Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe’s failing health

Click to see satellite image of Zimbabwe

• President Robert Mugabe is now 87 years old.
• He has traveled to Singapore 5 times to seek medical attention.
• He has ruled Zimbabwe since independence from Britain in 1980.
• He has said that despite his age, he is still fit to rule the country.
• Mugabe called for an election to occur in the current year, but regional mediators said it would be too early for a free and fair poll.
• A referendum on constitutional reform is slated for september.
• Its not clear if a regional summit on Zimbabwe will go ahead as planned in Namibia's capital, Windhoek.
• Mugabe's office said it received an invitation to go to Windhoek on Friday.
• At the last regional summit in Zambia in March, Mugabe and his party received a stern reproach over the slow pace of reforms in Zimbabwe and continuing political violence.
• Mugabe was transported around that summit venue in an electric golf cart, due to his poor health.

Colombian Civil War

• Began in 1964 due to low-intensity armed conflict between the Colombian Government and Peasant Guerrilla groups.
• Some of these guerilla groups include; Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the National Liberation Army (ELN).
• The FARC claim to be fighting for the rights of the poor in Colombia to protect them from government violence. Also to provide justice socially, through socialism.
• The Colombian government claims to be fighting for order and stability, the rights and interests of its citizens, private companies and multinational corporations, from guerrilla attacks
• Everyone involved in the conflict has been criticized for multiple human rights violations.
• The fighting has killed tens of thousand of citizens and displaced millions.
• It was the Colombian Government’s attack on the community of Marquetalia that forced the rebel creation of FARC.
• For most part the guerilla groups have roots deep in the jungle, due to government attacks.
• The most recent deaths were in January of 2010. 18 FARC members were killed when the Colombian Air Force bombed a jungle camp in southern Colombia.

Satellite view of Colombia

Interrelated

Political	Economic	Social/Cultural
Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, stated his disapproval with the FARC strategy of armed struggle and kidnapping. He repeated his call for a political solution and an end to the war on March and June 2008. The United States has been heavily involved in the conflict since its beginnings USA has spent over $3 billion in Colombia, more than 75% of it on military aid. Before the Iraq war, Colombia was the third largest recipient of US aid only after Egypt and Israel.	From 2002-2006, during President Uribe's first term in office, the security situation inside Colombia showed some measure of improvement and the economy, also showed some positive signs of recovery according to observers. But relatively little has been accomplished in structurally solving most of the country's other grave problems.	In the development of the country, Colombia, like many other Latin American countries, became very segregated between the rich descents of the Spanish and the original people. Social leaders, political activists, human rights campaigners and trade unionists are most at risk of being kidnapped or assassinated. Many indigenous communities have also suffered attacks.

Controversial

How did this issue start?

How should it be resolved?

The 1948 assassination of populist Jorge Eliecer Gaitan lead to the Bogotazo, an urban riot killing more than 4,000 people, leading to ten years of sustained rural warfare between members of Colombian Liberal Part and the Colombian Conservative Party, which took the lives of more than 200,000 people throughout the countryside. It was the 1964 attack on the community of Marquetalia that motivated the later creation of FARC, which lead to the technical beginning of the conflict.

The ICC (International Criminal Court) has already created a law that states: if members of any armed rebel force agreed to abandon the group, they would “face a maximum conviction of five to eight years if they released hostages, made a sincere and full confession, helped to locate the corpses of the disappeared people and paid damages to victims”. This approach has been relatively successful and 1,626 cases are in the beginning stages.

My Opinion

In my personal opinion, I think that there should be a branch created off the ICC to specifically deal with the conflicts in Colombia. I think that if there were a powerful organization to step in and take charge, the war could come to a stop without many more deaths. If the USA, who is already sending a lot of money to help, invested in this new branch of the ICC for Colombia, then the rest of the world would take note and probably invest as well. The end of the war would be in sight, at close range too, if the world contributed.