How a Refugee Crises went Unnoticed

Recently I’ve been disturbed by what I’ve been hearing. With the fifth anniversary of the Iraqi invasion recently passing, there are a lot of negative things about the state of the Middle East. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees is appalled by the increase of fleeing Iraqis. They are appalled by the lack of water, sanitation, stability and security remaining Iraqis live with. The lack of these commodities is shameful and it is tragic that people living relatively stable lives had them ripped away at the drop of a hat.

But another hat fell, 8 years ago in fact, and the world has done very little about it. People just like the Iraqi are often physically ripped from their homes and daily face insecurity and oppression. There’s a group of people that live in a nation where- as the World Bank states- has the fastest receding peacetime economic in known global history, it defies all logic and all laws of economics. People sleep in bank queues to withdrawal what amounts to 50 cents and wait in long lines for bread and water. Domestic agriculture has shrunk to 8% of what it less then 10 years ago and the nation cannot feed itself. 80% of people are unemployed, and up to a quarter of the population has fled the country because of economic oppression.

Where is this place the world forgot to note? It’s just Zimbabwe. The UN is concerned about the 2 million Iraqi refugees, they somehow forgot the hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans crossing daily over a crocodile infested river into “freedom” in South Africa. What about the thousands of white Zimbabwean forced to move to Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia and Australia? They didn’t want to leave anymore then the Iraqis wanted to leave Iraq and they have just as hard a time. In short, there is a lot of attention on the pea-sized Iraq but very little on Robert Mugabe’s watermelon sized Zimbabwe. Life expectancy in Zimbabwe is currently 37 years.

The moral of today’s posting? Don’t believe everything you hear from international media, and don’t forget Africa’s former breadbasket. Tomorrow elections will take place, no one there expects change. We all wish it would happen though.