Melville Cooke

Robert Gabriel Mugabe, first and so far only president of a nation for whom Bob Marley's performance at the official changeover from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe in 1980 is legendary, is not a preferred dinner guest these days.

As the editorial in this newspaper began on December 19, 2006, 'It has been suggested that Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe, may visit Jamaica during next year's Cricket World Cup, perhaps in a private capacity. But whether Mr. Mugabe wants to come to Jamaica as a private citizen or on a state visit, our Government should make it plain to him that he will not be welcome. And if he insists on coming, he must be told that he should expect no special courtesies. And it ended 'Jamaica must tell Mr. Mugabe that his actions and general behaviour are unacceptable and that unless he mends his ways he cannot be a guest in our country. If he comes, he should expect no warm welcome.'

Then earlier this month it was reported that at the University of Massachusetts and Michigan State in the U.S., as well as the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, there have been lobbies to consider revoking honorary doctorates granted to Mugabe.

No rumblings

On the other hand, there have been no rumblings about 'dedoctorising' George W. Bush, whose honorary doctorates include nods from Ohio State University, Concordia University and Yale. And certainly there have been no grand statements about his being unwelcome to visit.

So, let us put Mr. Mugabe, a former bush fighter against the racist regime of Ian Smith, head to head with George Bush the second, who could be styled the latest archangel Gabriel of democracy, and see (if there are indeed degrees of deviltry) whose doctorates should be dispensed with first. This is assuming that the press reports are correct, not a small matter in these times when the stage management of Pat Tillman's death and Jessica Lynch's rescue are being exposed.

The comparison begins in 2000, when there were 4,000 white farmers in Zimbabwe and George W. Bush won the U.S. presidency in November (Not that Mugabe was not accused of atrocities before, but they did not make him the reputed scourge of Africa). You know how it goes from the Jamaican blueprint; you can do anything to poor Black people and it counts for nothing. (Go to newzimbabwe.com.). By March 2003 Bush was into his second invasion and the farm invasions in Zimbabwe were well under way.

By 2005 there were 300 white farmers left in Zimbabwe and the Iraq body count website estimated civilian casualties in Iraq at well over 10,000.

Now, by all reports, George Bush beams over a disintegrating country in Iraq, and Mugabe holds sway over a country where inflation hit 1,600 per cent in February 2007, according to The Guardian. And earlier this month the BBC reported that two million Iraqis had fled to Jordan and Syria, in addition to nearly two million who were refugees in Iraq itself.

Violent deaths

So Mugabe caused just under 4,000 people to leave their homes (the white farmers' right to the land is not a part of this particular discussion); George Bush sent four million packing in Iraq alone. I have not been able to find a figure for the deaths attributed to Mugabe and his policies since 2000, but it is certainly less than the 600,000 violent deaths attributed to the Iraq invasion by the British medical journal Lancet in late 2006.

Mugabe is accused of cracking down on opponents; the U.S. maintains prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where people are held without charge and tried under circumstances where conviction is almost a foregone conclusion.

By my reckoning, if there are degrees of deviltry then George Bush is the one whose doctorates should go first and it is for him whom the dinner bell should not peal. Not that I am exonerating Mugabe of what he is accused of, in the beam and speck in the eye sort of reasoning, but the media has this way of creating monsters in Third World countries while the similar or more extreme actions of the world's more powerful nations go without extreme censure.

Hell, they are even called democratic.