What more in Zimbabwe?

Is the world just going to let everything collapse in on us?

These are the words of Pius Ncube, Archbishop of Bulawayo. He's calling on Britain to invade Zimbabwe, and get rid of Robert Mugabe. Hasn't the Archbishop heard of sovereignty? International law? Or that the Iraq war has made intervention a dirty word? Come to think of it, maybe he has heard all this, but is swayed by the calamity now facing the country:

Hope is all they have in many rural areas such as Matabeleland in the south of the country. A severe drought has resulted in a 95% crop failure in the south and in villages around Plumtree, one family after another showed their recent maize harvest was enough for only two or three weeks. Nationwide, the country's harvest of maize, its staple crop, is thought to have been between 500,000-800,000 tons, compared to annual needs of 1.4m tons.

Yet this works in Mugabe's favour because he will again be able to use food as a political tool in the run-up to elections next March.

If the situation seems grave in rural areas, things are even worse in parts of Bulawayo.

A whole community of people whose homes were demolished by the government two years ago now live on the Richmond rubbish dump, surviving by foraging for glass bottles and plastic.

Remedio Moyo, 26, shows the black plastic shelter he lives under with his wife and children aged three and five. Small black flies cover everything.

"This is not a proper life," he said. "I went to school and all I wanted from life was a job and a small house, not to be a big man. There is only one person to blame for this situation and I would like that man to die any minute."

Pius Ncube, the outspoken Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo, said things were now so desperate that he was calling on the West to invade and oust Mugabe's regime.

"Anyone who is ready to starve his people to death for the sake of power is a murderer," Ncube said. "What more does he have to do?"

Perhaps Pius Ncube is also thinking of the 'unambiguous acceptance by all governments of the collective international responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity' and of the 'willingness to take timely and decisive collective action for this purpose'.