Zimbabwe.... The Despot and A Silent Scream

Eduard Munch's painting one would think speaks for more than just war.

One would think that the legacy of war would be at least embed a certain strain of humanism.

Despots one would hope might be a political masterclass in international responsibility and history's plethora of them in the last century would have created something of a preventative rather than a curative precedent .

Instead the only thing all of these seems to have successfully bred is apathy. It's no wonder sociologists speak of a the cyclical need for world wars... if for nothing else but for the world to gain something of a hands on kind of perspective of all that is at stake.
Between these global descents into a distilled controlled kind of anarchy, Life they say goes on.
As long as Life is Elsewhere, and we're unaffected day to day, who really gives a toss what happens in Dafur, Afghanistan, Iraq, the middle east, Timor, or Zimbabwe?

The moral deficit of the international community has increased incrementally each day the world has allowed Robert Mugabe to stay in power and now it has become nothing short of a crime against humanity... do we care... nobody could be bothered as long as diamonds are still on the market at competitive prices,or that the South African economy doesn't totally collapse with the strain currently being put n the entire region and the place doesn't descend into civil war.

Bono praised FW de Klerk the other evening which is about as deeply ironic as Bush giving S. Hussein a eulogy.
In this shadowed wake of an "all-feel-good-self-congratulatory ego-stroking, people are dropping dead like flies under a spray of political Pyagra.

Cholera is sweeping the region and this unconscionable consequence of a single man's devotion to his own power is barely raising a whisper from anyone anywhere.

Thabo Mbeki cowered to familial pressure being related to Mugabe by marriage and this complicity is something which should by rights come at a heavy duty price: both politically and individually - but will it?

And what of Robert Mugabe? Who will pay him off to go live in exile?
Or is it possible that somewhere there is enough real moral indignation at the degree of humanistic negligence, both African and international to actually make this man accountable for ruining one of the most beautiful and potentially abundant countries in Africa and creating a living hell for her people?

Isn't it perhaps time for a different kind of voice to be heard in defence of a nation sentenced to death due to the gluttonous self glorification of man in love with only the idea of himself?

Or are each of us content to play our complicit role in allowing their death and ignoring our responsibility as human beings not to allow the demise of Zimbabwe to be just another silent scream?