Zimbabwe -- The World Reacts --There is No Compassion

Mad Bobby Mugabe’s terror regime just keeps rolling along. So complete is his triumph that the opposition is reduced to praying for his death or silliness like the following:

The Zimbabwe Independent reports:

IN a major indictment of Zimbabwe's electoral process, the European Union has extended its list of Zimbabweans under targeted sanctions to include head of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission Justice George Chiweshe, the Zimbabwe Independent can reveal.

Read it here.

Yeah guys, whatever, this will really hurt the old monster.

And there's this from the Zimbabwean:

MICHIGAN - The student government of Michigan State University recently voted unanimously to denounce President Robert Mugabe and ask the Board of Trustees to strip him of the honorary degree awarded him by that institution 15 years ago.

Read it here.

Or this:

Washington - The United States on Thursday strongly condemned an urban clean-up campaign by the Zimbabwe government that has left hundreds of thousands of poor people homeless and facing the winter cold.

Read it here.

Or this:

Harare - Zimbabwean doctors condemned a government campaign to clear shacks from the cities, saying as many as one million people might have been made homeless and expressing particular concern about Aids victims among those affected.

"The campaign has targeted the poorest members of our community, simply trying to survive," said the 300-member Zimbabwe Doctors for Human Rights statement on Monday. It added its voice to an outpouring of international and domestic outcry over what the government calls an urban cleanup campaign.

Read it here.

Maybe, just maybe, if things get bad enough we can have an official from one of the NGO’s send a strongly worded communiqué to Mugabe. That’ll show him we’re really, really serious, and he will bend to the weight of world opinion, for what that's worth (clearly not much).

Meanwhile the terror directed against Zimbabwe’s poorest citizens has spread from the cities to the countryside.

News 24 reports:

Harare - Police in Central Zimbabwe have begun evicting people who settled on former white-owned farms without government permission as part of a countrywide "clean-up" campaign, the Daily Mirror reported on Friday.

Police spokesperson Whisper Bondayi told the privately-run newspaper that the controversial Operation Restore Order, which was launched last month and has made tens of thousands of people homeless, had now spread to farms in the citrus-growing Mazowe district.

Read it here. [I like that name: “Whisper”]

And there’s this from Zimonline:

HARARE - More than 300 000 children of informal traders and city squatter families in Zimbabwe have dropped out of school in the last four weeks alone after their homes were destroyed by the government, ZimOnline has learnt.

Officials at the Ministry of Education head office in Harare said directors of education in the country’s 10 provinces were last week asked to compile figures of children under 13 years no longer coming to school because their families were evicted in the government’s highly unpopular urban clean-up operation.

….

The official said school authorities have not been able to establish the whereabouts of the children many of whom are now just roaming around urban areas with their families and sleeping in the open after the shanty homes were brunt down by the police.

Read it here.

And in particular read this moving account of the destruction by Neal Connerly:

It is a wasteland. Street after street razed in a scene that looks like a natural disaster. The hundreds of thousands who have been left homeless are calling it Zimbabwe's tsunami. But man, not nature, is to blame for the destruction enveloping this country.

The full force of Robert Mugabe's state is destroying homes and lives in what it calls Operation Restore Order. But all that can be seen is chaos and trauma. There is no compassion, only carefully executed brutality. [emphasis mine]

....

In the ruins of his former home in the Harare suburb of Mbare, a man called Isaac prepared for another night in the freezing mid-winter cold. His wife and four children were huddled around a small fire.

Three pieces of corrugated iron that they managed to salvage from the mess left behind by the bulldozers are the walls of their new home.

"This is our tsunami," he said. "We are cold and alone and who cares? What are we meant to do? We have no money, there is nowhere for us to go. What have done wrong?"

Indeed!

Read it here.

And yet another obscenity, the Times reports:

Harare has been turned into a refugee city with marauding bands of families pursued through the smoking rubble by police who move on anyone they find sleeping outside or still retaining a few possessions.
....

With international aid agencies prevented from helping, those who can have sought shelter from the freezing winter nights in church yards and halls.

But confidential minutes of a meeting last Wednesday between community representatives and government officials headed by Ignatius Chombo, the minister of public works, confirm that church leaders have been refused permission to help the homeless.
....

“It’s social engineering with sledgehammers,” said Oskar Wermter, a Jesuit priest in Harare. “I do not know anyone poorer than a widow with her orphaned grandchildren — remember, there is Aids all around — surrounded by the rubble of her destroyed home.”

Yet far from halting the brutal campaign, which has seen people forced to destroy their homes at gunpoint, government officials said yesterday they were extending it to rural areas. “We must clean the country of the crawling mass of maggots bent on destroying the economy,” declared Augustine Chihuri, police commissioner.

"Social engineering with sledghammers..." Hmmm.

Read it here.

Simple condemnation and symbolic gestures are not what is needed in these circumstances, but that seems to be all that will be forthcoming from the "international community." Once more, as has been so often demonstrated in the past few decades, the weight of world opinion counts for nothing -- absolutely nothing! And the poor suffer, and suffer, and suffer.

Sigh!

Previous posts here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here. There are more. Just scroll through my archives to see them.

Philip Chaston over at Samizdata thinks this is lazy blogging, and maybe it is, but he does so in the process of denouncing the cozy relationship that has developed betseen Mugabe and UN Special Envoy James Morris.

Read it here.