Zimbabwe: Leftists to blame for Robert Mugabe's blood-letting

Telegraph:

A few years ago, when the tyrant of Zimbabwe was moving from being wicked to being downright evil, I wrote that we should invade Harare, depose him, and supervise free elections. Invited to appear on a BBC programme to defend this stance, I was assailed by an "Africa expert" who told me that diplomatic pressure on Mugabe was bound to work, that the idea of sending the Parachute Regiment in to sort the monster out was offensively colonialist, and that I was wrong.
White liberals like him are as much to blame for the terror, starvation, brutality and genocide that now scar this once-rich and stable country. The supposedly civilised world has allowed Mugabe and his horrors to happen, mainly unchecked. Sanctions on his country merely starve those who disagree with him. Zimbabwe has all the natural, and had all the human, resources to be an example to the rest of Africa. It is now merely a symbol of what happens when a dictator takes charge, and those who might rein him in simply look away.

So it is infuriating to hear some Leftists and liberals saying, through the teeth of their post-imperial guilt, that perhaps an armed intervention is the only way to rid the world of this brute. Had this been done years ago, when they took the opposite view, how many lives might have been saved? How many productive people, black and white, would have felt able to stay in Zimbabwe, rather than flee with their talents abroad? Would it still be a country with a life expectancy in the low thirties, something not heard of in Europe since the early Middle Ages? How proud does the Left, with its stupidly romantic notions of the inviolate nature of "black freedom fighters", feel about what it has so ably helped Mugabe achieve?

Of course, even now the Leftists who are recanting cannot bear the thought of a military operation being conducted by Britain alone - not that our exploited and resource-starved Armed Forces are in a position to take out Mugabe. It is argued that there should be a UN or multinational force, something that most of us old cynics will believe only when we see it. Frankly, I couldn't care less who liberates Zimbabwe - North Korea, the Taliban or Venezuela are welcome to it: they couldn't be any worse than the incumbent.

Yet the gutlessness of our Foreign Office continues. The disastrous Lord Malloch-Brown, who is to international diplomacy what a lamp post is to a dog, said this week that it would be wrong for "the mangy old British lion" to strip Mugabe of his honorary knighthood. Let us ignore for the moment the question of whether a Foreign Office minister should insult his country so, another sign that this oaf is unfit for office. Four days later the knighthood did indeed go, on a recommendation from David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, to the Queen. Mr Miliband had said just two weeks earlier that removing the knighthood was not a good idea. And the Tories are no better. This week they ordered the suspension of a prospective parliamentary candidate who made the blindingly obvious observation that the late Ian Smith was better than Mugabe. It is time these people grew up.

I may not agree with military interventionism in a nation's internal affairs but I wish there could be a solution to the problem of Mugabe's desperate power grab in Zimbabwe.

Robert Mugabe’s thugs shout: ‘Let’s kill the baby’

In maintaining control of this African republic, the brutality knows no bounds. Article via Newsalert:

A baby boy had both legs broken by supporters of President Robert Mugabe to punish his father for being an opposition councillor in Zimbabwe.

Blessing Mabhena, aged 11 months, was seized from a bed and flung down with force as his mother, Agnes, hid from the thugs, convinced that they were about to murder her.

She heard one of them say, “Let’s kill the baby”, before Blessing was hurled on to a bare concrete floor.

Blessing, who may never be able to walk properly, was one of the youngest victims of atrocities against the opposition party Movement for Democratic Change in the run-up to last Friday’s sham presidential election.

As Mugabe, 84, the only candidate in the election, prepared to be sworn in as president today, it emerged that his forces of terror plan to pulverise opponents to prevent them from ever threatening his leading Zanu-PF again.

Leaked minutes of the Joint Operations Command (JOC), which has orchestrated the violence since Mugabe lost a first round of voting in March, revealed that it is willing to wipe out opposition supporters.

This is certainly one of those situations where peaceful demonstration as advocated by Mahatma Gandhi isn't likely to help this situation. This has got to be one of the sickest stories that I have seen coming from Zimbabwe. It's very unfortunate that the population has been largely intimidated from actually being able oppose this old man who just doesn't want to let it go.

The lesser of two incredibly awful evils

Megan McArdle talks about life in Zimbabwe during two different eras. One era with the nation known as Rhodesia and the other era as Zimbabwe under the regime of Robert Mugabe. Via Instapundit.

Zimbabwe opposition leader pulling out of election

NUTS!!!! A tyrant not ready to go apparently has won once again. Story via Instapundit...

Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai said Sunday he is pulling out of this week's presidential runoff because mounting violence and intimidation have made it impossible to hold a credible election.

Tsvangirai announced his decision about Friday's election during a news conference in Zimbabwe's capital after thousands of ruling party militants blockaded the site of the opposition's main campaign rally in a now routine pattern of intimidation.

"We can't ask the people to cast their vote on June 27 when that vote will cost their lives. We will no longer participate in this violent sham of an election," he said. "Mugabe has declared war, and we will not be part of that war."

He said it is the United Nations' responsibility to make sure the people of Zimbabwe are protected from the violence now under way in the country.

Tsvangirai said he would put forward new proposals by Wednesday on how take the country forward. He did not provide any details about what the proposals would include.

"Our victory is certain, but it can only be delayed," he said.

Tsvangirai won the first round of the presidential election on March 29, but did not gain an outright majority against 84-year-old President Robert Mugabe, who has held power since independence from Britain in 1980.

That campaign was generally peaceful, but the runoff has been overshadowed by violence and intimidation, especially in rural areas. Independent human rights groups say 85 people have died and tens of thousands have been displaced from their homes, most of them opposition supporters.

Tsvangirai complained that he was being treated like a "common criminal," with his attempts to tour the country stymied by police at roadblocks.

The state-controlled media have banned opposition advertisements, claiming they "contain inappropriate language and information." The media cited one ad that claimed that Tsvangirai won the election, "which is not the case, hence the runoff."

Tendai Biti, the opposition party's No. 2, was arrested within minutes of his return from South Africa last week and is being held on treason charges.

Tsvangirai had hoped to address his main campaign rally for the runoff Sunday afternoon.

But a Movement for Democratic Change statement said that armed soldiers and police in full riot gear took over the show ground early afternoon. It said that riot police mounted road blocks around the venue and on the main approaches to Harare. It said troops were jogging down another road leading into central Harare.

The party said military helicopters were flying around the city and around the second city of Bulawayo.

"Zimbabwe clearly is under military rule," the statement said.

The former breadbasket of Africa is only becoming the land of Mugabe for the foreseeable future.

Chicago-born diplomat riles Zimbabwe leader

Hey there's a Chicago component to the turmoil going on in Zimbabwe as they prepare for the future in terms of who will be running the nation. Tribune:

Early Wednesday, for example, McGee drove to a tense slum in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. At no trifling risk, he said he watched young backers of President Robert Mugabe round up about 500 men, women and children. The militants marched the terrified crowd down a road to a field, where they were forced to chant pro-Mugabe slogans. Laggards were brutally assaulted with clubs and tire irons.

McGee and his companions discreetly shot some video. But he is no journalist. Nor is he an aid worker. Nor a rights activist. He's the startlingly assertive U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe.

"I've been sent here to do a job, and I'm not interfering in the internal politics of this government," McGee, 59, said by phone from Zimbabwe, where he has been mocked as a "self-anointed Good Samaritan" by the official media and threatened with expulsion by Mugabe. "We're just trying to cast some light on a terrible situation."

For anyone accustomed to the stereotypes of risk-averse U.S. diplomats hunkering down in fortified embassies against an often hostile if not anti-American world, the barrel-chested McGee comes across as something of a shock: an activist diplomat who has virtually dared one of the world's most oppressive regimes to eject him as he embarks, video cameras in tow, on high-profile "field trips" to alleged torture camps, hospitals crammed with bloodied opposition activists and, most recently, the embattled slums of Harare.

Mixing fancy dinners at his official residence with nauseating slide shows of Zimbabwean voters who have been beaten to a pulp, Washington's man in Harare has even cajoled a few fellow ambassadors into following his lead: brazening the way through police checkpoints to expose a largely hidden wave of political terror that, since an inconclusive March election, has killed about 60 people and displaced at least 30,000 more.

Like many human-rights groups, McGee attributes most of the electoral violence to Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF party. Using language that would scorch a more conventional diplomat's eyebrows, he has dubbed Zimbabwe an "outlaw country" and its leadership "a bunch of greedy people who want to remain in power at all costs."

Go Ambassador McGee!!! I'm very glad to know someone in American government is concerned about the situation there in Zimbabwe.

Here's a State Department Bio and another article about the ambassador from Wikipedia.

Go read the whole article when you get a chance!

