Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Zimbabwe Sanctions.

South Africa has called for sanctions to end. I agree. Sanctions prop up the tyrannies they are designed to hurt. They deprive the ordinary people and create the opportunity for the despot in charge to bribe cronies with luxuries. The way to get rid of such regimes is to empower the people through greater prosperity to have time and energy to change their government. To cut off medicine, food and light causes so much initiative to be required for survival that politics takes a back seat. If we had opened up to Iraq after the first war to expel them from Kuwait, the Iraqi people themselves would have had the resources to change their government if they wanted to, or Saddam would have mellowed like Gadafi.

Now that there is a power sharing government, creaky and unstable but trying and already showing huge improvements in the quality of daily life, we need to set the country free of foreign shackles. It will then have the strength to free itself of its own. 

I have an interest in this. My grandfather was an early settler in what later became Southern Rhodesia, and my mother was born there. A cousin was a senior banker and diplomat who emigrated to America when Smith declared unilateral independence. Zimbabwe is a great country with room for everyone to live in harmony. White extremists have surely learned their lesson. The time is now for black extremists to show they have done so too. Starting with the President himself. The rest of the world needs to stop setting conditions based upon their own standards, arrived at only after many centuries of bloodshed and the slaughter of millions, and give these people a chance. That would shut down the patronage of ZANU(PF). Then things would really get moving.

Listen to the South Africans. They talk good sense.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 28th, 2010 at 7:35 pm and is filed under Malcolm Blair Robinson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.