JIM BLAKE,
Sir, - The EU and the US have joined up to place sanctions on Zimbabwe because they do not think elections will be free and fair.
If they are looking for unvarnished principles on which to base this intervention, they should look at the transnational corporations which own vast areas of land in Zimbabwe - companies such as Turners Asbestos, Rio Tinto, Union Carbide, tea, cotton, coffee and tobacco companies based in Europe and America - and which fear confiscation in the Zimbabwean government's land acquisition programme.
I hold no brief for the Mugabe government, especially as I heard just today that my old friend and comrade, Munyaradzi Gwisai, opposition MP for the Highfield constituency in Harare (also Robert Mugabe's old constituency) was detained in prison last week for three days and nights on flimsy grounds.
Zimbabwe, like Argentina, is in serious economic trouble partly because of its huge debt burden, the result of unequal and unfair trading. Sanctions against what is, after all, an elected government in Africa, seems odd when one considers that neither the European Union nor the United States stepped in to prevent the massacre of 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Indeed, the militias which carried out the killings were trained by European armies.
It would not be misplaced to say that no sanctions were ever brought to bear on those old kleptocrats Mobutu in former Zaire, Savimbi in Angola or Kamuzu Banda in Malawi.
Why now and why in Zimbabwe? - Yours, etc.,
JIM BLAKE,
Grosvenor Mews,
Douglas West,
Cork.