The United Nations Security Council issued a presidential statement, but not a resolution, condemning the “election,” the Organization of African Union (OAU) chided Zimbabwe, and human rights organizations remain outraged at this unfolding disaster. Speaking at an OAU Summit, the UN’s Under-secretary General Rose Migiro stated “This is a moment of truth for regional leaders... the secretary-general urges your excellencies to mobilize support for a negotiated solution.” She stressed “This is the single greatest challenge to regional stability in southern Africa.” Ms Migiro, herself a Tanzanian, expressed the UN’s regret that the election had been allowed to go ahead despite the violence. France's Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner called the election a “farce.”

Widespread Western criticism of the vote was rebutted by one of Mugabe’s thugs saying the West “Can go hang a thousand times.” The dictator and his cronies have long lambasted the West, especially Britain the former colonial power, for its continuing concerns over the political and human rights situation in Zimbabwe. Last autumn I witnessed Mugabe deliver a ranting diatribe before the UN General Assembly blasting both the British and the United States.

In March Zimbabwean Presidential and Parliamentary elections saw longtime dictator Mugabe facing Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Chance (MDC). Despite his best efforts at electoral fraud, Mugabe’s Patriotic Front party narrowly lost to the opposition. So Comrade President simply annulled the results and set a rematch. Due to violent intimidation of MDC voters (beatings, burnings, killings) the opposition boycotted the contest and Mugabe won a tainted “landslide” and his sixth term as President. Some 200,000 opposition supporters were forced from their homes during the “campaign.”

Having ruled this once prosperous land formerly known as Rhodesia, Comrade President Mugabe can point to a number of achievements; he has turned an agricultural breadbasket country into a pitiful basket case and Third World thugrocracy. Starvation is rife, millions live on UN food aid, and farms have been seized by government goon squads. HIV/AIDS stalks the land. More than 600,000 people have been bulldozed from their homes. Unemployment is over 80 percent, inflation has surged from a million percent earlier this year to two million percent!! Oh, for the days just a year ago when inflation was a mere 6,000 percent.

Exports are booming though. Over two million Zimbabweans and more likely three million have fled to neighboring countries, especially South Africa, to escape the Mugabe-made-catstrophe. The situation evokes Josef Conrad’s novel “The Heart of Darkness.”

Western talk about economic sanctions is meaningless for many reasons. Such moves would only impoverish the impoverished even more. So-called targeted sanctions on regime bigwigs or arms imports are marginally better but will not bring major change. The threat to Mugabe (now 84) and his goons coming before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague for crimes against humanity, is a looming shadow.

Still the real answer lies in South Africa, the regional powerhouse which borders Zimbabwe to the south and remains its major conduit for supplies and trade. Though the Pretoria government has been very equivocal in its criticism and pressure on Mugabe, South Africa must realize that it is in its own national interest not to have a failed state on its frontier. The refugee flow has already caused serious domestic problems in South Africa and ongoing political instability will only cause more negative impacts. Despite the usual polite palaver about African solidarity, Pretoria must squarely see the Mugabe regime not as an erring brother African state, but as a malignant political and economic cancer to the African subcontinent with its effects spreading to neighboring countries such as Botswana and Mozambique.

For the world community the best sanctions on Zimbabwe must be focused political ostracism of an odious regime which so craves legitimacy. Since gaining power in 1980, Mugabe has poised himself as a socialist “liberation hero.” Being barred from the international community, starting with the European Union, suspended United Nations membership, and bans from international sporting events will have an effect.

Zimbabwe’s rulers have chosen a path of into the heart of darkness; they must expect the consequences of their earned isolation.