TwentyFirst C Christianity

The World ignores Zimbabwe

Did you know that some 3 million Zimbabweans, not all whites by far, have left their country of now some 11 million recently? That some 600,000 poor were ruthlessly driven out of their town dwellings suddenly into barren countryside, in a program very reminiscent of Year Zero in Kampuchea.
Did you know they now have a life expectancy in the low 30s, one of the worst in the world, only partly the result of AIDS?
In Zimbabwe today, out of a population of 11 million:
· 25% of adults and children are HIV-infected, including 56,000 children under 15 years of age.
· In the last year alone, 160,000 people died from AIDS.
· More than 600,000 children living there today have lost their mother or both parents due to AIDS.
Much of this catastrophe could have been easily prevented by sensible, progressive government which the colonial British left their colony with a generation ago.

Did you know that the world community is just as effectively prevented from helping as it is in changing the lives of Cubans, because their decades-old dictator Robert Mugabe has many of the same policies and advantages as Castro [of about the same age]. Just as with Castro in his American setting, there is no African nation capable or willing to promote or achieve regime change.
Both are equally repressive, running their country on fear and ideology, but Mugabe is perhaps the less rational. He has reduced his country to bankruptcy quickly by deliberate socialist 'redistribution', so that there is constant near famine in a land that was called the 'Breadbasket of Africa'.
Rampant inflation makes the poor citizens' lives a misery, after a post-colonial period when the country was arguably the most successful in Africa. meanwhile the MSM, the EU and the UN agonize about the morality of 'regime change' of applying pressure to remove any regime even in the face of near genocide. The US is even branded a moral failure for putting Saddam out of power after decades of mayhem in his country.

Western and other critical journalists can only enter the country under disguise, but enough do so to tell us all the real situation. One, the white Zimbabwean author of a new book House of Stone, says that the people do not resent Westerners. She has found the people very friendly, despite Mugabe's marxist propaganda. They know it is not 'white capitalism' that has ruined them all.

The United Nations achieves nothing substantial here, just as it could not improve or change the Iraqi regime by all its slow policies. Moreover, its ineffective attention is fixed on the north in Chad and Sudan, or Liberia, or Eritrea, Ethiopia, or Uganda, or, or, or....

The world press is easily distracted by bigger issues and natural disasters, forgetting the human-forged disaster that is Zimbabwe, yet another total failure for a marxist dictator.
As for awareness in Australia, where there were once large protests and punitive polices against racist South Africa, there is just polite unease as we welcome many mostly white expatriates here as migrant-refugees.
We banned sporting contests with South Africa for two decades, but the Australian cricket team still plays Zimbabwe, where their white cricketers [the best they have] have recently been banished from the national scene for their colour. Just one of our best players, Stuart McGill, has twice now declared that he will not tour that country, which is to his cost as an outstanding player. He has no supporting colleagues.

What a strange absence of protest and action against vicious marxist oppression by our so-called enlightened people and press.

posted by Barrie @ 4/17/2006 03:59:00 PM