What you gonna do Zimbabwe? this guy's looking more and more like Pol Pot...of course, he'll be seen as a Chavez like hero to some, even as he goes on murdering and starving his own people. where are the cies of outrage? i guess since no koras were inadvertently peed upon while the cities were being depopulated amnesty international can't be bothered to take notice... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/mai...zim06.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/06/06/ixhome.html -- Mugabe's bulldozers push people back to land By David Blair in Johannesburg (Filed: 06/06/2005) President Robert Mugabe's onslaught against Zimbabwe's cities has escalated to claim new targets, with white-owned factories and family homes being demolished in a campaign that has left 200,000 people homeless. Across the country, Mr Mugabe is destroying large areas of heaving townships and prosperous industrial areas alike. Earthmovers destroy a house outside of Harare Virtually all the areas demolished voted for the opposition MDC Party in the last elections The aim of this brutal campaign is, says the official media, to depopulate urban areas and force people back to the "rural home". Chris Viljoen and his wife, Elsie, were still inside their five-bedroom house when a bulldozer began reducing it to rubble. The white couple live in the industrial zone of the capital, Harare. Next door was a 70-acre site filled with 24 factories and workshops. Bulldozers spent last week razing this area, destroying all but nine businesses that employed about 1,000 people in a country suffering mass unemployment and economic crisis. "My wife is still in a hell of a state," said Mr Viljoen, 55. "She's been having continuous nightmares." Last Tuesday, police told Mr Viljoen, a mechanic, that his family's home would be demolished and gave him 24 hours to move out. They claimed that the property on Seke Road was "illegal". In fact, the home is 30 years old and the owner, from whom Mr Viljoen rents the house, holds legal title deeds. None of this appeared to matter. "The officer said 'Get yourself out of there'. I said 'You can't do that' and he said 'If you argue about it, we'll put you in jail'," said Mr Viljoen. The couple sent their 10-year-old twins, Keith and Kevin, to stay with friends and began removing furniture. They were still trying to dislodge fitted wardrobes and kitchen surfaces when police arrived and their bulldozer started work at 6.30am last Wednesday. Mrs Viljoen, 38, was in the kitchen as the building began collapsing around her. She ran outside as her home was systematically demolished and then flattened. The bulldozer also destroyed the family's business. It wrecked Mr Viljoen's car workshop next door to the house. The Viljoens are now living in one room in a backpacker lodge. "I've got nothing left in this country," said Mr Viljoen. "If I could, I would get up and leave tomorrow." Earlier, bulldozers had begun wrecking the adjacent industrial area. Ian Lawson, the owner, was assured by a senior police officer that the site would be spared. But at 6am last Tuesday, 10 lorries filled with police arrived and the destruction began. "The police officer said to me 'Why are you running for help? No one can help you now. Not even God can help you. We are going to destroy this place'," said Mr Lawson, 60. Fifteen factories and workshops were then reduced to heaps of rubble. Mr Lawson, whose family bought the site in 1952, fled to Britain after being threatened by police. "All those factories were my pension. I said to my wife we can retire now and live on the rentals. Now everything has gone. I don't know what to do. Everything is wrecked," he said. Across Zimbabwe, the United Nations estimates that 200,000 people have lost their homes, with the poorest townships bearing the brunt of Mr Mugabe's onslaught. "The vast majority are homeless in the streets," said Miloon Kothari, the UN's housing representative. He added that "mass evictions" were creating a "new kind of apartheid where the rich and the poor are being segregated". Virtually all the areas singled out for demolition voted for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change in the last elections. The MDC says that Mr Mugabe ordered the destruction as a deliberate reprisal. But the regime is also seeking to depopulate the cities, driving people into the countryside where the MDC is virtually non-existent and the ruling Zanu-PF Party dominates. The Herald, the official daily newspaper, urged "urbanites" to go "back to the rural home, to reconnect with one's roots and earn an honest living from the soil our government repossessed under the land reform programme".
