Archive for Robert Mugabe

Confronting Mugabe

Posted by: Ion | September 22nd, 2007 · 3:53 AM

Nancy Reyes has a source telling her that former Archbishop Pius Ncube –the key figure in Zimbabwe’s internal opposition– may indeed stand for election against Mugabe himself:

“Pius is determined to fight Mugabe on the political front. All along he has been supporting other candidates, but none of them has been able to topple Mugabe. So this time he is taking the bull by the horns.” Ncube has so far made no direct statement of his intentions. I spoke to him at the weekend, and he told me: “I will issue a statement to answer your questions very soon.”
(Mugabe Makaipa)

This is a welcome event, if it turns out to be true. Elections will (probably) be held at some point next year. Of course, as James Kirchick warns, the odds that even a Ncube win would be a Ncube win, are remote:

The bare fact is that Robert Mugabe will never cede power. He is a totalitarian through and through, and will kill as many people—through slow starvation (as he has been doing for the past several years) or outright murder—as necessary to stay in charge. If, as in 2000, 2002, and 2005, it appears that ZANU-PF will lose at the polls, Mugabe will simply rig the vote, expel poll watchers, imprison and torture domestic opponents, and curse the West. He has done this every time even the slightest threat to his power emerged, and the world community has allowed him to get away with it for the past 27 years.
(Commentary)

In related news, British Labour MP Kate Hoey, in applauding Gordon Brown’s new attention to the situation in Zimbabwe, has a very relevant point:

Besides, the UK and other donor nations are all stakeholders in this crisis. Zimbabwe is a country that under a democratic regime with an efficient economy could easily feed itself with surplus for exports so why should we be expected to foot the bill for feeding a third of the population of Zimbabwe and yet be denied the right to engage in finding a solution?
(Yorkshire Post)

Brown’s hardline stance against Mugabe has come in for some criticism from the African leaders who through indifference, or just an old habit for colonial grievance politics, have been enabling Mugabe for decades. As well as from the usual suspects of the European Left who are still so ashamed of long gone empires that they’ve made a permanent apology for anyone who appoints himself the representative of Victim Africa™.

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The Hazards of Zimbabwean Diplomacy

Posted by: Ion | April 29th, 2007 · 7:43 AM

I’m not sure why this horrible story captured my interest. Perhaps it seems strangely befitting for that most hostile and unpredictable of countries: Zimbabwe.

27 year old Australian diplomat Gemma Huggins, had only been in Zimbabwe for a month on her first foreign assignment, when she was attacked and mauled by lions.

Her injuries were not life threatening, but far from pleasant:

Huggins was treated for severe injuries to her head, neck, torso and legs and had several skin grafts at the Unitas Hospital in Pretoria, it added.

Australia’s department of foreign affairs and trade confirmed that a diplomat from the High Commission in Harare had been hospitalised after an incident at a wildlife park.
(News24)

Equally depressing, Zimbabwe’s lunatic autocrat Robert Mugabe, has declared war on charity work within his impoverished and collapsing country.

Zimbabwe announced new controls Saturday to clamp down on charities and other humanitarian organizations, including democracy and human rights groups that the government accuses of campaigning against it.
(AP)

As Peta Thornycroft at the Daily Telegraph asks, “When will it end?”

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A Less Admirable Voice from the Left

Posted by: Ion | April 22nd, 2007 · 11:40 AM

(photo: AFP via Bittersweet)

After applauding Michael Stickings’ criticism of Hugo Chavez earlier this morning, I revisited his link to show a friend. But what I found there now was disappointing, if instructive.

Libby Spencer (who blogs at Michael’s blog as well as with Manny at The Detroit News), had chimed in with perfunctory criticism of Chavez, weighted with subtle apologies for the purposes of his deeds. In so doing, Libby’s views represent the bad side of the American Left, which I was earlier praising Mr. Stickings’ views at the expense of.

In reading her remarks, notice how she almost immediately turns the attention away from Chavez and Venezuela and onto his critics, seeking to delegitimize them. First she goes after Manny, by suggesting that he is in no position to criticize Chavez, because he’s from the “ruling class” (whatever that means, for a guy from Kansas). Then she adopts the old equalization technique, suggesting that opposition is merely one legitimate course among many and ultimately, whatever Chavez represents, the United States and the Bush administration is actually just as bad:

[W]hat struck me in reading Manny’s interview is that you could easily exchange the word Bush for Chavez in the criticisms of of Hugo and it would fairly describe the state of our own failing democracy.
(comments from Libby Spencer on The Reaction)

Equilibration of this sort is how every horror in the world is perpetuated. It’s tactical even when it’s unintentional: Get people feeling guilty about themselves and they get distracted and voluntarily forfeit their natural permission to criticize.

