Murder, Mayhem, Massacre – Come to Sunny Zimbabwe! UN Hails Mugabe


I tend to recoil each time I see the name of Robert Mugabe in the news. He’s a wicked old man, who has managed to destroy what was once wonderful Rhodesia. Zimbabwe today is a hell-hole.

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Mugabe

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The saddest book I’ve read in recent years was When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa by Peter Godwin ( Little, Brown & Company) I’ve mnetioned it before, but lest you think I’m using a ‘rightwing’ source, rest assured, Godwin is clearly a liberal, and I offer you a clip from the NYT review, an equally non-conservative source..

Mr. Godwin creates an indelible picture of life in that besieged and battered land. In telling the story of his parents — who after World War II moved from England to Rhodesia — he gives us a searing account of what has happened to Zimbabwe in the last 30-odd years, as bright post-revolution dreams of a multiracial society gave way to bloody racial hatred and strife, and the ordinary chores of daily life — going food shopping, buying gas — turned into a dangerous run through a gantlet of car hijackers and thugs.

Mr. Godwin recounts how people calling themselves “war vets,” ex-combatants from the war of independence, began arriving on white-owned farms and refused to leave, and how these “wovits” — most of whom weren’t really war vets, he says, but a ragtag collection of Mugabe supporters and unemployed youths — terrorized farmers with AK-47’s and machetes. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/18/books/18book.html?pagewanted=all

But now the United Nations, in its infinite lack of wisdom, has designated Mugabe as a  “leader for tourism” by the UN’s World Tourism Organisation. UNWTO secretary general Taleb Rifai was on hand at the Victoria Falls on Tuesday to hail the octogenarian fiend.

Tourist leader?
 
Will he give personal guided tours of the massacre scenes?
 
Day-trips to see burnt-out farms?
 
Excursions to view his political prisoners?
 
Will he turn up at your hotel as guest-lecturer on ‘how to wreck a prosperous economy?’
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I was once bundled roughly aside by a large cop when I tried to hand Sir Alec Douglas-Home a leaflet entitled Hands Off Rhodesia.
It was important, I felt, to recognise the loyalty Rhodesians had shown in World War 2, and given the gross slanting off the issue by the BBC (aka UK Pravada) many of us spent much time and energy in efforts to counter the disinformation used against Ian Smith.
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Time has proven us right, but much good that does, for those who suffer daily at the tyrant’s hands.
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But really, has the UN cast aside all pretence of rational conduct, honouring a man under international travel bans for his crimes against humanity?