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A moral duty to act there
Peter Oborne, Centre for Policy Studies (CPS)
January, 2003

http://www.cps.org.uk/pdf/pub/12.pdf

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Introduction
If Rwanda happened again today… we would have a moral duty to act there. - Tony Blair, Labour Party Conference Speech, 2 October 2001.

THERE IS LITTLE TIME LEFT. Zimbabwe has passed through crisis into catastrophe, and gone beyond fear into terror. Her people have fallen from poverty into desperation. They have made the sordid and degrading journey from hunger into starvation: famine beckons. No more than a few months remain until this recently prosperous and law-abiding country falls over the edge and becomes a failed state. The innocent may die in their millions. Only the evil and rapacious will thrive.

Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe, is waging war on his own people. The famine that looms for 7 million Zimbabwean citizens - more than half the population - is no natural disaster.1 There is indeed a drought in Southern Africa, and it is indeed causing widespread suffering. But Mugabe has taken advantage of the drought to starve and terrorise his people.

The prospect of famine has handed Mugabe a new weapon. Maize is the national subsistence food. Once it has been ground down in the mills it is turned onto a porridge-like substance known to the people as 'mealie meal'. Mealie meal is as ubiquitous, and as essential for the nourishment of the population at large, as the potato was in Ireland before the great famine of 1846-47.

A moral duty to act there
President Mugabe has seized control of the supply of mealie meal. He insists that it is marketed and distributed through state agencies to ensure that he can dictate who is worthy of food aid. Private operators are not permitted to procure or sell mealie meal. Generous supplies of maize exist on Zimbabwe's borders, waiting to be brought in. But this the President will not allow. His objective is to ensure that mealie meal is supplied only to the supporters of his own Zanu-PF ruling party, and forbidden to the opposition. So far, through ruthless use of the state machinery, and aided and abetted by his authorised thugs, Mugabe has been successful in his objective: hence the famine.

Zimbabwe can be saved, but only if Britain and the world wake up. Given the political will, it would be easy to restore Zimbabwe to prosperity and freedom. It took 78 days to bomb Serbia into submission during the Kosovo conflict. Mugabe and his henchman could be brought to their knees within weeks, merely by cutting off the fuel supply to this landlocked state. In particular, it is hard to find words strong enough to condemn the indifference shown by President Mbeki to the tragedy taking place on his northern border.

Yet there is no political will to act. Too many people have accepted Robert Mugabe's own false narrative that he is fighting a post-colonial battle against racist white farmers. This claim has gained him sympathy among some neighbouring states. But above all, it has cut ice among the liberal élites in the west. For some, Mugabe's rants have provided an excuse for inertia. For Mugabe, though, they are an alibi for genocide. The white farmers are a statistical pinprick in the Zimbabwean tragedy. There were just 4,000 before the land seizures began two years ago, and less than 500 today. The victims of Mugabe's oppression are not the whites, but the black Zimbabwean people. It is reckoned that 1.5 million black Zimbabwean farm workers and their families have been flung off the land and into camps in the past 30 months. Four times that number are starving. It is for those people, and emphatically not on behalf of the whites, that the world must act. It must act with compassion. It must act with conviction. It must act today.

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