Where Lies Responsibility to Protect?

It's long been acknowledged that affiliated groups, groups with similar backgrounds, states within a geographic area, political groups, professional groups, find it politic to overlook instances of deplorable, sometimes vicious, often unprofessional conduct practised by group members. Take the well-known instance of doctors refusing to testify in court cases against other doctors. Closed-shop mentalities abound. If you're an insider an blind eye is turned to excess; outsiders beware.

The African Union is a very particular instance of the worst type of acceptance of the most egregious affronts to human dignity and human rights. The government of Sudan, because of its association with the African Union is permitted by default to continue its miserable policies of human rights abuses, effectively using its unofficial militia, the Arab Janjaweed, to murder thousands of black Sudanese in a territorial dispute. The African Union may not find comfort in its position, but there is also no will to protect the Sudanese, and the AU's ragtag militia put in place to protect the Sudanese because of international concern, international censure, international pressure, is a disgrace; underfunded, incapable, utterly toothless.

And then there's the instance of Zimbabwe, once the proud breadbasket of Africa. Instead of embracing 20th century realities as South Africa did when tearing down the walls of apartheid, Robert Mugabe, another one of Africa's many dictatorial murderers determined to disinherit and disenfranchise the white farmers whose agricultural successes guaranteed the country's well-being. One after another, white farmers were wrenched from their former land, their countless farm workers left bereft of jobs and income, the land turned over to cronies of Mugabe's, and left to moulder.

Mugabe's brutal dictatorship has largely been directed against poor Zimbabweans, the homeless, the most vulnerable in his society, made all the more so as a result of his policies which have placed arable land into the hands of those who feel entitled to them but who make no effort to produce crops to feed the country. Greater numbers face starvation and privation and when those in the countryside gravitate to the cities to try to find work, settling into vast shantytowns, Mugabe designates them as undesirables and orders his troops to destroy the shanties while banishing the starving indigents from the cities.

Anyone who protests Mugabe's rule is arrested, tortured and often murdered. It's estimated that up to a million people may have been abused and tortured in Mugabe's prisons. The atrocities this dictator visits upon his people are well know, are decried, but no practical steps have been taken to assist the country out of the morass Mugabe has led them into. Zimbabean human rights activities are now turning to the international community, the Human Rights Council, the UN Security Council and the Commonwealth (which delivered a verbal slap on the wrist to Mugabe, nothing more) for help.

African countries stick together, as a brotherhood, they say. Zimbabweans cannot wait much longer for some kind of resolution to bring their country out of its crisis, and presumably, Mugabe out of office. The country teeters on the brink of utter collapse, plagued by food and fuel shortages and a failure in foreign exchange. Its economy has shrunk by 50%, inflation is over a thousand percent; unemployment over 70%. About four thousand of its citizens die every week from HIV/AIDS. Zimbabwe is on the brink of famine.

There is no rule of law, there are rampant abuses of human rights, and the country's governance is irredemiably corrupt. This is a country in the total grip of repression. Fear stalks the land. There is no opposition to the present government, for no opposition is brooked and when it rears its tentative head, it is summarily struck down.

Zimbabwe's Congress of Trade Unions tried to bring about peaceful protests against government policy, and its leaders were arrested, beaten and tortured. The government continues to evict white farmers in a continuation of its land re-distribution project. If the land were distributed in an equitable, meaningful way so that it could be farmed by those determined to bring the country out of its food crisis that would make sense, but that's not the case.

In the last six years roughly four thousand of the country's farms have been seized from their former owners, some of whom have been left with nothing after generations of farming and producing agricultural wealth for the country. Some of the white farmers have been murdered in the process. The idea behind redistribution is to redress the past hindrance to black ownership, but the poor have been overlooked consistently in favour of enriching Mugabe's associates and supporters.

Robert Mugabe feels perfectly entitled to rule his country as he sees fit, regardless of the state of desperate need he has brought it to. He and his colleagues live well, while countless poor black citizens reap the bare harvest of need. And the African Union will do nothing, say nothing to raise the ire of this lunatic dictator.