Zimbabwe party: Military plotting to kill leader

I could take this with a grain of salt because this is politics we're talking about here. Then again this is Zimbabwe where an aging leader is unwilling to let his power go and allow for a peaceful transition so it isn't a surprise that the opposition is making such an accusation. Sun-Times:

Zimbabwe's opposition party accused the country's military Monday of plotting to assassinate the group's presidential candidate using snipers.

The Movement for Democratic Change said Morgan Tsvangirai planned to return to Zimbabwe to contest the June 27 runoff election once security measures are in place to protect him against the alleged assassination plot. The opposition says it received details of the alleged plot on Saturday as Tsvangirai was on his way to the airport in Johannesburg, South Africa, to return home.

''The assassination plot involves snipers,'' party Secretary-General Tendai Biti told The Associated Press after a news conference in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. He said 18 snipers were involved in the alleged plot.

''It is the military (plotting), the JOC (Joint Operational Command) that has been running the country'' since Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, lost March 29 elections to Tsvangirai. ''I cannot speak (more) of that because it would put a lot of lives at risk,'' Biti said.

Biti also condemned African leaders' failure to confront Mugabe, Zimbabwe's leader of 28 years, in the strongest terms yet used by his party.

He said the campaign of violence blamed on Mugabe's regime could backfire, saying that many of the millions of Zimbabweans who have fled the country planning to return to vote in the June runoff presidential election.

South Africa's unseemly alliance

Another update about Zimababwe. One word that could be brought to mind on this issue especially thanks to the turmoil going on in that nation as they determine who will be the President there, enabler. From the LA Times:

The tendency to compare contemporary political events to the Third Reich is called reducto ad Hitlerum, so facile are the alleged similarities and so often is this tactic employed. With that caveat, when I saw a photograph Friday of smiling, garland-laden South African President Thabo Mbeki holding the hand of Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, I couldn't resist drawing a mental parallel: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938 waving his copy of the Munich treaty before a crowd of thousands, boasting that he had achieved "peace for our time."

That Mbeki, who last month insisted there was "no crisis" in Zimbabwe, continues to glad-hand Mugabe represents a complete abandonment of moral responsibility. As he provides diplomatic cover, Mugabe's armed thugs roam Zimbabwe's countryside threatening, torturing and killing people believed to have voted for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. The MDC claims 25 of its supporters have been murdered and 40,000 people have been displaced since the March 29 parliamentary and presidential election. The regime has detained journalists and trade union leaders as well as members of the country's electoral commission, the body that verifies election results.

The regime claims that MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, while besting Mugabe, did not poll more than the 50% required for an outright win and has mandated a runoff. Given that the alternative would be an automatic Mugabe victory, Tsvangirai has decided to take part. Yet conditions for a free and fair election clearly do not exist in Zimbabwe. In an interview with the New York Times last week, a member of Mugabe's Politburo implicitly promised war: "We're giving the people of Zimbabwe another opportunity to mend their ways, to vote properly. This is their last chance."

And yet, as the world looks to South Africa for political leadership (as it is the region's economic powerhouse), Mbeki stands idly by. In fact, his methods of dealing with the tyrant to his north -- supplying cut-rate electric power, issuing nary a word of criticism, siding with Russia and China to prevent the dispatch of a U.N. envoy to report on postelection violence -- has exacerbated the political and humanitarian crisis.

Why has Mbeki acted this way?

National liberation movements rule the roost in much of southern Africa: Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa are all governed by political parties that emerged from armed revolutionary movements, and their leaders tend to close ranks when one is threatened. The leaders of South Africa's ruling African National Congress fear a domino effect, in which the fall of a sister liberation movement could portend a similar fate for its own political fortunes. "If Zimbabwe 'falls,' South Africa will be the next target," South African historian R.W. Johnson wrote recently in the London Review of Books.

Zimbabwean writer Blessing-Miles Tendi, writing in the Guardian, offered another explanation for South Africa's inertia: Mbeki owes Mugabe a political debt. Mugabe could have seized Zimbabwe's white-owned farms in the 1990s but resisted, in part because of pressure from the ANC, then trying to convince South Africa's whites that they would not lose their land in a post-apartheid dispensation.

Article via Instapundit.

Opposition braced for dirty war as Mugabe clings on to power

Things are about to get more interesting in Zimbabwe. There will be a runoff but as I've stated since I've started covering Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe isn't ready to let go of his position even though he's been President 27 years. From the Sunday Times...

