A Chinese freighter brimming with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and three million rounds of AK-47 ammo has docked at the South African port of Durban, with Robert Mugabe’s landlocked fiefdom in Zimbabwe as its intended final destination. The shipment is especially disconcerting because Mugabe has refused to release two-week-old election results that would almost certainly see Morgan Tsvangirai oust him from office, and because Mugabe has never shown any qualms about using rape, torture, beatings and political killings to consolidate his power.
Zimbabwe, of course, isn’t at war with anyone, making the shipment all the more suspicious — especially for a country that’s facing a major food crisis, boasts the world’s highest inflation at 165,000 per cent, and certainly can’t afford to blow its cash on weapons it doesn’t plan to use.
Clearly then, it plans to use them.
From the BBC:
Mr Tsvangirai, who maintains he won the election, said Zimbabwe was not at war.
“The only war that is there is Mugabe’s war against the people,” he said.
Adding to the ominousness, Al-Jazeera says Mugabe warned before the vote that “Tsvangirai would never rule the country in his lifetime.”
The South African government says it won’t block a business transaction between two sovereign governments, so the port workers’ union in Durban is the only thing standing between Mugabe and a shipload of weapons that are very likely meant to kill huge swaths of his political opponents.
From South Africa’s The Times:
SA Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu) general secretary Randall Howard said: “Satawu does not agree with the position of the South African government not to intervene with this shipment of weapons.
“Our members employed at Durban Container Terminal will not unload this cargo neither will any of our members in the truck driving sector move this cargo by road.” He said the ship, the An Yue Jiang, should not dock in Durban and should return to China.
South Africa cannot be seen to be facilitating the flow of weapons into Zimbabwe at a time where there is a political dispute and a volatile situation between the Zanu-PF and the MDC.”
The Times also notes that South Africa’s failure to block the transport of Chinese machetes to Rwanda in 1994 helped fuel the genocide that saw 800,000 people killed.
Of course, there’s nothing to stop the ship from docking at another port staffed by less ethically minded workers, but forcing the weapons to take a detour would at least delay their arrival, and may encourage other southern African ports to turn them away as well. It would certainly be better than the alternative…
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