StrategyPage, the world's best public website for military analysis, warns that "Zimbabwe is about ready to explode in a nightmare mass murder." StrategyPage calls the killings "democide"--a word invented by University of Hawaii political scientist R.J. Rummel for mass killings. ("Genocide," a word invented during World War II, more narrowly refers to mass killings aimed a particular ethnic or religious group. Much of the Pol Pot killings in Cambodia would technically be "democide" rather than "genocide", since the Khmer Rouge killed many Cambodians without regard to their ethnicity.)

As with many previous democides, the democide in Zimbabwe is being perpetrated with a government-induced famine, in which food aid is directed only to government loyalists, and the "black market" in food is suppressed.

StrategyPage explains why the Mugabe tyranny is able to perpetrate democide: "There hasn't been any revolution so far because the potential rebels cannot get guns. No one is willing to arm the dissatisfied majority....The government seems determined to starve its enemies to death, secure in the knowledge that the victims are unarmed, and the government forces have lots of guns."

Back in 2001, Paul Gallant, Joanne Eisen, and I warned that Zimbabwe was "ripe for genocide." We also detailed how the Mugabe tyranny has used gun licensing and registration laws, inherited from British colonial times, to disarm the people of Zimbabwe, leaving them helpless against government-controlled gangs of young thugs.

In a 2002 article in the Rocky Mountain News, I noted the American media's extremely inadequate coverage of Zimbabwe, including the failure to report on an explicit statement by the ruling party (Zanu-PF) about the advantage of getting rid of half of the country's population.

The international community's response to the highly visible democide in Zimbabwe has been even more ineffectual and tepid than the response to the highly visible genocide in Darfur, Sudan. One reason is that the Mugabe dictatorship retains the support of South African President Mbeki. Likewise, the dictators who run most of subsaharan Africa strongly oppose creating a precedent of international intervention against mass-murdering African tyrants.

But if the people of Zimbabwe had not been disarmed under the pretext of "gun safety", they would be able to help themselves. A revolution would not be guaranteed to succeed, but fighting to live is much better than passively starving to death.

After the Holocaust, the international community said "Never again." Yet in Zimbabwe, as in so many other nations in the last 60 years, the combination of citizen disarmament and international indifference has made democide a reality again and again and again.

An excellent daily news source about Zimbabwe is the ZWNews website, which also offers a free daily e-mail update. The courageous Zimbabwe Independent is still publishing a web edition.