Just like it does every time there is a crisis in the developing world, the U.N. Security Council is contemplating a resolution. If the international community – as member countries like to call themselves – succeeds, Zimbabweans might be rewarded with S/RES/1821 (2008) at whenever the Council meets for its 5917th time. 

As in all prior resolutions, this one will contain code words and buzz phrases only a handful of the people it will be intended to save from violence and starvation can decipher –“Affirming,” “Reaffirming,” “Deploring,” “Noting,” “Taking note of,” “Taking further note of – we can even predict that, if passed, the resolution will be named, “The Situation in Zimbabwe.”

What is even more ridiculous is the fact that it is the United States pushing for the U.N. Security Council resolution on Zimbabwe, supposedly to send “a strong message of deterrence.” Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the same United States that renounced the U.N. and went to war alone against Saddam Hussein in Iraq is calling on the international body to pass a resolution condemning Zimbabwe!

What has caused the United States to embrace the U.N. is strange to us. But one thing we know certainly is that resolutions seldom work. In 2007, for example, the Council passed 55 resolutions. This year, with 26 resolutions already passed, many of them are meant to condemn many of the same countries listed in 2007. For example Somalia, which appeared on the list three times in 2007, has already had four resolutions, though we have barely crossed into the second half of the year. Afghanistan and the Middle East also feature prominently in the long list of declarations. Yet the same countries and regions contained in the list continue to experience the very problems that led to the passing of the condemnation.

If the United States and the “international community” genuinely cared even a tiny bit about Zimbabwe, they would take the approach they took on Kenya earlier in the year when a disputed presidential election led to months of bloodshed and political gridlock.

We hope that the international community and the United States see in Zimbabwe a more perilous situation than the one that prompted them to send some of their top officials to Kenya. Otherwise, those of us who thought that it was the value of African lives – not American interests – that were the reason America acted so expeditiously might begin to reconsider our beliefs.

If the bureaucracies that are the U.N. and the U.S. are really serious about making change in the world, they must move away from resolutions and sanctions to seek new solutions to the problems of this world. Resolutions and sanctions have been around for decades and have only made dictator stronger. It is time to upgrade.

Following Zimbabwe’s runoff elections of June 27, President (if we may call him that) Robert Mugabe has indicated that he is open to dialogue with Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change and other opposition parties. The international community should jump on this rare chance to slowly ease the old man out of power without bloodshed.

Africa – a continent with a population now approaching a billion people, must organize and work extra hard towards bringing home as many medals as possible from the 2008 Olympic Games slated for Aug. 8-24 in Beijing, China.

Over the years, Africa’s collective performance in such global games has been unimpressive as the continent has continued to lose its best competitors who flee into the first world in search of more money.

More importantly, Africa has not been able to qualify to host such a prestigious event to date. Our first shot will come when South Africa hosts the games in 2012.

This year’s games will comprise of 302 events in 28 sports. How will Africa perform in these competitions? Have we invested enough to hope for improved results?

During the 1996 games in Atlanta, Africa sent some 52 participating nations and won 34 medals – including 11 gold. 

In recent years, Africa’s competitive spirit in sports has emerged in soccer that saw Nigeria win a gold medal after defeating Argentina. Sadly, many African soccer stars have migrated to Europe contributing to a high caliber of professional teams giving credit to European nations as the continent scrambles to get them back to enhance its level of performance at home.

Yet, in the recent past, struggling poor African nations such as Burundi, which has gone through many years of political unrest, was able to produce a gold medalist, Venuste Niyongabo, in the men’s 5,000-meter race. Names like that of Ethiopia’s Haile Gebreselassie who won a gold medal in the 10,000 meters event; Chioma Ajunwa, the Nigerian female tack runner who won her country’s first gold medal in the long-jump competition, and Fatuma Roba of Ethiopia, who won the women’s marathon by the largest margin ever, all such stars are Africa’s hope for this year’s Olympics in China.

Africa could do better in Beijing, but has suffered “human capital drain” over the years. During the 2001 Francophone Games in Canada, a total of 106 participants from all over Africa defected to seek asylum in Canada. Similarly, during the Commonwealth Games of Manchester, 21 out of Sierra Leone’s contingent of 30 athletes defected.

