Posted on 11/28/2006 3:00:23 PM PST by siunevada
LONDON (CNS) -- More people are dying from starvation and disease in Zimbabwe under President Robert Mugabe than are killed in the war in Iraq or the conflict in Darfur, said an African archbishop.
Archbishop Pius Ncube of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, said about 3,500 people are dying each week in his country from a "unique convergence of malnutrition, poverty and AIDS." He said the world has forgotten about the plight of Zimbabweans although "hunger, illness and desperation stalk our land."
"Cemeteries are filling up throughout the country, but no blood is being spilt," he told a private meeting of politicians and church leaders in London Nov. 22. "People are just fading away, dying quietly and being buried quietly with no fanfare, and so there is little media attention."
As many people die prematurely in Zimbabwe in one week as in one month in Iraq when the violence is at its worst, he said. In October, 3,700 people died in Iraq.
The mortality rate in Zimbabwe is also a thousand per week higher than the Darfur region of western Sudan, where a genocidal campaign by government-backed militias against local tribes has claimed an average of 2,500 lives a week since 2003.
Archbishop Ncube said World Health Organization figures reveal that life expectancy in Zimbabwe is the lowest in the world -- 34 years for women and 37 years for men.
The U.N. World Food Program estimates that 6.1 million Zimbabweans, about half of the 12 million population, face starvation.
The archbishop said Zimbabwe's unemployment rate is 80 percent, and the country has the fastest-declining economy in the world.
Archbishop Ncube, who was in London to raise funds for an AIDS charity, blamed the crisis on the mismanagement of the country under Mugabe over the last seven years.
"Zimbabwe is not a nation at war," Archbishop Ncube said. "It used to be able to feed itself and its neighbors. Zimbabwe used to have one of the highest life-expectancy rates in Africa.
"And these figures cannot just be blamed on AIDS," he added.
He said the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front government, or Zanu-PF, was not investing in medicine to treat AIDS because it was "more interested in importing military aircraft from China than protecting (the) lives of its people."
"We remain in the grip of a dictator. ... We cannot compete for attention in a world fixated by events in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Sudan and elsewhere. Yet we need the international community to maintain pressure on Zanu-PF now as much as ever before," he said.
Marxism works its magic on the once super-prosperous Rhodesia, now the hell-on-earth Zimbabwe.
They are suffering from a far from unique convergence of tyranny.
Was the Archbishop in the choir clamoring for land reform? If so isn't he part of the problem?
Once again, the problem is never about money, it's about chaotic social problems, corrupt leadership.....
Poverty is the result, not the cause.
For the record,it must be acknowledged that Zimbabwe,too,was comparatively prosperous until Mugabe's steady drift toward Maoism finally compelled him to destroy the country's agricultural sector by allowing his benefactors to become "gentlemen farmers".
Zimbabwe is a nation of locusts who brought this about on their own. Let them fix the problem they created. I will not stand to see one US dollar go to aid *anyone* in that country.
Perhaps after mass famine they can serve as an example that "Gee, perhaps we weren't so bad off when those white guys were running things"
There wasnt anybody starving there when it was turned over to them.
"Zimbabwe is not a nation at war," Archbishop Ncube said. "It used to be able to feed itself and its neighbors. Zimbabwe used to have one of the highest life-expectancy rates in Africa.
Yeah Bishop, Thats the way it goes. First your money then your clothes. You got what you asked for.
"Was the Archbishop in the choir clamoring for land reform?"
Doesn't appear that way.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/2414161.stm
November 7, 2002
By Mike Donkin
BBC correspondent recently in Zimbabwe
A leading Zimbabwean churchman has called on President Robert Mugabe to stand down because his controversial land reform programme is ruining the country's economy and putting millions at risk of hunger.
The Archbishop of Bulawayo, Pius Ncube, says black farmworkers are the real victims when white farms are handed over to government supporters.
Mr Mugabe, he says, seems ready to starve his own people to keep power.
Marxism works its magic on the once super-prosperous Rhodesia, now the hell-on-earth Zimbabwe.
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islam will come along and clean it up...
http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2005/51503.htm
The Muslim community consists primarily of South Asian immigrants (Indian and Pakistani), a small but growing number of indigenous Zimbabweans, migrants from other southern and eastern African countries (including Mozambique and Malawi), and a very small number of North African and Middle Eastern immigrants. There are mosques located in nearly all of the larger towns. There are 18 in the capital city of Harare, 8 in Bulawayo, and a number of mosques in rural areas. The Muslim community has expanded its outreach efforts with the aid of the Kuwaiti-sponsored African Muslim Agency (AMA); the Harare AMA office has had increased success proselytizing among the majority black indigenous population, in part because of its humanitarian projects in rural areas. Some chiefs and headmen in the rural areas have reportedly converted from Christianity to Islam.
Oh, but of course! Starvation, famine, disease from natural drinking water* are nothing, nothing I tell you, to the horrors of apartheid. I mean, remember how life was under the whites when this land was called Rhodesia but today we....
[*Unfiltered and untreated. The way nature intended]
(sarcasm)
Now that is a Quagmire....
Good research -- I'm impressed.
He also turned down American food aid as it was Genetically Modified food. Ironically there is coffee called Fair Trade or something like that. The pastors at my church are pushing that coffee on the congregation. I visited the website for that coffee. The coffee persons are anti Genetically Modified food.
I wonder if the pastors know that they are promoting a product that is contributing to genocide in Zimbabwe and probably in other countries.
Making way for the Chinese. Once, there's no one left then the Chinese can be moved in.
My wife is a Rhodesian,this makes her cry.
SAD.
But since they can't blame USA or Bush, it will be ignored by the MSM.
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