In Obama’s recent speech in Ghana, he said, “the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants.”
Thereby, he neglects and obscures Western mining companies’ implication in the resource wars that have propped up authoritarian leaders in Zimbabwe. In “Zimbabwe: imperialism, hypocrisy, and fake nationalism,” Leo Zeilig writes, “Zimbabwe is a hive for regional and international capital. No sector illustrates this more than minerals. The country is home to the second greatest platinum reserves in the world—a centre of activity for the South African mining giant Impala. There are new mines developing in the Midlands province, and the London-based mining company Rio Tinto extracts diamonds among other minerals. But the development of this sector has been hindered by the economic crisis. Rio Tinto has seen the quantity of diamonds mined drop from 240,000 carats in 2006 to 145,000 in 2007. The company blames the erratic power supply and has recently started to import power directly from Mozambique. The mining corporations are desperate to see stability in Zimbabwe to secure their investments from both the possibility of nationalisation (recently threatened by Mugabe) and the current economic chaos.” (read more here)
