Why Not Admit Some Real Refugees?

President Bush was off to Canada last week to attend a conference of the Group of Eight leading industrial states, where problems of Africa were supposed to be high on the agenda. Presumably the president displayed more knowledge of Africa at the conference than he did of Brazil a few weeks ago when he met with Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. "Do you have blacks too?" Mr. Bush asked his Brazilian counterpart, the German magazine Der Spiegel reported. (translation)

Presumably Mr. Bush does know that Africa has blacks. What he may not know is that it has whites as well, who in Zimbabwe are facing the outright expropriation of their farms and perhaps even genocide from the black government of Robert Mugabe. Just before his trip to Canada, Mr. Bush announced that the United States was coughing up some $700 million in foreign aid to help prevent AIDS in Africa over the next five years. It is doing absolutely nothing to help the whites of Zimbabwe.

Mr. Mugabe, the Zimbabwean premier, has ruled his country since it switched over, under U.S. pressure, to black majority rule in 1980. This year he got himself re-elected through blatant intimidation of the black opposition and by targeting whites in general and white farmers in particular for persecution. Inciting black mobs to seize white farms, Mr. Mugabe has succeeded mainly in bringing productive agriculture to a halt. Now the country faces famine.

Despite warnings from other nations and international organizations, Mr. Mugabe proceeded with ruinous anti-white policies. Last month he showed up in Rome, where the United Nations World Food Summit was meeting, to stick out his hand and beg for other countries to feed the country his own policies have starved. The European Union banned Mr. Mugabe from coming to Europe after he threw out a team of its election observers. No one bothered to enforce it, and Mr. Mugabe arrived in Rome anyway.

The U.S. representative at the summit denounced Mr. Mugabe as a "head of state that is tyrannical and predatory" and said forthrightly that "He is causing the crisis in Zimbabwe." All the African despot could do was insist on his "right" to steal other people's land:

"Zimbabwe's land must rightly belong to Zimbabweans, that being the true test of our national sovereignty. Where previously only a handful of colonial settler farmers were undertaking commercial farming, the country now has over 260,000 farming families."

Of course, Zimbabwe's land did belong to Zimbabweans—white Zimbabweans—but Mr. Mugabe doesn't consider whites to be part of the nation.

"Our party must continue to strike fear in the heart of the white man, our real enemy,"

he pronounced a couple of years ago,

"The white man is not indigenous to Africa. Africa is for Africans. Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans."

Last week, his government imposed a ban on production by the nation's remaining 3,000 white-owned farms, and the whites who own them must give them up to the government within 45 days, under a land expropriation law passed by Mr. Mugabe's tame parliament. The country's agricultural output has already fallen by some 40 percent in the last year.

A UN official announced "there is precious little time" left to avoid a serious famine in Zimbabwe and called for other nations to donate more aid.

No doubt President Bush and the United States will fork up as soon as they can.

When Jean Marie Le Pen or Jorg Haider or other political figures call for reducing immigration into Europe, the international press screams for weeks and depicts them as reincarnations of Hitler. When anti-Communist ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet of Chile travels to London for a medical treatment, he gets arrested and put on trial for "human rights violations."

But when Robert Mugabe spews anti-white hatred, threatens to murder the whites of his own country, steals their land and incites mobs to attack them, we hear not a peep. When he travels to Europe, the ban imposed on him is ignored (he's also been banned from the United States, but he showed up in New York in February; the intrepid Mr. Bush did nothing about it), and it occurs to no one to slap the cuffs on this killer and throw him in jail so he can stand trial for the murders and crimes for which he's responsible.

The next time Mr. Mugabe pops up in Europe or America, he should be rounded up like the common thug and terrorist he is.

Mr. Bush should invite the white residents of Zimbabwe now facing famine, dispossession and genocide to immigrate to the United States as soon as possible.

Then, even if Mr. Mugabe stays in his own country, he and his fellow Zimbabweans can enjoy forever whatever they have not managed to destroy all by themselves.

July 01, 2002