It’s a good thing that Jimmy Carter is pressing the case for help to the Zimbabwean population. But following the Mugabe regime’s politicized denial of a visa to Carter and his group, the former president’s statements have a weirdly passive ring — in stark contrast, one might point out, to his unequivocal denunciations of the Israeli occupation.
“It seems obvious to me that leaders of the [Zimbabwean] government are immune to reaching out for help for their own people,” said Carter in
this NY Times report. Well, yes, that is obvious, but surely one can’t expect a regime that is starving and brutalizing its subjects as a matter of deliberate policy to “reach out for help.”
Today’s
dispatch includes the following:
Graça Machel, a women’s rights advocate who is married to Mr. Mandela, said after three days of listening to stories of heartbreak from Zimbabwe in conversations here with refugees and others, “Either the leadership doesn’t have a clear picture of the suffering of their own people, or they don’t care.”
Former President Jimmy Carter suggested that heads of state in the region had no clue about the extreme hardships in Zimbabwe, while Zimbabwe’s leaders were callous. He said the African Union and the United Nations should send teams to document the situation inside the country. “We all have the feeling leaders of S.A.D.C. [Southern African Development Community] do not know what is going on in Zimbabwe,” he said.
Again, it’s all to the good that these important figures are speaking out. But there’s a certain unreality to these statements, an unwillingness, for diplomatic reasons no doubt, to put the matter in plain English. The Zimbabwean leadership does have a clear picture of the current suffering, because it’s a situation they’ve created. And the leaders of the S.A.D.C. do know what is going on in Zimbabwe. Reports on the crisis have been widely available for some time. I’m just a schmo on the upper west side and I’ve read them. African heads of state have read them too. They just choose to do nothing, for fear of being labeled friends of the West by a senile madman. Let history record this, one of the most shameful profiles in cowardice of the early 21st century.
