The usually staid CSMonitor again blasts Mugabe for human rights violations and impending democide...and blasts those who sit back and watch it happen....
...The head-shaking reality is that Mbeki is not using his leverage and moral standing. Instead, he's pursued a course of "quiet diplomacy" that's nothing more than a whisper, judging by the results. A more vigorous approach, with South Africa ready to give a $1 billion loan to Zimbabwe, would be to demand economic and political reforms. Any such incentive may lack force, though. Mugabe, who just closed an economic deal with China, may feel he can afford to spurn loans with unwelcome conditions.
Or maybe not, since some reports said he got only minor concessions from the Chinese, who, unlike Mbeki, put profit in front of ideology...the bad news is that China has a veto at the UN...
A whole host of reasons explain Mbeki's reticence. His neighbor may be a despot at the helm of a failing country, but he's a hero to many South Africans for getting whites out of government and off farmland.
Mbeki's African National Congress party also has serious reservations about the effectiveness of Zimbabwe's political opposition. And South African businesses prefer the great mining deals they're getting in Zimbabwe....
Wait til they hear that Mugabe is also confiscating mines to give " great mining deals" to China...
...The UN Security Council is under pressure to meet regarding the report. But as with Darfur, where China has oil interests, it's hard to imagine Beijing backing UN intervention in Zimbabwe, where China has mining interests. That puts pressure on Africa for a home-grown solution - to alleviate the suffering in Zimbabwe, but also to ease Mugabe's exit.
Hmmm...oil for palace program bribed France and Russia to oppose the US stopping S.H....Sudan's oil bribes for China are stopping the UN for intervening in the genocide of Dafur...selling platinum and chromium mines to China will stop the UN for intervening into Zim...is there a pattern here? ....but then, the UN didn't stop the Bosnian massacres or the Ruandan massacres either, so we can't blame capitalism for all genocides....
If it's African cover that Mbeki needs, he's got the UN report - produced by a Tanzanian. And he should turn for help to Nigeria's president Olusegun Obasanjo, a Mugabe critic.
If he could find the moral courage he summoned to fight apartheid, Mbeki could use these two African levers, as well as his own weight and that of Zimbabwe's neighbors, to bring Mugabe to the negotiating table.
Delay just prolongs the despot's day of reckoning.
and will allow a couple hundred thousand people in rural areas, far from reporters, to die of famine related diseases... not to mention the hundreds of thousands of refugees in SA will continue to increase...but then, we rarely hear about them in the news....
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