: market forces alone cannot salvage a national economy from collapse when declining business confidence is followed by a drop in investment, low consumption, depressed spending, and huge job losses. They concluded that government borrowing, spending, and a massive credit push in the economy becomes a necessary evil.

These recent developments have, indeed, vindicated politicians in the developing world, such as Meles, who have been trying to voice their discontent with the market fundamentalism of Ayn Rand and her disciples such as Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve for many years during the terms of George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton, and George Bush Jr.

It is obvious that the global liberal forces are on the retreat. As was the case in the early 1930s and the following decades, the time in Ethiopia and elsewhere in the world has come for social democratic ideals or centre-left parties.

Ethiopia’s history has not been short on such political powers. In fact, all its governments - whether imperial, military-Marxist, or guerrilla-cum-revolutionary democratic - had in common their views of what the state should be in the society they chose to govern.

To their luck, the popular view of the citizenry favours the involvement of the government in every affair of public life. Most Ethiopians do not seem to mind seeing a benevolent welfare state.

Although in the minority, this ideology of a paternalistic state is unsettling for many other people in Ethiopia. The growing influence and control of the government in the private business of citizens and groups sends a shiver down the spine of those who see that space for dissent and independent activities are increasingly stifled. It gets more alarming when the same government comes up with a desire to transform Ethiopia’s society but with the government taking up close to 85pc of the planned spending.

Meles's spending plan will be covered by local sources of income as much as possible the PM told donors last week at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). Doing so will free himself and the administration he leads from the accountability that comes from outside through loans and grants, he believes.

In trying to accomplish this, his party plans to increase tax collection to the GDP to 17pc in five years, from the current nine per cent. A rough calculation of this in real terms reaches 170 billion Br, from taxpayers annually.

Such an ambitious plan of demand management and even more daring task of revenue collection from domestic sources are not without their own dire consequences.

Financing mega public projects with the policy objective of creating as many jobs as possible has had terrible consequences elsewhere in the world. The stagflation of the US economy in the 1970s (where inflation galloped to new heights while unemployment was high) compelled the free market politicians in the US to impose quotas and price controls during the era of Richard Nixon.

Citizens should be protected from abuses of the government, Ronald Regan believed, and, along with Margaret Thatcher of Britain, their two monetarist regimes helped recover the world economy in the 1980s. Advocating the trickledown effect in an economy, whereby the wealth of the rich inevitably reaches the working class, both leaders took the historic route of liberalisation and deregulation that has not only limited state power in their societies but also paved the way for unprecedented creation of global wealth for almost four decades.

It is refreshing to see Meles being ambitious and taking such bold initiatives. That is expected of a leader. However, There is only so much a government can do on its own, the economic history of the world shows. Perhaps, it may be worth his efforts to consider the private sector as much in his proposed (yet to be elaborated upon) plan. What the country has been deprived of for so long is a system that allows fair competition in the market, based on merit and one’s own efforts.(http://www.addisfortune.com/fortune_editors_note.html)

As Western Civilization Lies Dying

By John Kozy


Global Research, September 29, 2010

The Western commercial system exists to extract more from consumers than it supplies in products and services. Its goal is profit and has never been to improve the human condition but to exploit it. When governments institutionalize this system, they place their nations on suicidal paths, because as Jefferson recognized, "Merchants have no country." It is not terrorism that threatens the security of the Western World, it is the Western World's commercial system.

A man suffering from severe chest pains collapses. His wife calls 911. An ambulance arrives, the EMTs treat the patient, place him in the ambulance's bed, and start off to the hospital. Along the way, the engine stalls. The ambulance's staff begins arguing about how to get the motor restarted. One says more gasoline is needed, another says there's water in the tank, a third says the fuel filter is clogged. While they argue, the patient lies dying.

This situation is analogous to what's happening in America and parts of Europe. While economists and politicians argue, their nations are in the throes of death. These people are looking for the devil in the details, but he is not there. It's the system itself that’s diabolical.

