Robert Mugabe at the UN food summit
The London newspapers today all have the same story on the front pages: Robert Mugabe causes scandal by going to the UN food summit.
Some people don’t understand the meaning of the words ‘grotesque brass neck’, but I suppose if you’re the sort of person who thinks nothing of destroying your country and provoking murder and mayhem, you’re not going to give a stuff what people think of your nerve.
So Mugabe landed in Rome yesterday, one of more than 60 world leaders at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s summit, to a flood of international protests. He’s with his wife Grace, who snapped up the chance for a little European travel and shopping out of her base on the Via Veneto. The Mugabes are banned from travelling to any member state of the European Union, but this EU sanction doesn’t hold for UN meetings on UN premises. So while his people starve because of his rabid policies, Robert and Grace Mugabe have used the excuse of a UN food summit to take a little break in Rome.
Lord Malloch-Brown, the British Foreign Office minister for Africa, said: “Robert Mugabe going to Rome for the food summit is like Pol Pot going to a human rights convention.”
In Zimbabwe, there is a state of formalised anarchy – a contradiction in terms but one that describes best what is happening. Death squads roam the land, people starve, and two days ago, the tortured corpse of one of Mugabe’s most courageous opponents, Tonderai Ndina, was found, weeks after he had been dragged from his home in his underwear. Inflation is running at 165,000%, and no, there’s no typo there.
Robert Mugabe is 84 years old. It is people like him who make non-believers wish they could hope for hell.
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She transcends the Lilliputian fence for a while, and where does she land? In Zimbabwe! Easy-peasy… not much to say here: Mugabe, bad, bad man.
Criticizing EU leaders is not the stuff of weenies, it’s complex. So if it’s not poodle-talk time, it must be time for a Mugabe snippet.
Careful there, Daphne. It’s only a short step from saying that Zimbabwe was better off under Smith.
Sweet, Daphne.
Europarl: You sound rather Lilluputian yourself with constant harping on about the baddies of Europe. Why not climb out of your self-imposed pen and take a look at the wider world?
@Daphne
If there is no hell, one will surely be created for him. He had it so good for so long.
Mugabe is long defunct. I have stopped judging his behaviour several years ago. He is a poor old demented puppet propped up by his henchmen and cronies. These are the regime’s elite who send their children to British public schools and do their shopping at Harrods. You can watch their comings and goings outside Zimbabwe House in The Strand. These are the ones who have so much to lose if there ever is a regime change. In fact the biggest problem facing the country is that these same people will probably stage a coup as soon as they feel that the opposition stands a real chance of taking over control. Remember the early eighties in Malta.
Reflect carefully . The similarities are many.
OK D let me bounce the question back to you. Was it better under Smith?
gogo: Having a bad predecessor, does not justify being a bad ruler. Mugabe is an extremely twisted man and the closest analogy you can do involving Smith, is that Mugabes rule was necessary to shift the country back to it’s own people, although even that is a far fetched argument to justify.
To me this is just another sign to how dumbstruck the UN is at resolving attrocities.
Paraphrasing Hitchens in the last line there by any chance?
Anthony: It’s unfair to compare 1980s Malta to Zimbabwe today – unfair to Zimbabweans, that is. Things weren’t too good here but, economically at least, it wasn’t as bad as Zimbabwe. Drawing a parallel trivialises the situation in Zimbabwe.
OK gogo, I’ll answer you with another riposte. Which is better, majority black rule or enough food on your plate? In any case, I’ve already said too much. This sort of subject should not be touched with a ten foot bargepole, so I’m outta here.
With all due respect to H.P. Baxxter, I think that asking the Zimbabwean people whether they were better off under Mugabe or Smith is like asking a man on death row whether he’d prefer the gas chamber to the electric chair.
