China-Zimbabwe arms deal: If not by sea, then by air?

Tue, 04/22/2008 - 2:12pm

ALEXANDER JOE/AFP/Getty Images

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. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, temporarily in self-imposed exiled, declared himself the victor of the March 29th elections. Since then, journalists and activists alike have reported that hundreds of opposition supporters have been detained, beaten, or tortured (warning: illustrations may be unsettling).

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.

Lucy Moore | Permalink | | Comments? Login or register
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"Finalized just days after..."

by AndrewS on Wed, 04/23/2008 - 11:05am

As much as Mugabe disgusts me, it doesn't seem probable that these orders were placed after the election. Goods just don't move that quickly. The News24 story says that, "the paperwork for the ship carrying the weapons, the An Yue Jiang, was finalized in Beijing on April 1." I'm guessing this is the Bill of Lading or similar shipping documents, which have nothing to do with when the order was placed (likely months beforehand according to a friend in the industry I spoke with). This doesn't change the fact that everything should be done to prevent the arms from entering Zimbabwe. My point is that this is misleading reporting by News24 and should be placed under better scrutiny here.