At Least the Trains Ran on Time

21 Nov 2007 The Times uses the death of Ian Smith as an excuse to go all Major Beaglehole over the situation in Zimbabwe.

Look, I'm not defending Mugabe in any way, but let's get a couple of things straight. First, the British media coverage of Zimbabwe has been disgustingly disproportionate; this particularly struck me when I watched sympathetic local news reports on a white Zimbabwean asylum seeker, contrasting sharply with the coverage of black African asylum seekers.

Second, land reform had to happen in a country where a white 1% of the population owned 70% of the land. In the long run, land reform is important both for equality and efficiency reasons; having a small elite own all the land isn't good in any sense (even the World Bank says so [pdf]). The fact that it's happened in a spectacularly bad way cannot be detached totally from the way this elite held on for so long.