The Western commercial system is extractive. It exists to extract more from consumers than it supplies in products and services. Its goal is profit, and profit literally means to make more (pro-ficere). Its goal has never been to improve the human condition but to exploit it. It works like this:

Consider two water tanks, initially each partially full, one above the other. One gallon of water is dumped from the upper tank into the lower one for each two gallons extracted from the lower tank and pumped into the upper tank. Over time, the lower tank ends up empty and the upper tank ends up full. The circulation of water between the tanks ends.

Essentially, this scenario describes all commercial systems based on profit. It is why the top 20 percent of Americans has 93 percent of the nation's financial wealth and the bottom 80 percent has a mere seven percent. It is why the bottom 40 percent of all income earners in the United States now collectively own less than one percent of the nation’s wealth. It is why the nation's poverty rate is now14.3 percent, about 43.6 million people or one in seven. It is also why the Wall Street Journal has reported that 70 percent of people in North America live paycheck to paycheck. It is also why, despite numerous pledges over decades, no progress has been made in reducing world-wide poverty. The system is a thief.

The economy has collapsed not because of misfeasance, deregulation, or political bungling (although all may have been proximate causes), it has collapsed because the pockets of the vast majority of Americans have been picked. The housing bubble didn't burst because home prices had risen, it burst because the pockets of consumers had been picked so clean they could no longer service their mortgages.

What the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans don't realize is that some in this group will begin to target the others in order to keep the extractive process working. In fact, it's already happening. "The brute force of the recession earlier this year turned back the clock on Americans' personal wealth to 2004 and wiped out a staggering $1.3 trillion as home values shrank and investments withered." Little of this loss from investments was suffered by the lower 80 percent of Americans. There is, after all, no goodwill within greed, and the market can be and often is manipulated.

The "system" has impoverished the people, the circulation between the two tanks has been reduced to a trickle, and our economists have convinced the government that the only way to get things flowing again is to pour more water into the upper tank, hoping that the spillover will settle in the lower tank. Better to pray for rain!

This impoverishment has numerous mathematically certain implications; two major ones follow.

First, the system can't be fixed by tinkering with the details. At best, tinkering with the details can merely slow down the depletion of consumer wealth. As long as the system is based on profit, more must be taken than is given. The rate of depletion can be changed, but the depletion cannot be stopped. This conclusion is as mathematically certain as subtraction. Why the geniuses in the American economics community, all who whom taut economics for its use of mathematical models, cannot understand this is a conundrum. They can tinker as much as they like. Some tinkering will produce apparent benefits, some won't. But one thing is certain—the system, unless it is fundamentally and essentially changed—will break down over and over again just as it has at fairly regularly intervals in the past. As long as maintaining the system is more important that the welfare of people, the people have no escape. They are eventually impoverished—both when the system works and when it doesn't! Two thousand years of history has produced not a single counterexample to this conclusion. Prosperity never results from exploitation.

Another implication that few seem to recognize concerns the national debt.

We are told that the burden of paying off the debt will be borne by our progeny, our children, and their children. But unless the Western commercial system undergoes fundamental changes, the children and grand children of most Americans will never have to bear this burden. Why? Not even governments can pick empty pockets. So if the debt is to be paid by raising taxes, the children and grandchildren of that 20 percent of Americans who hold 93 percent of the nation's financial wealth will have to pay them. Most, if not all, of these people are also investors. Given the acrimonious debate about letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire, the chances of that ever happening are slim to none.

Will the debt then be paid by devaluing the dollar, by printing money? Many believe that the government will eventually take this alternative. Let's say it does. Then all the dollars held by anyone anywhere will be devalued equally, including the dollars held by that same 20 percent of Americans. Again the wealthy 20 percent of Americans, having the most, lose the most. The devalued dollars they collect on their investments are merely added to their other devalued dollars, and the more the dollar must be devalued to repay the debt, the more the wealthy lose.

And finally, will the government default? Most seem to believe this to be unlikely. Perhaps, but isn't it the best alternative? Investors will simply not be paid, but the rest of their money will retain its value unless other economic consequences reduce it. Even Morgan Stanley recognizes that "the sovereign debt crisis won't end till deeply indebted rich country governments give holders of their bonds a good soaking."

So relax, Americans, your children will never bear the burden of paying off the national debt. Just sit back and enjoy watching the wealthy squirm.

