One man's Dictator...

It has not failed to capture my attention recently that another term of Robert Mugabe’s brutal rule in Zimbabwe is about to be ushered in. The seemingly eternal president has once again managed to bully his way to the premiership by threatening supporters of his opponent Morgan Tsvangirai, and of course Tsvangirai himself.

The sad thing about the whole affair is that we, the western world who have seemedly pledged to end all dictatorial injustice in the world (that’s the official line at least), are just sitting back and doing nothing, well except for strongly wagging our finger disapprovingly. Well that ought to stop him won’t it? It’s a pity that Zimbabwe isn’t oil rich otherwise we’d have been in there like a shot.

Instead we seem to spend our time on economically strategic action rather than morally or humanitarian strategic types of intervention. Let’s be fair here Saddam Hussain did have a bad human rights record like Mugabe. The only difference of course was that we delayed our intervention (to be blunt also we didn’t go in to save the Iraqis from him did we) until a good decade after he had committed the worst of his atrocities. Who knows maybe in 10 years time we may cotton on to how serious the situation in Zimbabwe is and take the

delayed initiative although too late to save anyone and just in time to screw up the country completely (if that is at all possible, as to be fair that would be a big job for any meddling nation).

It’s as plain as daylight that the Zimbabwean elections have been rigged and the people threatened to vote for Mugabe lest they face having already meager food supplies cut off, or family members taken away etc. It’s also clear to see that Mugabe has managed to mess up the whole countries infrastructure with his megalomaniac tendencies. This of course brings me to the issue of the white farmers being thrown off their land. This was a terrible idea as these people whether you liked them or not knew how to keep the land prosperous. After all as many people have told me (some who once lived there) that Zimbabwe was the “bread-basket of Africa” and to think that one man driven by the same race-hating anger which he was protesting against has managed to ensure that the prosperity is lost is nothing more than pathetic and saddening.

Of course you can call me biased because I am white and British but that doesn’t mean the facts are any different. Why the other African nations let alone someone from the UN, EU or USA haven’t done something sooner is beyond me. It’s hard for us (Britain) to intervene as there’s so much bad blood from the imperial times but we

should try doing something still, especially as we attempted to come across as such enlightened humanitarians in war. It’s hypocrisy to take up a humanitarianism cause to one (not as recently atrocious) dictator, as we did in Iraq, and to ignore one who’s doing worse in the here and now. We really need to sort out our priorities. Also what about Kim Jong Il!?