"Frankly obscene," Australia's foreign minister said.
Australia's Stephen Smith was referring to Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe's appearance at a U.N. food conference earlier this month.
Yes, a dictator who uses starvation to scatter and kill his own people making an appearance at an international conference devoted to raising food and feeding the hungry is an obscenity -- though I add, without cynicism, that the situation isn't all that unusual. Petty tyrants, terrorist enablers and tribal killers cluster about the wine and cheese smorgasbords of international community fetes and summits...
Mugabe, a classic Marxist rebel leader, plays this game ( i.e. blame America/blame imperialism for everything) quite well. Toppling Southern Rhodesia's white dictatorship made him a cult hero. The left-leaning internationalists gave Mugabe's mass murder in Zimbabwe's Matebele land a pass. That brutal campaign of the early 1980s, conducted against his former anti-colonial allies, included imported North Korean mercenary-advisers. But his obscenities are catching up with him. His greatest obscenity is his war on his own impoverished nation. Mugabe's tyranny has savaged Zimbabwe, making the country yet another tragic example of a nation brutalized by its own government. Zimbabwe is blessed with rich farmland and ought to be an agricultural breadbasket. It was, until Mugabe's "land redistribution" and "farm policies" turned it into a starving basket case....(relates how Mugabe destroyed the country)... (Mugabe lost his local support and lost the election)... Mugabe has manufactured a run-off election, scheduled for June 27, pitting him against Tsvangirai. The "war veterans" are out with their clubs and knives. The MDC claims at least 40 of its supporters have been killed since March 29. Moreover, they allege that Mugabe is plotting to assassinate Tsvangirai. Mugabe's police have repeatedly detained and harassed Tsvangirai. Nobel Prize winner former Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa has called for international peacekeepers.... This week, Mugabe said he will ignore the election results. .... The real disappointment is South Africa President Thabo Mbeki. Mbeki was supposed to help "mediate" Zimbabwe's political crisis, but his mediation has been a biased farce in favor of Mugabe. Why? "Old radical solidarity" is one possible reason. Mbeki's memories of anti-colonial struggle produce a soft spot for Mugabe. Pray that it's blarney, but this kind of embedded, selfish bitterness from the political past does scar the present and damage the future. True or not, Mugabe continues to kill and steal, with obscene impunity.
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