Sir, - Having just returned from ten years teaching with Apso in Southern Africa and greatly missing the news from that part of the world I was delighted with your editorial "Mugabe Turns", all about Zimbabwe.
As many other fellow returnees will also have noticed, knowledge and understanding of Africa is scanty, often prejudiced and ill-informed. Recent figures show that one per cent of the world's tourists visit Africa (40 per cent, by contrast, visit London).
Zimbabwe is a beautiful country with a vibrant and very much switched on population, who have demonstrated their love of freedom and democracy, by consistent calls for openness, transparency and defence of human rights. The trade unions, with a series of one-day strikes, which got a huge, widespread and highly disciplined response, have shown their willingness to do the job of defending the working class against social and economic injustice.
It is proper for those living in the developed countries to support the criticisms by the students and workers of the Mugabe government. However, it is not proper to be seen to support the tiny minority of white farmers (4,000 in a country of 11 million people) who still control 70 per cent of the best land, in their campaign of vilification of the Mugabe government. They have enough allies in their powerful kith and kin of the British upper classes as they seek to prevent the redistribution of land back to the black farmers.
Of course there is corruption amongst members of the government in Zimbabwe, but the blame for the cutbacks in Education, Housing and Health in Zimbabwe must be laid at the door of the unelected IMF, which forced through a totally inappropriate economic structural adjustment programme (ESAP).
The developed countries, through such institutions as the European Union and the World Trade Organisation, have forced terms of trade on the less developed countries including Zimbabwe, which effectively mean that the gap between rich and poor countries in terms of absolute wealth and income grows ever-wider every year. Does your call - "It is surely time for Mr Mugabe . . . to depart the scene" do anything to prevent this trend? Mugabe at least was elected. Who elected the IMF? - Yours, etc., Jim Blake
Grosvenor Mews, Douglas West, Cork.