Zimbabwe and Genocide

The largest genocide for many years, some 700,000 people a year for the last three years, is being carried out by Robert Mugabe’s government against its citizens. It continues to remain unnamed and thus ignored by the international community.

The ravage of a 40% plus HIV/AIDS infection rate exploits the enormous difficulties most Zimbabweans already face in that ‘failed state’. At the 60th anniversary of Auschwitz, Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General, called for an end to genocide. “It is, above all, a day to remember not only the victims of past horrors, whom the world abandoned, but also the potential victims of present and future ones. A day to look them in the eye, and say: “you, at least, we must not fail”.

Not a word about Zimbabwe. Not by any authority. Not by South Africa, SADC, the African Union or the UN. Yet, Kofi Annan quoted the old chestnut, “ Truly it has been said: “all that is needed for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing”.

In Zimbabwe, HIV/AIDS has turned to a form of genocide as economic, political and electoral policies have devastated the economy and made it hard for people to care for their families and to find and to buy food. In 2002, it is estimated that some 700,000 Zimbabweans, all recently infected with HIV/AIDS, died rapidly as they could not look after themselves. Their normal life expectancy should have been for another ten to fifteen productive years. That is, 700,000 of the 1 million who died that year died of HIV/AIDS related illnesses in the early years of HIV infection.

The same pattern continues in Zimbabwe except that more Zimbabweans now live outside that county and so, together with the massive death rates internally, there are fewer to kill by official neglect of economy and of human rights. Nonetheless, it remains the largest genocide for decades worldwide.