Crocker on Zimbabwe

Someone mentioned to me that she liked Ishmael Reed's poetry, so I went to read about him. He turns out to be ghastly beyond measure, though unfortunately not beyond words, which he has a lot of. Like Ron Paul, though this is surely the only point of correspondence, Reed has a newsletter put out under his name. The sample article I read, by "Chinweizu," defends Mugabe against all charges, ranting in full blown paranoia about British war crimes committed against the ZANU-PF, misunderstanding standard international actions, and filling all the remaining gaps with ideology. I would have left it at that, but he named a specific bill, and gave a quotation from Chester Crocker, supposedly in testimony about the bill, that sounded made up: "To separate the Zimbabwean people from ZANU-PF we are going to have to make their economy scream, and I hope you senators have the stomach for what you have to do." That it's from Democracy Now! means it is most likely fantasy, but I decided to take a look; after all the Democracy Now! maniac claims the statement is in the transcript. The Crocker quotation shows up a few places online, all radical sites, but with no better attribution.

The schedule of the bill (S. 494 of the 107th) shows only three opportunities for testimony: the hearing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the hearing before the House Committee on International Relations, and the short debate in the House on 12/4/2001 (Thomas expires search links, but you can re-search with the day). I checked all the dates in Thomas anyway, but the other dates were merely procedural. (I did get to enjoy the declaration of National Shaken Baby Week on one of the dates.) The committee hearing includes only the formal statements of the participants, but since Crocker is not one of the participants, or even mentioned, that is not a problem. Crocker is also not mentioned in the debate, which of course was not a debate but a series of speeches in favor of a bill that after all passed by 390 or so to 11 in the House and 97 to 0 in the Senate.

I wish I had access to the Lexis-Nexis congressional database, but I am pretty confident this is a sufficient search. The bill is a small one, doing little--it suspends debt service freebies and new loans, allocates money to be given whenever Mugabe stops murdering people, and proposes international travel sanctions against the ZANU-PF leaders--on a subject of peripheral concern to the US, especially just three months after Sept. 11. Zimbabwe, formerly the British colony of Rhodesia, is primarily a British concern in any case. Given the limited American interest, the committee hearings and the short debate are a lot of time.

Added to the complete absence of Crocker from all the proceedings is the implausibility of the phrase. I did find some testimony by Crocker online, and that is not his tone; the quotation sounds like movie dialogue to me. Crocker does have a history of preferring engagement to sanctions, even with South Africa in the 1980s, so it is at least possible that he might agree with the general idea that sanctions would be unproductive. Otherwise, though, I am calling this debunked. This post is to help some other curious person from having to read quite so much congressional blather.

[Update: I was at the university library not long after so I had a chance to use Lexis-Nexis. I have the citations on a card somewhere and if I find it I'll post them, but anyone can duplicate the search. The supposed quotation first appears, quite late, in the Zimbabwean government paper among a lot of other outlandish propaganda. Hilariously, though after its first appearance it appears regularly, the citation for the quote changes every time. It is simply a government fiction, and not a well thought out or cleverly maintained one.]

Speaking of Ron Paul, he shows up in familiar mode in the House hearing:

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The gentleman from New York, Mr. Houghton, mentioned that he had some reservations about this bill. And indeed, I think that we all should have some reservations about this bill. The one thing, though, that I would concede to the authors of this bill is the description of the problem that exists in Zimbabwe. There is no doubt about that.
The question I have, though, is whose responsibility is it? Is it the responsibility of us in the U.S. Congress to deal with this? Is it the responsibility of the American taxpayers to deal with it? Quite frankly, I just don't agree, no matter how bad the situation is, that it is our responsibility.

I wholly agree with the sentiment that human misery alone does not grant congress constitutional authority to act, but it comes across very poorly amid the other remarks, which are serious and actually pretty reasonable. Also, surely there are other battles for Paul than a bill that provisionally allocates $26m.

In passing, I noticed that the House Committee on International Relations transcript records a congressman uttering this immortal phrase: "The whole focus of our national posture was always the Middle East and Europe." Focusing posture sounds painful.