The UN is not the Holy See

The situation in Zimbabwe is intolerable: on that all decent people can agree. Robert Mugabe has turned the breadbasket of Africa into a wasteland. He has set his militia, his army and his police to beat, rape and kill his own people. He respects neither the results of any democratic ballot nor the norms of human decency. Neither pregnant women nor children are exempted from the brutality of his thugs.

The conclusion that something must be done is obvious. The question of what, precisely, is much trickier. The reports coming out of Zimbabwe have been so awful and the world’s response so feeble that there is an increasing clamour for Britain and America to intervene directly. We can sympathise with the sentiment behind this thinking — but a British- or American-led action would play into Mugabe’s hands. It would, sadly, justify in the eyes of many Africans his assertion that what is at stake in this election is Zimbabwe’s independence, and that the country’s problems are the result of a colonial conspiracy.