Solomon's Wisdom Revisited

How to judge the unflinching resolve to dedicate one's life to another? State the intent to take a loved one's life if a solution is not found to demands for recognition. Challenge the individual who claims rights by informing them that their continued demand for recognition will result in the death of loved ones.

Isn't that, after all, what heartless terrorists do, hold someone for ransom in the certain knowledge that those who love them will do everything in their power to have them restored? It's a primitively time-honoured expedient, one practised by unprincipled antagonists determined to have their way. Innocents held to ransom to extract information from recalcitrant family members, for example.

It's what we witness, for example, with Hamas threatening Israel that unless it accedes to demands made by the Islamist terrorists, the life of captured IDF soldier, Gilad Shalit will be forfeit. Knowing full well how seriously the country takes its obligation to its people to shelter them from harm, to retrieve them at whatever cost from capture, even when to do so results in doing harm to the country's own interests.

And here is Robert Mugabe, the triumphant, South Africa-supported tyrant of Zimbabwe, willing to "share" power with his political adversary as long as Morgan Tsvangerai accepts a minor government position void of political power. To emphasize his determination, Mugabe refuses to allow transport of international relief into his country from its temporary warehousing in South Africa.

This prime example of an egotistically delusional despot determined to hang on to power in Zimbabwe despite the catastrophic effects of his misrule which have left his country, formerly one of the breadbaskets of Africa in ruin, poses that age-old conundrum in yet another permutation. Aid agencies were accused by Robert Mugabe of actively taking part in campaigns on behalf of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

Irrespective of the staunch denials of humanitarian groups which remain politically neutral, with the certain knowledge that they will be marked as an enemy otherwise; tailoring their activities to ensure that emergency food and medicines will get through to the starving in Zimbabwe, the internally displaced, the rural indigent. Yet a ravening and violent dictator decreed that this aid will not reach his people.

With a world-record, truly staggering inflation rate sweeping the value entirely away from that collapsed economy, leaving its population in dire straits, Mugabe remains obdurately unmoved. Despite that he had promised, as a signatory to a memorandum of understanding between his party and his antagonist's, he steadfastly refuses to lift the ban on permitting life-saving supplies to reach his countrymen.

The talks between Mugabe and Tsvangerai remain deadlocked. And will remain so until and unless Mr. Tsvangerai ceases to insist that his is the democratic right to either co-rule in equal measure, or take over the administration of his forlorn country completely. Yet were he to value as his personal responsibility the desperate condition in which Zimbabweans are now struggling, he has the means to transform the situation.

If he agreed to give up his opposition to Mr. Mugabe, permitting him to continue his ruinous administration, raping the country completely of its resources, leaving his people destitute and starving, Mugabe will relent, and permit those emergency supplies to reach Zimbabweans in desperate need. Mugabe and his supporters, along with the army and the police will continue to live in style, while the country desiccates.

Obviously a sacrifice of personal ambition allied with the fervent desire to rescue his country from immediate disaster that Mr. Tsvangerai is not prepared to submit to. What would result from such a move would be of transitory value, in any event, perhaps. The country would continue to limp along, its economic immune system in complete decline, its people left with no hope for the future.

As a complex moral issue, a criminal, violent, self-availingly mercenary president, exerting inhumane pressure on his people through a political adversary anxious to save his country in its dying paroxysms accepting a tenuously temporary solution, the outcome is nothing short of fascinating.

That is, if the onlooker can detach himself from the horrendous matter of peoples' lives forfeit to the gamble of criminal persuasion.