Zimbabwe needs help.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Robert Mugabe, the 79-year-old president of Zimbabwe, has systematically destroyed his own country and inflicted misery, violence and hunger on its citizens with criminal abandon.

Mugabe was once a very different leader. He led the fight to free Zimbabwe from British colonial rule and became a source of inspiration to all African nations battling for independence.

But Mugabe has shown he is capable of doing absolutely anything in the single-minded, self-serving name of remaining in power over the past two decades. He has stolen elections, tortured and killed his political opponents, bombed newspaper offices, dismantled what was once a model judiciary, and devastated his nation's economy.

Until several years ago, Zimbabwe was the agricultural envy of other African nations, with its modern commercial farms producing bumper crops of corn, wheat and tobacco. Then Mugabe initiated a campaign to seize 95 percent of the nation's white-owned farms and distribute them to his cronies.

Now 8 million Zimbabweans are at risk of starvation. in a nation that was once the breadbasket of sub-Saharan Africa. The economy currently is in its worst crisis since independence in 1980 with 269 percent inflation and widespread unemployment. AIDS is ravaging the cities and the countryside.

Meanwhile, Mugabe's regime has become a pariah state - sanctioned by the European Union and the United States, booted from the British Commonwealth and suspended from the International Monetary Fund.

Yet Mugabe refuses to budge, escalating the intimidation, terror and corruption that has enabled him to maintain autocratic control of his country.

Now he faces the worst crisis of his dictatorial rule. Anti-government strikes called by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change have shut down most of Zimbabwe for the past three months.

True to form, Mugabe has sunk to new lows in his determination not to yield power. He recently dispatched gangs of armed thugs to beat and arrest hundreds of protesters in the capital. Among those arrested was Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change and the man who actually won last year's presidential election. Tsvangirai is facing trumped-up charges of treason - and a possible death sentence - in Mugabe's croney-clogged courts.

Without additional international pressure, Mugabe will push his country even further into chaos and humanitarian disaster. Change will require that neighboring African nations - in particular South Africa, which supplies a major portion of Zimbabwe's electricity - isolate Mugabe economically and politically and make every effort to force the restoration of the rule of law. Once Mugabe is removed from power, the nation will require loans from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and Western nations.

Without swift and decisive intervention by the rest of the world, Zimbabweans have no hope for the future.