ninme

What a great line.

The Australian - Mugabe’s crimes a blight on Africa

WITH unemployment at 70 per cent, inflation over 100 per cent and about a quarter of its 12 million people living with HIV/AIDS, Zimbabwe seemed to have arrived at the bottom of the pit. Things, surely, could not get worse? They have. Under dictator Robert Mugabe’s delicately named “drive out the rubbish” program, 300,000 urban dwellers have had their homes bulldozed, leaving them destitute in Zimbabwe’s freezing winter. Dressed up as an assault on crime and illegal economic activity – not that there is much economic activity in Zimbabwe – the operation is more likely payback against groups who voted against Mugabe’s Zanu-PF at the parliamentary elections in April. There is also, it appears, the forlorn hope that driving people into the countryside can rejuvenate agricultural production, which was devastated during the 1990s as a result of Mugabe’s dispossession of white farmers, leading to massive food shortages.

Mugabe, yet another poster boy of the 1970s Left who has been unmasked as a genocidal maniac, is a living emblem of the depth and intractability of Africa’s problems as the world prepares for next week’s G8 meeting.

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