Humanitarian Aid for Zimbabwe
“Action” withdrawn in 1996.
An amendment to H.R. 3540 conditioned humanitarian aid for the African nation of Zimbabwe on its doing the bidding of a New York-based multinational insurance giant, American International Group.
As reported in Time magazine and the online Internet magazine, Salon, the government of Zimbabwe was requiring its citizens to control the major part of companies doing business in Zimbabwe. (The United States itself requires this in the television industry, which is why Australian-born Rupert Murdoch became an American citizen so he could buy up what eventually became the Fox Network.) In response, AIG met with aides to Senator McConnell, who was chairman of the Senate Appropriations Foreign Operations Subcommittee. According to Salon, AIG drafted an amendment itself and sent it on to Robin Cleveland, the subcommittee’s staff director, on July 17, 1996, a day after meeting with AIG executive Edmund Lee. AIG’s amendment limited humanitarian aid to Zimbabwe $10 million — half of the previous year’s allotment — unless Zimbabwe exempted U.S. financial-services companies, according to Salon.
Despite the memo, obtained by Salon, Cleveland insists that her committee does not allow corporations to draft legislation.
The U.S. State Department and the Agency for International Development feared that, without the humanitarian aid, the AIDS crisis would worsen in Zimbabwe, a country in which more than 25 percent of adults are HIV positive and where experts fear the life expectancy will soon be down in the 40s, Salon said.
Senator McConnell followed AIG’s travails closely enough to publicly congratulate Zimbabwe on the Senate floor on July 25, 1996, for caving in to the pressure he, AIG and others had exerted, but included a warning:
[T]his committee was prepared to deal with a current trade dispute and nationalization of foreign assets in Zimbabwe, but has withdrawn action relying upon the good faith representations of Ambassador [Amos Bernard Muvengwa] Midzi of the Republic of Zimbabwe that the problems involving United States companies have been mediated successfully. We congratulate the leadership of the Republic of Zimbabwe for its constructive actions and hope there will be no further need for this committee to review this matter…