Other recent defections occurred in Finland where 12 members of Sierra Leone’s Under-17 national football team “disappeared.”  To add salt to injury, at the Special Olympics in Ireland, four of the six-strong Niger delegation went missing.

As Africa continues to lose its best sportsmen, we still put our future hopes on names like Maria Mutola, Hicham El Guerrouj and Haile Gebreselassie as our continent’s patriots who may bring honor to us from Beijing.

The 2008 Addis Ababa African Athletics Championships revealed new talents from South Africa, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Kenya.  South Africa collected 12 gold medals and 10 others, while Nigeria snatched 19 medals, out of which 7 were gold. Ethiopia collected a total of 15 medals and came third.

Ethiopia’s Dibaba sisters (Tirunesh and Ejegayehu) and Kenenisa Bekele were shining stars while Kenya did well in the 3,000 steeplechase event enabling the country to stand fourth in medal acquisition.

President Umaru Yar’Adua of Nigeria has projected that his country should aim at collecting eight gold medals in the Beijing. Unhappily, debates are still raging over money to fund such efforts. His chairman of the National Sports Commission and Minister of Sports, Abdurrahman Hassan Gimba is pessimistic about his country being able to win any medals. Sports observers say that there is a lot of cosmetic talk about sports in Nigeria while Olympics dreams remain under-funded.

Zimbabwe’s hopes for Olympics are in an upbeat mood despite recent political unrest. Already 11 athletes have reached appropriate levels of participating in Beijing.

Cameroon’s Francoise Mbango, who excels in triple jump, is a potential gold medalist. In boxing, the names of Joseph Bessala and Ndongo Ebanga may help in bringing home some medals. Yet, I would not be surprised if some African nations return from Beijing empty-handed!

Since the 2010 FIFA World Cup will take place in South Africa bringing the continent into the global family for the first time, Africa should focus on unleashing a few surprises then for it is too late now to plan for great expectations in the August Beijing Games. We must start our preparations from this very moment to do better in our own soil.

There have been a lot of hurtful remarks made by surrogates of the three remaining presidential contenders about a candidate’s race, gender or age. Democratic presidential nominiee Sen. Barack Obama took a lot of heat recently because of remarks he made during a fund-raiser in San Francisco. He was explaining the difficulty he is facing winning working-class white voters, especially those from small rural towns.

 It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,  Obama said.

Obama was widely condemned and seen in some quarters as a bigot. However, on the unsavory route of bigotry some slurs are considered worse than others. Mockery or insult to a person’s race, ethnicity or religion is totally unacceptable. Making fun of someone because he or she is  queer  may be somewhat less taboo, but it is still definitely frowned upon.

When I was a child growing up in Upper Caldwell, Liberia, I was taught not to point at or laugh at a handicapped person. A fat person was what I aspired to be, for in most of Africa heavyset people are often associated with good health. People who would never openly admit to racism have no qualms about expressing revulsion for a chubby person. And that just may be because the fat threatens the thin down to the deepest levels of their psyches.

The reaction of some Americans to an overweight person – especially one who is 20 or 30 pounds over the so-called ideal weight – is so intense and so overwhelmingly ridiculous that it makes the United States a big superficial nation that has a problem with its human composition. When I tried to highlight the discrepancies meted out against overweight people in a conversation with a group of my American friends, I got berated from all sections of the room for sounding like a chauvinistic cockroach.

My message was intended to draw attention to the perception that some in this society have about fat people, which has appalled me since I arrived here over a decade ago. Unfortunately, my remarks were misunderstood as being judgmental rather than a thought-provoking look at fatness. I have noticed that being too fat is one of the phobias of the West, where the 21st Century has seemingly imposed on most of us the aesthetic ideal of a wasp waistline, a non-existent tummy and twig-like thighs. 

In most Third World countries, however, a belly and a prominent back (butt) are signs of prosperity and confer a certain prestige. Now, perhaps, you understand why I am suffering from culture shock, even after being in this country for over a decade. While most men in the West lust after pencil-like women, men in most African cultures drool over voluptuous women. Being skinny is a sign of malnutrition and sickness. But it would be wrong to take either of these versions too lightly, since they apply psychological bias and social pressures that can influence health to a considerable degree.