Some say that if the nation defaults, the government will be unable to borrow. But other governments have defaulted without losing their ability to borrow. Russia, Argentina, and Zimbabwe are but recent examples. Of course, there are severe economic consequences to defaulting, but there are severe consequences to each of these alternatives too. How much harder can life be for the 80 percent of Americans holding a mere seven percent of the nation's wealth? There are, after all, no degrees of broke; no broke, broker, and brokest.

Will investors refuse to lend? Doubtful. A wealthy person can do four things with money: give it away, spend it, stuff it under the mattress, or invest it. Those are the only alternatives, and it is unlikely that much of it can be spent or that many will have the inclination to give it away or save it. So the wealthy really lack a great deal of choice.

Finally, a hidden principle underlies this extractive system—It is okay for some to enrich themselves by making others poor. Even though this is exactly what thieves do, no one, to my knowledge, has ever pointed out that this principle is immoral. It appears to be accepted universally as economically acceptable. But consider these two similar principles: (1) It is okay for some to improve their health by making others unhealthy, and (2) It okay for some to avoid the consequences of their criminal acts by making others bear them. No one would consider the last of these right, yet all three are logically and materially identical.

Some may claim that without profit, no commercial system can function effectively. If true, the implications for humanity are horrific. It implies that mankind was made in Satin's image, that the Commandments, especially the tenth, are fraudulent, that all the philosophy and literature that defines Western Civilization are nugatory, that no essential distinction exists between so-called civilized and barbaric nations, that all governments are illegitimate, that words like justice and fairness are meaningless, that the law is lawless, that society disintegrates into nociety, and that nothing really matters. The economy is Bedlam, the Earth is the Universe's Insane Asylum, and the craziest are in charge. What kind of human mind would ever attempt to defend this abomination?

This Western commercial system exists merely to enrich vendors by exploiting consumers. When governments institutionalize this system, they place their nations on suicidal paths. Astute observers of history have long recognized what Thomas Jefferson made explicit—"Merchants have no country." Oh, yes! These merchants will object vehemently. Pay no attention. Just watch what they do.

They expect favorable treatment and services from governments but do everything possible to keep from paying for them in taxes and exhibit no concern whenever their native lands face bankruptcy. When their native lands face stress, as in times of war, the people are called upon to sacrifice while the merchants are allowed to profiteer. When John F. Kennedy said, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country," he was not speaking to corporate America. Does any reader of this piece really believe that the makers of Humvees, drones, and F16s would ever consider supplying them to our military at cost? Yet how great is the cost of the sacrifice parents are asked to make by sending their children off to fight hideous wars?

People, a merchant unwilling to sacrifice for his country has no country, he will support no country, defend no country, and if such people are given control of a nation, they will suck its blood dry and sell off the body parts to the highest bidder. Not even a recognizable corpse will remain. It is not terrorism that threatens the security of the Western World, it is the Western World's commercial system.



John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who writes on social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a university professor and another 20 years working as a writer. He has published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed from that site's homepage

Vulnerable nations could hasten international action on climate change by taking industrialised countries to court, say lawyers

Climate-vulnerable developing nations could use international law to break the current deadlock in the intergovernmental negotiations onclimate change by taking industrialised nations to court, says a paper published today (4 October) by the Foundation for International Environmental Law and Development (FIELD).

The publication comes as government officials from around the world gather in Tianjin , China for three days of negotiations under theUnited Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

“A large part of the relevant legal literature suggests that the main polluting nations can be held responsible under international law for the harmful effects of their greenhouse-gas emissions,” says the paper’s author, lawyer Christoph Schwarte.

“As a result affected countries may have a substantive right to demand the cessation of a certain amount of emissions. In selected cases they also have the procedural means to pursue an inter-state litigation in an international judicial forum such as the International Court of Justice in The Hague .”

Schwarte’s paper outlines a possible legal argument for such a lawsuit and offers some observations on the potential impacts of bringing a case before an international court or tribunal.

While there are various substantive and procedural legal hurdles, under certain circumstances litigation under public international lawwould be possible and could become a bargaining chip in the negotiations.

