ThunderDragon Blog

Zimbabwe under Mugabe is thoroughly undemocratic. It has become the worst kind of dictatorship, the kind that doesn’t even bother to hide the disgusting things that it is doing, and just ignores, beats up, or kills anyone who disagrees with it.

Mugabe has destroyed the economy, taking Zimbabwe from the bread-basket of Africa to the basket case of Africa. His claim to power rests not on the ballot box, but through militias on the streets. He fights his opposition not in debates over the facts and over visions for Zimbabwe’s future, but with mass and extreme violence committed against people who have nothing wrong bar supporting the wrong political party.

When it has come to the state that the opposition candidate has to pull out, you know it’s bad.

But, put simply, there isn’t much that we can do.

We can tell Mugabe that he’s been bad, impose more sanctions, and strip him of his knighthood. We can can all even refuse to recognise the results of the presidential run-off election.

Yet it will have bugger all effect.

Due to historical colonialism, anything that we do - not just Britain but the entire West - will be condemned by Mugabe and other African leaders as an attempt to reclaim an empire. Hence, there is only only group of people that have the power and position to stop Mugabe.

I wish that this group was the Zimbabwean people, but they do not have the power as Mugabe terrorises them and restricts their choices at the ballot box to one.

No, the only group of people who can stop Mugabe and save Zimbabwe are the other African leaders. They must make the stand. They must tell Mugabe that enough is enough, that he may have been a great freedom fighter thirty or forty years ago, but now is no more than a despotic tyrant who is murdering his own people. They must grow a pair of balls and tell him to stand down and, if necessary, ask for Western help to achieve it.

It is up to Africa to save Zimbabwe. If they don’t, we can’t. If they won’t, Zimbabweans die.

The government has said that it is banning unskilled workers from non-EU countries for the “foreseeable future”. This is just pointless and probably illegal under some EU law. It is pointless because there are hundreds of thousands of unskilled migrants in Eastern Europe which are inside the EU who will immigrate, and it is them who are said to be causing the problems.

Frankly, I have no problem with immigrants, wherever they come from, if they come to work and are willing to integrate - my problem is with lazy-arse Britons who don’t bother getting a job because they can live off the State. I just can’t see how so many just can’t get jobs - since they are supposed to be “Job Seekers” - and yet so many unskilled immigrants can.

So long as they come and work and try to integrate, why can anyone object? If we have jobs that need filling, they need filling. if Britons are too lazy/unwilling to the job, then give it to someone who will. And instead anyone talking about how much they are taking out of us in services, talk about how much the Britons who could be doing the job if they could be bothered are taking out - far more, since they are also claiming benefits.

This ban is pointless as it is mostly unskilled migrants from inside the EU who are coming here - and this ban won’t stop them. All it is aimed to do is make the government look tough while they are being soft.

Sources: BBC, The Guardian

David Miliband is calling for a model EU. I wonder what relation to the model UN this will have.

Well, it’s not like he’s old enough to go to the real thing is he!

… Wait you mean he’s the actual Foreign Secretary? Shit, we’re screwed.

Why do we have a twelve year-old representing us on the world stage?

The gay icon Foreign Secretary, David Miliband has, as I reported he intended to, restarted his blog. The aim of his blog is, he says to

But will they be worth my time reading?

But he’s not alone - he has friends blogging with him! There are six of them from the Foreign Office blogging - Milibland himself, Jim Murphy (Minister for Europe), the “Strategy Adviser to the UK Ambassador to the EU”, and other officials. They want to have a “global conversation” - whatever one of them is.

But the burning question is - how much does this cost us, the taxpayer? Miliband’s original blog at Defra was costing us £40,000 a year, but how much more is this one going to cost, considering that there are six of them? I think we have a right to know.

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, writes in the Guardian about how “saving Zimbabwe is not colonialism, [but] Britain’s duty”:

Yes, Zimbabwe needs international intervention - but it is up to Africa to invite us in. Until they accept that Mugabe is “the worst kind of racist dictator” and has “enacted an awful Orwellian vision”, there is nothing that can be done. As it is, Brown’s refusal to even potentially have a “Straw moment” with Mugabe has led to African nations refusing to go to a summit, so how much worse a reaction would be received if he - or any other non-African nation - suggests direct intervention?

In this article, Sentamu has a weird argument with regards to colonialism, using it as a basis of both intervening and not intervening in Zimbabwe. He says that “saving Zimbabwe is not colonialism, [but] Britain’s duty”, that “the time has come for Mr Brown… to slay the ghosts of Britain’s colonialist past by thoroughly revising foreign policy towards Zimbabwe and to lead the way in co-ordinating an international response” and also that “Britain needs to escape from its colonial guilt when it comes to Zimbabwe.” All of these cannot be true. I don’t think that Britain’s colonialist history is anything to be ashamed of or to feel guilty for. To start with, it happened in a different time and culture, and we were by no means the worst perpetrators of the bad aspects. If anything, we should feel more guilty for ending colonialism in much of Africa when we did than for doing it in the first place.

When it comes down to it, I think that we do need into intervene in Zimbabwe, but in the current political climate, we can’t until Africa - or at least much of Africa - asks for us to do so. Whilst they stand beside Mugabe and his dying Zimbabwe, there is nothing that the rest of the world can do. Zimbabwe may not be a problem that Africa alone can fix, but no-one else can do anything to help until Africa asks for it.

Source: The Guardian

“Zimbabwe’s beleaguered currency has lost half its value in three days, black market dealers said last night, prompting predictions that the country was plunging into an economic meltdown that its veteran leader Robert Mugabe would not survive.
According to the government in Harare, one US dollar is worth 250 Zimbabwean dollars. But the free market rate yesterday reached more than Z$300,000 to one US dollar…
John Makumbe, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Zimbabwe, said: “It is the economy that is going to bring the regime down.
“I don’t think it’s very sustainable. Right now the transport sector is grinding to a halt. A lot of people are now in abject poverty. With a million dollars you will be lucky to buy two or three items.”" (The Telegraph)

What more can I say? Zimbabwe is dying, and the world ignores it. The Zimbabwean people don’t deserve to suffer like this. Something really does need to be done. Hopefylly Mugabe will get toppled by his own people, and Zimbabwe can try and come back from the devastating consequences of his incompetent and corrupt reign.

More people die every month in Zimbabwe than in either Darfur or Iraq. Rape, torture, and murder by government officials is commonplace. Mugabe has systematically destroyed the Zimbabwean economy by evicting white farmers and giving their farms to political friends, and once prosperous farms become desolate- and he wants to do the same to foreign-owned businesses. Zimbabwe has gone from the breadbasket of Africa, to a basket-case.

Yet will anyone help? Does anyone care? Over his decade as Prime Minister, Tony Blair has spent a lot of time on foreign policy with wars and intervention all over the world, most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq, and yet has done nothing about the abuses in Zimbabwe, where Mugabe is arguably as, if not more, oppressive than Saddam Hussein had been in Iraq.

Sarkozy is to be applauded for the inclusiveness of his first cabinet after taking office. He has seven women and eight men in it, as well as the first Cabinet minister of north African origin. He has also persuaded a socialist humanitarian crusader to be his foreign minister.

This shows that he is at least trying not to be divisive as President, and that even though he has almost halved the size of his Cabinet, he can still fill find space for talented politicians of different ideologies.

Whether it will work, however, is another story entirely. But he should be congratulated for trying at the very least to produce an inclusive approach to French politics.

A list of those in Sarkozy’s Cabinet can be found here.

Sources: The Independent, The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, BBC - article 1, article 2