Zimbabwe election

I have been reading comments on the ‘Have Your Say’ page of the BBC website [I still like the BBC site despite their insistence to overkill the coverage of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 fiasco] about the elections in Zimbabwe and I am amazed by the amount of comments on there coming from the US.

Perhaps it is an old colonial throw-back but many of the comments are asking for the west to keep out of the ‘democratic’ politics of Africa. I find this strange, since we left Zimbabwe the people there have known nothing other than the rule of Mugabe for 28 years and yet the country is fraught with problems, the least of them being a shortage of water and food.

Perhaps it is just the fact that the west, especially the US, have had their foreign policy focus elsewhere. I know that GW Bush has aided Africa with programs to assist with poverty and HIV but Mugabe has for the most part been ignored, until now.

The way in which the world’s press report on events in other countries obviously has a bearing on how we in the west perceive the world and our perspective of it. I realise that I must read more of the coverage given over to news in other countries, perhaps someone can recommend a news worthy source on the internet for the US, not Fox.

No doubt there is trouble ahead for Zimbabwe as a result of these current elections, either way the ordinary people are in a no win situation; if Mugabe wins [rigs the election] they will still live in abject poverty, if he loses [which he won’t is my guess, not without a fight] then there will be more bloodshed and perhaps another catastrophe in the making.