“Today, a credible case for inter-state litigation on climate change can be made,” says Schwarte. “Developing country governments are understandably reluctant to challenge any of the big donor nations in an international court or tribunal. But this may change once the impacts of climate change become even more visible and an adequate agreement remains wanting.”

FIELD analyzed the current legal discourse and has summarized its findings in a longer working paper, which it has made available online as an open wiki document to allow legal academics and practitioners to comment on, criticise or strengthen the arguments.

“While international judicial organs are unlikely to issue hard hitting judgments, climate change litigation may help to create the political pressure and third-party guidance required to re-invigorate the international negotiations, within or outside the UNFCCC,” says Schwarte.

Since the failed Copenhagen summit in 2009, there has been limited progress in the UNFCCC climate negotiations. At the current rate of progress, a new legal framework and ambitious emission reductions look unlikely in the near-term.

As a result billions of extra tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will be released into the atmosphere, and many scientists warn that this means global temperatures could rise by 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

Joy Hyvarinen, Director of FIELD says ‘Progress in the international climate change negotiations is nowhere near enough to reducegreenhouse gas emissions to a safe level. Something new is needed to push the negotiations forward. Perhaps an international court case could help bring new momentum to the negotiations.’

Analysis: New Ethiopian policy to handle disaster risk

from ReliefWeb

Source: United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs - Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN)

GAMBELLA, 27 September 2010 (IRIN) - Huge bonfires mark the Orthodox Christian feast day of Meskel on 27 September, which coincides with the end of the rainy season in the highlands of Ethiopia. This year rains were good; too good in some places.

The residents of the Cheffa Valley, some 350km northeast of Addis Ababa, will no doubt celebrate the end of the rains. When floods hit the area in late August [ http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=90287 ], buildings collapsed, houses filled with mud and some villages had to be abandoned while women and children camped at a school and men slept out with their livestock.

Adam Mustafa, 80, said the floods were the worst in his lifetime, a punishment from God; other residents blamed bad management of drainage canals and excessive run-off from the degraded highlands. Local officials blamed a changing climate.

Whatever the causes, help came from local government, welfare groups, the military, local business, UN agencies and international NGOs. A relatively small but effective operation provided immediate help with food, plastic sheeting, clothing, blankets, soap, water purification and healthcare. Military helicopters ferried supplies to stranded villages.

The valley was one of dozens of places across the country to face floods in 2010. Overall this year, the government estimates several hundred thousand people will be affected, while tens of thousands have been forced to leave their homes, at least temporarily, in seven regions. Floods continue to threaten some parts of lowland areas in the Somali and Gambella regions.

Disaster strategy

A new government strategy is under development to establish new systems to tackle perennial hazards including drought, floods and disease outbreaks.

Well-fed by rivers from the highlands on both sides, the broad Cheffa valley, green and sometimes swampy, has obvious agricultural potential - a thin furze of seedlings of a staple crop, teff, is sprouting in the alluvial soils of the flood plain. Some farmers are doing their first weeding, but the floods washed away their earlier planting attempts and they said they could not afford to buy more seeds. Longer-term recovery needs, such as seeds, will take longer to mobilize, local official Jibril Osman Wado told IRIN.

"If this situation continues yearly," said Wado, "farmers will find it difficult to survive." Wado is the zonal head of disaster prevention and food security headquartered in the town of Kemisse.

Health workers were still trying to dry out the files and stores at Kemisse's health centre. Fridges, supplies, drugs, computers and paperwork were swamped. Vacuum tubes for blood samples were caked in mud, medical records turned to pulp and operations disrupted.

"I feel for the patients who were sent back without service," said health centre administrator Hussein Said.

Handling the threat of floods - often overlapping with other natural or man-made emergencies - demands a coherent government response and the sound management of domestic and international resources.

But local officials are careful not to overplay the flooding situation - although it is "challenging", according to Wado - and to emphasise the importance of a recovery plan.

An ability to take relatively small disasters in stride is part of the government's "Disaster Risk Management" approach - a policy framework which looks at the cycle of preventing, mitigating and recovering from disasters in a coherent way.

