African leaders often point fingers at the West for "not doing enough." But last week's meeting of the Southern African Development Community shows why sensible wealthy nations are reluctant to give aid.

For at that meeting, some of Africa's so-called leaders disgraced themselves by endorsing the brutal, murderous regime of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe.

Mugabe's 27 years of misrule have taken a country that was once prosperous — the breadbasket of Africa, it was called — and turned it into a poverty-stricken hellhole rife with famine, genocide and terror, and lacking rule of law.

The Heritage Foundation's recent Index of Economic Freedom ranked Zimbabwe 154th out of 157 countries in terms of economic freedom — and dead last in Africa.

"Corruption is endemic, inflation is in triple digits, most economic activity is informal, and controversial land reform has seriously undermined agricultural production," the report said. ... Sadly, that description doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what Mugabe has wrought. His thugs have taken to beating and jailing thousands of his opponents.
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Seizures of farms from highly productive farmers have led to widespread hunger. Meanwhile, economic mismanagement has sent inflation soaring to 1,700% a year. Real output per person has plunged two-thirds since 2003.
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Faced with such economic chaos, more than 3 million people — many of them Zimbabwe's most productive citizens — have become refugees in neighboring countries.

Given that performance, you'd think Mugabe would come in for a bit of criticism by other leaders in the region.

But you'd be wrong. At the SADC meeting, 14 leaders issued a communique in which they, as the Times of London put it, "reaffirmed their solidarity" with Mugabe. That is, they supported a murderous dictator and even called on the West to drop sanctions against his regime.