{"id":69,"date":"2008-07-09T10:47:44","date_gmt":"2008-07-09T17:47:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/warriorshepherd.com\/blog\/2008\/07\/09\/intervention-in-zimbabwe\/"},"modified":"2008-07-09T10:47:44","modified_gmt":"2008-07-09T17:47:44","slug":"intervention-in-zimbabwe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/warriorshepherd.com\/blog\/intervention-in-zimbabwe\/","title":{"rendered":"Intervention in Zimbabwe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s just something to get you thinking.\u00a0 It’s a\u00a0little bit different from my usual posts.\/\/Dave<\/em><\/p>\n

CNN reported intimidation by militias:\u00a0hands chopped off, fingers broken.\u00a0 If you wear the wrong colors, you’re beaten to the brink of death.<\/p>\n

BBC reported that\u00a0a 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.<\/p>\n

Simply put, Zimbabwe is a mess.<\/p>\n

After opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai\u00a0won the popular vote in March, the runoff election between Tsvangirai\u00a0and Robert Mugabe was marked with intimidation, vote rigging, and murders of opposition leaders and their families.\u00a0 Tsvangirai pulled out of the runoff to avoid more killings, and spent election day holed up in the Dutch embassy.\u00a0 Of course, Mugabe claimed\u00a0victory in the runoff…<\/p>\n

\"Video<\/a><\/p>\n

African leaders won’t publicly censure Robert Mugabe… Governments in Gambia, Angola, Gabon, Rwanda, and Gambia all have dirty secrets, election fraud,\u00a0and corrupt\u00a0governments of their own, just to name a few.\u00a0 (And those are just out of the countries with functioning governments)\u00a0 South Africa, whose president Thabo Mbeki has been named mediator for Zimbabwe’s political struggles, has done nothing to intervene.\u00a0 As Georgina Godwin, a Zimbabwean journalist, put it: \u201cMbeki\u2019s quiet diplomacy is comatose.\u201d\u00a0 Mugabe has destroyed Zimbabwe, turning it from an example of how African nations can thrive, to a country whose economy has crumbled.\u00a0 The World Factbook <\/a>reports,<\/p>\n

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%<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Where is the international community?\u00a0 Where is the United Nations?\u00a0 Why doesn’t Mugabe qualify as a dictator (he’s been in office since December 1987) who needs to be strictly sanctioned or expelled?\u00a0 The world leaders at the G8 conference<\/a> and the United Nations Security Council are currently debating what to do <\/a>… but they seem to be at a loss, and no nation has the willpower to send a peacekeeping force or substantial election\u00a0monitors…\u00a0any ideas?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s just something to get you thinking.\u00a0 It’s a\u00a0little bit different from my usual posts.\/\/Dave CNN reported intimidation by militias:\u00a0hands chopped off, fingers broken.\u00a0 If you wear the wrong colors, you’re beaten to the brink of death. BBC reported that\u00a0a woman was raped because she could not sing the ruling regime’s “theme song”, homes were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/warriorshepherd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/warriorshepherd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/warriorshepherd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/warriorshepherd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/warriorshepherd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/warriorshepherd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/warriorshepherd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/warriorshepherd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/warriorshepherd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}