Zimbabwe: “Prepare To Be A War Correspondent”

The sentence jumped off the newspaper page at me today.  “Prepare To Be A War Correspondent.”

It was a brutal reminder that the situation in Zimbabwe is a tinderbox following the elections where President Robert Mugabe was defeated.  His attempts, however,  to hold onto power, and even drag the nation into chaos and bloodshed is not a shocker for anyone who has followed his chaotic and wretched time as leader.

The party of Mugabe is threatening the nation into supporting him in a runoff election.  Many however do not see as necessary another election, given the fraud that took place a month ago when voters cast their ballots to end the monstrous regime of Mugabe.

If voters fail to return Mr. Mugabe to office, the Politburo member told a Zimbabwean journalist working with The New York Times, “Prepare to be a war correspondent.”

The political impasse seems likely to persist for months. ZANU-PF and the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, have challenged the election results in more than 50 parliamentary districts, the state-owned newspaper, The Herald, reported Wednesday. Those challenges, which are supposed to be resolved in six months, could overturn the opposition’s newly won control of the lower house of Parliament.

The ruling party, the military and their irregular forces — youth militias and veterans of the liberation struggle against white rule — have for weeks been threatening, arresting and beating those they see as threats, including journalists, election monitors and even people who had simply voted for the opposition.

But the widening net of intimidation now appears to be taking a toll on children too, further fraying a society enduring a precipitous economic collapse.

Services that would normally help tens of thousands of orphans each month — including health care, clean water, sports and social clubs — are now being restricted because of the political violence in large areas of the country.

“Zimbabwe’s children are already suffering on multiple fronts,” said James Elder, a spokesman for Unicef. “To see their situation further deteriorate through violence or intimidation that prevents people reaching them is unacceptable.”

Other aid workers say they have been warned by government officials to suspend their operations, lest they be seen as meddling in the nation’s affairs. Teachers, who served as nonpartisan supervisors at polling stations, have been systematically singled out, with 496 questioned by the police, 133 assaulted by thugs and 123 charged with election fraud, according to the Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe. Teachers who worked for the opposition also said they had been attacked.

An unsigned editorial in Saturday’s issue of The Herald singled out teachers as part of an elaborate British- and American-financed plot to rig the election and get rid of Mr. Mugabe.

The editorial described the teachers as having been trained in South Africa and by the National Democratic Institute, a nonprofit group based in Washington whose chairman is Madeleine K. Albright, the former American secretary of state. It said the teachers were fleeing “to avoid the long arm of the law.”

 

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Robert Mugabe Hoping To Ruin Zimbabwe For Another Term

 Political Cartoon From The Economist

To see a country strangled in slow motion is a horrible thing to witness.  However the citizens of Zimbabwe have been seeing that very thing up close as their loathsome leader, Robert Mugabe, has his hands around the political levers and drains the nation of vitality year after year.

With a vote to take place on Saturday there is no doubt that corruption will again be the only victor in  Zimbabwe. 

Two great articles were published today highlighting  the hopes and fears of a nation being run by an 84-year-old tyrant.

As The Financial Times reports there is hope, slim though it may be, that election monitors might prevent what Mugabe excels at…stealing elections.

There is a heavy burden therefore on the shoulders of the Southern African Development Community and the African Union, the only outside organisations permitted to monitor the vote. Controversially, both endorsed Mr Mugabe’s previous election wins. But having stood firm so recently in the face of election fraud in Kenya, and in the AU’s case having played a prominent role in finding a way out of the subsequent crisis, there is pressure to apply the same standards. More­over, to save Zimbabwe from further ruin, whoever wins will have to go cap in hand to foreign donors for a rescue package.

The Los Angeles Times writes a powerful and well worded piece about the destructive legacy of Robert Mugabe.

The country’s free-fall into failed statehood began in earnest in 2000. That was when the electorate tired of him and his increasingly imperious one-party rule and voted down his attempt to do away with term limits so that he could continue as president. Mugabe, the onetime guerrilla leader who now saw himself as liberator of the country, reacted with astonishing venom. He turned on the newly emboldened black opposition, harassing, imprisoning and torturing their supporters. And those white commercial farmers he’d invited to remain in 1980 he threw off the land, distributing their farms among his cronies, which helped precipitate the economic catastrophe because few of them had the inclination or technical know-how to farm.

Mugabe became an African Ahab, Melville’s “monomaniacal commander,” marinating in a toxic brew of hate and denial as he plunged his ship of state down into the dark vortex, railing all the while from the quarterdeck against the great white whale. He blamed Zimbabwe’s plunge on the largely symbolic sanctions imposed by the West. And he refused to negotiate with his own, overwhelmingly black, opposition, dismissing them as lackeys of Britain, the former colonial power.

Technorati Tags: Zimbabwe, RobertMugabe, Africa, ForeignPolicy, ForeignAffairs,