Drawing on the "Hyogo Framework" [ http://www.unisdr.org/eng/hfa/hfa.htm ], developed at the 2005 World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Japan, Ethiopia's draft policy promises a "paradigm shift". After decades of emergency and reactive relief operations, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said this month the country would no longer need food aid by 2015. The new policy marks an effort to break with the past, by prioritizing national preparedness and engaging the private and voluntary sectors and international agencies only where needed. In the past, "the disaster response structure was excessively reliant on external resources", the document states.

Coping better with disaster - and being seen to do so - is a key government objective, observers say.

Image issues

To the chagrin of Ethiopia's leadership, who have now been in power longer than the former regime of Mengistu Hailemariam, overthrown in 1991, the country struggles to shake off an association with starvation and beggary, analysts told IRIN.

This has been a good year for food security in the whole region but despite the good weather, Ethiopia's vulnerabilities - food insecurity being the most serious - have not gone away. In a country of some 80m, with two million more mouths to feed every year, even a small percentage of needy people translates into a formidable burden.

According to government figures, some five million Ethiopians - about 6 percent - require emergency food aid in 2010, amounting to some 650,000MT (3 percent of the projected national crop production of 18m MT). A further 7.5m people who are chronically food-insecure receive cash or food assistance through the government's Productive Safety Net Programme.

Ethiopia, whose modern history has been closely entwined with drought and food shortages, has been the scene of innovative programmes to mitigate food and climate risk: weather and risk insurance, safety nets, cash transfers and public works programmes.

The government has retooled its disaster response architecture several times since the creation of the Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (RRC) in the 1970s. In the latest policy a new Federal Disaster Risk Management Council, chaired by Meles, is proposed as the top decision-making body.

Numbers of those in need (and the definition of need), statistics about levels of malnutrition and the prevalence of diseases are closely managed and their political and diplomatic impact closely monitored, aid workers and observers told IRIN.

Some aid workers worry, however, that in the drive to shed the image of a country perennially in crisis and needing foreign emergency aid, the government is too quick to minimize problems.

The 2010 Humanitarian Requirements Document prepared by the government and its international partners refers to a "shift in targeting of beneficiaries for various interventions"; by using a new way of defining those who are eligible for food aid, the head count of the needy fell by hundreds of thousands.

Some aid workers worry that the very poor may lose out in the drive to show progress away from relief dependency.

A humanitarian observer told IRIN the government's approach was to "vapourize" any notion of Ethiopian dependency on emergency handouts.

Just as if it were thrown on a Meskel bonfire.

bp/mw

Mugabe's darkest secret: An £800bn blood diamond mine he's running with China's Red Army

Editors Note: I like this story cause it holds water in other African cases too.Ours(Ethiopia) is a typical example of hidden inter-party and regime deals are sealed with China on resources and bids .

By Andrew Malone

Across a remote tract of southern Africa, naturally fortified by mountains and patrolled by hundreds of soldiers with dogs trained to tear intruders apart, teams of mining experts are hard at work.

Yet they are not speakers of Shona, the native language of this land on the border between Zimbabwe and Mozambique. No, thousands of miles from home, under a broiling African sun, these slim, pale-skinned figures are members of the Chinese military.

Working alongside henchmen from one of Africa’s most murderous regimes — headed by Robert Mugabe — the Chinese are here to oversee Beijing’s investment in the world’s most controversial commodity: blood diamonds.

High-ranking officials of China’s People’s Liberation Army, they have been striving to escape detection for their role in this blood-thirsty — but hugely lucrative — trade.

For here, carved out of the African bush, is a runway big enough for huge cargo planes. There is also sophisticated radar equipment, a fully-operational control tower and comfortable barracks for the Chinese officials overseeing the entire operation.

And twice a week, its wings wobbling on waves of thermals rising from this scorching corner of the continent, an Antonov An-12 cargo plane can be heard droning towards the airstrip.

The Antonov — developed by the Soviets and, like so much else, copied by the Chinese and manufactured en masse — carries men and equipment from a secret military airbase outside Zimbabwe’s capital Harare, whose job is to tear the gems from the earth. It deposits between eight and ten Chinese military officials, who work overseeing members of the Zimbabwean military, as well as local labour who work at gunpoint in slave conditions.

