The Year of Living Dangerously
The story of the Zimbabwean government’s attempts to expel Andrew Meldrum, a journalist for British newspaper The Guardian, reads like a bad novel, with night-time raids by police on a house from which the reporter, having been tipped off, has escaped; the reporter being seized by police and dragged away as he yells to colleagues that he’s being deported; his heroic lawyer winning a stay of the deportation in court, then having only 50 minutes to get to the airport to stop the deportation; portions of the airport being locked down in a failed attempt to prevent the lawyer from being able to serve the order preventing the deportation; and finally, the government refusing to produce the journalist for the demanded court appearance and subsequent uncertainty over his whereabouts. Or maybe it’s more like a Peter Weir movie. Robert Mugabe is as much a tyrant as some other people out there, but because his benighted country is in Africa, nobody here seems to pay attention. Zimbabwe is heading for a fall, and it’s going to be very bad indeed.
Posted at 8:19 PM