Mugabe's neighbors speak out

NY Times:

As Zimbabwe’s neighbors urged it to postpone this week’s presidential runoff, hundreds of beaten, newly homeless Zimbabweans amassed outside the South African Embassy here in a desperate bid for help during the electoral crisis gripping the nation.

By 8:30 p.m., around 400 people, mainly men displaced by the recent political violence, were pulling down their woolen caps and hunching into thin jackets to sit out one of the coldest nights this winter. Few of them had eaten in the last several days; they began converging outside the embassy in hopes of finding food, water and medical attention.

“The situation is absolutely desperate,” said an opposition official trying to find shelter for 80 women and children at the site.

The scene unfolded amid a scramble of regional and international diplomacy, with many African and Western nations saying the vote on Friday would be neither free nor fair.

On Wednesday, officials from Swaziland, Angola and Tanzania — the so-called troika empowered to speak for the Southern African Development Community, a regional bloc of 14 nations — called on Zimbabwe to put off the voting because the current crisis would undermine its legitimacy.

Tacking a different tack, Queen Elizabeth II stripped Robert Mugabe, the country’s president for nearly 30 years, of his honorary knighthood as a “mark of revulsion” at the human rights abuses and “abject disregard” for democracy over which he is presiding, the British Foreign Office said Wednesday.

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Meanwhile Swaminathan Aiyar at Post Global in the Washington Post argues that being a bloody tyrant is not a disqualification for rule. I suppose there is someone always willing to make the case for despots, but that does not mean we should accept their argument.

Barack Obama has finally noticed what is happening in Zimbabwe and for a second day in a row spoke out against the Mugabe regime. He says the international community should be doing more. Where has this guy been? The problem is that African governments have been the most reluctant to do anything and they are in the best position to have an effect.

Mandela has also finally been stirred into a condemnation, but folks this has been going on for weeks and the misrule has been going on for years. Zimbabwe has been breaking all records for inflation over the last year to go along with the farms becoming unproductive under Mugabe's cronies.

The Independent reports that Mugabe's party has a plan to carry them through the election:

The ruling party in Zimbabwe has a detailed plan to murder opposition polling agents, bomb polling stations and march the electorate to the ballot box under armed guard to ensure an emphatic victory for Robert Mugabe in tomorrow's uncontested presidential run-off.

Minutes of a meeting of the regime's top security officials, the Joint Operations Command (JOC), seen by The Independent, outline the ruthless strategy which appears to be going ahead regardless of the withdrawal of the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai from the race.

The notes, leaked from a JOC meeting late last week, include instructions to kill opposition MPs, for death squads to stuff ballot boxes in rural areas and the prevention of any rallies by the opposition. Detailed instructions were included on how to rig the vote: "Voters in a ward should surrender their IDs to the village head, and have their names taken down. On the day of voting, the respective village heads should queue outside the polling station with each member [voter] with a respective number. Each voter shall profess ignorance of the ability to write on his/her own... agents in the polling stations will be helping in marking X."

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This pretense of an election is more inhumane than a straight coup. If Mugabe and his thugocracy think it will get them an ounce of legitimacy, they have become completely detached from reality.