The departing flights leave with rough, uncut diamonds worth millions.

No flight plans are filed and there are no records of these trips. Such secrecy — and sophisticated organisation — is understandable. This is the centre of diamond fever, and the scene of the biggest diamond heist in history.

Here, at the Marange diamond fields in the far southeast of Zimbabwe, where four planes bound direct for China have thundered out of the secret bush runway already this year, astonishing natural wealth has been found in the soil. Indeed, so common are diamonds here that, for many years, local children used the ‘hard stones’ in catapults to hunt birds, not realising that they were firing unimaginable riches into the sky.

Searching for hope: Zimbabweans rummage through the dirt for diamonds before Mr Mugabe found out about mine. Now the area is considered a military zone - with people beaten to death who enter

But stomach-gnawing poverty — life expectancy here has halved to just 35 since Mugabe came to power in 1980 — led to a local diamond rush as news spread that riches were to be found.

Professionals such as doctors, nurses, teachers and plumbers as well as other workers all descended on the fields four years ago, hoping to find enough stones in the earth to survive as the country’s currency collapsed, with worthless notes blowing through the streets.

Yet all their hopes were crushed when Robert Gabriel Mugabe, the 86-year-old Zimbabwean president, and his ruling military junta, also came to hear of the rumours of such wealth.

Mugabe’s military — many of whom have been given training in torture techniques in China — reacted in characteristically brutal fashion, shooting hundreds of people, setting Alsatian dogs on others and raping women and children.

They wanted the diamonds for themselves. The carnage had the desired effect: the poor and wretched were driven from the fields, leaving the way clear for Zimbabwe’s military chiefs to move in.

Today, the fields are a military zone — and anyone caught there faces being beaten to death.

The reason for the secrecy became apparent during an undercover investigation at the fields, where I found conclusive evidence of collusion between China and Mugabe.
In an official — but highly-confidential — agreement between the two countries, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and Mugabe’s military chiefs are plundering this diamond find, believed to be the biggest in the history of the world and worth an estimated £800 billion.

So vast are the riches that diamond experts believe the gems from Marange — in a country of less than ten million people — could account for more than a quarter of all diamonds mined around the globe, and could even trigger a massive slump in diamond prices if the stones come on the market and cause a glut.

Not that the people of Zimbabwe will see any of these riches. Instead, in return for the gems, the Chinese are paying Mugabe’s thugs in guns and ammunition, ensuring his regime can stay in power despite international condemnation of his atrocities.

The two countries — both with appalling human-rights records — are involved in a vile scramble for loot at Marange, and there is clear evidence that Mugabe and his generals are also personally stealing millions from the trade.

Secret documents obtained by the Mail reveal that the company given the rights to the diamond fields —called Mbada Diamond Company — is fronted by Mugabe’s trusted former personal helicopter pilot, with Chinese military officials as silent partners.

The documents reveal that the pilot — Robert Mhlanga, who has no experience of mining — was personally appointed by Mugabe, with Chinese partners named as Deng Hongyan, Zhang Shibin, Zhang Hui, Jiang Zhaoyao and Cheng Qins. With military camps set up around the perimeter, and three separate fences erected to keep out smugglers and spies, local villagers told me appalling stories of how they have been driven from the land at gunpoint.

Soldiers set their dogs on one girl, who was mauled and killed in front of her parents. The military said this was a warning to others to keep away from the fields; at least seven people caught near the fields were killed by the military in the last month alone and their bodies dumped

Lucky Sibanda, a local man, showed me the wounds on his back where he was attacked by dogs after the military caught him by the fields. ‘These Chinese men have hard hearts,’ he said. ‘They are taking away diamonds that could save this country. I hate them.’

The disclosures make a mockery of the decision by the Kimberley Process — the diamond watchdog set up in the wake of the diamond war in Sierra Leone — to allow Mugabe to sell gems from Marange — which is in the remotest, most inaccessible part of his impoverished nation.

And it comes as the issue is once again in the spotlight following supermodel Naomi Campbell’s controversial appearance at the war-crimes trial of Charles Taylor, the cannibal warlord who funded the bloodshed and slaughter of more than 200,000 people in Sierra Leone in a battle over diamonds.

