Alex Singleton | Journalist and political commentator

Zimbabwe’s socialist dictator Robert Mugabe has called for critics of his government’s physical beating of the main opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai to “go hang”. In a deluded statement, Mr Mugabe said:

We do not accept their criticism at all, here are groups of persons who went out of the way to effect a campaign of violence, and we hear no criticism at all of those actions of violence. Now when they criticise government that is trying to prevent that violence or to punish the perpetrators of that violence, then of course we take the position that they can go hang.

The BBC reports that the US and UK governments want to extend sanctions on Zimbabwe, despite the overwhelming evidence that more significant sanctions are ineffective in situations like these. The European Commission and UN are more skeptical: “Sanctions have to be weighed very carefully because of the experience that we have had in the past, whereby sanctions have had a counter-productivity against innocent citizens,” said UN Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro. EU Development Commissioner Louis Michel said sanctions against the general population could be counterproductive: “I am not sure they work,” he told reporters.