WSJ

The Sounds of Silence

A politically correct tyrant visits New York.

Friday, September 13, 2002 12:01 a.m. EDT

Outside some Berkeley coffee house or an anti-American United Nations development summit, there aren't too many places in this world where Robert Mugabe can count on a warm welcome. But one, apparently, is New York's City Hall. Yesterday the president of Zimbabwe was feted at a reception there sponsored by councilman Charles Barron and the City Council's Black, Latino and Asian Caucus.

"I'm honored to host him," Mr. Barron told us by phone yesterday. The councilman went on to say that he intended to go to Zimbabwe on a fact-finding trip to see for himself if all the accusations against Mr. Mugabe--ethnic cleansing, corruption, sanctioned rape of opponents--are true. It seems that the councilman remains undecided despite the many reports of Mr. Mugabe's human-rights violations, because he can't trust the news that he has been getting.

Given how Mr. Mugabe has been cracking down on all independent voices inside his country (the country's only privately owned radio station, the Voice of the People, was bombed less than two weeks ago), Mr. Barron has a point here, albeit not the one he intended to make.

We'll admit that Mr. Mugabe is not without his fans. At last week's summit on sustainable development in Johannesburg, he was cheered. In sharp contrast, when Secretary of State Colin Powell rightly declared that "the lack of respect for human rights and the rule of law has [helped] push millions of people toward the brink of starvation," he found himself booed. Mr. Barron's take on Mr. Powell is that the Secretary of State was "just saying what Bush tells him to say."

Back in the mid-1980s, when protest against white-ruled South Africa was the flavor of the month, symbolic shantytowns popped up all over America's college campuses, part of an effort to intimidate college presidents and boards into disinvesting in Pretoria. But our campuses are mute about Mr. Mugabe's ethnic cleansing, which while taking land away from about 2,900 white farmers has taken jobs away from at least 150,000 blacks who worked the farms and is reducing the food available to the entire population. It can't be Mr. Mugabe's progressive social policies that earn him such immunity from campus protest. It was Mr. Mugabe, after all, who declared homosexuals "lower than dogs and pigs" and avowed that they had no rights at all. Nor can it be the results achieved by kicking off the shackles of colonialism; today's Zimbabwe has probably the fastest-shrinking economy in the world.

Surely the answer is obvious: Mr. Mugabe's targets are white. In the canon of the politically correct, that means that they don't qualify as victims. It doesn't seem to matter that far more Zimbabwean blacks will suffer than whites thanks to Mr. Mugabe's tyranny, because so many depend on the farms for their livelihoods. Already the U.N. says that unless massive food aid is forthcoming, "there will be a famine."

In the 2000 presidential campaign President Bush spoke of the "soft bigotry of low expectations." How perfectly that describes the failure to hold Mr. Mugabe responsible for his barbarities. And how well it encapsulates the screaming indifference to the suffering of Zimbabwe's population we see among our high caste of professional protesters.

-- Anonymous, September 13, 2002