FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE

by Stefan Kanfer

     Force, as Jimmy Carter keeps reminding us, never solved anything.

     Or does it? Might this worthy be wrong? Force, after all, is what finished slavery.

      But that was so 19^th century.

      And then there was Imperial Japan and the Third Reich. Force seemed to push them into the dustbin of history.

       But those were was so 20^th century.

      Now we are in a new millennium.

      Granted, it’s a very young millennium. Still, the 21^st century has done little to give credence to the Carterian doctrine.

      The morning of 9/11 began it all.

      That horror might have been mitigated, but it could not have been prevented. Islamic radicals would have attacked American soil sooner or later; they had done so before, and they had not been discouraged by the U.S. response. Until now.

     Meantime, the horror continues outside of the U.S. and the Middle East. Today, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—War, Famine, Pestilence and Death—leave their hoof prints in Africa. More specifically, in Zimbabwe, once known as Rhodesia.

     This beautiful land, rich in tradition and in nature, lives under a curse. His name is Robert Mugabe. That dictator’s “reforms” included a land grab that ordered 2,900 of the country’s remaining 4,500 white commercial farmers to surrender their acreage to black settlers. Those settlers had no idea how to work the soil. Result: mass starvation, effecting millions.

    And this is not the worst of Mugabe’s criminal efforts. Once upon an era, Zimbabwe’s hospitals and doctors offered, along with South Africa’s, the best health care on the continent. Then the governmental thugs took over. Now, some 40% of the doctors in Harare, the nation’s capital, have left for better-paying, safer jobs elsewhere. There are currently about 900 doctors serving a population of 11.5 million.

     Rushing in to replace them: witch doctors. No, this is not an Evelyn Waugh farce. This is 21^st  century Zimbabwe, where diagnosticians toss animal bones in the air to determine what’s wrong with their patients.

     And even here the atrocities do not end. According to a recent paper by two science professors at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Zimbabwe “exhibits one of the highest levels of HIV/AIDS in the world, with approximately 34 percent of the adult population now infected with the human immunodeficiency virus.” The misery has been compounded by Mugabe’s muzzling of the press, so that the population remains ignorant of the AIDS danger, and by the reluctance of other countries to intercede.

      The report goes on: “The continuing absence of the rule of law in Zimbabwe, widespread corruption, electoral fraud, and the government’s renowned propensity to default consistently on loans have generated significant mistrust of the Mugabe regime by foreign donor countries.”

      This is one catastrophe that could have been prevented. Even now, it could be mitigated. But this would require intervention, military presence, and that contradiction in terms, the moral will of the United Nations. And force, as their biggest fan keeps saying, never solves anything.