Africa's Shame and Zimbabwe's Greater Threat
By Douglas Farah
The recent assault by armed government gangs, leading to dozens of deaths and hundreds of encarcerations, has led the opposition in Zimbabwe to withdraw from the electoral process. The striking inability of Tabo Mbeki in South Africa and other sub-Saharan African nations and institutions (the Africa Union, for example) is a shameful episode that has set the continent back for decades.
But there are reasons other than human rights and the rule of law to be concerned about Zimbabwe and its meglomaniacal leader, Robert Mugabe. To discern that, one only has to look at other criminal states in the region, and their history.
As regimes such as that of Mugabe, Charles Taylor or Mobutu in Zaire (DRC) become more isolated and more desperate, the leadership turns increasingly to organized criminal activity to finance itself and stay in power. With the organized crime, one almost always gets the shadow facilitators that connect the transnational criminals to their desired source of wealth or activity.
And the shadow facilitators almost always bring in the terrorist connections, because the two groups operate through the same pipelines. A merger is almost impossible to avoid.
These shadow facilitators, like Viktor Bout, who dealt with Charles Taylor, a host of other African governments, the FARC and the Taliban, don't distinguish among their clientele. Others, like Sanjivan Ruprah, facilitate the deals across the continent.
By 1998, Taylor was hosting Russian organized crime, Ukrainian organized crime, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, Israeli crime and South African organized crime. Why? Because he was able to give them things they needed-passports, aircraft registrations, safe entry and exit points etc.-in exchange for what he wanted-money to run his regime. My full blog is here.