It’s a good thing that Zimbabwe doesn’t have any oil or gas, or we might have to do something about this.
The men who pulled up in three white pickup trucks were looking for Patson Chipiro, head of the Zimbabwean opposition party in Mhondoro district. His wife, Dadirai, told them he was in Harare but would be back later in the day, and the men departed.
An hour later they were back. They grabbed Mrs Chipiro and chopped off one of her hands and both her feet. Then they threw her into her hut, locked the door and threw a petrol bomb through the window.
The killing last Friday – one of the most grotesque atrocities committed by Robert Mugabe’s regime since independence in 1980 – was carried out on a wave of worsening brutality before the run-off presidential elections in just over two weeks. It echoed the activities of Foday Sankoh, the rebel leader in the Sierra Leone civil war that ended in 2002, whose trade-mark was to chop off hands and feet.
Mrs Chipiro, 45, a former pre-school teacher, was the second wife of a junior official of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) burnt alive last Friday by Zanu (PF) militiamen. Pamela Pasvani, the 21-year-old pregnant wife of a local councillor in Harare, did not suffer mutilation but died later of her burns; his six-year-old son perished in the flames.
Yesterday about 70 local MDC supporters gathered in Mr Chipiro’s small yard in Mhondoro, 90 miles south of Harare, to protect him. Inside the hut where his wife of 29 years died, women sang softly to a subdued drum beat next to the cheap wooden coffin. The thatched roof had been destroyed in the fire so they sat under the open sky. The lid could not be closed because Mrs Chipiro’s outstretched arm had burnt rigid. Her charred hand was found as women swept the hut.
I’m not sure the US and EU or any other group can do anything more to punish Zimbabwe economically than they are already doing to themselves.
The government of Zimbabwe faces a wide variety of difficult economic problems as it struggles with an unsustainable fiscal deficit, an overvalued official exchange rate, hyperinflation, and bare store shelves. Its 1998-2002 involvement in the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo drained hundreds of millions of dollars from the economy. The government’s land reform program, characterized by chaos and violence, has badly damaged the commercial farming sector, the traditional source of exports and foreign exchange and the provider of 400,000 jobs, turning Zimbabwe into a net importer of food products. The EU and the US provide food aid on humanitarian grounds. Badly needed support from the IMF has been suspended because of the government’s arrears on past loans and the government’s unwillingness to enact reforms that would stabilize the economy. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe routinely prints money to fund the budget deficit, causing the official annual inflation rate to rise from 32% in 1998, to 133% in 2004, 585% in 2005, passed 1000% in 2006, and 26000% in November 2007. Private sector estimates of inflation in 2007 are well above 100,000%. Meanwhile, the official exchange rate fell from approximately 1 (revalued) Zimbabwean dollar per US dollar in 2003 to 30,000 per US dollar in 2007.
However, per the CIA, the US is the fourth biggest (10%) consumer of Zimbabwean goods. That means that we have the ability to do something simply by refusing to purchase their exports. It’s not really much of a solution since the people are already suffering enough. I am quite sure that if Zimbabwe had more than 0 cu m of proven oil and gas reserves that Robert Mugabe would be getting the Hugo Chavez treatment. It’s not clear to me why the travails of the Zimbabwean people are America’s problem. They are the world’s problem, insofar that we stand for human and political rights. If the world is willing to pay the bill and provide unstinting political support for a foreign intervention, then I would consider supporting the use of American soldiers and resources to bring about a change in regime in Harare. But even with the bills paid and a united global community, I’d still want to see what the prospects are for establishing a government that can provide for its own security. The world needs the capability to intervene to stop tyranny and protect human life, but I’m not interested in that job falling almost exclusively to the American soldier and taxpayer. We have an interest in protecting human rights but he don’t have an interest in paying all the costs, increasing resentment, and taking on more risk of terroristic blowback. The UN and other wealthy nations need to develop the capability and political will to carry out humanitarian missions, including the occasional regime change. Zimbabwe is a case in point. We even have an obvious justification since Mugabe clearly lost the recent election and yet is calling for a do-over run-off election.
