Begone I Say And Let Us Have Done With You
Posted at 11:17pm on Jul. 8, 2008 Pope Griswold Schools The Head Of Zimbabwe's Central Bank
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
I know that's a weird title to a blog post, but it does make sense if you read this.
Posted at 6:28pm on Jul. 5, 2008 "CIBD"
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
The acronym spells out the specifics of Robert Mugabe's plan to remain in power in the aftermath of the first round of Presidential voting in Zimbabwe:
President Robert Mugabe summoned his top security officials to a government training center near his rural home in central Zimbabwe on the afternoon of March 30. In a voice barely audible at first, he informed the leaders of the state security apparatus that had enforced his rule for 28 years that he had lost the presidential vote held the previous day.
Then Mugabe told the gathering he planned to give up power in a televised speech to the nation the next day, according to the written notes of one participant that were corroborated by two other people with direct knowledge of the meeting.
But Zimbabwe's military chief, Gen. Constantine Chiwenga, responded that the choice was not Mugabe's alone to make. According to two firsthand accounts of the meeting, Chiwenga told Mugabe his military would take control of the country to keep him in office or the president could contest a runoff election, directed in the field by senior army officers supervising a military-style campaign against the opposition.
Mugabe, the only leader this country has known since its break from white rule nearly three decades ago, agreed to remain in the race and rely on the army to ensure his victory. During an April 8 military planning meeting, according to written notes and the accounts of participants, the plan was given a code name: CIBD. The acronym, which proved apt in the fevered campaign that unfolded over the following weeks, stood for: Coercion. Intimidation. Beating. Displacement.
The story makes for shocking and appalling reading. Go through it . . . if you have the stomach. Perhaps not to anyone's surprise, it is reported that when the CIBD campaign began showing its bloody and politically desirable--from Mugabe's perspective--results, Mugabe started laughing and joking with his associates again.
And why not? Sadists enjoy inflicting pain and torture, after all.
Posted in Begone I Say And Let Us Have Done With You | Contra Tyrannum | Robert Mugabe | Zimbabwe — Comments (7)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 9:59pm on Jun. 30, 2008 The Blindest Of Eyes
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
This story speaks for itself in discussing how much the African Union cares about the nightmare currently going on in Zimbabwe:
A defiant Robert Mugabe sailed unchallenged through the first test of his presidency by his peers.
Freshly sworn-in following a single-candidate election, he received a leader's welcome when he strode into the African Union summit in Sharm el-Sheikh today and emerged unfazed, his authority intact.
He dined at a lavish luncheon given by his Egyptian hosts, hugged heads of state and other diplomats in the corridors and stayed at one of the most luxurious resorts in this Red Sea town.
I'm sure that Mugabe is quaking in his boots after that.
Posted in Begone I Say And Let Us Have Done With You | Foreign Affairs | Robert Mugabe | Zimbabwe — Comments (1)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 10:11pm on Jun. 29, 2008 No Words
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
Just read this:
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.
The degree to which the Mugabe regime continues to horrify reasonable people of humane sentiments continues to utterly and completely boggle the mind.
Posted in Begone I Say And Let Us Have Done With You | Contra Tyrannum | Robert Mugabe | Zimbabwe — Comments (3)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 11:21pm on Jun. 28, 2008 Compare And Contrast
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
Update by Jeff: The results have been announced, and Mugabe has claimed victory with 90.2% of the "vote." The final tally was 2,150,269 to 233,000.
When the first round of presidential voting took place in Zimbabwe, it took weeks for the government to come back with results and when it did, it made clear that it would steal the elections and give Robert Mugabe yet another chance to win in a second round of voting.
Now that the second round of voting has taken place, and now that the Mugabe regime has been able to scare off Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC from participating in the election, it is able to report its results ever so much faster:
Robert Mugabe looked poised to have himself re-appointed president of Zimbabwe on Sunday, following a roundly condemned election in which he was the lone candidate.
Despite a low turnout in the poll, tents were being raised at a stadium in Harare on Saturday, according to news agency reports and a senior Zimbabwean civil society figure, seemingly in preparation for a hasty coronation before the ageing autocrat heads to Egypt for a summit of African leaders.
A swift inauguration would see Friday's results rushed out in advance. In the absence of almost all election monitors and following a campaign of intimidation by security forces and militias loyal to Mr Mugabe's Zanu-PF party, the outcome will be highly dubious at best, civil society groups and the opposition say.
Every time one is led to believe that things could not possibly get any worse in Zimbabwe, the Mugabe regime demonstrates a shocking capacity to surprise. I shudder to think what we will see next in this sorry story.
