Cape Point and Da Gama Peak
Give me back my broken night | My mirrored room, my secret life | It's lonely here, | There's no one left to torture | Give me absolute control | Over every living soul | And lie beside me, baby, | That's an order!
It is a standoff war in which the Pentagon lobs million-dollar cruise missiles into a famine-haunted African wasteland the size of Texas, hoping to kill lone terror suspects who might be dozing in candlelit huts. (The raids' success or failure is almost impossible to verify.)
It is a covert war in which the CIA has recruited gangs of unsavory warlords to hunt down and kidnap Islamic militants and — according to Isse and civil rights activists — secretly imprison them offshore, aboard U.S. warships.
Mostly, though, it is a policy time bomb that will be inherited by the incoming Obama administration: a little-known front in the global war on terrorism that Washington appears to be losing, if it hasn't already been lost.
"Somalia is one of the great unrecognized U.S. policy failures since 9/11," said Ken Menkhaus, a leading Somalia scholar at Davidson College in North Carolina. "By any rational metric, what we've ended up with there today is the opposite of what we wanted."
Paul Salopek | Nobody is Watching
Olifantsbospunt to Simonsbank
Give me crack and anal sex | Take the only tree that's left | And stuff it up the hole | In your culture | Give me back the Berlin wall | Give me Stalin and St Paul | I've seen the future, brother: | It is murder.
Screw Mogadishu. The Courts will prevail. Besides, on the strength of one of your earlier attempts to invade that country, I warned you foreign fuckers to stay out of Africa.
But that was five or six years ago. Today, weep for Harare, a tragedy of our own making.
CapeTalk carried an item this morning wherein it stated that a visibly thinner Braam Hanekom has returned from our northern neighbour. The Cape Town-based refugee rights activist and chair of People Against Suffering Suppression Oppression and Poverty (PASSOP) reckons the game in that cholera-infested country is almost up.
I don't recall Braam's words, but I do remember what he and others had to say. With extended-family members in various stages of either staying or leaving the place, I also know that Tamar Jacobson holds Zimbabwe pretty close to her heart.
Collapse is all but complete and despair and desperation reign. The morgues are full and bodies are now found everywhere. With the country's main hospitals having shut down, Harare is pervaded by the sickly-sweet stench of death.
In a city without potable water — further damaging business in a country where 90 percent are unemployed, many of those not dead now have cholera. People dig for water wherever they can. Compounding their destitution, the sewerage system has collapsed. All are starving.
Roaming bands of soldiers, having spent three days rioting after finding they could no longer draw money from the banks, heighten a sense of untamed anarchy.
Anybody able to flee is getting out. Cape Town, a couple of thousand miles south, is full of refugees, whose interests are looked after only by NGOs such as Hanekom's and that of Sam Pearce, eMzantsi Ubuntu Coalition.
The Times reports:
Soldiers went on the rampage last week in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, looting shops and assaulting illegal foreign currency traders. The soldiers clashed with the police as a protest over unpaid salaries turned ugly.You know things are getting bad when what remains of the Health Ministry warns people against shaking hands. The cholera death toll is hopelessly understated. Perhaps it's time Zimbabweans "remembered Mogadishu".
The capital has been without running water for more than 48 hours, officials having cut supply because of the cholera outbreak that has already claimed 473 lives across the country. According to the World Health Organisation, more than 11000 cholera cases have been recorded since August.
Zimbabwe is now on the brink of a precipice. But the most frightening thing about this is that the world seems unwilling or powerless to do anything about it.
The world monetized a botched American invasion and many fat people in foreign countries profited handsomely from the suffering of the emaciated people in the dusty streets of that blighted city.
Most couldn't give a damn about starving Africans. Like the Somalis, Zimbabweans are on their own and need to pull this one out of the fire. Reuters tells us:
Muttiah Muralitharan took five wickets Sunday to lead Sri Lanka to a 19-run win over Zimbabwe and a 5-0 sweep in the limited-overs series. After Sri Lanka was bowled out for 152 for its lowest total in the series, Muralitharan claimed 5-29 for his 10th five-wicket haul in 50-over internationals and Nuwan Kulasekara took 3-14 to bowl out Zimbabwe for 133 at Harare Sports Club.And although these teams are barely competing on level playing fields (literally), the International Cricket Board (ICC) expresses dissatisfaction with the administration and development of the game in Zimbabwe.
"When we came here we set ourselves goals. We needed to win 5-0. We did that," Sri Lanka captain Mahela Jayawardene said. "Yes, it wasn't convincing, but considering the conditions and that the opposition played well in the last three games, especially with the ball, we have to take that as an achievement.
S'far as I'm concerned, it's just not cricket.
It's bizarre ('surreal' does not do it justice), but such is the way of the world and it has happened many times before. People will deny a reality so completely, almost nothing will wake them to it.
For now, the carnival continues. I fear ordinary Zimbabweans may well starve or succumb to disease before their sporting and business compatriots come to the realization that they need to put their skills to good use, i.e. ending Mugabe's genocidal rampage.
Give me back the Berlin wall | Give me Stalin and St Paul | Give me Christ | Or give me Hiroshima | Destroy another fetus now | We don't like children anyhow | I have seen the future, baby: | It is murder.
Leonard Cohen | The Future
Note: Interestingly, in warning "you fuckers" to stay out of Africa five years ago, I quoted one General James Jones: "I think Africa is a continent that is going to be of very, very significant interest in the 21st century," said President-Elect Obama's National Security Adviser back in May 2003.
Jones's value to Obama? "He understands the connection between energy and national security," says the President Elect in November 2008 (Jones, formerly head of United States European Command, is a Board member of both Boeing and Chevron).
