Eight years after Rwanda, the world may be witnessing another genocide on the African continent. This one is harder to see because the mechanism of death isn't machetes; it's lack of food. Zimbabwe's Matabele minority has suffered at the hands of President Robert Mugabe's Shona-dominated Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party for as long as Zimbabwe has been independent. So it is no surprise that they, even more than their oppressed countrymen to the north, withstood threats, beatings, and murders and last March cast their ballots for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Tragically, the ZANU-PF bludgeoned and rigged their way to reelection nonetheless, as African leaders throughout the continent cheered. And Mugabe is now taking his revenge in maize. His catastrophic decision to cleanse the country's farms of their white owners has forced the country--once southern Africa's breadbasket--to import food from the world's charities. And Mugabe is making sure little of it enters the south. The government has only permitted half a million tons of maize into Zimbabwe, all of it distributed through the state-operated Grain Marketing Board, one of whose managers told The Times of London, "We only sell to Shona-speakers." Reports of desperate hunger have been trickling out of Matabeleland for months. And Didymus Mutasa, ZANU-PF's administrative secretary and senior bureaucrat, recently admitted that whittling down Zimbabwe's population from its current twelve million is his government's explicit plan. "We would be better off," he said, "with only six million people ... who support the liberation struggle. ... We don't want all these extra people." In the wake of the Rwandan genocide, Washington witnessed an impassioned round of never-agains. It's time for the Bush administration, in conjunction with the world's other great powers, to show that it was listening.
