I spoke to Ed Warner last night, a board member of the Sand County Foundation that has great heart and works in Zimbabwe. The Foundation has expanded from being caretaker of The Leopold Memorial Reserve — 1500 acres of cooperatively mananged private land– to advising the managers of hundreds of thousands of acres of land in several countries. The Foundation works with private landholders to improve the quality of their lands through science, ethics, and incentives.

Warner is a geologist, who’s funded two endowed chairs in Geosciences, a spatial analysis laboratory, graduate teaching assistantships, and a research assistantship. He created an innovative community-based conservation institute, the Center for Collaborative Conservation, college-wide research grants, and endowments to the Department of Geosciences and the College of Natural Resources at CSU.

Hugely successful man by most standards, but last night he had that sound in his voice that men have when they’re filled with tears inside. And resolve. Still.

Warner’s been to the big Z many times, and as he filled me in about its huge beauty and what a incredible culture and strong economy it once had… and then as he described the shambles that it is in right now, how Mugabe has unleashed teenagers and young men to raid and violate and murder across the land, huge roving hoards who Warner says, are unemployed men who have nothing to live for and nothing to lose… and that Mugabe pays them with… oddly enough the same thing Than Shwe the dictator of Burma pays his soldiers with: food. Food for themselves and whomever they rage with.

I began to wonder again for the umpteenth time what the UN does for a living, anyway? I mean starting with the smallest things that somehow don’t seem right at the UN… Does anyone besides me think it’s dangerous to wear blue helmets so adversaries can get a good head shot?

And much more serious entreaties, and much more serious failures to act, as well. I do know some of the programs and people at the UN, and some, with regard to children and education and health are well warranted. But I also know some at the UN who deadly want to live like Kings and Princesses, and their ‘holding office’ is more like holding court… and their throne is more important to them and their sashaying around and making pronouncements and doing nothing, than anything else.

Making pronouncements doesn’t cut it. Not with the thug of Zimbabwe, Mugabe, and not in Burma either. In fact, the UN emissary to Burma pathetically pleading with Than Shwe to please please let aid and aid workers in after hundreds of thousands of people were drowned and maimed by the earthquake and tsunami on the Irrawaddy delta recently. What did the UN accomplish there? Make nice to the demon, literally days and weeks after help was so so needed.

What is the UN doing with regard to the mayhem, blood on black skin, in Zimbabwe that Mugabe has given the go-ahead to… and with grinning greed? Nothing. Tonight I heard one of the UN Princes on TV saying, Oh, I believe eventually Mugabe will lose power

Really? Meanwhile, red blood flowing like rivers over black skin.

I swear, if I were Reverend Sharpton, instead of scolding Don Imus over what this time amounts to a vague reference to ‘it figures’ about a black sportsman’s arrest, I would rush over to Zimbabwe and take on the real deal, a real wrecker of the ancestral black people. Man, think of it: Jesse and Al up against Robert Mugabe.

Yes, Yes, I know. I probably have to go to Confession now, even though I am sincere and think its a much better idea than the slower than molasses in January United Nations. We’re all global now, right? The Pope comes here; why cant Al and Jesse go wreak havoc on Zimbabwe’s Mugabe? I have no doubt, none, that those two firecrackers of ‘the old ways’ would be far more formidable and effective than the UN.

And maybe more effective than the SADC, which is a group of 120 ‘observers’ to oversee the voting run-off who have just arrived in Zimbabwe from South Africa. Here is a take on them from Mr. Sabanda writing for en afric news:

By Bruce Sabanda, from Zimbabwe

A visit to the hotel Tuesday revealed that a they were enjoying themselves on their tour of duty. Several Hotel workers speak of massage parlours being fully booked and the observers taking over the Gazebo bar as well as the state of the art gym.

Disappointment: A manager at the hotel says the massage parlour and the gym were fully booked mostly by the SADC observer mission. ” Its routine, these so-called observers go for breakfast then have a small meeting leave the hotel but come back before 4 pm. They have been doing this since they checked in some two weeks ago”

She said, this was a similar thing for the March 29 elections. She said she wonders what they would write in their reports. “I often see them again glued to their laptops and just wonder what they would be writing. Maybe they would be reading online stories on Zimbabwe by journalist in South Africa on what is happening here”

(This group of election observers will supposedly travel to Zimbabwe’s many provinces eventually. Southern African Development Community =SADC, Election Observer Mission= SEOM.

A director with a civil organizations tells a same story. “They guys a just driving around during the day but in the evenings, when Zanu PF thugs are on the loose, they will be sipping whisky in the hotel bars” “They behaving as people on holiday,” he said.

Observers [themselves] strongly disagree

Asked why they spend much of the time in hotels, they said they are waiting to be deployed to different districts. They were hanging around hotels because they were dependent on the Robert Mugabe government to take them around.

Also they were warned to operate within the confines of the law, they claimed. But observers have diplomatic status, and according to Zimbabwe’s laws, diplomats can travel more than 40 kilometers from major cities without informing the authorities.

Meanwhile, Ed Warner says the people who set up and carefully swept and cleaned the polling places in the election just past, were school teachers from across Zimbabwe... from every humble village, every town came the school teachers to set things right so people could vote.

It seems that some of these school teachers have now been harmed by Mugabe’s young thugs run riot. And still and yet, it seems that certainly not all, but way too many ‘authorities and observors’ really like marching naked around the parapets having a good time while Zimbabwe bleeds and the demon who runs it, says he will only be removed by God, not by elections… Mugabe’s idea of democracy.

It occurs to me again for the millionth time that the prefix demo in democracy can, in the hands of power-rabid dogs– with just the addition of one letter only– turn into pure demonocracy.