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June 25, 2008
What Took Her So Long?
Today, Queen Elizabeth II revoked Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's knighthood. And all I could think was why did she wait until now?
Mugabe was made an honorary knight in Britain in 1994. Sure, at that time we had not yet seen the full measure of his evil, but it is surprising to me that the Queen would bestow any honor on him when we already had seen so much evil.
More than 20,000 Ndebele civilians were killed by Mugabe's North-Korean trained 5th Brigade during the "Gukurahundi" (which translates to "the early rain that washes away the chaff") beginning in 1982. I was in Zimbabwe in the middle of Ndebele territory at the time. His soldiers were terrorizing the people - wrapping them in thatch and burning them alive, among other horrors.
That was twelve years before the good Queen knighted Mugabe.
She allowed him to retain his knighthood despite his country's collapse into hell. Since 1995 - one year after his knighthood - we have known Zimbabweans' life expectancy was dropping spectacularly. Today, Zimbabweans have the lowest life expectancy of any nation - 37 years for men and 34 for women.
The Queen also allowed Mugabe to retain his knighthood despite his leading the country into such massive extremes of hyperinflation as to outrank everyone else in the world - it is right now at 100,000%.
His country used to be the bread basket of Africa, but now a third of its population relies on food aid to keep from starving to death. Apparently, this didn't bother the Queen, either.
It seems what troubles her is that Morgan Tsvangirai has dropped out of the Presidential race because after years of arrests and torture himself, not to mention assassination attempts and assassinations of those around him, none of which deterred him from pressing forward in his effort to save his country, he decided he could not enter the presidency at the price of further brutalization and murder of his fellow Zimbabweans at the direction of Mugabe. Without Tsvangirai in the race, the killing can end, at least for now.
Maybe that's the whole problem. Mugabe took things a little too far for the rest of the world to stomach and now the slow decimation of a nation of black people is over. We can't be having that, can we?
Posted by Becky at June 25, 2008 04:43 PM