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The Agonies of Zimbabwe
Editorial, New York Times
December 09, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/09/opinion/09sat4.html

One problem with labeling states as pariahs is that it’s all too easy to forget about them. Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is a prime example: it is under economic sanctions by the United States and the European Union and few tourists go there, so the suffering of its people is largely out of sight and out of mind. Yet things are truly terrible.

The latest indication comes in a United Nations-financed report by Zimbabwe’s own social welfare ministry. More than 63 percent of the rural population, and 53 percent of the urban population, couldn’t meet "basic food and non-food requirements" in 2003, the last year for which figures were available, and things have gotten far worse since. Malnutrition among children is up 35 percent, people without access to health care is up 35 percent, H.I.V./AIDS afflicts 18.1 percent of the population, unemployment is over 70 percent, life expectancy is down to 36.

Mr. Mugabe’s government blames sanctions, weather, former colonial rule, market conditions. Yet the real culprit is Mr. Mugabe, who has run Zimbabwe since 1980. Now 82, the president is a master at the blame game, accusing the West of colonialism and racism when it criticizes his scheme to redistribute white-owned commercial farms among blacks, or the cruel expulsion of 750,000 slum dwellers from cities, or whatever else he does.

There’s not much the West can do; more sanctions would only bring more suffering. But Africans could make a difference, if they joined in condemning Mr. Mugabe. For understandable reasons, African leaders have been reluctant to publicly criticize fellow Africans. But as Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, declared yesterday, "human rights are perhaps more in need of protection in Africa than in any other continent."

The suffering Zimbabwean people are in desperate need of protection, the sooner the better.

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