Editorial

The image of a four-year-old boy's eye, swelled like a golf ball after he was beaten while his mother was dragged away, was one of the few acts of violence the world was able to see as Zimbabwe held its sham election.

With virtually all news organisations banned from the country, reporting the human tragedy in this southern part of Africa has been at its most difficult. Even the journalists who made it inside have had to be at their most vigilant, since they face arrest if caught.

It is, therefore, left to the more unpleasant sides of our imagination to picture what has been happening to those who failed to show Robert Mugabe's henchmen the indelible pink mark on their fingers to prove that they voted in the so-called election.

Mr Mugabe, the country's leader for 28 years, lost the real election to Morgan Tsvangirai in the first round last March. But according to the official result, with 50 per cent (as opposed to Mr Mugabe's humiliating 43 per cent), Mr Tsvangirai did not win outright and a run-off was necessary.

That triggered a wave of violence and intimidation by Mr Mugabe's Zanu-PF party far greater than that seen in the March election. Supporters of Mr Tsvangirai's MDC party were forced out of their homes, beaten and killed, forcing the opposition leader to pull out of the run-off and seek refuge in the Dutch Embassy.

The Zimbabweans who did not go to the polling stations - independent reports suggest they were numerous - deserve an immense amount of credit for defying him in these circumstances.

However, the stark reality is that they had no choice: their country has become one of the poorest African nations as a result of disastrous economic policies and cronyism. Their dollar is worthless and inflation is over 150,000 per cent. This is a far cry from Mugabe's early days; when Zimbabwe was so well-off it could export food to the starving in Ethiopia in the 1980s. Now its only export is people.

The international community has done a lot of talking in recent weeks. Britain stripped Mr Mugabe of his honorary knighthood and the UN Security Council has said that it is "a matter of deep regret" that the presidential run-off went ahead in these circumstances. But although it maintained that conditions for a free and fair election did not exist, it stopped short of saying it was illegitimate.

Even the iconic Nelson Mandela, the shining light of African freedom who marked his 90th birthday last Friday, failed to go that far, preferring instead to limit himself to a one-liner saying that there has been "a tragic failure of leadership in Zimbabwe".

Malta has disappointingly followed this line, with Foreign Minister Tonio Borg saying that the country strongly deplores the circumstances that led to the decision to hold the election. His opposition counterpart Leo Brincat was the more forceful, saying the international community could not continue to remain silent in the face of such a situation.

Everyone seems to be throwing the ball in the court of the African leaders, and in particular at the feet of South African president Thabo Mbeki, who has so far unsuccessfully led diplomatic efforts to find a solution to the problem.

The only way Mr Mugabe will listen, it seems, is if he is made to do so. Which is why it is vital that the Security Council, and African leaders, must turn words into action in the coming days. Africa has watched more than enough avoidable humanitarian tragedies without doing anything about them. So have we.