to chaos.
Brown announced recently that he will not attend the EU/Africa summit scheduled for Lisbon in December if Mugabe attends.
We hope other European leaders will follow his lead. This will send a clear message to the Zimbabwean tyrant that – because of his persistent trampling of human rights, economic mismanagement and flagrant disregard for the rule of law – he is no longer welcome to rub shoulders with world leaders.
True to form Mugabe and his acolytes have reacted to Brown’s principled stance with their usual incoherent vitriol about colonialism and its evils.
Mugabe has thrashed and starved those who dare oppose him into submission and reduced Zimbabweans to paupers. Africa has turned a blind eye. In the words of Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, “African leaders should hang their heads in shame.”
The United Nations Charter is quite clear that human rights are universal. There are no African rights or European rights – or Asian rights for that matter.
If people are persecuted anywhere in the world, we all as citizens of the world have a duty to speak on their behalf. Mugabe himself used to speak out with authority for the downtrodden around the world. He was a formidable critic of the apartheid regime in South Africa, and never liked Mobutu Sese Seko for his thievocracy and abuse of human rights in the former Zaire.
Under Mugabe, Zimbabwe was instrumental of the suspension of Nigeria from the Commonwealth because of the military junta that took power there in the 1990s.
Now the boot is on the other foot.
And the powerless and voiceless of Zimbabwe expect the international community to speak and act on their behalf. Or at least to show that they are aware of the sufferings caused by Mugabe.
Word
“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us, he sent his one and only Son into the world that me might live through him. This is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” 1 John 4;7-11
27.9.2007
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Applause for Brown
We applaud the position taken on Zimbabwe by the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. He has shown that he is not afraid of Mugabe's anti-western rhetoric that seems to have had an extraordinary paralytic effect on the governments of the west since 2000 when Zimbabwe began its tragic descent in