WATERLOO, Ontario — The responsibility to protect (R2P) norm, embraced universally at the world summit in New York in 2005, remains operationally elusive. Calls are growing for international intervention to lift the shroud of Robert Mugabe's ruinous reign from Zimbabwe's body politic.
A country that was once a prosperous breadbasket has become a basket case with nearly total unemployment, stratospheric inflation, widespread brutality and a cholera epidemic. The official death toll is 500; unofficial estimates run into the thousands. With the collapse of the country's health system, growing food scarcity and the approaching rains, the toll will climb steeply.
All this because one aging tyrant would rather rule by thuggery than give up power. Mugabe gets ever more delusional, declaring the epidemic is over while blaming it as a conspiracy hatched in London to provide the pretext to invade.