Mugabe on Hunger
Here's Gindy's take:
Communist dictator Robert Mugabe has litteraly caused a good amount of the starvation and homelessness in Zimbabwe. But, not to worry. The UN still invited the dictator to address a conference on world hunger (if that is not ironic, I don't know what is). If it wasn't so serious it would be funny. But, it's not. Because it is so serious. It is estimated that a third of the population, four million, will need someone from outside the country to provide for them....
According to the BBC, UN delegates applauded the Communist dictator's speech in which he compared President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair to Hitler and Mussolini. This from a man who has the homes of poor bulldozed and purposefully uses food as a weapon by starving his own people. Yet the UN loves this guy....
Here's news coverage of the event:
Robert Mugabe used a United Nations platform yesterday to compare George W. Bush and Tony Blair to Europe's fascist-era leaders. Speaking in Rome at a 60th anniversary ceremony of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) yesterday, the Zimbabwean president called the US and UK leaders "international terrorists" for launching the war in Iraq.
"Must we allow these men, the two unholy men of our millennium, who in the same way as Hitler and Mussolini formed their unholy alliance, formed an alliance to attack an innocent country?" news agencies quoted Mr Mugabe as saying. "We did not agree with Saddam Hussein, but we accorded to the people of Iraq their right to decide who should lead them."
Mr Mugabe was applauded after he spoke as the last of nine leaders to address the conference. The Venezuelan and Brazilian leaders also hit at US foreign policy.
Tony Hall, the US ambassador to the UN's food agencies, had earlier said he was "amazed" by the FAO's invitation to Mr Mugabe, "who has done so much to hurt his own people". European Union sanctions in 2002 banned Mr Mugabe and other top Zimbabwean leaders from travelling to Europe but he is allowed to attend UN events.
In July the UN Security Council condemned Mr Mugabe's government for an urban clearance programme that displaced some 700,000 people. However, the UN's Rome-based World Food Programme has had to tread delicately to maintain its programmes in Zimbabwe, where some 4m people face food shortages.
And, before we conclude that Mugabe is championed by the usual Bush-bashers in the Franco-German alliance, note that even they are opposed to Mugabe. From Der Spiegel:
Robert Mugabe is inexorably destroying his country. Although the dictator is essentially persona non grata in Europe, African politicians celebrate the potentate as a nationalist messiah.
It's unlikely that the dictator hears much about what goes on in his foundering realm. When Robert Mugabe, 81, has himself chauffeured through the streets of Zimbabwe, his Mercedes S600L Pullman limousine comes fully equipped with a CD player, movies and Internet access....
If Mugabe did in fact glance out of his car's tinted windows, he would see traces of his "Operation Murambatsvina" along the roadside. The program, which began on May 25, is officially known in English as "Operation Restore Order," but the rough translation of its name in the national language, Shona, is "Get Rid of Trash." Throughout Mugabe's realm, bulldozers are in the process of demolishing bothersome and unsightly slum neighborhoods, renderring their exhausted inhabitants homeless.
Throughout it all, "Comrade Bob" sits in his Mercedes and has himself driven through leveled cities, still believing in the illusion that Zimbabwe is the "jewel of Africa." Tanzania's first president, Julius Nyerere, coined the name in 1980 when it fell into the hands of then 56-year-old rebel leader Robert Gabriel Mugabe. At the time, Nyerere cheerfully admonished Mugabe to "take good care of it."
Nyerere died in 1999. A year later Mugabe, a self-proclaimed Marxist, began expropriating land from Zimbabwe's white farmers. Since then, the former Rhodesia, once a paradise for safari vacationers and hunting tourists, has been transformed into a scene of devastation.
For years the Europeans, driven by the uncompromising British, have been putting the thumbscrews on the man Bob Geldof has called a "murderous thug." Mugabe and 115 of his key henchmen, "who commit human rights violations and restrict freedom of expression and assembly," are no longer allowed entry into Europe. The United States has taken similar steps. The European Union and Germany have cancelled development aid to Zimbabwe....
Africans, of all people, have been surprisingly willing to accept the dictator in Harare and his affectations. Hardly any African politician ever so much as voices a word of criticism about Mugabe. In March, when Mugabe held a charade-like parliamentary election in which his ZANU-PF walked away with a proud two-thirds majority, the African Union praised the farce as "free and credible" -- despite the fact that the results of the campaign's dirty tactics were on full display in Harare's hospitals: hundreds of wounded, victims of Mugabe's gangs of thugs.
The 13 representatives of the Southern African Development Community, a group representing the countries of southern Africa, came to the same odd conclusion -- at a time when the rest of the world had long since declared the election a fraud. "The procedure was credible," said South African Minister of Minerals and Energy Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, "and it reflects the will of the Zimbabwean people."
On another front, no one seems to want to say anything negative about Mugabe's new policy of razing slums, with the African Union saying that it will not become involved in Zimbabwe's "internal affairs." In an editorial, the South African weekly newspaper, Mail and Guardian, accuses Mugabe's critics of "hypocrisy" and former colonial power Great Britain of "demonizing President Robert Mugabe." After all, says the paper, millions of people are resettled somewhere in the world every year to "make room for tourists, dams, roads and airports."
When US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called Mugabe's realm an "outpost of tyranny," the statement prompted South African President Thabo Mbeki to say that Rice's tone was damaging to South Africa's "silent diplomacy" with Zimbabwe.
What's wrong with Africa's leaders, with the next generation that proclaimed an "African renaissance" and promised "good governance," a completely new style of leadership? At times it even seems that Mbeki's supposedly quiet democracy is really nothing but a cover for clandestine approval of the madman, who has called himself a "modern-day Hitler."...
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