ZIMBABWE was bracing itself yesterday for the possibility that President Robert Mugabe, forced into an expected election runoff against his opposition challenger Morgan Tsvangirai, could mobilise an army of thugs to beat, intimidate and terrify voters, while taking emergency powers to vary the electoral regulations so as to make ballot-stuffing easier.

Both Britain and the United States are exercising strong diplomatic pressure on Mugabe not to follow this route. But some diplomatic observers believe that it may be the ageing despot’s only way of keeping his vow to die in State House.

Mugabe’s deputy information minister, Bright Matonga, who claimed last week that the president’s Zanu-PF party had let him down in the first round of voting, predicted a resounding victory in the second, saying: “We only applied 25% of our energy in the first round. That [the runoff] is when we are going to unleash the other 75%.”

What will be unleashed, according to leaders of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), are war veterans, pro-government militia and the security forces in a display of brute force aimed at enabling Mugabe, 84, to cling to power.

Tsvangirai, the MDC leader, who warned that Mugabe was about to launch a “war against the people” said his party was reluctant to take part in any runoff because of the growing risks of violence. In any case, he argued, there was no need for one because he had won last weekend’s presidential election outright and was already forming a new government.

He called Mugabe a lame duck president who “must concede to allow us to move on with the business of rebuilding and reconstructing the country”.

According to the MDC, Tsvangirai secured 50.3% of the vote, enough to be named president. It is understood that Mugabe’s politburo was briefed on Friday that Tsvangirai had won 47.7%, compared with 43.4% for Mugabe and the remainder for Simba Makoni, a former finance minister expelled by Zanu-PF. If confirmed, this result would require a runoff.

Election Results Still Unknown

A video report from Zimbabwe. Apparently it's not know whether Robert Mugabe's 28 year reign there will end or not, but we do know his party is no longer in control of their parliament. It seems like most of the people on the street in the vid, well mostly men, there seems to be a great interest in change. Hopefully there will be.

Zimbabweans line up early to vote in crucial elections

The one thing I do know about Zimbabwean affairs is the fact that the regime of Robert Mugabe attempted to redistribute land from productive white farmers and then gave this land to African farmers. While the idea was to right the injustices of European colonialism in Africa. The unfortunate side effect as it was understood was that this nation once had a food surplus has a food shortage.

I've also heard about electoral irregulaties. Robert Mugabe has been in power for the better part of 20 years and isn't ready to give it up. The last elections in Zimbabwe was ripe with charges of voter intimidation with Mugabe winning another term.

Now there's another election. Here's what the Sun-Times says...

Eager to vote, Zimbabweans began lining up before dawn Saturday for elections that present President Robert Mugabe with the toughest political challenge of his 28 years in power.

The opposition accuses Mugabe of plotting to steal the election and tensions rose Friday with soldiers and police in a convoy of armored personnel carriers with water cannons patrolling through downtown Harare, the capital. The security chiefs warned against violence and police presence at the polls Saturday was heavy.

The economic collapse of what was once the region's breadbasket has been a central campaign issue, with the opposition accusing Mugabe of misrule and dictatorship. Mugabe, appealing to national pride, blames the Westand charges his opponents are stooges of former colonial ruler Britain.

In southern Bulawayo, Moreblessing Ndlovu said he has chosen democracy over dictatorship. ''The people of Zimbabwe have had enough of this,'' he said, his bare feet reflecting his poverty.

''Everyone here is hungry. They want to see a change,'' Bulawayo said, pointing a snaking line of about 200 people waiting to vote. Some had gotten in line hours before the scheduled 7 a.m. opening.

Running against Mugabe are opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, 55, who narrowly lost the disputed 2002 elections, and former ruling party loyalist and finance minister Simba Makoni, 58. Makoni has shaken up Zimbabwe's politics with his appeal to disillusioned citizens, threatening to take votes from both the opposition and the ruling party.

All three candidates voted early Saturday, with Mugabe telling reporters afterward he would accept whatever results emerged and rejecting opposition charges he had already orchestrated his own victory.

''We are not in the habit of cheating,'' he said. ''We don't rig elections.''

Tsvangirai sounded a resolute note, saying: ''The people's victory is assured.''

Most stations opened after 7 a.m. and people complained the process was slow. But Noel Kututwa, head of the independent Zimbabwe Election Support Network, said voting was going smoothly countrywide.

Wait the voting is today? Well let me go find an update right quick let's see how the election is turning. BTW, here's another piece by Pajamas Media about the Zimbabwean elections.