Anna Tibaijuka, the highest-ranking African wo-man at the UN, is not one of the boys. Maybe that’s why she did not mince her words about the horrors going on in Zimbabwe that Africa’s male political establishment seems so afraid to talk about. Tibaijuka is a Tanzanian economist

who is executive director of the UN agency that looks into the mass destruction of slums and shantytowns by Robert Mugabe’s dictatorial regime. She has reported that the forcible clearances that have cost 700,000 people their homes or livelihoods, were carried out in an “indiscriminate and unjustified manner” with “indifference to human suffering.” The damage from this “virtual state of emergency,” she reported, will take years to undo. In the name of the UN, she demanded that the razing of homes and businesses be immediately halted, that the campaign’s architects be prosecuted and that the victims of this “man-made disaster” be compensated. Hundreds of thousands of uprooted people, many of them women and children, are shivering in tents, thanks to Mugabe. Mugabe is out of touch with reality. He is starving and killing his own people, and the unwillingness of some of Africa’s prestigious leaders, like President Thabo Mbeki, to challenge him publicly is especially disturbing. Tibaijuka’s unflinching honesty shames their silence. — The New York Times