Pointless.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20080604/local/sant-to-resign-opposition-leader-post
I
‘ll believe it when I see it
Way back in the late 70s (early 80s), Robert Mugabe, at the request of the then PM Dom Mintoff send a few dozen cronies to study in Malta. Some of these Rhodesians (as Zimbabwe was back then)were lodged in the flats in Fgura formerly occupied by British Forces personnel. Although they were hard line anti-Smith (always saying “pasine Smith” meaning death to Smith in Swahili)they all agreed that apart from not having a say in the running of their own country, at least they were not hungry slaves. Mugabe has stifled democracy and is now starving his people to death.
I am not saying that Smith was a better man, just a case of the proverbial frying pan and fire.
Corinne I am sorry if I was not perfectly clear. I was talking about similarities in a broad sense. In no way did I intend to trivialise the atrocious situation in Zim. I tried to point out the features which characterise a discredited regime attempting to hang on to power at all costs. The breakdown of the rule of law and the gnawing away at the tenets of democracy we witnessed here were certainly not on the scale now pertaining in Zim. In Malta it was the beginning. Thank God it turned out to be the beginning of the end. All Maltese with a brain know who delivered the Nation from a dreadful situation that had all the potential for getting out of hand.
@ Corinne – Indeed, teasing can be very Lilliputian at times. I will instead try to appreciate the wider world of kaccaturi, poodles, elifints, mannerisms and dress codes… and tyrants, of course, but only of the defunct variety.
Which reminds me that not so long ago, writing in l-orizzont in April 2007 to be exact, Dun Ang Seychell claimed that in Malta we are worse off than the people in Zimbabwe!
His exact words were:
Lanqas maz-Zimbabwe ma jixirqilna nitqabblu!
Michael Falzon
@Meerkat
of course, Sant will really remain there, lurking in the shadows, controlling everything from his house in Laqxija. He will be on his phone all the time (landline, of course) instructing the new leader Joseph Muscat what to say and how to move. He will be given advance copies of Kullhadd, and ONE News for him to vet. All delegates will be equipped with invisible headsets through which Alfred Sant will dictate to them the words to say when they are addressing the Konferenza Generali.
But surely there is a limit to the amount of Pieta spin you believe???
europarl, are you referring to Mintoff when you mention defunct tyrants?
Dun Ang should stick to what he and his fellows are used to doing these days lol
When I read about the Mugabe regime and their hold on power at all costs it does remind me of those terrible years between 1981-7. The scary thought is we could have easily ended up like Zimbabwe if Mintoff had not seen the writing on the wall and resigned (lumping us with KMB who at least had the decency to concede defeat in 1987).
Actually Mintoff recently wrote to his old pal Robert to “help” (sic!) him? What is it with megalomania that makes you end up acting like the village idiot I wonder?
http://www.maltatoday.com.mt/2008/02/10/t2.html
Where is Daphne?
No posts on MLP’s election eve??
I am getting seriously worried. Hope that nothing happened.
Zimbabwe was better off in its colonial years!
[Moderator – Not if its colonial years enabled its current situation.]
That’s what I was thinking… Daphne!!?!? We need your opinion! Otherwise, how will we form our own?
Maybe she’s one of the delegates, deeply engaged in a soul-searching exercise and no one is allowed to disturb her!
Yippeeee no 50% +1 for Herr Doktor
Yes it was better under Ian Smith. Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) had a stable economy and a stable government. Smith fought for independence from Britain, but wanted to remain faithful to the crown, only to be opposed by the United Nations, because Britain sustained the NIBMAR policy. Smith went on with the declaration of independence and sanctions were authorised by the UN. This effected Rhodesia’s main export products, mainly tobacco, forcing the white farmers to start cultivating maize, in direct competition with their fellow black Rhodesians, whose answer was to start burning white farms and killing their owners (women and children included). In 1979, after 7 years of civil war, democratic elections were held, with Smith inviting the main black parties ZANU (Mugabe’s party) and ZAPU to participate, only for them to decline. The new government was not internationally recognised, unless the parties mentioned were to be involved. After a three month conference in England, elections were held again, this time Mugabe participates and wins. Mugabe’s policies included confiscating all white owned property; the rest is in Daphne’s article. I see no similarities between Smith and Mugabe, Smith was no murderer, torturer or anarchist