For, while Mugabe insists these diamonds will be for benefit of his people, the truth is they are already being used to fund a war chest designed to keep him and his generals in power, while millions more are siphoned into their personal accounts.
That much was made clear to me during a chilling conversation I had as night fell this week near the diamond fields.

There, at a meeting in a car on deserted waste ground — set up after tortuous negotiations through a go-between — one of Mugabe’s most senior intelligence chiefs rubbed his hands with glee at the deal with the Chinese, and told me the weapons were being handed out to the military in preparation for a brutal new crackdown against opponents.

‘There is a memorandum of understanding between China and Zimbabwe — Beijing supplies weapons to us, and we allow them to mine diamonds.’ As well as paying a share of the diamond profits to Mugabe’s regime, he confirmed that China has agreed to supply military hardware to Zimbabwe.
‘It is a government-to-government deal,’ the official said. ‘It has been signed at the highest level.

Mocking the ‘monkeys in the West’ who have been outraged by Mugabe’s brutality, my source — a cold-hearted killer — predicted that the diamond deal with Beijing would mean they could stay in power indefinitely.

‘You can write 1,000 stories, and print them 1,000 times, but it won’t make any difference,’ smirked the official. ‘We have all the diamonds, so we have all the weapons — and we will kill anyone who tries to take anything from us.’

During an hour-long conversation, the intelligence source — whose identity I know, but who insisted I do not use his name or rank — also admitted that, without the Chinese pact, the ruling junta would have been driven from power. ‘But now we have all the guns we need,’ he said.

Of course, Zimbabwe is not Sierra Leone, where Taylor’s forces drove civilians from diamond fields there, brutally cutting off the arms of thousand of people. Mugabe, who is reported to be in poor health, is far too clever for that.

Never killing so many, or so openly, that the West would be forced to intervene, he has become Africa’s second-longest-serving leader by quietly terrorising the population, killing opponents and using his dreaded secret police, rather than wholesale slaughtering — with the exception of 25,000 members of the Ndebele tribe he murdered in the Eighties.

The country is run as a personal fiefdom for Mugabe and his military junta, all of whom live in palatial homes and expect a personal cut from every aspect of the country’s wealth — from road ‘tolls’ raising millions and going to their personal accounts, to companies set up to capitalise on the diamond find.

‘Just because they are crooks, doesn’t mean they aren’t clever crooks,’ says one veteran underground Zimbabwe journalist. ‘These guys were trained by the North Koreans and at Nanking Military Academy in China. They are thugs, but smart — that’s why they are so scary.’

To protect their wealth and grip on power, the junta runs three different intelligence services, hundreds of thousands strong. Countless opposition politicians have been murdered, not to mention hundreds of white farmers.

A human rights activist was jailed and tortured last month for giving Kimberley Process officials details of abuses at the fields, including the torture and murder of gwejas — illegal miners caught in the area.

The arms-for-diamonds deal between Zimbabwe and China was set up by General Constantine Chiwenga, a brutal killer and one of the so-called ‘dirty half-dozen’ military chiefs who run the country for Mugabe.

Believing the Chinese would be ‘more disciplined’ in extracting diamonds, Chiwenga struck the deal with Beijing during a trip to China last year in order to control sales for his personal benefit and that of Mugabe, who has more than £1.5 billion hidden in secret Asian bank accounts.

Already, an operation is underway to hide the bloodshed and abuses at Marange ahead of a series of visits planned by Kimberley Monitors to decide whether diamond sales should continue.

Mocking those ‘fools’, my source — who reports directly to Chiwenga — sniggered that they would just show officials ‘the good bits’ and would make sure that any traces of brutality were hidden.

Asked if he believed these stones are ‘blood diamonds’, the thug laughed again. ‘This is a military operation, not a civilian operation, and that means that of course they are. Are you a fool?’

Not that a worldwide ban on Zimbabwean stones would stop the flow of diamonds out of Marange. Gripped by diamond fever, even these Chinese communists are trying to make money on the side.

