Defiant Voters Await Mugabe’s Revenge
When the first result arrived from Zimbabwe’s election, it was not what Robert Mugabe had ordered. Instead it was another win for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
The bulletins came in the early hours of yesterday morning by the only way they can in this terrorised country—anonymous text message. They announced that the information minister, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, had finished a humiliating third behind two opposition candidates in a by-election on the undercard of this weekend’s electoral charade.
The defiant democratic gesture will not stop the 84-year-old, known unaffectionately as Comrade Bob, from being inaugurated today, but it offered a more honest gauge of feeling in his country than his uncontested “re-election”. It was one of many acts of defiance made all the more remarkable in that they came after a week of almost relentless terror unleashed by the government.
There are few who know better than Stabilo Nyathi the lengths to which the Mugabe regime has gone to reverse its March defeat at the polls. With no formal training, no facilities and in constant fear of abduction herself, she has been attempting to counsel the torture victims who have arrived broken and bewildered in the southern city of Bulawayo.
“The first man I saw, they had smashed his skull,” she said. “They beat him with the fan belt from a tractor, making massive wounds on his arms and back. Then they burned him. He was in shock. He did not know where was his wife, or his children.”
The man had been an opposition supporter from the rural areas near Gweru, and had had to make his way to the city mostly on foot. His was one of dozens of similar horror stories she had heard. A young, local organiser, with no international profile or protection, Ms Nyathi is exactly the kind of opposition activist who has ended up in the firing line.
“I don’t tell people where I am going,” she said. “I try to change the place where I’m staying as often as I can. If I get a lift I get someone to drop me three streets away.”
She says that in place of the fear, there is now a kind of numbness. “I have been beaten up in the past, and after a certain point you can’t feel it any more. I am not afraid. I am numb. The pain will come later.”
Tens of thousands across this impoverished southern African nation were waiting for that pain to come as it emerged that many had ignored mortal threats from the ruling party and either stayed away from the “one man election” or spoilt their ballot papers. The “massive turnout” trumpeted by the state-run Herald newspaper yesterday was a fiction that found few backers. Even the handful of observers that were allowed in refused to sanction what they had seen.
Marwick Khumalo, head of the Pan-African Parliament observer mission, described turnout as “very, very low”. The lawmaker from Swaziland confirmed what many others had witnessed when he said: “There was a lot of intimidation for people to vote.” He also said that he had seen many ballot papers that had been defaced, some with slogans saying “We will not vote” on them.
But this will be matched by equal defiance from Mr Mugabe, who wants to be sworn in for a new term before departing for a summit of the African Union that begins in Cairo tomorrow. There he will challenge fellow leaders from across the continent to refuse him recognition, and they are expected to back down, even though many have criticised his election.
Zimbabwe’s opposition has placed its hope in figures such as Zambia’s President, Levy Mwanawasa, Kenya’s Prime Minister, Raila Odinga, and Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa’s ruling ANC, who have described Zimbabwe as being out of control. The MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, who withdrew from the election in protest at the intimidation, called on the AU and the UN to supervise fresh elections.
There was also pressure from President George Bush, who announced yesterday that Washington would enforce new sanctions on what he called an “illegitimate government”, and said he would call on the UN to impose an arms embargo on Zimbabwe and a travel ban on its officials. The International Advisory Board of the Independent News & Media Group, publishers of The Independent on Sunday, condemned “the sham election, the political turmoil and extreme human rights violations” in Zimbabwe. But Mr Mugabe will dismiss anything short of a military threat or an all-out embargo by South Africa, his powerful neighbour.
In the meantime, Zimbabwe will suffer. The price of defiance in a place like Chinhoyi in rural Mashonaland, once the heartland of support for Mugabe the hero of liberation, could not be higher. The IoS has seen images of dead and mutilated bodies dumped by the roadside after being processed in the torture camps run by the ruling Zanu-PF.
