Common sense suggests that when a house is burning down, the owners do not charge the firefighters an exorbitant fee to enter. Nor do the owners bar the relief brigade from entry and accuse them of spying for the neighbors down the street. When occupants inside the house start dousing the flames on their own, they are not viewed as betrayers and traitors. Yet that scenario more or less captures the reprehensible attitude of the Zimbabwe government toward the media in advance of today’s (March 29) presidential and legislative elections. The Information Ministry has charged reporters at least $1,700 to [...]
PARIS — U.N. refugee camps in Chad’s eastern province now provide shelter to more than 200,000 Darfur refugees and close to the same number of Chadians displaced by their country’s civil war. But in the absence of any governmental control over the area, both the refugees and relief workers have been increasingly targeted by border-crossing insurgents, militias, and organized bandits that use the region as safe harbor, exacerbating an already desperate humanitarian crisis. The European Union peacekeeping force currently deploying just inside Chad’s border with Darfur was mandated last September by the United Nations to fill the security vacuum that [...]
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia — On rare occasions, the wasteland that is North American television surprises. During a recent dreary, winter morning, an arts channel broadcast a Senegalese movie that depicted life in the lesser corners of Dakar. A female vendor took her abused friend and daughter into her care, and then she fell in love with a corrupt but amiable policeman. Not much happened, and, if it did, this writer missed it because of a scheduled flight out of town. Nevertheless, the Senegalese movie provided an antidote to the conventional portrayal of Africa in a spate of popular Western movies. [...]