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The Exhaustion of Good, the Restlessness of Villainy

Posted by: Ion | April 5th, 2007 · 10:54 PM

Peta Thornycroft was at the High Court in Zimbabwe’s capital to check in on democratic opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. Tsvangirai, you may recall, was recently arrested and savagely tortured, along with other opposition leaders. Irrepressible in his lunacy, Mugabe bragged to the world about the beating his political opponent sustained, boasting that Tsvangirai deserved it to the horrified international press.

The charge against Tsvangirai was “terrorism” a frequent and absurd charge of the Mugabe regime against all dissidents. But not an insincere one it should be said. In Robert Mugabe’s warped world, demanding human rights and open elections is terrorism. What we would call terrorism in our world, he would consider good government.

But this post is not about that. While Peta was in the corridor of the Court, she came upon this event. It’s a poignant moment about a woman who is on the verge of killing herself for democracy:

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Department Five

Posted by: Ion | · 4:59 PM

There was an interesting article in TalkZimbabwe yesterday. It described an elite secret police force attached to the Zimbabwean SAS, which is specifically charged with strike-breaking. Labor strikes are a technique much employed by the oppressed population of Zimbabwe against their psychopathic leader, Robert Mugabe.

This grim tale of infiltrating and disrupting labor strikes, is very reminiscent of the Urząd Bezpieczeństwa’s clandestine war against Solidarity in Poland:

“They operate in civilian clothes and will often make friendships with members of the civilian population to gain the information they need. Your neighbour could be a member of Department 5. They are highly paid and supported.”

The first task of this force is to disperse demonstrators and force people to go to work, in order to brand the strikes a failure. This, according to our source, is only one task among many other tasks they will carry out in the coming months.
(Talk Zimbabwe)

The ominous sounding name “Department 5″ may refer to the elite North Korean trained 5th Brigade of the Zimbabwean Army, which committed vast and grisly atrocities in the Matabeleland uprisings of the early 1980s (SW Radio Africa). Atrocities in which the 5th systematically murdered upwards of twenty thousand Ndebele people in a genocidal bloodbath. Although Mugabe disbanded the 5th in 1984 after their crimes began to come to light, the 5th lives on in ZANU party lore.

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Mad Mugabe Finds Some Unlikely Sympathy

Posted by: Ion | March 27th, 2007 · 2:14 PM

Peta Thornycroft has a choice quote from Morgan Tsvangirai, president of the Movement for Democratic Change in Zimbabwe:

“We don’t hate Mugabe, in fact I think he needs psychiatric help.”

It’s a generous enough sentiment, but I’m afraid an entire psychiatric ward would be too little assistance in Robert Mugabe’s case.

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The Fall of Zimbabwe

Posted by: Ion | March 6th, 2007 · 12:50 PM

CFR has an outstanding audio interview with Peta Thornycroft, Daily Telegraph foreign correspondent and blogger in Zimbabwe, here: Interview

The scale and magnitude of the ongoing economic collapse in Zimbabwe -which has been inaugurated by ruler Robert Mugabe’s misguided economic policies- is staggering (Peter Drucker might call them noneconomic policies):

There isn’t much municipal water around on a regular basis in various Harare suburbs, and several towns, like Marondera, 45 miles east of Harare, for example, hasn’t had water since new year.

For the last six years many people have said, “it can’t get worse.” It did, and it does, there is no bottom to economic collapse, economists always say.

But the bad times are escalating fast. Bread more than doubled in price in the last three weeks, and on Saturday in Haddon & Sly, an old supermarket in central Bulawayo, the shelves were piled with stale bread as so few can afford to buy it any longer. Bread, like meat and milk, are now luxury items.

Few shops around the country have any of the staple food, maize meal this week.(Telegraph)

Peta concludes in her CFR interview, that as despotism, inflation, nepotism and economic ruin near their fatal crescendo in April (conjectured to be the point at which the Zimbabwe currency becomes effectively worthless), the democratic opposition to Robert Mugabe’s rule is in disarray, unable to effectuate any meaningful resistance. Thornycroft concludes that if any opposition to Mugabe’s crazed policies is to be mounted, it must come from within his ruling ZANU PF party.

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