What to Do With Robert MuGabe?
Who can appreciate what Mugabe has done to Zimbabwe? £1 is worth 16 Billion Zimbabwe Dollars. He will go down in the history of Zimbabwe as the worst thing since colonialism. The South Africans need to grow a pair and take him on. We can overthrow Saddam in the name of liberty, democracy, but Zimbabwe doesn't have oil.
Who can appreciate what Mugabe has done to Zimbabwe? £1 is worth 16 Billion Zimbabwe Dollars. He will go down in the history of Zimbabwe as the worst thing since colonialism. The South Africans need to grow a pair and take him on. We can overthrow Saddam in the name of liberty, democracy, but Zimbabwe doesn't have oil.
4 comments:
Kill the son of a bitch.
Michael Carmichael, a former advisor to Morgan Tsvangirai, offers
the following observations on the recent attempt by President George W. Bush to appear less despotic than the reviled president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe .... In the midst of the sham election rigged to give Robert Mugabe the impression that he is still the most popular leader of his teeming masses, George W. Bush outdid himself in a realm where he deserves a special distinction for excellence: hypocrisy.
.... now in the waning months of his forlorn presidency Bush frets and yearns for his place in history. With his presidency marred by an illegal war, stained by war-crimes, tattooed by torturers and infected with the historical equivalent of the AIDS virus, cancer and clinical insanity, Bush is now seeking a phantasmagoric form of presidential redemption.
.... Presented with the possibility of chastising Mugabe in order to appear to be a defender of democracy, Bush struts and prates on the world stage making a mockery of himself and the undeniable facts of his shameful history....
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Russia and China have vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution on sanctions. British shadow foreign secretary William Hague said put it correctly:
"The excuse given by Russia and China, that the issue is no threat to world stability, does not hold water when millions of Zimbabwean refugees have fled to neighbouring countries... With the UN paralysed, the need for more serious and properly enforced EU sanctions is all the greater."
BBC
Simon Jenkins,
Sanctions are a war waged by cowards:
Unlike war, which is violence aimed at conquering and replacing a regime, merely engineering a shift in terms of trade is play-acting. As a gesture of soft power, sanctions were first imposed on Italy during the Abyssinian crisis of 1935 and did not work. Yet their appeal is undiminished. Macho in rhetoric yet painless to the imposing nation, they replace guns and bombs with trade returns and computers.
History offers one generalisation: that sanctions add longevity to anyone on whom the West imposes them.The most sanctioned leaders of the past half-century have been Fidel Castro, Colonel Gadaffi, Saddam Hussein, Aya-tollah Khomeini, the Taliban, the Burmese generals and the rulers of North Korea. None was brought down by them. Where intervention was effective, as in the Falklands, Haiti, Afghanistan, Serbia and Iraq, it required force.
Nothing is more arrogant than a powerful nation’s belief in the efficacy of all it does. If a sanction is imposed and does not achieve its goal, it was not tough enough. If the goal does occur, then its sanctions must have been the cause.
Students of sanctions remain mystified by their appeal. They are near impossible to make leak-proof and just establish more costly and corrupt conduits of trade. Kofi Annan of the UN calls them a “blunt and even counterproductive instrument”.
Sanctions may not make a country wealthy in the longer term, but they can make a regime more secure in the short one. They also enrich its ruling elite.
The threat of economic siege drives a nation towards state power, as does the threat of terrorism in the West. It makes governments behave more not less repressively and the populace become more not less dependent on it.
he appeal of sanctions is that they are a quick answer to public opinion demanding that “something must be done”, something that does not mean body bags. They are war by other means, bloodcurdling but not bloodthirsty. But they are cowards’ war because those they hurt, usually the poor, are also defenceless.
The last desperate cry of the sanctions lobby is: if not sanctions, what? It is as if any gesture were better than none.
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