AU: we have no time for 200,000 (400,000?) IDPs

You really have to wonder what sort of incriminating photos Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe has of South Africa's otherwise respectable president Thabo Mbeki. How else to explain Mbeki's disgraceful sycophancy to the dinosaur who's destroying South Africa's neighbor?

Earlier this month, I deplored the Mugabe regime's mass razing of poor townships in the capital Harare (not coincidentally, an opposition stronghold).

US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice called on the African Union and other African leaders to speak out against the atrocity. After all, denouncing such idiocies as this is precisely what was supposed to separate the AU what its predecessor, the Organization for African Unity (often derided as a social club for dictators).

Well, the AU rejected the call by Rice and a similiar one by British Foreign Minister Jack Straw. An AU spokesman said the organization had more important things to consider. Apparently it couldn't even spend a few minutes to speak out against this disaster which has left 200,000 homeless and two young children dead.

That's 200,000 homeless in the city of Harare alone. By contrast, the entire country of Liberia, which recently ended its second devastating civil war in the last 15 years has only 150,000 internally displaced people, according to the UN Refugee Agency.

A spokesman for President Mbeki, whose failed 'quiet diplomacy' in the Zimbabwe crisis has earned much criticism, bristled at Rice's and Straw's calls.

"South Africa refuses to accept the notion that because suddenly we're going to a G8 summit, we must be reminded that we must look good and appease the G8 leaders," the spokesman said.

Ah yes, the old 'blame the westerners and the opposition (the "westernized")' card that Mugabe himself has so perfected. After all, it's been clearly demonstrated that when bad things happen in Africa, the key point according to some is not the skin color of the victim, but the skin color of the perpetrator.

Consider the regime's of apartheid South Africa, Iain Smith's racist Rhodesia and Mugabe's Zimbabwe. The primary victims of all three regimes were black. Two earned widespread condemnation from the continent's leaders, while one provokes avid defenders.

I wonder how Mbeki and his spokesman would explain the condemnation as 'inhuman' of Mugabe's destruction by the Roman Catholic archbishop of Harare. The archbishop is black, since it apparently matters.



Update: The UK Independent puts the number of homeless at 400,000. And as though the creation of possibly 400,000 homeless wasn't enough, Mugabe's regime is ignoring a famine, according to The Independent. Unofficial estimates obtained by [the paper] suggest the death rate is already outstripping the birth rate nationwide by 4,000 a week. 4000 a week times 52 weeks... I can't even bear to do the math.