My mother could have prevented the current carnage in Zimbabwe. She had her chance to alter the course of history back in 1979 when ‘freedom-fighter’ turned dictator/torturer/election rigger and all-round sadist Robert Mugabe was attending the Lancaster House agreement in 1980, the negotiations that ended white rule in the former Rhodesia. She bumped into him (literally) at the entrance to London’s Royal Lancaster Hotel. Then they sort of swerved to avoid each other, only to find themselves belly to belly again as people do.
If only my mother had possessed a poisoned umbrella, she could have perhaps forestalled the disintegration of beautiful Zimbabwe – the former 'bread basket' of Africa – into today's poverty-stricken hellhole where life expectancy is only 37.
I have a friend in Bulawayo. Over and above the mindless violence, lawlessness and intimidation, she tells me that the battle to keep abreast of the stratospheric inflation rate and worthless currency is exhausting in itself. In a recent email she quoted 1.7 billion dollars for a loaf of bread and 10 billion dollars for a Father’s Day cake. Needless to say, the man responsible for the entire nightmare is Mugabe himself, not his opponents or white imperialists/colonialists. I assume that by now everybody knows this apart from a lunatic fringe of far-lefties and Mugabe's immediate entourage, all of whom – of course – have their filthy mitts in the trough.
History, as I've said, could have been so different if my mother had had a little foresight. Sometime I’m surprised that that there are so few political assassinations. Given the horrors perpetuated by some of history's recent barbarians, you’d have thought somebody would have tried to dispatch them. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of lack of ingenuity. For example, I blame Tony Benn for the Gulf War. He had golden opportunities in 1990 and then again in 2003 when he met Saddam Hussein. Given Benn’s well publicised aversion to war he could have done us all a favour by bumping off Saddam, saving the world from a 100,000 casualties in the process. Don’t say it can't be done. On their second visit, by which time Saddam would have trusted Benn, the veteran politician could surely have handed Saddam an envelope containing what purported to be an important missive from international dignitaries. The letter would be saturated with poison. The Iraqi leader would have ingested said toxic substance through the skin when he opened it.
You guess I have my proverbial tongue in my proverbial cheek but then, again, in a way I don't. Why are there so few murders of prominent despots? How is it possible that neo-Nazi, Holocaust denier David Irving can still walk around London without some aggrieved anti-fascist or – better still – the family of an Auschwitz survivor, ending his miserable existence? Why is it that the Iranians don’t see sense and terminate the life of their leader who seems hell bent on defying the will of the rest of the world?
It’s a sad truth that the more evil the person, the less prone they seem to assassination. It’s only the good guys that get killed: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, the two Kennedys, John Lennon, Georgi Markov – as well as the attempts on the lives of the Pope and Ronald Reagan. Why is it that nobody delivered us from Idi Amin, Louis Farrakhan, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, Nicolae Ceausescu (I don't really count his execution in 1989) and Muammar Gaddafi, not to mention Stalin and Hitler. Ok, so humble cabinet maker George Elser and not-so-humble von Stauffenberg tried to do in the latter but given the Fuhrer's track record more people should have tried earlier.
It does seem we are terminally unlucky with our assassinations. Why is it that Pim Fortuyn, a brave Dutch politician who spoke out against the extremist influence of militant Islam, was slain – and by an animal rights activist at that – whereas France's Le Pen has survived in spite of far more incendiary and downright nasty rhetoric against minorities? Does the answer lie in the sometimes warped psychology of the assassin? Perhaps it's simply more commonplace to find a deranged person affronted by the incorruptibility of a good public figure rather than a good person who is so affronted by the personification of evil that he/she is willing to take the ultimate step.
Failing the assassination route, the international community (don't you just love that phrase?) could start to get really audacious and arraign despots like Mugabe at the Hague before they get to the stage of hanging political opponents upside down from the ceiling on meat hooks. Otherwise, one day, you could find yourself living in a country where it costs 200 billion dollars to do your weekly shopping. And that isn't funny at all.
