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China-Zimbabwe
arms deal: If not by sea, then by air?
Foreign Policy
April 22, 2008
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/8706
A shipment of ammunition,
rockets, and mortar bombs en route from China to Zimbabwe has been
denied passage from the South African port of Durban to the shipment's
landlocked destination.
On Friday, South Africa's
High Court barred the transport of weapons aboard the An Yue Jiang,
arguing that the shipment would be used by Zimbabwe's president
of 28 years, Robert Mugabe, against members of the opposition party.
Although the An Yue Jiang
is expected to return to China, a South African paper, News24, reports
that a second arms shipment from China is scheduled to arrive by
air in order to "expedite the delivery and to circumvent the
controversy around last week's shipment by sea." The story
also claims that both orders, placed by the Zimbabwean government,
were finalized just days after Zimbabwe's elections.
The arms shipments brings
to light the hazards of China's growing role in the world's poorest
and most unstable continent. According to Serge Michel in the current
issue of FP, in the last seven years, "trade between China
and Africa jumped from $10 billion to $70 billion." But the
resulting projects highlight the competing interests of Chinese-African
cooperation:
Take, for example, the
dam being built at Imboulou in Congo. Officially, it's a huge success:
It's expected to help double national electricity production by
2009... [But according to a project engineer] the quality of the
cement being used is sub-standard, the Congolese workers are so
poorly paid that none of them stays longer than a few months, and,
above all, the drilling has been so poorly done that half of the
dam sits on a huge pocket of water that continually floods the site
and could cause it to collapse one day."
From weapons to shoddy
cement, the Chinese-Africa deal is looking more like a recipe for
disaster every day.
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