and a merry hell for others.......
just one of the happy occasions around the world......
| Quote: |
HARARE, Zimbabwe – At overflowing garbage dumps in Zimbabwe's capital, desperate vagrants pounced on trash bags and fought over chicken bones and scraps of discarded food. Sewage clogged streets and most shopkeepers didn't even bother with holiday decorations.
In crumbling, largely Christian Zimbabwe, where a cholera epidemic has killed more than 1,100 people, Christmas is just another day of suffering.
"There is nothing for us to celebrate. Christmas is a story of hunger," said Monica Rugare. "It is just another day of poverty, the way we are living today."
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081223/ap_on_re_af/af_zimbabwe_bleak_christmas
smileeeeeeeee
NOT And yet nobody does a thing about it 
It is really a pity that even in the festival holiday season, a whole country of people is suffering for lack of basic needs.
It is really a case of extreme mismanagement by the political powers of the country. This has led to obsecene inflation and the currency is basically worthless. Hope that Zimbabwe gets back on its knees soon. For a country with such an amount of natural resources at its disposal, it definitely could do better!
Truly sad, and this has been going on from the beginning of time with the Mugabe Government, and yes, it certainly boggles the mind that it has continued in this way regardless. The people from Zimbabwe are of the nicest I know, hard working, and sought after as workers in South Africa. As well as of course being challenged in South Africa as some enter illegally, and there are South Africans who feel they are taking their jobs away from them so they are treated in a challenging way in South Africa as well. You will easily find single Zimbabwe workers in South Africa caring after more than one family in Zimbabwe. Sending all of their salary at end of the month, and still serving everyone with a smile. I really do not know how they do this, the smiles and carrying on regardless. And yes, I cannot understand that the UN is looking after the Congo, yet nothing is done to assist in Zimbabwe, particularly with medical services.
Since Mugabe was the successful Revolutionary Leader, against the hated (but successful) white rulers of Rhodesia, all the anti-capitalists in the world were happy to let Mugabe do whatever he liked.
When he decided that blacks should run the farms instead of ex-colonial whites, he drove his drifting downward country into a dive-bombing crash. From a food exporter to local malnutrition and starvation -- the wages of corrupt cronyism.
South Africa has done little to even condemn Mugabe, much less push him to reform.
To the United NATIONS, there is no external threat, everything is a local issue -- NATIONAL sovereignty is more important than human rights.
Bah.
Of course, any and everybody who is or was against the Iraq War has to be partly responsible for being presumed to be against any Operation Zimbabwe Freedom -- but that's what the people need.
Nobody, yes nobody, is unhappy we took out Hussein and kept him from carrying out more murders. People are/were angry at the fact that they were lied to, deceived, etc. People are/were angry because we went there for the wrong reasons and excuses were constantly made. People are/were angry that we tried to take on more than we could possibly handle at that given time (a voluntary two front war is ridiculous).
I can't recall anyone (that most US citizens would listen to...like the President) pushing the early invasion idea coming out clearly and saying, with zero deception and no excuses, we were invading Iraq to overthrow Hussein and save the people from his unending tyranny. Instead, we got the bull rhetoric about WMDs, Hussein helping terrorist organizations, fighting the war on terror, allowing the idea in which Iraq was connected to 9/11, etc.
Maybe they did say we were going there solely to free people from tyranny and I missed it, but it certainly, to my memory, wasn't the #1 message they put out to gain support for the Iraqi invasion.
I don't want to take this off topic, but I'm all for freeing people from the likes of Hussein, Mugabe, etc.. But if that's what we're doing, then we have to take the right initiatives, we have to time it correctly, we have to state that to be the truth up front, no excuses, no deception and so on.
Last edited by liljp617 on Wed Dec 24, 2008 6:02 am; edited 1 time in total
Err..not so. Many people are unhappy that 'you' took out Hussain. Many of them are currently fighting in the insurgency.
I personally am quite happy that the man is gone, but to pretend that this view is shared by all Iraqi's and others in the middle-east is simply wrong.
I really don't think many people in the US are unhappy we took him out. I think they're unhappy with the way we did it and for the reasons I listed...among others. I could be wrong.
Certainly the people who were helping him and continue to fight US troops are angry we took him out. I figured that was a given.
(Of course, I didn't make it evident I was speaking in terms of the people of the US)
In the UAE there are a great number of professional and intellectual Iraqis, who have lost out in a major way in their careers due to Hussein. For example I met a chemical engineer, who was barred from leaving Iraq for at least 10 years (probably because he had been associated with some of the famous weaponry projects there), and also could not find work in Iraq. I think quite a number of Iraqi people were most relieved when Hussein was gone. However, at the same time were more upset about their country being invaded by a foreign Western power for reasons that seemed to have been nonsense in the end, i.e. search for weapons of mass destruction. The bloodshed of loved ones was very real and acutely felt here in the UAE as well as other neighbouring countries where quite a number of Iraqi professionals are employed and the fate of their families shared with those countries. Think all of them suffered from massive post traumatic stress as it came so swiftly and quite a number of them were unprepared for the consequences of real war.
a lot of filipinos were become jobless this year due to the recession...I think majority isn't merry for this Christmas season...
