Plowing Zimbabwe Under

Surfing the web, and thanks to Kim Du Toit's weblog (good, but occasionally profane, and featuring enough firearms pictures to send the entire California State Legislature into a collective psychotic episode), I discover that Zimbabwe is getting even worse.

In typical dictator fashion, Zimbabwe President-in-Perpetuity Mugabe keeps threats to his power in check by rewarding his loyalists and controlling the supply of firearms, disarming the populace early in his term. No citizen militia can rise to defeat this dictator; for Zimbabwe, the battle of Concord has already been lost. Quoting from The Volokh Conspiracy,

As with many previous democides, the democide in Zimbabwe is being perpetrated with a government-induced famine, in which food aid is directed only to government loyalists, and the "black market" in food is suppressed.

StrategyPage explains why the Mugabe tyranny is able to perpetrate democide: "There hasn’t been any revolution so far because the potential rebels cannot get guns. No one is willing to arm the dissatisfied majority....The government seems determined to starve its enemies to death, secure in the knowledge that the victims are unarmed, and the government forces have lots of guns."

Back in 2001, Paul Gallant, Joanne Eisen, and I warned that Zimbabwe was "ripe for genocide." We also detailed how the Mugabe tyranny has used gun licensing and registration laws, inherited from British colonial times, to disarm the people of Zimbabwe, leaving them helpless against government-controlled gangs of young thugs.

Reminds me of the saying, "The second amendment is there in case the government ignores all the others."

Now, as I have mentioned before, Zimbabwe has managed to screw up its farm economy so badly that it can no longer feed itself. One of the biggest problems is with equipment pillaged and most of the skilled white labor, there is a high demand for manpower. The chaos and near-civil war of the last few years has pulled most of the population into the cities.

So now Mr. Mugabe has apparently chosen to borrow a page from the Khmer Rouge. They have begun bulldozing urban areas, in particular white-owned factories and homes, in order to "to depopulate urban areas and force people back to the 'rural home'." From the London Telegraph:

Chris Viljoen and his wife, Elsie, were still inside their five-bedroom house when a bulldozer began reducing it to rubble. The white couple live in the industrial zone of the capital, Harare.

Next door was a 70-acre site filled with 24 factories and workshops. Bulldozers spent last week razing this area, destroying all but nine businesses that employed about 1,000 people in a country suffering mass unemployment and economic crisis.

Not really surprising are the areas targeted: the homes, industries, and neighborhoods with whites or large numbers of members of the Movement for Democratic Change political party, the only groups which present any threat to Mugabe's hold on power.

Last Tuesday, police told Mr Viljoen, a mechanic, that his family's home would be demolished and gave him 24 hours to move out. They claimed that the property on Seke Road was "illegal".

In fact, the home is 30 years old and the owner, from whom Mr Viljoen rents the house, holds legal title deeds. None of this appeared to matter...

They were still trying to dislodge fitted wardrobes and kitchen surfaces when police arrived and their bulldozer started work at 6.30am last Wednesday. Mrs Viljoen, 38, was in the kitchen as the building began collapsing around her. She ran outside as her home was systematically demolished and then flattened.

Like all good little socialist dicators, Mugabe is wishing his ideal society into existance. If a few thousand die, so what? As Stalin said, "The death of one is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic." And like all good little socialist dictators, Mugabe will keep wishing. And wishing. And wishing. But he will never succeed. So he'll keep killing and destroying.

Ever notice how good little socialist dictators only succeed in destroying and killing while claiming they're building something better, but they never really build anything?

All right, we are now months, maybe weeks, from The Killing Fields: Genocide Does Zimbabwe. So do we mean it when we say, "Never again"?

The odds of things happening are not very good right now. Diplomacy so far has been worthless. ("You really shouldn't be doing that." "Oh really? Well, here's what I think of your opinion.") Direct intervention is out, at least by the United States. The United States is still cleaning up from its last four goes at intervention (Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq) and will not commit large numbers of forces or resources on its own to Africa for anything short of a humanitarian crisis on par with the 2004 Tsunami. Plus, the US is still taking lumps both internally and externally for deposing Saddam, and there is little political will in either party to care about Africa in anything other than abstract terms. (i.e., "Boy, we really should do something about debt relief/AIDS/women's rights/celebrity cause of the week.")

If anything is going to happen, it is up to Britain and the Commonwealth States. This would be an ideal opportunity for India to step up, for Canada to do something, and for Blair to show his own commitment to human rights and democracy. The US could get involved in such a coalition, but only as a minor player. But that doesn't look likely, either. Too few care.

When have you last heard of Zimbabwe? The international press, the UN, the International Red Cross, and Amnesty International don't care. They're all looking for the next Abu Grahib to embarrass Bush with.

A note to Dean, Kerry, Hillary, Teddy, Byrd, and all your fellow travelers - here's your human rights abuses. Here is your totalitarianism. Here is your dictatorship.

But they will do nothing. Bush = Hitler, after all, and Iraq and Afghanistan were all about oil. Besides, everybody knows that blacks discriminating against whites isn't racism.

For Further Reading:
Samizdata
Belmont Club