I watched as two Chinese officials approached illegal diamond smugglers at a notorious trading point just outside the Marange perimeter. They left after purchasing uncut gems for their own private sales.

As well as flying diamonds out directly from Marange, other shipments are taken out via a military base near Harare, while lorry loads of soil from the diamond fields are trucked overland to a port in Mozambique, and then shipped for processing on Chinese soil.

And, at a town called Manica, just over the border in Mozambique, Chinese and Lebanese dealers run an international smuggling hub, mopping up any diamonds being sold by the few gwejas still brave enough to risk their lives at the field.

Once the diamonds are cut, the best stones for rings and other jewellery are sold back into the diamond network through dealers in India and the Middle East. Commercial grade stones are used in industry, helping fuel China’s rise as a superpower.

During a visit to one infamous Lebanese dealer, who was surrounded by armed guards, I was told simply: ‘I don’t want to talk. If you have diamonds, show me them. If you don’t have any, leave. Now.’

My gruesome military source was correct: it is impossible to police these diamonds, whatever the Kimberley Process decides.

Borders are porous; officials are corrupt. I was offered blood diamonds within ten minutes of arriving in Manica.

Perhaps now is the time for a new ethical debate: should diamonds now forever be associated with, quite literally, having blood on one’s hands?

Only consumers can decide; Zimbabwe’s dead can’t.

ICC to open liaison office in front of genocide suspect PM

ICC President Sang-Hyun Song and African Union Commission Chairperson Jean Ping meeting in Addis Ababa (AU Website)

By Ankober

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is set to establish a liaison office in Addis Ababa to serve as its branch office in Africa, sources confirm.

Judge Sang-Hyun Song, President of the ICC, concluded a two day visit to the headquarters of the African Union(AU) in Addis Abeba and met with its Commission Chairperson Jean Ping, who reiterated the body’s commitment to end impunity, two months ago. The Economist in its issue on the week of the 20th June 2010 had also reported about the opening of the branch.

“How can such a big organisation that fights genocide, open an office in front of Africa’s top genocide perpetrator, Meles ?’’ our source posited.

While the letter by Genocide Watch sent in March 2009 to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, asking for a full investigation into the Ethiopian government’s complicity in widespread crimes against humanity is still hanging, the opening of the Branch in Addis Ababa just because it is the seat of the African Union is a travesty of justice for some of our respondents.

They added that organisations like Genocide Watch and the Solidarity Movement for a New Ethiopia (SMNE) need to press ICC to stop from opening its branch in Addis Abeba before the full investigations of the High Commissioner are finalized.

“African states had feared that The Hague was stalling on financing a launch to the liaison office after African countries collectively resolved not to cooperate with the ICC in arresting and handing over Sudanese President Omar El-Bashir who is wanted by the court for war crimes he allegedly committed in Darfur.” Sudan Tribune reported.

The International Criminal Court is the only permanent international court established with the mission to help put an end to impunity for the perpetrators of the most serious crimes, namely the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, and thus to contribute to the prevention of such crimes.

Foreigners engaged in banking in Ethiopia, law prohibits

By Ankober

The banking sector in Ethiopia has been protected from involvement of foreigners and bankers by Banking Proclamation No. 1984.However, negating this Proclamation, the government in Ethiopia has been illegally allowing foreigners and foreign banks to invest in the sector.

Although, the regime and its ideologues have in various forums staunchly argued that the opening of the banking and telecommunication sectors to private or foreign investors would hazard the country security, economy and basically opposes their political ideology, since few years, a growing number of foreign owned banks and foreigners are being involved in the business sector.

For many, the 2007 announcement by Commerzbank, the second largest German bank, to open an office in Ethiopia was unexpected news and contrary to the law. The Bank opened its Eastern Africa branch at the DH Geda Tower 9 Floor Bole Sub city, Bole Road after the arrival of Chancellor Dr. Angela Merkel along with the bank’s officials to Addis Ababa in 2007.The move then made many wonder whether there was political pressure at government to government level. The office was opened to perform representative functions and carry out market research.
Similar to this bank, different Sudanese, American and Chinese banks and citizens are involved in Ethiopia’s banking sector.

Details to come soon...