Last week, a Chinese ship anchored off Durban, South Africa to unload a shipment of arms from China for the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. The South African government refused to stop them—apparently siding with Mugabe’s deputy information minister, who told a South African radio station, “Every country has got a right to acquire arms. There is nothing wrong with that. If they are for Zimbabwe, they will definitely come to Zimbabwe. How they are used, when they are going to be used is none of anybody’s business”—but the South African people did what their government would not do. The workers of the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union, who work the docks of their country’s ports, refused to unload the cargo, effectively stopping the shipment. When a South African court declared that the arms could not be transported across South African soil, the ship raised anchor and set sail. The nearest non-South African port would have been Maputo, Mozambique, but the Mozambican government wouldn’t let the ship into their territorial waters, so it headed off the other way instead, for Luanda, Angola. Here’s hoping the dockworkers there do the same, or perhaps that Namibia and Zambia refuse the arms passage; however it plays out, here’s praying they never get where they’re going.
HT: Gordon Chang