Zimbabwean Descent

The world should be incandescent with fury over the demonstrated fact that a lunatic egomaniac is able to hold to ransom the lives of millions of people because he is permitted to do so by inaction to correct a mistaken impression that he has the support of his peers to act as he will. Impoverishing a once-wealthy African state, completely destabilizing its economy, relegating the vast majority of its population to starvation and rampant disease.

Yet that wily old dictator without a thought for the destruction he has wrought on his once-proud nation feels completely entitled to destroy a nation whose interests he purports to represent. While the population of Zimbabwe desperately searches for sources for food, wrestling with an impossible inflation rate and a devastating unemployment situation, Robert Mugabe continues to instruct his well-paid henchmen to brutalize his opponents.

The power-sharing deal that former South African head of state Thabo Mbeki succeeded in wrangling lies in ruins. Morgan Tsvangerai, whose Movement for Democratic Change had won the majority of electoral seats, is helpless witness to that failure. Witness also to the dire straits that the old thug has visited upon Zimbabwe, with even his Zanu-PF health minister appealing to the international community to help with the cholera outbreak.

Robert Mugabe, charging humanitarian aid groups with siding with Britain and Morgan Tsvangerai, has refused to permit food aid to reach his starving people. Is he now to permit volunteer medical teams to treat the dying? It's either death by starvation or by rampant disease, hitting those least capable of battling it through their compromised immune systems and starving bodies.

Thousands of starving Zimbabweans are flooding back into South Africa to settle listlessly into squalid refugee camps. Back to the country whose own impoverished underclass revolted against their presence, claiming they took jobs from poor South Africans. But being there, in South Africa, barely able to sustain themselves, is an improvement over remaining in Zimbabwe.

Robert Mugabe's frail population is perishing. Kenya's new president, Raila Odinga, himself involved in a power struggle that ended judiciously, had hoped that Jacob Zuma, head of the African National Congress, soon to be elevated to President, would intervene decisively. Yet Jacob Zuma, once so critical of Thabo Mbeki's unwillingness to denounce Robert Mugabe, now supports the failed diplomacy of Mr. Mbeki.

Moral bankruptcy prevails, even as the cholera epidemic spreads to neighbouring countries, some of which haven't the health care infrastructure to battle the disease, and whose weak treasuries aren't able to help care for the Zimbabwean refugees flooding their borders, either. And in the vacuum of moral responsibility evidenced by African leaders in denouncing Mugabe and insisting on his departure, a dire situation becomes more impossible by the day.

President Mugabe feels empowered to continue his aggravating assaults on his political opponents, instructing his henchmen to abduct members of the political opposition in a frenzy of violence. Key opposition members are disappearing, their whereabouts unknown. Even the director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, a violence monitoring group, has been abducted, along with others of her colleagues.

So much for the good intentions of the West, and the United Nation's calls for cool heads to prevail, and the Responsibility to Protect.