Being too fat, especially to the point of obesity, experts say, is potentially harmful to one’s health. For many, a fat person variously symbolizes loss of control, a reversion to infantile desires, failure, self-loatheness, loss of will power, passivity and gluttony. Such ingrained attitudes must be confronted and rejected. 

Society always looks for types of people to hate and to feel superior to,  says Amardeep Singh, my Indonesian friend of Indian descent.  Fatness is about the last thing left that seems to be a person’s fault, but it’s really not. 

Nevertheless, the gear may be shifting as ever more people protest against the nefarious demands of external slenderness, as the population ages and thickens, and as excessive thinness becomes associated – not with athletic superiority – but with chronic ailments that alter a person’s physical appearance, such as the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

When you have a disease like HIV/AIDS that makes people skinny, suddenly slenderness, sooner or later, may be seen as suspicious.

I also hope that as Hollywood’s demand for super thin bodies continues to drive celebrities and those who wish to be like them to develop eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, Americans will rediscover the beauty of the curvaceous body.

 It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,  Obama said.

Obama was widely condemned and seen in some quarters as a bigot. However, on the unsavory route of bigotry some slurs are considered worse than others. Mockery or insult to a person’s race, ethnicity or religion is totally unacceptable. Making fun of someone because he or she is  queer  may be somewhat less taboo, but it is still definitely frowned upon.

When I was a child growing up in Upper Caldwell, Liberia, I was taught not to point at or laugh at a handicapped person. A fat person was what I aspired to be, for in most of Africa heavyset people are often associated with good health. People who would never openly admit to racism have no qualms about expressing revulsion for a chubby person. And that just may be because the fat threatens the thin down to the deepest levels of their psyches.

The reaction of some Americans to an overweight person – especially one who is 20 or 30 pounds over the so-called ideal weight – is so intense and so overwhelmingly ridiculous that it makes the United States a big superficial nation that has a problem with its human composition. When I tried to highlight the discrepancies meted out against overweight people in a conversation with a group of my American friends, I got berated from all sections of the room for sounding like a chauvinistic cockroach.

My message was intended to draw attention to the perception that some in this society have about fat people, which has appalled me since I arrived here over a decade ago. Unfortunately, my remarks were misunderstood as being judgmental rather than a thought-provoking look at fatness. I have noticed that being too fat is one of the phobias of the West, where the 21st Century has seemingly imposed on most of us the aesthetic ideal of a wasp waistline, a non-existent tummy and twig-like thighs.

In most Third World countries, however, a belly and a prominent back (butt) are signs of prosperity and confer a certain prestige. Now, perhaps, you understand why I am suffering from culture shock, even after being in this country for over a decade. While most men in the West lust after pencil-like women, men in most African cultures drool over voluptuous women. Being skinny is a sign of malnutrition and sickness. But it would be wrong to take either of these versions too lightly, since they apply psychological bias and social pressures that can influence health to a considerable degree.

Being too fat, especially to the point of obesity, experts say, is potentially harmful to one’s health. For many, a fat person variously symbolizes loss of control, a reversion to infantile desires, failure, self-loatheness, loss of will power, passivity and gluttony. Such ingrained attitudes must be confronted and rejected.

Society always looks for types of people to hate and to feel superior to,  says Amardeep Singh, my Indonesian friend of Indian descent.  Fatness is about the last thing left that seems to be a person’s fault, but it’s really not.

Nevertheless, the gear may be shifting as ever more people protest against the nefarious demands of external slenderness, as the population ages and thickens, and as excessive thinness becomes associated – not with athletic superiority – but with chronic ailments that alter a person’s physical appearance, such as the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

When you have a disease like HIV/AIDS that makes people skinny, suddenly slenderness, sooner or later, may be seen as suspicious.

I also hope that as Hollywood’s demand for super thin bodies continues to drive celebrities and those who wish to be like them to develop eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, Americans will rediscover the beauty of the curvaceous body.

Wynfred Russell is the director of the Center for Multicultural Services at Normandale Community College. He can be reached at 952-487-8131 and [email protected].