The intense humanitarian attention concentrated on Africa's problems from the developed world over the next week as the Group of Eight meet in Scotland encounters one immediate crisis demanding action - Zimbabwe.
Over the last six weeks hundreds of thousands of people living in shanty towns around the capital Harare have been evicted from their homes by police, ostensibly in a campaign to uproot black marketeers.
The people directly involved and opposition representatives say it is in fact aimed at punishing opponents of Robert Mugabe and his regime who have their main political base there. They say the numbers involved are much larger and the campaign is now spreading to rural areas.
Most states attending the G8 meeting have expressed their outrage at these events and demanded action against them. The United States, the United Kingdom, the European and the Commonwealth executive have raised it in recent days, while United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan has sent an envoy there. But their appeals to the African Union to take action on the issue have fallen on deaf ears. There is a great reluctance to take an explicit and openly critical position on a fellow African ruler and a strong preference for quiet diplomacy.
This attitude is driven by abiding suspicions that former colonial powers, the UK especially, have little legitimacy on the subject - a sentiment Mr Mugabe continuously fans. But it is a wrong-headed approach. Mr Mugabe's policies must be judged on the facts available, which point strongly towards his responsibility for their authoritarian and repressive character. This is not diminished by their origin in land transfers from white commercial farmers in a hamfisted policy which has devastated the country's main export industry and benefited mainly his own circle rather than the landless. Trade unions representing urban workers who support the opposition Movement for Democratic Change have been equally and courageously critical of such policies and have suffered grave human rights abuses as a result. The Zimbabwean economy, once one of Africa's strongest, is devastated by 144 per cent annual inflation and an estimated unemployment rate of 70 per cent.
Pressure must be kept up politically on Zimbabwe to change these policies, especially from other African states. But the calls made for humanitarian agencies to boycott the country go a step too far, given the pitiful amounts available for relief of HIV/Aids and other aid there. It is not appropriate to withhold such aid in an attempt to force political change.