You can institutionalise kelptocracy on a grand scale. You can ethnically cleanse your minority white citizens. You can employ gangs of vicious thugs to intimidate and even murder your political opponents. You can rig elections and disregard the law. You can use the apparatus of state to deliberately starve your own citizens. You can take a prosperous country and reduce it to a debilitated ruin. But, forcefully ejecting a Guardian journalist from your country puts you beyond the pale:
The Guardian’s Zimbabwe correspondent, Andrew Meldrum, was deported last night even though three separate court orders were made prohibiting his expulsion.
After spending 23 years reporting on the country, Meldrum was manhandled into a car outside the offices of Zimbabwe’s immigration service, driven to the airport and put on a plane to London.
Bearing in mind the melancholy fate of others who have displeased Mugabe, Mr.Meldrum might want to consider himself fortunate.
The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, led worldwide condemnation, saying: “I’m very concerned at this case. Petty and vindictive actions like this simply expose the Zimbabwe regime for what it is.”
Well, I must say I am shocked! Up until now I have been labouring under the apprehension that Mugabe was an admirable African leader.
Michael Ancram, the shadow foreign secretary, said: “This is yet another disgraceful action showing the lack of respect for freedom of expression and speech of Robert Mugabe’s evil regime. This is the act of a dictator.”
As opposed to all the previous acts which were the hallmarks of a reasonable and decent man.
The editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, said: “The deportation of our reporter Andrew Meldrum from Zimbabwe is a political act which should invite the strongest possible condemnation from the international community.
Oh now steady on, Mr.Rusbridger. Let’s not be too hasty now. We wouldn’t want to say anything in a fit of temper that we might regret in the cold light of day.
To be fair to Mr.Meldrum he has been meticulously recording and reporting on the horrible predations of Mugabe’s marxist regime not to mention the transformation of a bread-basket economy into a year-zero hellpit. You do not have to be a rocket-scientist to figure out why he is now being unceremoniously bundled out of the country. But is there any chance that any of Messrs. Straw, Ancram or Rusbridger actually read any of the reports? I only ask because they all sound as if they are somewhat taken aback.
When I was doing graduate work in British history at the University of Texas in Austin I found myself quite often engaged in bitter arguments with liberals about colonialism. Africa was a particularly prickly topic. It used to infuriate the liberals to no end that the Africa of 1957 played a greater part in world trade than the Africa of 1999. They responded to my examples of African governmental ineptitude with the riposte that it was all a “stage in their political development.” I finally realized that I was talking to people divorced from reality when I heard the ethnic massacres in Rwanda and Burundi described as “a necessary evolutionary phase.” Maybe it’s just because I’ve spent most of my working life as an engineer, but I think any “phase” or “stage” that shuts down the electricity and running water, much less leaves a million-plus dead bodies about, is one that the people in question could well do without. The fatuous, self-satisfied pomposity of the leftist intellectuals spouting this arrant nonsense while sitting in comfortable air-conditioned rooms at a major university just sickened me. I suspected they might not have been so loftily detached had the people on the receiving end of those panga strokes been their family and friends. Short of that, however, they were perfectly content to spout the party line supporting criminals like Mugabe, Mobutu, Bongo, Bokassa, Kaunda, Banda, Nkrumah, Toure, etc. as great nationalist heroes who had thrown off the yoke of the cruel white oppressors. How they could believe that stuff in the face of all the evidence against it just baffles the mind. I’d be very interested to know how many Zimbabweans would welcome a return to Ian Smith’s regime, much less a return to outright British colonial rule. I’d bet money you’d have a plurality for the first and an overwhelming majority for the second. The Europeans helped themselves by leaving Africa when they did but it appears painfully obvious that Africa needed them to stay at least one more generation. If Lord Carrington is still alive, I wonder what he thinks now of his part in turning Rhodesia into Zimbabwe?