Zimbabwe+Neg+-+Case+Turns

4. Turn- In its current state, giving foreign Aid to Zimbabwe will only create more corruption and oppression, and cannot possibly solve for HIV/AIDS Walter Williams, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, 2006 (“Western Aid is no Boon for Corrupt African Nation.” Deseret news.) http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_20060628/ai_n16505942

Zimbabwe provides an excellent example of why foreign aid, as a way out of poverty, is a fool's errand. Salem University, Winston- Salem, N.C., professor Craig Richardson explores this further in "Learning From Failure: Property Rights, Land Reforms and the Hidden Architecture of HIV/AIDS Frontline

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Capitalism," a paper written for the American Enterprise Institute's Development Policy Outlook Series (2006). Not that long ago, Zimbabwe was one of the more prosperous African countries. Richardson writes, "Few countries have failed as spectacularly, or as tragically, as Zimbabwe has over the past half decade. Zimbabwe has transformed from one of Africa's rare success stories into one of its worst economic and humanitarian disasters." It has the world's highest rate of inflation, currently over 1,000 percent. To put this into perspective, in 1995, one U.S. dollar exchanged for eight Zimbabwe dollars; today, one U.S. dollar exchanges for 100,000 Zimbabwe dollars. Unemployment hovers around 80 percent. Its financial institutions are collapsing. The specter of mass starvation hangs over a country that once exported food. What's the cause? President Robert Mugabe blames domestic and foreign enemies, particularly England and the United States, for trying to bring about his downfall. Of course, according to Mugabe, and some of the world's academic elite, there's that old standby excuse, the legacy of colonialism and multinational firms exploiting the Third World. The drought is used to "explain" the precipitous drop in agricultural output. Then there's AIDS. Let's look at drought and AIDS. Zimbabwe's next-door neighbor is Botswana. Botswana has the world's second highest rate of AIDS infection, and if there's drought in Zimbabwe, there's likely a drought in Botswana, whose major geographic feature is the Kalahari Desert, which covers 70 percent of its land mass. However, Botswana has one of the world's highest per capita GDP growth rates. Moody's and Standard & Poor give Botswana an "A" credit rating, the best credit risk on the continent, a risk competitive with countries in central Europe and East Asia. Botswana, compared to her other African neighbors, prospers not because of foreign aid. There's rule of law, sanctity of contracts, and in 2004, Transparency International ranked Botswana as Africa's least corrupt country, ahead of many European and Asian countries. The World Forum rates Botswana as one of Africa's two most economically competitive nations and one of the best investment opportunities in the developing world. Botswana shares a heritage with Zimbabwe, for it, too, was a British colony. What it doesn't share with Zimbabwe explains its success: the rule of law, minimal corruption and, most of all, respect for private property rights. No amount of Western foreign aid can bring about the political and socioeconomic climate necessary for economic growth. Instead, foreign aid allows vicious dictators to remain in power. It enables them to buy the allegiance of cronies and the military equipment to oppress their own people, not to mention being able to set up "retirement" accounts in Swiss banks. The best thing Westerners can do for Africa is to keep their money and their economic development "experts."

1. Turn- giving foreign aid to Zimbabwe in the name of ethics falsely calms the consciences of those giving, while perpetuating even more poverty and corruption Lawrence W. Reed, president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, 2005 (“Africans Whom Westerners should heed”) http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=7447

Cudjoe speaks in brutally honest terms about the high-level corruption that steals savings from citizens and capital from entrepreneurs. Government spending throughout Africa, he says, routinely funnels both aid and tax dollars to the politically well-connected. When foreign aid advocates claim that a child dies in Africa every three seconds from hunger or disease, Cudjoe poignantly asks "But do you realize that $4,700 gets stolen by African governments every second?" When the Dutch-based airline KLM offered to begin flights from Ghana to neighboring countries, Ghanaian government officials demanded bribes. KLM pulled out. "Western nations didn’t do that to us, and Western aid only helps keep such a system going," says Cudjoe. It’s even harder to see how Westerners can be blamed for troubles in Zimbabwe when its leader, Robert Mugabe, lives like a prince as his Marxist policies squander the nation’s dwindling wealth. This past summer alone, Mugabe’s goons forcibly displaced three-quarters of a million people in a campaign against private enterprise and his political opponents. Hundreds of thousands are shivering in tents and hovels, their homes and businesses razed. Does anyone besides Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton think that what Zimbabwe really needs is a boatload of Western cash? Market advocates throughout Africa have come to a conclusion once famously expressed by the comic strip character Pogo: "We have met the enemy and he is us." They understand that foreign subsidies may salve the consciences of naïve foreigners, but they perpetuate the poverty-creating cultural and political pathologies that Africans must shed. They have stepped forward and devoted their careers to filling a longstanding void in discussions about Africa.