Joseph Madzivanhendo, an MDC activist, had his foreskin severed with a machete blow and was left to bleed to death afterwards. The headman of Madzivanzira village was murdered with an axe. His wife somehow survived an axe blow that split her forehead open. Their crime was that their son was an MDC organiser. Beta Chokurioriama, another activist, died from multiple stab wounds.
These are only three of a death toll of more than 120 confirmed cases, which doctors fear will top 500. The toll does not include those who were raped or those who had both hands chopped off to stop them from voting.
Despite the intimidation, Mashonaland voters refused to play along. Speaking by telephone from Chinhoyi yesterday, an independent observer, who cannot be named, said that the polling stations had been empty before midday. “Then they [soldiers, youth militia and paramilitaries] went door to door, ordering people to vote. They demanded to see the ink stain on peoples’ fingers. The people I spoke to said they spoiled their papers.”
In Harare, the post-election blood-letting that had been feared was slow to start as the scale of the boycott ruled out the kind of forensic reprisals that Zanu officials had threatened. By yesterday afternoon the tell-tale red ink-stains were hard to discern even on those who had voted.
In the meantime, the mood is one of paranoia. Meetings with local journalists or opposition officials have become snatched conversations in parking lots. Cars with no number plates patrol the streets, and plain clothes informants are everywhere.
Much of the real terror comes at night. After the polling stations closed, it was the turn of the hundreds of political refugees who had camped all week outside the South African embassy. In the afternoon they had put up banners calling on the South African President, Thabo Mbeki, to help them. In the early hours yesterday they were rounded up, along with freelance journalists watching nearby; nobody knows where they have been taken. Like so many Zimbabweans, they have been disappeared.
Statement from Independent News & Media: A call to Africa to stop Mugabe
The International Advisory Board (IAB) of the Independent News & Media Group meeting in Dublin condemns the sham election, the political turmoil and extreme human rights violations unleashed in Zimbabwe.
The IAB recognises that many African states, among them Zimbabwe’s neighbours, are strongly critical of the Mugabe regime and its violent suppression of democracy. We particularly applaud the sentiments expressed by the President of the ANC, Jacob Zuma, and Nobel Laureate, Bishop Desmond Tutu, in South Africa, as well as the concern of former president, Nelson Mandela. The IAB now looks to the South African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union (AU) urgently to develop a strategy for the restoration of civil authority and a free and fair election process in Zimbabwe.
(Posted on June 30, 2008)
Comments
Is anyone surprised he has lasted this long? Why don’t the people of Zimbabwe rise up and throw him out of power?
Posted by Chuck_W at 7:17 PM on June 30
I met a black male at my local lunch counter who had changed his name to ‘Zimbabwe’. He lectured whites about how awful we were until he was asked to leave and never come back. He also carried around a book called ‘blacked out by whitewash’ by Suzar. Go to Suzar.com if you want a good chuckle. That was almost 3 years ago to the day. I found AMREN at that time also. I owe my racial conciousness to ‘Mr. Zimbabwe’..and AMREN….
Posted by toonces at 8:12 PM on June 30
If Zimbabwe doesn’t straighten up and fly right, the country will be as ill-run as Detroit and Washington, D.C.
Posted by at 9:10 PM on June 30
Will Mugabe attend Obamas presidential inaugural?
Will Obama attend Mugabes?
And when will Barack come out and condemn Mugabe for his murders of blacks and whites in Zim? I say he never will. And that should tell us whites in America all we need to know about Obama.
Posted by at 12:07 AM on July 1
There must still be some whites in the Zim though and collectively they probably have enough money (in English banks) to hire a group similar to the previously mentioned 5th Commando. With no concern for political correctness, a proper mercenary group could change the face of Africa rather quickly. The only POSSIBLE resistance to such a group, would only come from the U.S. military and I suspect quite a number of said mercenaries would be former U.S. military and Special Forces types. In a stand up fight, gloves off, no prisoners fight! nothing in Africa or the middle east can stand against the U.S. military and those trained in those services. Nothing in Europe either.
