Robert Mugabe has banned international aid agencies from operating in Zimbabwe, accusing them of campaigning for the opposition.

Since Mugabe stole white-owned farms and handed them over in small plots to black Zimbabweans the country has gone from “the breadbasket of Africa” to a destitute, net importer of food, reliant on international aid.

The problem in Zimbabwe is not too far removed from the Chinese revolution in which privately owned land was stolen from its owners, parceled up into small plots and given to Chinese peasants who were expected to work their plot to produce enough food for themselves and contribute what was left over for redistribution amongst those who couldn’t work.  Of course, this proved disastrous and millions starved when crops failed through over-cultivation and because most of the farmers weren’t farmers at all.

In Zimbabwe, the farms have been taken from their white owners, parceled up given to supporters of Robert Mugabe.  They aren’t farmers and Zimbabwe has gone from being one of the most wealthy and food rich countries in Africa to having the highest inflation of any country since Germany after the second world war and 80% of the population suffering from malnutrition and reliant on food aid.  Just as in China, Mugabe clings to power by suppressing the opposition, violence, murder and worst of all, by selling belief in his ideology.  Despite the quite obviously disastrous outcome of Mugabe’s leadership of late (like most leaders, he started off well and degenerated as time went on) there are masses of people in Zimbabwe who really believe in Mugabe’s ability to lead their country, they believe his hysterical claims that the decimation of the Zimbabwean economy is all a plot by the imperial British.

China has emerged as the economical success story of extreme Marxist ideology but the cost of getting China to where it is now has been millions of lives, the occupation of Tibet, the perpetual threat of conflict with Taiwan and the oppression of a billion people.  Early intervention in China may have saved millions of lives or it may have accelerated the communist/western posturing to the extent that a third world war was kicked off.  We’ll never know but there is no global communist alliance to support Zimbabwe’s “revolution”.  China has a big interest in Zimbabwe but it’s largely economic, it doesn’t appear to be trying to turn Zimbabwe into a client state as USSR did with other communist countries during the cold war.

I don’t go in for the whole world police spreading democracy round the world at gunpoint thing, that’s for Americans to get excited over but there is an opportunity to save hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of lives in Zimbabwe.  All it needs is for someone to look beyond the fact they’re not muslims with oil and get stuck in.

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