Obama's disdain sends Mugabe to Russia; China revisited?

In June of last year Barack Obama, soon to be inaugurated as the next president of the United States, declared Robert Mugabe’s regime illegitimate and lacking in credibility. Then Senator for Illinois, Obama expressed the view that “If fresh elections prove impossible, the US and other countries should tighten “targeted sanctions” and “pursue an enforceable, negotiated political transition in Zimbabwe that would end repressive rule”.

Subsequently the USA has made it clear that, as far as they are concerned, Mugabe has to go before any support will be forthcoming from that quarter. Indeed yesterday’s influential Washington Post carried an article “In Zimbabwe, a cancer called Mugabe.

While Obama is primarily focused on the financial crisis prior to his becoming president on January 20, Mugabe can be in no doubt that, if anything, the squeeze on his regime will be tightened after the new president arrives in the White House.

So Bob figured that seeing as he wasn’t doing anything anyway he might as well pop down to Moscow for a visit.

“Mugabe will use the trip, details of which are shrouded in secrecy, to seek closer strategic ties with Moscow, a senior government official told New Zimbabwe.com.

With a power sharing agreement signed with the opposition stalled amid calls from Western powers, particularly Britain and the United States, for him to step down, Mugabe “will seek a new alliance with Russia that will secure Zimbabwe’s sovereignty and provide a new front for combating economic sanctions that have created nothing but misery for ordinary people”, according to the official.

The source added, without elaborating, that the “new front” is linked to the “exploitation of a strategic resource that God has given to Zimbabwe and which could be used to give the country a much-needed new lease of life”.

A well-structured injection of between US$5-billion and US$10-billion, Mugabe’s aides believe, can stabilise the country’s economic decline and give the 84-year-old leader some breathing space to pursue an elusive political settlement that he has been battling to forge with the two MDC formations.

Without confirming a date of Mugabe’s imminent visit, the official said the trip was of “strategic necessity” and a direct response to British and US efforts to isolate Zimbabwe through a combination of sanctions and diplomatic pressure.” (New Zimbabwe.com)

Now far be it for me to criticize Bob for trying to do the right thing for himself … er, I mean his cronies,…,er, I mean the people of Zimbabwe but we saw the exact same stunt pulled with the Chinese in 2005 whereby Bob got his mansion, Grace went shopping, the cronies got cars and houses and the people of Zimbabwe … the right to starve and die at an ever increasing rate from abuse, starvation and disease.

In these articles from the Weekly Standard’s Richard Bate UK Telegraph’s Christopher Booker and EU Referendum’s Richard North we learn of Bob’s trading substantial Zimbabwean mineral rights to China in return for financial assistance.

Subsequent to 2005 Bob and his cronies have done very nicely thank you very much and the people of Zimbabwe have become substantially poorer and the country has turned into a sewage farm not fit for humans to inhabit.

Little wonder that China blocked any UN intervention in Zimbabwe — can’t allow genocide to interfere with business. Of course these are the same Chinese who are asking the planet to hold off on prosecuting the genocide in Darfur, also related to their vested interests there.

Along with China, Russia vetoed the UN resolution and I would imagine that Bob is now off to sell a further substantial proportion of the Zimbabwean birthright to maintain his expensive habits. Very little, if any, of the proceeds to find a way to the masses as the Chinese adventure demonstrated.

Zimbabweans’ heritage and God given resources being traded away so that one man and a handful of cronies can live like kings.

But who are we to argue?

The real danger is after all Western imperialism, not so?

Shame.