Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) is a classic case. After its independence, the leftist government nationalized (confiscated) many of the farms previously owned by white settlers. The most desirable of these lands became occupied by the government's senior ruling-party officials, and the rest were turned into state-run collectives. They were such miserable failures that the workers on 1. "IMF Hands Out Prescription for Sour Economic Medicine,"
NEARER TO THE HEART'S DESIRE
99
^ese farmlands were, themselves, soon begging for food. Not daunted by these failures, the socialist politicians announced in j991 that they were going to nationalize half of the remaining farms aS well. And they barred the courts from inquiring into how much compensation would be paid to their owners.
The IMF was represented in Zimbabwe at the time by Michel C a m d e s s u s , the Governor of the central Bank of France, and a former finance minister in Francois Mitterrand's Socialist government. After being informed of Zimbabwe's plan to confiscate additional land and to resettle people to work on those lands, Camdessus agreed to a loan valued at 42 billion rands with full knowledge that much of it would be used for the resettlement project.
Perhaps the worst violations of human rights have occurred in Ethiopia under the Marxist regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam. The famine of 1984-85, which threatened the lives of millions of people, was the result of government nationalization and disruption of agriculture. Massive resettlement programs have torn hundreds of thousands of people from their privately owned land in the north and deported them to concentration-camp "villages" in the south, complete with guard towers. A report by a French voluntary medical-assistance group, Doctors without Borders, reveals that the forced resettlement program may have killed as many people as the famine itself.1 Dr. Rony Brauman, director of the organization, describes their experience:
Armed militiamen burst into our compounds, seized our
equipment and menaced our volunteers. Some of our employees were beaten, and our trucks, medicines and food stores confiscated. We left Ethiopia branded as enemies of the revolution. The regime spoke the truth. The atrocities committed in the name of Mengistu's master plan
FINANCING FAMINE AND GENOCIDE
In the 1980s, the world was saddened by photographs of
starving children in Ethiopia, but what the West did not realize was that this was a
~ "Famine Aid: Were we Duped?" by Dr. Rony Brauman,
'1986, p. 7]
1
100 THE CREATURE FROM JEKYLL ISLAND
starvation program in the Ukraine in the 1930s and Mao's starvation of the peasants in the '40s. Its purpose was to starve the population into total submission to the government, for it is the government which decides who will eat and who will not. Yet, right up to the time Mengistu was overthrown, the World Bank continued to send him hundreds of millions of dollars, with much of it going specifically to the Ministry of Agriculture, the very agency in charge of the resettlement program.1
In the late 1970s the same story unfolded in Communist
Vietnam. There were resettlement programs, forced collectiviza-tion, concentration camps, atrocities, and tens of thousands of dissidents escaping to the sea only to drown in overcrowded, leaky boats. Throughout it all, the regime was generously funded by the World Bank.
Laos has jailed thousands of political prisoners; Syria has massacred 20,000 members of its opposition; Indonesia has up-rooted several million people from their homelands in Java; the Sandinistas in Nicaragua murdered their opposition and terrorized the nation into submission; Poland, while a puppet state of the Soviet Union, brutally suppressed its trade-union movement; China massacred its dissident students and imprisoned its religious leaders; and the former Soviets slaughtered civilians in Afghanistan while conducting a relentless espionage war against the entire free world. Yet, these regimes have been the recipient of literally billions of dollars from the World Bank.
