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Extending sanctions hypocritical
Related to country: Zimbabwe

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Extending sanctions hypocritical Political and

Features Editor

THE Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Street Car named Desire, Tennessee Williams, once remarked that, "The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!"

Williams lived and died in the United States and so he surely knew a thing or two about hypocrisy.

His forebear, Abraham Lincoln, used a better turn of phrase when he was confronted with hypocrisy. He defined a hypocrite as a person who kills both his parents and pleads for clemency on the grounds that he is an orphan.

America knows hypocrisy because it is a country that is founded on being two-faced. It is called the land of the free and yet it was built on the back of genocide against the indigenous Americans who inhabited that territory before Christopher Columbus got lost and blundered into North America.

A few centuries earlier, across the Atlantic before Europeans started fleeing their own barbarism to go and unleash similar barbarism in the United States, French philosopher and Renaissance scholar Montaigne also battled with the hypocrisy of his countrymen.

He said: "Saying is one thing, doing another. We must consider the sermon and the preacher distinctly and apart."

Montaigne was obviously dispirited by the rank of hypocrisy surrounding him and had he lived another century or so, he would have also seen the glaring hypocrisy and startling inconsistencies of Napoleon Bonaparte’s French Revolution.

After all, Bonaparte’s revolution rode on liberty, equality and fraternity and yet discriminated against the Catholic Church to the extent of imprisoning Pope Pius VII.

It would not do to say that France is a country of hypocrites. Every country has its good, its bad and its ugly.

Perhaps it would be fairer to say that France and Europe in general play host to more than their fair share of the hypocrisy in the world.

That is why countries like Switzerland are the home of the largest financial houses in the world and yet they are, as a consequence, described by some as the most corrupt in the world.

That is why countries like Holland and Belgium, which would like to give the appearance of being peace-loving nations, are actually the centre of the global trade in illegal arms, both great and small.

That is why countries like Germany, which only 60 years ago was pillaging its fellow European hypocrites in the quest for global domination, can today unashamedly stand in front of the world and preach democracy and human rights.

If Montaigne were alive today, he probably would be exasperated too by the recent decision to extend sanctions on Zimbabwe. After all, how does one reconcile the quest for human rights with an active campaign to try and starve a whole nation to death?

On Tuesday, the European Union, the largest bloc of hypocrites in the world, announced that they had extended their sanctions regime to include a travel ban and an assets freeze against another 37 individuals and four companies. And it had to be the French Foreign Minister, that child of hypocritical tradition, Bernard Kouchner, who announced the decision to extend the sanctions from the capital city of a fellow hypocritical nation, Brussels.

A list of those added to the list seems hard to come by though. The EU claims that they do not want to alert the individuals lest they pull their assets out of Europe and that they would soon be announcing even more names.

But the word doing the rounds is that some journalists have been added to the list.

If this is true, then it only adds to the Third World’s belief that the EU is the most hypocritical defender of human rights that the world has ever seen, probably rated only with the United States.

Even the crowd that brought the adulterating woman to Jesus was far better because even they realised that they were not fit to cast the first stone.

It is absurd for the EU to condemn Zimbabwe for lack of media freedom if they turn around and place sanctions on journalists. But then again, it ties in with Western policy to destroy those instruments of communication that seek to tell the world the truth.

That is why key media houses have been targeted for missile fire as a matter of policy whenever Europeans and Americans wage foreign wars. It happened in Afghanistan, it happened in Iraq and it is now happening in Zimbabwe — though not through bullets but through sanctions. Where is freedom of expression when journalists reporting honestly from a sovereign country are sanctioned?

Last year, the EU carried out a study on the implementation of Article 96 of the Cotonou Partnership Agreement, which provides the basis for the implementation of an economic embargo.

The study was carried out by the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France and Belgium. For those who care, they can find it at ISBN 978-90-5260-264-6 (using Google or Yahoo!), or at www.three-cs.net/resource_corner/ongoing_studies/.

The CPA came into being in 2000 as a replacement of the 1975 Lomé Convention as the defining document guiding relations between 77 countries from Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific, on one hand, and the EU, on the other. Article 96 of the CPA outlines the procedures to be followed should a country be deemed to be in violation of certain governance, rule of law and human rights requirements of the document as defined in Article 8.

The study carried out to evaluate the application of Article 96 has the potential to cause immense embarrassment for an EU that prides in its self-righteousness and that is why it has never been publicised as much as it should have been.

This is for the simple reason that the study says the EU has been hypocritical in its treatment of Zimbabwe, has used Article 96 two-facedly, admits sanctions damage the economy and were enacted to influence the 2002 presidential elections, and that the group is divided over Harare’s maltreatment.

So if sanctions were put in place to influence the 2002 presidential election, would it be wrong to surmise that this time they are being extended to influence the on-going dialogue between Zanu-PF and the two formations of the opposition MDC?

Page 50 of the report explicitly says Article 96 procedures against Zimbabwe only were initiated even though "the absolute level of freedom of participation was better in Zimbabwe than in an average ACP country".

It further says Zimbabwe’s human rights and governance record is better than that of most countries that are signatories to the agreement. So why then was Zimbabwe and Zimbabwe alone targeted?

Page 73 provides part of the answer: "The explanation for the haste was the forthcoming elections (2002 presidential poll). In other words, foreign policy goals were safeguarded and considered more important than the partnership principle in the Cotonou Agreement."

The following page adds to this, saying the imposition of the sanctions was a unilateral measure and that the EU deliberately ignored more pressing cases in its bid to ensure President Mugabe did not win the elections. All the talk of human rights, rule of law and good governance is hogwash.

The study says that "any sanctions or the threat of sanctions" hurt the economy — regardless of what blinkered people may say, sanctions are hurting the economy — as admitted by the EU itself on Page 19 of the study. Tennessee Williams might have believed that there is nothing worse than a hypocrite who is liar. There is. And that is a lying hypocrite who believes his lies.


http://www.herald.co.zw/inside.aspx?sectid=1005&cat=13

July 24, 2008 | 9:33 AM Comments  0 comments

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