From Terror to Hunger

Robert Mugabe turns from beating the people of Zimbabwe to starving them.

IT'S BECOMING clear that there's nothing that Robert Mugabe will not do to prevent the people of Zimbabwe from voting him out of the presidency -- and very little that Zimbabwe's African neighbors or the United Nations will do to stop him. The two phenomena are related: The more foreign governments have dithered over Mr. Mugabe's violent repression since the March 29 election, the more blatant and brutal his actions have become.

The announcement of the presidential election result was delayed for more than a month while the president's thugs rampaged through the countryside, beating and torturing people suspected of supporting the opposition. Authorities finally announced that opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai had defeated Mr. Mugabe but had fallen short of a 50 percent majority. They scheduled a runoff for June 27.

Since that announcement, the violence has escalated. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change says that more than 50 of its members have been murdered, including key activists who were abducted from their homes and later found dead. Yesterday, Mr. Tsvangirai was arrested and held for several hours before being charged with a spurious public order offense. Meanwhile, Mr. Mugabe has returned to one of his favorite weapons: hunger. According to a report in the New York Times, Mr. Mugabe's regime last week ordered a number of nonprofit groups working in Zimbabwe to suspend their operations until after the runoff vote. These include CARE, which feeds more than 100,000 people in schools, orphanages and nursing homes; and Save the Children, which said that it was unable to serve 60,000 children to whom it was providing food, counseling and education. A U.N. official said that, in all, millions of people had lost assistance.

The United Nations, which ought to be intervening to rescue Zimbabwe's people, instead allowed Mr. Mugabe to cynically mock his victims. This week the 84-year-old strongman used the occasion of a U.N. food conference to skirt a European Union travel ban, check into a luxury hotel in Rome and deliver a speech in which he accused the international aid groups of using food to undermine the government -- a monstrous lie.

Zimbabwe's neighbors, beginning with South Africa, could stop this humanitarian tragedy. Shamefully, they have failed to do so, largely because lame-duck South African President Thabo Mbeki has dedicated himself to protecting Mr. Mugabe. Consequently, Mr. Mbeki will share the responsibility for the atrocities being committed in full view of the world -- the murders and beatings, the blocking of food for orphaned children. Like Mr. Mugabe himself, Mr. Mbeki deserves to be condemned and shunned by the democratic world.