Afternoon Focus

Genocide Without End? The Destruction of Darfur

By Eric Reeves

AS GENOCIDAL destruction in the Darfur region of western Sudan enters its fifth year, we must accept not only the overwhelming disgrace of such prolonged human agony but register important shifts in the nature of the destruction—the appearance of new and different threats to the existence of both Arab and non-Arab populations in Darfur. Genocide is evolving in Darfur, mutating, and perhaps only now reaching the point of greatest human destruction.

Zimbabwe - Dissent Magazine Annotated

ZIMBABWE was known as the “jewel of Africa,” as Samora Machel, the Marxist president of Mozambique, told Robert Mugabe when the new nation won its independence in 1980. As the second-most-industrialized country on the continent, the former Southern Rhodesia already had a decent infrastructure, including roads and railways (“You were lucky to have had the British,” another Mozambican leader told Mugabe, no doubt wistfully); an energetic, talented, book-hungry populace; and democratic institutions such as a relatively free press and a functioning judiciary. The problems, of course, were immense: there was the need to recover—economically, psychically, spiritually—from over a decade of brutal civil war; and there were vast disparities between whites and blacks in wealth, education, skills, and land ownership. But in addition to having had some historic, manmade luck, Zimbabwe was naturally lucky, too: beautiful, mineral-rich, and astoundingly fertile. Zimbabwe’s vast, sophisticated commercial farms were ingeniously irrigated and passionately tended; they produced, and often exported, fruits, flowers, peanuts, grains, tobacco, cotton, coffee, poultry, pigs, and some of the best beef in the world. Doris Lessing, who was raised in Southern Rhodesia, called the country “paradise,” and she is among the least sentimental of writers.

Beginning in 2000, most of the country’s commercial farmers, who were white, were driven from their lands, violently and without compensation; hundreds of thousands of black farm workers have, consequently, also lost their homes, livelihoods, and access to medical care—particularly devastating in a country where at least one-fifth of the population is HIV-positive. The newly appropriated farms, many now in the hands of Mugabe’s cronies, lie in ruins: and so in what was once the breadbasket of Africa, famine looms for millions.

The World Bank has called Zimbabwe’s woes unprecedented for a country not at war

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, the journalist Peter Godwin paints a portrait of an imploding Zimbabwe that is alternately tender and furious. But it is a portrait that is also startlingly, almost willfully, partial, and it sent me looking to Zimbabwe’s complex past—exactly the place Godwin refuses to go—in an attempt to understand its present despair. And to try, too, to find voices other than those of Zimbabwe’s liberal whites—not because their views are wrong or unimportant, but because there is much that they cannot tell us.