It is bad enough that bully should trade on someone’s bare toes but it is intolerable that the bully should trivialise the mental anguish and physical pain of their victim. Mugabe was in Copenhagen calling for the lifting of the targeted sanctions against him but would not even acknowledge the suffering his repressive rule has caused and continue to cause on the people of Zimbabwe – was the human rights violations which trigged the sanctions in the first place.
Here is a man whose thirty year reign of terror has left the entire Zimbabwe population in object poverty and despair. 90% of the people are out of work. Hospitals and schools are barely functioning. Up to 80% of the people are now depending on food aid – the nation used to grow enough to feed its own people and had plenty left over for export before Mugabe took over. The economic poverty has reached such level of depravity, it is killing people. Life expectancy has dropped from 65 years to 34 years in the thirty years of Mugabe’s rule.
Mugabe has also murdered tens of thousands of people to secure his iron grip on power. Last year Mugabe “declared war” on the people to force them to vote for him; over 400 people were murdered in cold blood.
The token punitive targeted sanctions by the West were in response to Mugabe’s continued failure to hold free and fair elections and other serious human rights violations. The West wanted to impose more far reaching sanctions but China and South Africa blocked their passage at the UN. A country like China with a very poor human rights record of its own would never support such UN disapproval that would set a precedence by which they too would be measured tomorrow. This, sadly, has left the UN totally ineffective when it comes to dealing member countries who flout the organisation’s own human rights values.
Mugabe has used the UN platform to complain about the token sanctions against him and his cronies. He never seems to get tired of this. This time it was at Climatic Conference in Copenhagen.
“Why is the guilty north not showing the same fundamentalist spirit it exhibits in our developing countries on human rights matters on this more menacing threat of climate change?” mourned Mugabe. “Where are its sanctions for eco-offenders?”
He did not say who exactly the eco-offenders are. But since the greenhouse gases started increasing significant at the start of the Industrial revolution it is logic to blame, if one has to use that word, all those who led and all those who have benefited from the revolution. So, according to Mugabe, there should be targeted sanctions against every industrialist and citizen from the all the developed countries.
Of course, Climate debate in Copenhagen is not anti-development, even his Chinese friends are very proud of their country’s rapid economic development of the last ten years or so. The debate is about how to reduce the greenhouse gases without affecting development. For the developing countries, the debate is about getting assistance from the rich to help them cope with the adverse economic condition brought about by climatic changes brought on by global warming. Of course Mugabe does not care about all that.
Mugabe is mourning the targeted sanctions are stopping him and his cronies from visiting the developed countries as often as they would like to spend Zimbabwe’s national wealth, stolen from the poor, on luxuries only a few in the developed countries can afford!
Thanks to the countless UN talk-shop, Mugabe and his cronies have been able to circumvent the travel ban and do their shopping almost every month. The West’s travel ban does not apply to UN related travel.
It is ironic that Mugabe should use a UN platform to talk so dismissively about his continued violation of the UN human rights violation, the very core values the organisation was supposedly founded to defend.
I am angry that the UN should afford a brutal dictator like Mugabe to opportunity to disrupt important world business again and again with his egotistic nonsense. My greatest fury however goes to Tsvangirai whose stupidity gave Mugabe the legitimacy without which he would never been invited to address such UN gatherings.
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