3. Giving Aid to Zimbabwe under Mugabe’s current regime is supporting the self-proclaimed Modern day Hitler- this is the opposite of ethical Peta Thornycroft, 2003 (“Hitler Mugabe Launches Revenge Terror Attacks.” The Telegraph.) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/03/26/wzim26.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/03/26/ixworld.html

President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has compared himself to Adolf Hitler. At the state funeral of one of his cabinet ministers, Mr Mugabe said: "I am still the Hitler of the time. This Hitler has only one objective, justice for his own people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people, and their right to their resources. "If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold. Ten times, that is what we stand for." Hours later members of the Zimbabwe National Army, including Mr Mugabe's elite force, the Presidential Guard, began a pre-dawn rampage in revenge for the opposition general strike last week. The attacks left more than 250 people injured, scores of them seriously, but victims remained defiant yesterday. Patricia Mukonda, 27, a secretary at the head office of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, needed hospital treatment. Up to 60 members of the Guard and other soldiers arrived in two armoured personnel carriers in Mabvuku, a working class suburb east of Harare, and attacked under cover of darkness.Bursting into her house, they accused her of burning three buses during the two-day strike. "They beat me all over," she said, adding that she was sexually assaulted with a baton while her six-year-old son was forced to watch. "They said I was [MDC leader Morgan] Tsvangirai's prostitute," she said. "They roped me to the window sill, took a glass and broke it, and pushed my left arm on to it and I fainted. They heard a woman crying and rushed out and my brother came in and took me to a field, and I slept." Miss Mukonda, who is chairman of her local residents' association and has been arrested five times, said the soldiers promised to return to Mabvuku and kill 20 people by the end of the month. "They have to come at night when we are sleeping, when we are weak," she said. "What hurts my mind is that I am in hospital, and I should be revenging. I will be the first soldier of the MDC." The United States condemned the regime's actions and said the attacks were directly linked to Mr Mugabe's "Hitler" remarks. President George W Bush has frozen the assets of Mr Mugabe and 76 other government officials, accusing them of undermining democracy.

ETHICS Frontline

4. Turn- A Genocide is on the brink of occurring in Zimbabwe- allowing Mugabe to continue with his current policies is the same mistake the world made with Hitler in the thirties will lead to a full blown genocide Duncan Du Bois, writer for the Natal Witness, 2007 (“Zimbabwe- the Road to Genocide.” The Free Republic.) http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/837660/posts

Just as in the thirties, when people like George Bernard Shaw proclaimed Stalin's Russia a model society and Chamberlain declared that Hitler could be trusted, the international tip-toeing around Mugabe's tyranny in Zimbabwe reeks of hypocrisy. Indeed, it beggars belief that officials of the ICC have failed to pick up on the fact that besides security problems in Zimbabwe, the reality is that basic foodstuffs, household goods and fuel are in critically short supply, to say nothing of the infrastructure that is teetering on the brink of collapse; that, in fact, a pogrom is being systematically conducted by Mugabe's thugs against those who believe in democracy; that torture, beatings and starvation is what Zimbabwe is about in 2003. A widely circulated (yet amazingly unpublished) report entitled Is Zimbabwe on the brink of Genocide? places the state of affairs in that country in a chilling perspective. Prepared for ZWnews by an independent human rights consultant, what this meticulously-researched document states should be headline news. Genocide, as the writer states, is usually a subject associated with history books. What people don't realise is that it doesn't just happen overnight. Although the mass killing of Jews by the Nazis occurred from 1942, the process which led to it began with the onset of Nazi rule in Germany in 1933. Mass human rights violations, harassment and killings of Jews was institutionalised long before genocide became policy. Then, as now, disbelief that something as horrific as genocide was taking place resulted in inaction. Adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, the Genocide Convention has been signed by 130 countries including Zimbabwe. Article Two of the convention defines genocide as acts committed with the intention to destroy, in whole or in part, national, ethnic, racial or religious groups. Such acts include "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction". The means listed to achieve that end include "deprivation of the means to sustain life through confiscation of harvests, blockade of foodstuffs, detention in camps and forced relocation". Those very things have been happening in Zimbabwe for the past year.