The Real World

Claudia Rosett, a journalist who has been at the forefront of exposing Saddam Hussein's Oil-For-Food exploitation, reveals to me once again that I have little idea what the real world is like.

In this case, it's the horrible atrocities committed by Robert Mugabe's government in Zimbabwe, as detailed in this morning's Opinion Journal.

A few of the "highlights":

• The government's latest atrocity has been to "clean up" the cities by evicting hundreds of thousands of poor people, destroying their dwellings and leaving them jobless, homeless and hungry.
• One of Mugabe's first moves after coming to power was to invite in North Korean advisers, to train the shock troops known in Zimbabwe as the "Fifth Brigade." In the 1980s, Mugabe dispatched this Fifth Brigade to massacre an estimated 18,000 Zimbabweans opposed to his rule — far more than the number of people slaughtered, say, at Srebenica, and more than six times the number murdered in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
• Starting in 1998, the country's farm invasions escalated in Zimbabwe not only into the eviction of white land-owners, but the ruin of the country's agricultural base — replaced not by fair distribution of property and rule of law for blacks, but by plunder, violence, and enrichment of Mugabe's chums at the expense of millions of black Zimbabweans. The model for this was not equitable land reform, but Communist China's cultural revolution, the methods of which Mugabe and his crony "war veterans" learned in the 1960s and early 1970s at the knees of Mao Tse-tung himself. And the mobs who invaded the farms, while described as war veterans, did not consist on the ground of the aging satraps of Mugabe's elite circle--who profited from the policy. They were youth militia, unleashed by the aging Mugabe in an effort to thwart a growing opposition movement, and keep his grip on power.

And this doesn't even touch on the United Nations' duplicity in the situation by refusing to call a spade a spade. I'm not sure what world the United Nations lives in, but on a daily basis, the UN provides yet more evidence that it's a worthless institution for those who live in "the real world."

I think I'll start looking for a bumper sticker that says: "Regime change begins with Robert Mugabe, with Kofi Annan not far behind."