Not much you can do when idiots are ruling a country. China experienced this for about 30 years during the Mao period. Just hope he dies quickly and a competent leader takes over.
sure there is, unfortunately no one in the rest of the world, or the UN, cares. and zimbabwe is hardly china, or even iraq for that matter.
Guess you are talking about military invasion. Why would any country wan to do that? There is absutely nothing good that could come out of it.
This is an ongoing problem with numerous African countries. Humanitarian Aid is being given to them by the truckloads but no one seems to care that their leaders are corrupt. There's no real incentive to working a "regime-change" in any these nations led by wack-jobs, at least for the US, EU and other powers. Until there is government reform in some of these nations, that aid will never be properly distributed. Not to mention, when a country actually tries to formulate a sane democratic government on their own, they never get recognized, case-in-point being Somaliland (the northern part of Somalia which has been governing itself democratically for years, despite the violent bedlam in the rest of the country).
surely there's room for a response somewhere between pretending the problem doesn't exist and invading. this would be the perfect opportunity for the UN to demonstrate it still has a purpose, unfortunately, like it darfur, if africans are killing africans, no one in turtle bay seems to give a damn.
But the U.S. and the chicken-hawk-express Admin does? Words, nothing but rhetoric--Basso, you are using a liberal argument to very little effect. Funny that you are incorporating the same arguments that more Liberal and Moderate posters on this board were saying about Darfur and why there wasn't "outrage" and calls for invasion from the Administration on the genocide in The Sudan... Hey, I AGREE with you, the UN is far to hamstrung and cautious sometimes...that is why we have a president who says Bring-it-on, we have to do what's RIGHT, right? We don't need a world consensus to do the morally RIGHT thing. Unfortunately we don't have the wherewithal, as I believe SamFisher put it, to invade Liechtenstein.
basso, why do you continually come to a pro-basketball message board in the off-season, and shriek "Where is the outrage?" over various topics as if you're exposing some sort of moral dereliction, which, predictably only goes one way. I'm going to give you an answer: the answer is that the outrage is probably somewhere other than on a basketball message board in the off-season. That doesn't mean that people want to have Robert Mugabe over for dinner.
not sure why this has to be a liberal/ conservative fight- no one is doing anything, not just the US. btw, if you'll use the handy search function, you can find the several threads i've started about darfur, no one of which is particularly easy on the admin.
is there something you'd rather debate on the d&d, perhaps the inability of any team other than the stockton/malone jazz to effectively run the pick and roll?
You are right, I will give you that as I do recall seeing them, but your tone suggests that you are taking shots at the other side of the isle for not standing up and denouncing world atrocities.
What's to discuss? Outrage or lack thereof? That seems like your focus, so fine, I find him and his behavior outrageous.
i'm taking shots at everybody, but the hypocrisy of amnestry in this instance is pretty striking. and, btw, i didn't think they were supposed to be on one side or the other.
Well let me tell you something Mean Gene; this cat Mugabe's been runnin' around, tearing down people's houses and redistributing land dishing out his own brand of justice. Thousands upon thousands of Hulkamaniacs have been left homeless, brother. Well let me tell you something, brother, it's gonna end tonight! Me and my main man Duggan here came to liberate the people of Zimbabwe and in that cage I'm going to be judge, jury, and executioner. SO WHATCHA GONNA DO MUGABE, WHEN HULK HOGAN, THE 24-INCH PYTHONS, AND HACKSAW JIM DUGGAN RUN WILD ON YOU?!
nobody's outraged over your outrage, it's just that you assume lack of outrage when there isn't and then use it as an indictment. that's not outrageous, though it is a mild irritant.
Amnesty International has a report on Zimbabwe, just like they do on the U.S. and 149 other countries. If you bothered to actually read their report, you would know that. But I guess bashing the source of criticism of the U.S. is easier. http://web.amnesty.org/report2005/zwe-summary-eng
