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Leftists to blame for Robert Mugabe's blood-letting
Simon Heffer,
Telegraph
August 28, 2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/06/28/do2801.xml
A few years ago, when
the tyrant of Zimbabwe was moving from being wicked to being downright
evil, I wrote that we should invade Harare, depose him, and supervise
free elections. Invited to appear on a BBC programme to defend this
stance, I was assailed by an "Africa expert" who told
me that diplomatic pressure on Mugabe was bound to work, that the
idea of sending the Parachute Regiment in to sort the monster out
was offensively colonialist, and that I was wrong.
White liberals like him
are as much to blame for the terror, starvation, brutality and genocide
that now scar this once-rich and stable country. The supposedly
civilised world has allowed Mugabe and his horrors to happen, mainly
unchecked. Sanctions on his country merely starve those who disagree
with him. Zimbabwe has all the natural, and had all the human, resources
to be an example to the rest of Africa. It is now merely a symbol
of what happens when a dictator takes charge, and those who might
rein him in simply look away.
So it is infuriating
to hear some Leftists and liberals saying, through the teeth of
their post-imperial guilt, that perhaps an armed intervention is
the only way to rid the world of this brute. Had this been done
years ago, when they took the opposite view, how many lives might
have been saved? How many productive people, black and white, would
have felt able to stay in Zimbabwe, rather than flee with their
talents abroad? Would it still be a country with a life expectancy
in the low thirties, something not heard of in Europe since the
early Middle Ages? How proud does the Left, with its stupidly romantic
notions of the inviolate nature of "black freedom fighters",
feel about what it has so ably helped Mugabe achieve?
Of course, even now the
Leftists who are recanting cannot bear the thought of a military
operation being conducted by Britain alone - not that our exploited
and resource-starved Armed Forces are in a position to take out
Mugabe. It is argued that there should be a UN or multinational
force, something that most of us old cynics will believe only when
we see it. Frankly, I couldn't care less who liberates Zimbabwe
- North Korea, the Taliban or Venezuela are welcome to it: they
couldn't be any worse than the incumbent.
Yet the gutlessness of
our Foreign Office continues. The disastrous Lord Malloch-Brown,
who is to international diplomacy what a lamp post is to a dog,
said this week that it would be wrong for "the mangy old British
lion" to strip Mugabe of his honorary knighthood. Let us ignore
for the moment the question of whether a Foreign Office minister
should insult his country so, another sign that this oaf is unfit
for office. Four days later the knighthood did indeed go, on a recommendation
from David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, to the Queen. Mr Miliband
had said just two weeks earlier that removing the knighthood was
not a good idea. And the Tories are no better. This week they ordered
the suspension of a prospective parliamentary candidate who made
the blindingly obvious observation that the late Ian Smith was better
than Mugabe. It is time these people grew up.
I know what a shock it
must be to Leftists of all parties, with their uncritical adoration
of African leaders from the saintly, such as Nelson Mandela, to
the repulsive, such as Mugabe, to see that sometimes black people
can be evil too. But that is the truth. And Zimbabwe may be the
prologue to what may happen in South Africa after a decade of failure
by Thabo Mbeki is followed by the rule of the dubious Jacob Zuma.
It may be very uncomfortable and embarrassing for whites to intervene
to stop the butchery of black tyrants. But if they don't, hecatombs
of lives will be lost.
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