Zimbabwe's opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has said that his party will not participate in the runoff presidential elections this week because of President Mugabe's reign of terror.
And so it is that Zimbabwe, once a democracy, albeit an unjustly limited one, and the breadbasket of Africa has descended into a nakedly racist dictatorship ruling over a terrified, hungry and impoverished people. If ever there was an object lesson in how moral posturing leads to disaster, this is it. The old Ian Smith regime was nothing to applaud. Its whites-only government and open rebellion against Britain left a permanent bad taste in the mouth, but it was at least a fundamentally civilised society that, given time, could have been reformed. Instead, a load of we-know-better types at Lancaster House demanded instant solutions that boiled down to handing power over to a Marxist tyrant whose literally only qualification was that he wasn't white. But that didn't matter to successive British governments who just wanted to wash their hands of the whole mess. The result has been a slow motion Grand Guignol while Britain, who forced this situation and bears the largest responsibility for its outcome, sits back and does nothing for fear of being seen as "colonialist."
I'm sure that's a great comfort to the Zimbabweans.
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