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Bono's Next Cause - Another African project for the U2 front man
Wall Street Journal, Page A12
June 13, 2005

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1421812/posts

The world's richest nations are patting themselves on the back for agreeing this weekend to erase the debt of the world's poorest, mainly in Africa. The U.S. reached an agreement with Tony Blair but sounded lonely in suggesting that extra money from abroad without improved governance in the poor countries themselves would be all for naught.

As it happens, U.S. worries are playing out in real time. One of Africa's poorest countries, Zimbabwe, is suffering through a brutal forced relocation reminiscent of the Khmer Rouge's "ruralization." Hundreds of thousands of people in and around the capital, Harare, have been evicted from their homes, which are then bulldozed under the order of dictator Robert Mugabe, the poster child for Africa's governance problem.

The United Nations says that in less than four weeks at least 200,000 people have been displaced; other estimates are closer to one million. On one night alone, May 26, more than 10,000 people in a north Harare community called Hatcliffe Extension reportedly lost their homes.

In an open letter passed around by email, the Member of Parliament for Hatcliffe Extension, Trudy Stevenson, described the scene there Thursday morning as thousands more residents awaited eviction: "On vacated stands the building materials [from their dismantled homes] were still piled up or scattered around -- i.e. wooden cabin panels, asbestos roofing, window frames, bricks, poles -- because people are not allowed to take their building materials with them."

At the "detention camp" outside Harare where the residents were being taken, Ms. Stevenson saw people "crowded together in fenced compound. ... The people are staying in tents, and the tents are right next to each other, not a bit of space in between. ... The main shock was the small size of the place -- there is no way all the people from Hatcliffe Extension (there are still roughly 6,000-8,000 people staying there) will fit inside that compound, even if they all remain standing!"

Mr. Mugabe is the same leader whose theft of land from white farmers nearly pushed his once-thriving nation into famine. He calls this latest exercise in social engineering "Operation Murambatsvina," or "Drive Out the Rubbish." And it's not only residents who are being shooed away: Street vendors are also banished, even though most Zimbabweans are out of work.

Cleaning up urban blight is not Mr. Mugabe's real objective, however. By sub-Saharan African standards, many of the condemned dwellings were more than adequate. The evictees' crime was living in areas that are increasingly opposed to Mr. Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party, an unacceptable challenge to the man who has misruled Zimbabwe for 25 years. The cash-strapped government also wants to reduce the size of the black market -- the only part of the country's economy that still functions with some efficiency.

None of this is to deny that debt forgiveness for many of Africa's poorest governments is worth doing. Most of these countries haven't been paying interest on their loans anyway, so debt relief recognizes the reality and lets everyone (including the world's development banks) move ahead more honestly.

But if U2's Bono and other celebrities really want to help Africa, they will have to do more than appeal to the West's guilty consciences. They ought to speak candidly about the misgovernment in the poor countries themselves, especially in places like Zimbabwe, where the depredations of Mr. Mugabe have been so frequent and well documented.

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