The group Physicians for Human Rights have a damning report (PDF format) of how the government of Robert Mugabe has deliberate starved a good part of the population of Zimbabwe. The denial of food, the withholding of medical care, the use of access to clean water as a political weapon, and the cover-up of a cholera epidemic all, in the view of the PHR, constitute crimes against humanity.
The death toll is in the tens of thousands, if not higher.
So where is the outrage of the world?
Where is the public anger, so on display throughout the blogosphere over Israel's attack on Gaza?
Mugabe has been carrying out an internal campaign of slaughtering his own people for many years now and nobody has done anything. Zimbabwe's neighbors have shut their eyes as Mugabe turned his nation from a comparatively well-off nation that not only fed its own population and exported food, into a national charnel house of disease and famine.
While the rest of the world, to the extent they even have noticed what has been going on, all they do is flap their gums and wring their hands and say "something must be done."
But that mythical "something is never done.
Which is pretty much all that ever happens, isn't it?
Only in this case, hardly anyone is even bothering to insist that something be done. It's as though it just doesn't matter. No oil under the ground. No good visuals of military action. Nothing to make a stirring YouTube clip. Just another brutal dictator slaughtering his own people.
Nobody cares, it seems.
The world yawns.
(H/T to C&L)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Actually I have always thought that the powers that were, defeating the Rhodesian Independence from Commonwealth Stupidity, should have been forced to thirty years of living in that country, and you may have stumbled on one of the two names I would never have hesitated to make a perfect shot upon. But no one cared nor asked me to...
graps -- wv
Jeez, why couldn't BushCo saved Zimbabwe instead of Iraq?
It's a rhetorical question..I know the answer.
The world cares about as much as the world cares about Sudan, about Gaza, about the Iraqi civilians killed in Fallujah by U.S. war criminals... i.e., enough to flap their hands and whine, "something must be done!". But never enough to do anything. Because a) doing something might take, like, effort, and b) doing something might offend people who, like, are powerful and stuff.
So it goes.
-Badtux the Cynical Penguin
Post a Comment