Why do taxpayers around the world allow their billions of collective tax dollars to be spent supporting Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe, by popular consensus rated as a totally degenerated tin pot dictator? To grapple with this conundrum, consider that the modern world houses more multilateral organisations than ever before. The long list includes the likes of the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation, entities funded by billions of taxpayer dollars.
The world also has more “do good” NGOs (non governmental organisations) than ever before, and a record number of relief agencies. These are often at least partially funded by governments, which are funded by taxpayers, individuals which in turn often make direct donations to these kinds of entities, in the manner of voluntary tax dollars. It’s estimated that there are more than 40,000 so-called INGOs (international NGOs), and hundreds of thousands of country NGOs.
The billions of dollar confiscated from, or donated by, countless individuals, are being used to prop up one of the most appalling characters known to history. Link up the world’s biggest multilateral organisations, its biggest NGOs, and its biggest relief agencies, and all you get for your taxpayer and donated dollars are an increasingly demented Mugabe turning up his volume of invective aimed at the world as a whole, while perpetuating gross human rights atrocities under the world’s proverbial nose.
Nobody watching on seems to give a damn, yet at the same time, everyone watching on is kicking themselves in the shins. Never has the world been so organised, and never has it had so pitiful little to show for it. Mugabe will never match the status of a Ghengis Khan or an Attila the Hun, nor rank as a poor cousin of Adolph Hitler, nor be described by sane people as an Idi Amin wannabe. Mugabe will instead go down as the architect of one of the world’s biggest sewage pits, and will be remembered only as an industrially mutated vermin.
Anyone familiar with the military will know that Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, could be taken by a professional regiment led by a seasoned colonel, accompanied by decent hardware, and escorted by a couple of well-equipped Apache helicopters. Make no mistake, when it’s clear that Mugabe’s going to be captured, it will be impossible to ever find anyone who supported him. The drained Zimbabwe Defence Force, police and army veterans (most barely out of their teens) would be burning their clothes the moment chopper blades are heard.
Professional and decisive military action – with no threat of preemptive violence – is the only logical option left available to an appalled global audience watching on as Mugabe’s goons escalate an orgy of violent murders, accompanied by rape and every possible version and perversion of human rights atrocities. The tragedy is that it’s going to prove impossible, in practice, to establish consensus on military action, especially with the likes of South African president Thabo Mbeki seemingly lurking around like a flittering shadow in a fresh mass graveyard.
Beyond the squandering of billions of taxpayer dollars, the world has completely lost its moral compass. Even the most outspoken leaders avoid calling for military intervention. This week US presidential candidate Barack Obama called on the UN to continue applying “as much pressure as possible on the Mugabe government”. He added that “in particular other African nations, including South Africa, have to be much more forceful in condemning the extraordinary violence that's been taking place there”.
John McCain, the other US presidential candidate, with the military strongly in his personal history, also falls short of calling for what’s really needed: “I believe the international community must act to impose sanctions against Mugabe and his cronies and thereby hasten the end of that regime”. If the world is vaguely democratic, vaguely free and vaguely hopeful, the proof lies in the overwhelming ongoing violence perpetrated by Mugabe, the Devil’s spawn.
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