NYT Editorial:
Truth Telling on Zimbabwe
Published: July 26, 2005
Anna Tibaijuka, the highest-ranking African woman at the United Nations, is not one of the boys. Maybe that's why she did not mince her words about the horrors going on in Zimbabwe that Africa's male political establishment seems so afraid to talk about. Late last month, Secretary General Kofi Annan sent Mrs. Tibaijuka, a Tanzanian economist who is executive director of the U.N. agency that looks out for the interests of slum dwellers, to investigate the mass destruction of slums and shantytowns by Robert Mugabe's dictatorial regime.
She has now reported that the forcible clearances, which began in May and have cost 700,000 people their homes or livelihoods, were carried out in an "indiscriminate and unjustified manner" with "indifference to human suffering." The damage from this "virtual state of emergency," she reported, will take years to undo. In the name of the United Nations, she demanded that the razing of homes and businesses be immediately halted, that the campaign's architects be prosecuted and that the victims of this "manmade disaster" be compensated. It is winter in the Southern Hemisphere, and hundreds of thousands of uprooted people, many of them women and children, are shivering in tents.
Mr. Mugabe, a tyrant, is increasingly out of touch with reality in the style of Stalin and Mao. He is starving and killing his own people, and the unwillingness of some of Africa's most prestigious leaders, like Presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania, to challenge him publicly is especially disturbing at a time when these same leaders prate on about a commitment to accountable governments and peer review of one another. Mrs. Tibaijuka's unflinching honesty shames their silence. |
