Nobody who knows Mugabe can possibly believe that he will ever accept defeat at the polls. After all, this man is a genocidal megalomaniac who is congenitally disposed to war. Therefore, it will take a war, the likes of which Africa has not seen in years, to wrest power from his hands.
[Mugabe makes a dictator’s pitch for reelection, The iPINIONS Journal, March 29, 2008]
Alas, since March 29, Zimbabwe has descended into the heart of darkness. Here’s a recap:
On March 29, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party lost power in presidential and parliamentary elections. Instead of conceding defeat, however, Mugabe launched a campaign of intimidation, harassment and murder amongst supporters of the triumphant opposition Movement for Democratic Change. This forced many of them, including leader Morgan Tsvangirai, to seek refuge in neighboring countries like South Africa.
On June 3, claiming that neither Mugabe nor Tsvangirai had won a majority, the cowered and compromised members of the Zimbabwe Election Commission (ZEC) scheduled a run-off election between them for June 27.
On June 4, less than a week after his return from exile, Tsvangirai and the entire leadership of the opposition MDC were arrested en route to a campaign rally. More arrests followed, making it virtually impossible for them to campaign.
(According to the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, since the March election, thousands of people have been displaced by violence wrought by Mugabe’s marauding supporters; 1300 have been tortured; and 86, including the wife of the mayor of the nation’s capital, Harare, have been murdered. The institute has described the acts perpetrated by Mugabe’s supporters as “crimes against humanity.”)
On June 20, lamenting that free and fair elections were “impossible under current conditions,” Tsvangirai announced that he will not participate in the run-off elections.
We in the MDC have resolved that we will no longer participate in this violent, illegitimate sham of an election process…. We will not play the game of Mugabe.
[MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai]
Then just yesterday, Tsvangirai made it clear that he does not intend to be a martyr for his cause. Because, after police raided his party headquarters again and arrested more MDC officials, he sought refuge in the Dutch Embassy in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe.
But Mugabe and his supporters could not be happier about Tsvangirai fleeing for his life:
The runoff would go ahead in accordance with the constitution – and to prove Zimbabweans’ support for Mugabe, who has held power since independence from Britain in 1980.
[Zimbabwean Information Minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu]
In fact, this means that Mugabe will be able to continue his iron-fisted rule indefinitely, which he vowed from the outset to do by any means necessary.
Only God will remove me from power
[Mugabe]
Moreover, he made it plain that he would “never accept a Zimbabwe ruled by the MDC” whose members he claims are traitors and puppets of their former colonial masters, Great Britain.
Meanwhile, Tsvangirai has resorted to pleading once again for South Africa (and the United Nations) to intervene to halt the genocide that Mugabe has been perpetrating for years now.
Unfortunately, despite condemning Mugabe as “a former independence who has become a despot and bankrupted the country,” African countries are unwilling to lift a finger to help the oppressed people of Zimbabwe. And, of course, the UN is simply unable to do anything.
NOTE: Yesterday the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution condemning Mugabe for the “campaign of violence” that has made a free and fair presidential run-off impossible. It also declared that Tsvangirai should be recognized as the duly elected president of Zimbabwe based on the results of the March election.
Unfortunately, this UN resolution is not worth the paper it’s written on (and the verbal condemnation of its indignant members, including the US, is worth even less). And nobody knows this better than Mugabe.
After all, this resolution is conspicuous by its failure to indicate how the UN intends to help Tsvangirai come out of hiding to begin serving as president. And unless the UN (AU or US) deploys troops to depose Mugabe, Tsvangirai will wither into oblivion as a president without a country….
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Mugabe makes dictator’s pitch for re-election…
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