The world is complicit in our decline.

last updated 8 January 2015

Zimbabwe

Eddie Cross

The international community is coddling Zimbabwe’s dictator, said Eddie Cross in the Web newspaper Newzimbabwe.com. The country is starving. We produced just 600,000 tons of grain last year—a far cry from the 2.4 million that President Robert Mugabe had so “confidently predicted.” So the minister for social welfare last week sent a letter “urgently appealing to the international community” for enough food to feed 5 million people for several months. But Mugabe insisted that the request for aid be kept secret, so he could continue to boast to the world how well Zimbabwe is doing. Amazingly, donor organizations “agreed to keep the formal request for food aid confidential.” They apparently feared that if they did not comply, Mugabe would simply let his people starve. Don’t they realize they are enabling his behavior? And it gets worse: The U.N.’s own Food and Agriculture Organization actually picked Zimbabwe to host a meeting on food aid—a move as ludicrous as naming Cuba to the Human Rights Commission. The U.N. is becoming as delusional as Mugabe himself. And the Zimbabwean people, abused by their leader, have been abandoned by the rest of the world “like a mugged man lying in the street and being run over by the passing traffic.”