Nicholas Kristof:
The hungry children and the families dying of AIDS here are gut-wrenching, but somehow what I find even more depressing is this: Many, many ordinary black Zimbabweans wish that they could get back the white racist government that oppressed them in the 1970's."Our hypocracy?" Mugabe has his own passive aggressive form of genocide--famine and disease helps him get rid of his enemies along with soem collateral damage. It is genocide on the cheap as practices by other tyrants like Stalin and Mao. Mugabe's racisim against white farmers has produced a famine in a fertile land. It is hard to imagine any colonial regime that would be so ignorant and heartless. It is not outsiders, be they hypocrits or not, who are causing this disaster. Mugabe deserves full credit."If we had the chance to go back to white rule, we'd do it," said Solomon Dube, a peasant whose child was crying with hunger when I arrived in his village. "Life was easier then, and at least you could get food and a job."
Mr. Dube acknowledged that the white regime of Ian Smith was awful. But now he worries that his 3-year-old son will die of starvation, and he would rather put up with any indignity than witness that.
An elderly peasant in another village, Makupila Muzamba, said that hunger today is worse than ever before in his seven decades or so, and said: "I want the white man's government to come back. ... Even if whites were oppressing us, we could get jobs and things were cheap compared to today."
His wife, Mugombo Mudenda, remembered that as a younger woman she used to eat meat, drink tea, use sugar and buy soap. But now she cannot even afford corn gruel. "I miss the days of white rule," she said.
Nearly every peasant I've spoken to in Zimbabwe echoed those thoughts, although it's also clear that some still hail President Robert Mugabe as a liberator. This is a difficult place to gauge the mood in, because foreign reporters are barred from Zimbabwe and promised a prison sentence of up to two years if caught. I sneaked in at Victoria Falls and traveled around the country pretending to be a tourist.
The human consequences of the economic collapse are heartbreaking. I visited a hospital and a clinic that lacked both medicines and doctors. Children die routinely for want of malaria medication that costs just a few dollars.
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As many as a third of working-age Zimbabweans have AIDS or H.I.V., and every 15 minutes a Zimbabwean child dies of AIDS. Partly because of AIDS, life expectancy has dropped over the last 15 years from 61 to 34, and 160,000 Zimbabwean children will lose a parent this year.
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When a white racist government was oppressing Zimbabwe, the international community united to demand change. These days, a black racist government is harming the people of Zimbabwe more than ever, and the international community is letting Mr. Mugabe get away with it. Our hypocrisy is costing hundreds of Zimbabwean lives every day.
However, where are the human rights organizations that have been fretting about a few Iraqi prisoners having to wear panties on their head, when real systematic abuse is evident in Zimbadwe and Sudan? Perhaps that is the hypocracy that Krisof was referring to, but don't call it mine.
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