Mugabe Under Fire Over Cholera Epidemic

(CBS)  In Africa, the crisis is deepening in Zimbabwe, if that's possible. As a cholera epidemic rages, pressure is growing on Zimbabwe's long-time ruler Robert Mugabe, reports CBS News correspondent Richard Roth.

Even Zimbabwe's bankrupt government now admits there's a national emergency. Sewage and health care facilities hardly exist. The country's 12 million people lack money, food and clean water - and it's killing them.

Six hundred or more have died in an epidemic of cholera, which the United Nations says has infected more than 12,000 people.

Just outside the nation's capital, water from wells reeks of sewage.

"I am very afraid of cholera, but there is no substitute where we can get clean water," says one woman. "We rely on these wells."

Spread by contaminated food and water, the disease has followed a tide of desperation to the border with South Africa. Medical help is meager, but as one man put it our hospitals in Zimbabwe "are a dead zone."

Most of the blame falls on the misrule of Zimbabwe's 84-year-old president, Robert Mugabe, who's still in power despite losing an election this year, reports Roth. Now the calls for his ouster, from Europe and the United States are getting louder.

"It's well past time for Robert Mugabe to leave," said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "I think that's now obvious."

And with fear spreading like the cholera, Mugabe's neighbors in Africa are also pressuring him to leave office.

"He's destroyed a wonderful country," says Desmond Tutu, former archbishop of South Africa. "A country that used to be a bread basket, it has now become a basket case itself needing help."

If there's hope in all this misery, it may lie in what a Zimbabwean writer calls "the cholera effect" a disease that's crossing borders, and a crisis growing bigger, that could become the catalyst for change.

[miamiderick]

Gordon Brown has a problem in that he is being forced to remove his troops from Iraq and the British public is opposing their re-deployment to Afghanistan. At the same time, the Brown economy is more of a failure than the Bush economy, and Britain is faced with deepening depression and massive unemployment. Like the US, the last thing Brown needs is to stand down the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, as for every troop in the field there are nine employed in command, support and logistics, not to mention the military industrial companies that are making a killing on the deal and employing thousands. Adding these people to the army of unemployed would be an economic disaster. Brown is desperately seeking a new war to deploy his military. He stood by and supported the murder of over a million Iraqis in order to steal Iraqi oil, and silently stands by while genocide is committed against the Palestinians on a daily basis. Now Brown and Rice claim they have humanitarian concerns about Zimbabwe. Give me a break. They are lame ducks on their way to the scrap yard of history.

[drinuk]

Whitemale08, Jeeez, You are one big idiot, a sick unbalanced headcase. It is almost impossible to imagine that people so demented can walk this earth, come the day of reckoning you will be amongst the first to be eradicated. SAD B A S T A R D !

[clathrate]

The Arabic/Muslim whacko''''s are starving these people so they can oust a government run by a Roman Catholic leader.




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Posted by RowdynTex

So that''s why a Roman Catholic priest is asking Mugabe to step down? And since when is the President elect of Zimbabwe, Morgan Tsvangirai, not a Christian?

Where do you come up with your crapola? Your ideas stink as much as the cholera infested sewage these people are drowning in.

[whitemale08]

To hell with Zimbabwe. Charity begins at home. Help the people here, first.


Posted by Gatofeo at 10:17 PM : Dec 07, 2008--

To hell with Iceland and Ukraine, Charity begins at home. Help the people here first.

[gatofeo]

Time for Hollywood to have another fund-raiser, so Mugabe can steal it before it gets to his people.
Of course, Bono will write a touching song about saving Africa ...

Africa
Save Africa
Save the people
Africa
Send them help
Send me money
I''ll save Africa
I''ll keep it safe
Here in my Swiss bank
Africa
Save the people
Africa
(and so on ... ad nauseum)

Bono ... what a phony, arrogant con man. But millions everywhere will fall for him because he wears those cool sunglasses and isn''t burdened with a formal education on the problems he professes to know.

To hell with Zimbabwe. Charity begins at home. Help the people here, first.

[whitemale08]

The New Dark Ages have already been taking place in Zimbabwe.

British oligarchs caused this to force ''white-farmers'' back into that country to export their soveriegn food supply as ''booty'' for export.

To un-discerning people in the West it looks like Mugabe''s fault when in it is a formula of ''chaos out of sanctions'' when you refuse to obey the British.

The same will happen to the U.S. if the British can manage an assasination of President-Elect Obama on top of the worse ''financial-crisis'' since the fall of the Lombard banking cartel.

Time to understand the ''physical economy'' and how its ''dynamics'' work and under the Keynesian system of economics (an empire based on ''fiat-currency'' that demands other countries to ''buy our debt'').

The financial empire or ''quadrillion-dollar-derivates-bubble'' is taking down with it the entire ''physical economy'' of the world.

To think that we are exempt of the same fate of Zimbabwe is ludicrous.

The United States will pawn over our military to the U.N. which will be run by a handfull of oligarchs and so-called monarchies of Europe.

[bleechdahole]

Bono''s Live8 was a success...

as promised it eliminated poverty..his..

to save this sh*thole..

dont let the liberals save them