Link Banana

Speaking of Mr. Keating, he also points out an interesting story from China Digital Times. Confusion about whether or not Zimbabwe’s government received the shipment that South African dockworkers refused to unload remains. On one hand:

THE ZIMBABWEAN government said yesterday that weapons carried by China’s so-called “ship of shame”, the An Yue Jiang, had arrived in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, despite an international campaign to prevent the 77 tonnes of arms reaching President Robert Mugabe’s regime.

On the other:

But China’s Foreign Ministry said the An Yue Jiang was on its way back to China, and denied reports the weapons had arrived in Zimbabwe.

“These reports are baseless and purely fictitious,” spokesman Qin Gang said in a statement on the ministry’s website (www.fmprc.gov.cn).

“The Chinese side has already said many times that the weapons sold to Zimbabwe will return on the An Yue Jiang. The ship is currently on its way back to China,” Qin said.

It’s possible I went from sharing to much international news to too little… In any case, Foreign Policy’s Passport has most of the details on this intriguing/troubling story:

A shipment of ammunition, rockets, and mortar bombs en route from China to Zimbabwe has been denied passage from the South African port of Durban to the shipment’s landlocked destination. […]

Although the An Yue Jiang is expected to return to China, a South African paper, News24, reports that a second arms shipment from China is scheduled to arrive by air in order to “expedite the delivery and to circumvent the controversy around last week’s shipment by sea.” The story also claims that both orders, placed by the Zimbabwean government, were finalized just days after Zimbabwe’s elections.

Also of note: The Economist has some broader coverage of what’s been happening on the ground in Zimbabwe.