Posted by Skip at 2:38 AM on July 1
An African-descended acquaintance of mine once remarked, under his breath, that the white farmers had it coming.
Even if that is so, millions of black Zimbabweans are on the brink of paying an even greater price.
Starvation is a terrible way to die.
Posted by at 3:01 AM on July 1
What I don’t understand is why Mugabe pretends to be a democratically elected official. This is a man who proudly compares himself to Hitler and who is so stupid, he was tricked into paying a woman a huge sum of money to use her black magic powers to produce oil, as his master plan to address the failing economy. Less than half of the leaders in africa are elected. Most are tin pot dictators. Sure, he can use it to squeeze a few extra bucks out of idiot whites. But you can’t tell me he’s sophisticated enough to understand that.
Posted by at 7:08 AM on July 1
“There must still be some whites in the Zim though and collectively they probably have enough money (in English banks) to hire a group similar to the previously mentioned 5th Commando. With no concern for political correctness, a proper mercenary group could change the face of Africa rather quickly.”
And what will you achieve with that? A new black dictator? The problem with Zimbabwe is not Mugabe but that there are too many black people. Rhodesia was always unsustainable because they never checked the black birth rate. They always thought they will hold the upper hands but in this coming century what matters is the population of your tribe. As long as there are black people in Zimbabwe there is no reason why whites should farm and develop that land (and in doing so help the blacks breed and increase their numbers). Now that Whites in Zimbabawe have been reduced to an insignificant minority, Zimbabawe should be of no interest to us except as a lesson of what mistakes the Rhodesians made and about what happens under black rule.
I say let Mugabe rule, let him starve and torture his own people, let him make a mockery of the liberals, the U.S. government and the British Government (they are the ones who brought him to power).
Posted by Brian at 11:43 AM on July 1
In as statement today, Mugabe’s spokesman (probably with a gun to his head) told the West to “go hang.”
Where in the world is Jimmy Carter? Shouldn’t he be over in Zimbabwe checking the election results? Oh wait, I keep forgetting that Mugabe is black and completely off limits.
Posted by Gayle Sollenberger at 12:22 PM on July 1
Aaahh, the bold efficiency of Mugabe’s political campaign - don’t teach recalcitrant folk better, just murder them - make an electoral majority the old-fashioned way.
In future years, I see a triumphant African Union, with a statue of the illustrious Mugabe in it’s Capital city - a tribute for showing them the way, setting the [by then] universally successful African method of extracting victory from voters…
“The first man I saw, they had smashed his skull,” she said. “They beat him with the fan belt from a tractor, making massive wounds on his arms and back. Then they burned him. He was in shock. He did not know where was his wife, or his children…”
Posted by Gary at 2:04 PM on July 1
“There was also pressure from President George Bush, who announced yesterday that Washington would enforce new sanctions on what he called an ‘illegitimate government’, and said he would call on the UN to impose an arms embargo on Zimbabwe and a travel ban on its officials.”
So our abjectly worthless Red dictator, now finally has the unmitigated gall to denounce his good pal Comrade Bob? Well, wonders will never cease!
Just a few years ago, wasn’t our El Presidente congratulating this terrorist?
Well, I guess that now that there is hardly a white left in Zimbabwe to: rape, mutilate, or murder, the West has finally “awoken” to the horror it has wrought in that country. How bleeding bully; yes indeed, the ebony “answer” to Ian Smith has been so successful as to make “integration” and “affirmative action” in this country look like a kindergarten concert.
Of course, our “elites” do not have the intestinal fortitude to capture and hang this Communist butcher, only the obsolete timidity to wag a sanctimonious finger and then skulk away with that absurd digit fully inserted up their collective sniffling noses.
As always, God help us all!
Posted by John PM at 6:13 PM on July 1