PREVENTED from unloading its cargo by dock workers acting in solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe, a Chinese ship loaded with weapons for Zimbabwe's despot, Robert Mugabe, has been sailing from port to port along the coast of southern Africa. The rejection of the Chinese vessel and its lethal cargo is a tale about the power of commoners when they act in concert; the corruption of onetime liberation leaders; and the involvement of China's communist rulers with the world's worst dictators.
Mugabe lost the recent elections in Zimbabwe. But his appointed electoral commission is withholding the results while conducting a recount that will no doubt be rigged to reverse his party's defeat in parliament and prevent his challenger, Morgan Tsvangirai, from supplanting him as head of state.
At the same time, bands of regime-backed goons have been going about the countryside demanding to see party identification cards and then beating, torturing, and sometimes killing citizens who had the temerity to oppose the 84-year-old strongman's reelection.
Leaders of all church denominations in Zimbabwe issued a statement yesterday asking for international intervention to stop the regime's violent assaults and demanding publication of the true election results. But amid the courage of Zimbabwe's clerics and the steadfastness of South Africa's dock workers, South African President Thabo Mbeki has been solicitous of Mugabe - as usual. In describing the situation in Zimbabwe as "normal," Mbeki betrayed not only Zimbabweans, but also South Africa's own liberation struggle against the anti-democratic apartheid regime.
Zimbabwe could have been the pride of post-Colonial Africa. When the country is finally liberated from Mugabe, Mbeki and his fellow collaborators in Beijing should be made to explain why they sided with a political gangster who ruined that hope.
