Where is the Outrage?

Robert Mugabe is turning into the Mao of the 21st Century:

Jobs are hard to come by after six years of economic collapse that has led to 80 per cent unemployment. The informal street traders and artisans had become vital for the survival of urban populations, but Mr Mugabe’s crackdown has wiped out nearly every vestige of street business. The flower sellers, soapstone sculpture hawkers, itinerant panel beaters and vegetable touts have all but disappeared from towns and cities. The homes they lived in — many of them respectable brick structures — are now no more than flattened heaps of rubble.

Miloon Kothari, a UN housing expert, described the scorched-earth policy as “a gross violation of human rights” that was creating “a new kind of apartheid”.

Mugabe has set in motion a plan to force people into collective farming, a plan that was shown as disastrous in the former Soviet Union.