Mugabe makes life a misery in Zimbabwe

Source The Australian

Mugabe makes life a misery in Zimbabwe

January 08, 2007

A country is being destroyed by avarice and ambition
ENEMIES of liberty who argue that democracy is not suited to all societies and that US President George W. Bush was wrong in principle as well as in practice in fighting to allow Iraqis to choose their rulers should read RW Johnson's report on Zimbabwe in The Australian today. The story shows what happens when fair elections and open government, as well as the other pillars of a just society, free enterprise and equal access to justice, do not exist. Johnson reports on how a once prosperous African nation is reduced to a wreck, where starvation and brutality are the norm and the state treats ordinary people as its enemy. Millions have fled Zimbabwe, or died from hunger, disease and violence. Life expectancy is barely half what it was 15 years ago, and the economy has shrunk by 40 per cent this century. And it is all the work of dictator Robert Mugabe and his henchmen, who have entrenched their political power and economic authority by beggaring and beating, starving and killing their own people.
As with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Mugabe's Zimbabwe is a warning to the world of what happens when a state is run as a family or factional fiefdom. As in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, in Zimbabwe the state and the dictator's political party are all but amalgamated. Such regimes are not only immoral, they are incompetent in governing for the people, because the needs of the vast mass of ordinary citizens are always ignored. As in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, Mugabe has tried to drive the urban poor into the country by bulldozing their shanty towns. Every dictator understands the dangers of large concentrations of desperate people in cities. Like the old Soviet Union under Stalin, Mugabe has taken farmland from ostensible enemies of the regime, in this case white farmers, and handed it over to party loyalists. In the process, as was the Soviet experience, he has all but destroyed the country's rural economy. Not long ago, Zimbabwe was the bread basket of southern Africa. Now its citizens stay and starve or seek bread in South Africa. Similar to Mao's China, Mugabe is big on state control of everything, with plans that destroy the economy. And, as with all states where democracy is blighted and official corruption flourishes, Mugabe ensures he will not be called to account for his evil incompetence. He allows his henchmen to ransack the state. And his regime rorts elections and intimidates opponents. There is yet another dictatorship Mugabe's Zimbabwe is coming to resemble -- Kim Jong-il's starving police state in North Korea.
That Mugabe's dictatorship would be ended by fair elections seems assured. But there is no way he will readily submit to such. Nor is it likely that the UN would ever act in the interests of the Zimbabwean people and remove him. Mugabe enjoys the diplomatic protection of South African President Thabo Mbeki, presumably on the principal that African leaders should stick together. China is happy to fill the aid and investment vacuum left by Western nations. And the prospect of the West removing Mugabe by military action is unlikely given the US debacle in Iraq following the removal of Saddam. Zimbabwe's best hope is that the 82-year-old Mugabe's regime will die with him, or collapse earlier under the weight of its own incompetence. Neither are morally acceptable solutions -- but Zimbabwe's tragedy is being played out at a time when appeasing or ignoring evil is politically popular in many of the countries that have the economic and military power to do something about it.