Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Sits like a man but he smiles like a reptile


The opposition MDC party has dropped out of the Presidential race in Zimbabwe, where the downside to participating in the political process is being raped, tortured and murdered. The UN Security Council has issued an "unprecidented condemnation" of Robert Mugabe, which will likely follow precident in resulting in nothing. Britain thinks that having the world deny "international legitimacy" to Mugabe would help, which might be true if he weren't barking mad. Of course, there are those "Sponsor-a-child" programs in Africa; I wonder if we could arm the children of Zimbabwe instead?

5 comments:

irasocol said...

I'm stunningly disappointed in South Africa. They could end this tomorrow without firing a shot. Simply by closing the borders.

Holly said...

In the BBC article I saw about the opposition candidate bailing out, I was horrified that the *footnote* to the article was, "Oh, and the next day 60+ people at the opposition campaign headquarters were arrested for reasons the police wouldn't discuss."

Rufus said...

Ira: I'd actually like to see all of the UN nations and a number of the African nations each contribute 10-20 troops and post them all on the border to follow any refugees back into Zimbabwe. I think the chances of an intervention are about 20% now though.

Holly: What's also scary is that they're rounding up entire communities to keep them up all night being re-educated and then beating anyone who tries to slip away.

SecondComingOfBast said...

Queen Elizabeth took away his knighthood, which will probably amount to about as much as the UN will accomplish. How did this guy even get a knighthood? So far as I know all he did was snatch a bunch of farms and nationalize some industries, and things have been going downhill ever since.

Anonymous said...

Well he got the knighthood back in the 80s when everyone was fairly glad to see Ian Smith finally step down and Mugabe still seemed relatively normal. There were rumors of tampered elections from the beginning, but it was nothing compared to what the Rhodesian Front had done, and Mugabe didn't really go off the rails until the 90s.