Here’s just something to get you thinking. It’s a little bit different from my usual posts.//Dave
CNN reported intimidation by militias: hands chopped off, fingers broken. If you wear the wrong colors, you’re beaten to the brink of death.
BBC reported that a woman was raped because she could not sing the ruling regime’s “theme song”, homes were burnt down, and citizens hid so they would not be forced to place ballots for the dictator.
Simply put, Zimbabwe is a mess.
After opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai won the popular vote in March, the runoff election between Tsvangirai and Robert Mugabe was marked with intimidation, vote rigging, and murders of opposition leaders and their families. Tsvangirai pulled out of the runoff to avoid more killings, and spent election day holed up in the Dutch embassy. Of course, Mugabe claimed victory in the runoff…
African leaders won’t publicly censure Robert Mugabe… Governments in Gambia, Angola, Gabon, Rwanda, and Gambia all have dirty secrets, election fraud, and corrupt governments of their own, just to name a few. (And those are just out of the countries with functioning governments) South Africa, whose president Thabo Mbeki has been named mediator for Zimbabwe’s political struggles, has done nothing to intervene. As Georgina Godwin, a Zimbabwean journalist, put it: “Mbeki’s quiet diplomacy is comatose.” Mugabe has destroyed Zimbabwe, turning it from an example of how African nations can thrive, to a country whose economy has crumbled. The World Factbook reports,
The government of Zimbabwe faces a wide variety of difficult economic problems as it struggles with an unsustainable fiscal deficit, an overvalued official exchange rate, hyperinflation, and bare store shelves. Its 1998-2002 involvement in the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo drained hundreds of millions of dollars from the economy. The government’s land reform program, characterized by chaos and violence, has badly damaged the commercial farming sector, the traditional source of exports and foreign exchange and the provider of 400,000 jobs, turning Zimbabwe into a net importer of food products. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe routinely prints money to fund the budget deficit, causing the official annual inflation rate to rise from 32% in 1998, to 133% in 2004, 585% in 2005, passed 1000% in 2006, and 26,000% in November 2007. Private sector estimates of inflation in 2007 are well above 100,000%.
Where is the international community? Where is the United Nations? Why doesn’t Mugabe qualify as a dictator (he’s been in office since December 1987) who needs to be strictly sanctioned or expelled? The world leaders at the G8 conference and the United Nations Security Council are currently debating what to do … but they seem to be at a loss, and no nation has the willpower to send a peacekeeping force or substantial election monitors… any ideas?