Zimbabwe

There's a great article ($) in the latest issue of the London Review of Books--I'm sure you all subscribe to that periodical, no?--on the current famine and, well, genocide in Zimbabwe. There hasn't been a lot in the U.S. news about Zimbabwe in the last few years, but things there are very, very bad.

The population has shrunk so rapidly and to such an extent that many believe it is now under ten million (some put the figure as low as eight) instead of the 18 million there should have been had nothing untoward happened. Even allowing for the four million people who are believed to have fled, several million are simply missing. The highest estimates suggest that six million have died. The minimum estimate, two million, is already twice the number who died in the Rwandan genocide. The fact that the margin of uncertainty is so wide is itself a measure of how close to total breakdown the country now is.

Why so little coverage of this story in the U.S. press? Especially given that, from time to time, the Darfur nightmare garners so much attention? (Not lately, though.) One possibility is that the call, by liberal hawks, to intervene in Darfur plays a political role in the ongoing Iraq debate. That calls for a humanitarian intervention in Darfur are really a kind of argument that support for the Iraq invasion wasn't seriously misguided. That is a distinct possibility. No one in the United States is calling for an intervention in Zimbabwe, where a minimum of two million people have died. Mugabe is a tyrant, same as Saddam was. Maybe worse. So ponder the silence . . . .