Zimbabwe Spirals Downward
by Ian Mosley
Zimbabwe is becoming a truly amazing place, a living chamber of horrors. Just when you thought things hit rock bottom with a fuel shortage leaving most vehicles permanently parked, the insane dictator Robert Mugabe finds more ways to make his people more miserable, coming up with measures more bizarre and tyrannical than before.
As in most Third World dictatorships, the army in Zimbabwe was one of the few groups of people who got some kind of regular paycheck and at least some kind of food ration, which is more than average people are getting. Many of the soldiers in the army were keeping their families fed with their meager military allowance. Now Mugabe is starting to lay off his own military. It’s usually a bad move for a dictator to fire the men with the guns in their hands who keep him in power, but damned if Mugabe isn’t getting away with it –so far. Mugabe has now laid off 10,000 soldiers, or a quarter of his army of 40,000 men.
The old Rhodesian Army in the 1970s, excluding the Territorial units doing national service, consisted of some really fine young men, including volunteers from Europe and America, who wanted to fight the communists. There were about 1200 European regular soldiers and maybe 5,000 blacks. This force had to maintain order and fight off a communist guerrilla force from Mozambique that was well-supplied by the Soviets and reinforced with Cuban advisors at the same time Rhodesia was suffering a world-wide boycott. Contrast this to Mugabe’s communist Zimbabwe, which needed 40,000 soldiers just to stay in power while not facing any military threat from outside. (Notice any waste?)
All the limousine liberals in Europe and the leftist Carter administration in the US were hoping the black communists would win their guerilla war against Rhodesia even though anyone with a brain should have known this would lead to starvation and probable massacres of minority tribes. The white population which was feeding the nation and keeping the infrastructure functional, would be either slaughtered or driven out (as history has proven). Prime Minister Ian Smith surrendered Rhodesia in 1980, which has led to 26 years of oppression and incompetence.
Highlighting the increasingly desperate conditions in Zimbabwe, a recent news article reports “Most of Zimbabwe’s wheat mills have closed as depleted supplies force prices up, and aid agencies warn the wheat supply will be depleted within weeks. The BBC reports a 30 percent jump in bread prices and a 600 percent inflation rate.”
At a time when most other African nations have protected endangered species from hunting, a CNET news article reports “Foreign big game hunters bid $1.5 million US to shoot leopards, lions, elephants and buffaloes in Zimbabwe this year, the state media reported Sunday. In an annual state auction for hunting trophy ‘bags’ on Friday, 64 local agents and foreign hunters, including bidders from Austria, Germany, Russia, Spain and the United States, paid a fixed fee of $40 US for a license to kill a lion, the state Sunday Mail newspaper reported. Bidding for elephants exceeded $20,000 US.” Most other African nations have realized that they can make just as much money with wildlife tourism, but Zimbabwe has such a bad reputation only tourists with guns want to enter that country.
To top it off, a health catastrophe also looms in this wretched hellhole as other government services such as garbage collection fall apart from lack of money and fuel for garbage trucks, causing a wave of cholera. The outbreak of disease follows President Robert Mugabe’s notorious “Operation Sweep Out The Filth” in June, in which police destroyed up to 700,000 shantytown homes while providing no place for these people to go. Add to this the massive epidemic of AIDS and other diseases, and we are beginning to get a good look at what hell on earth truly looks like.
The West, in one of the few cases where military intervention might truly be justified on humanitarian grounds at least as much as it was in Somalia or Haiti, has simply stood by with its hands in its pockets, shuffling its feet and pretending it doesn’t see. Mugabe is a “black revolutionary hero” who fought the “evil white man” and one can’t embarrass the black dictator, now can we? The West’s policy has been stated in so many words as waiting for the 82 year-old Mugabe to die of old age. How’s that for statesmanship?