Posted in Begone I Say And Let Us Have Done With You | Contra Tyrannum | Robert Mugabe | Zimbabwe — Comments (1)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 12:57am on Jun. 24, 2008 The Nightmare In Zimbabwe
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
Think that having the opposition withdraw from the presidential run-off race will be enough to stop the political violence currently going on in Zimbabwe?
Well, think again:
Morgan Tsvangirai, the Zimbabwe opposition leader, was on Monday night sheltering in the Dutch embassy in Harare as security forces loyal to President Robert Mugabe detained dozens of opposition supporters.
The leader of the Movement for Democratic Change sought refuge after announcing on Sunday that he would not contest Friday's scheduled presidential run-off election, which he described as "a violent, illegal sham". Mr Tsvangirai had said staying in the race would cost more lives beyond the 86 supporters the MDC says have already been killed in state-sponsored attacks.
Any hope that his withdrawal would stem months of electoral violence and intimidation was dashed when, according to news reports from inside Zimbabwe, police raided the MDC headquarters in Harare and rounded up 60 activists.
The MDC said that Thamsanqa Mahlangu, one of its MPs for Bulawayo, was in intensive care after being attacked by militia loyal to Mr Mugabe's Zanu-PF party while en route to a Harare stadium on Sunday for a rally. This was eventually aborted when some 2,000 armed government supporters blockaded the venue.
The situation in Zimbabwe has to qualify as being the most depressing news item around. Bar none.
Posted in Begone I Say And Let Us Have Done With You | Contra Tyrannum | Robert Mugabe | Zimbabwe — Comments (1)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 11:30pm on Jun. 22, 2008 The Two Most Popular Question Being Asked In Zimbabwe
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
"Where is it you said we are going? And what's with the handbasket?"
Morgan Tsvangirai, the challenger to Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, on Sunday pulled out of a presidential run-off and pleaded for international action to prevent "genocide" in his country.
"We can't ask the people to cast their vote on June 27 when that vote will cost their lives," Mr Tsvangirai told reporters in Harare, the capital. "We will no longer participate in this violent sham of an election."
It was for the United Nations to protect Zimbabweans, he added. Mr Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) says 70 of its supporters have been killed in pre-election violence and thousands more injured.
His withdrawal came after about 2,000 armed government supporters broke up an MDC election rally in Harare.
By withdrawing from Friday's scheduled head-to-head, a divided MDC has thrown down the gauntlet to Zimbabwe's neighbours.
How much does anyone want to bet that the gauntlet won't, in fact, be picked up by Zimbabwe's neighbors? And how much does anyone want to bet that despie the widespread and massive amounts of opposition to his rule and the defeat he suffered in the first round of voting, Robert Mugabe will likely remain in power?
Because, catastrophically, that seems to be where this sad, sorry story is heading.
Posted in Begone I Say And Let Us Have Done With You | Contra Tyrannum | Robert Mugabe | Zimbabwe — Comments (3)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 10:35pm on Jun. 19, 2008 This Game Is Rigged
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
For those who still harbor hope that the upcoming runoff elections for the presidency of Zimbabwe will be free and fair, I give you this:
Robert Mugabe's government on Thursday slashed the number of accredited Zimbabwean election observers, further heightening fears that the result of next week's run-off presidential poll will be manipulated.
During the first round in March, the 8,800 independent monitors from the Zimbabwe Election Support Network collated information posted outside the more than 9,000 polling stations - a process which, according to Noel Kututwa, its chairman, was "critical" in curbing distortions to the final tally.
On Thursday the network was informed that, of the 23,000 names it submitted to the Ministry of Justice for accreditation to monitor the run-off on June 27, a mere 500 had been approved.
Mr Kututwa told the Financial Times the reason given was that the presence of observers "disrupts the smooth flow of voting".
"The idea is to make it impossible to do what we did [in the first round]," he said. "It will be very difficult but not impossible."
The news came as Bernard Membe, Tanzania's foreign minister, warned "there is every sign these elections will never be free nor fair".
For those of you who are disappointed, I don't blame you. But if you are surprised, then you qualify as being shockingly naïve.
Posted in Begone I Say And Let Us Have Done With You | Contra Tyrannum | Robert Mugabe | Zimbabwe — Comments (1)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 2:03am on Jun. 14, 2008 "Go To Hell"
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
That is the rebuke that Robert Mugabe commonly reserves for his critics when they take him to task for plundering and annihilating Zimbabwe in order to further his need for self-aggrandizement. Nowadays, "Go to Hell" may as well be replaced by "Come to Zimbabwe." The two phrases mean the same thing, after all:
Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's president, said on Friday that liberation war veterans would take up arms if he lost a June 27 presidential run-off vote.
Mr Mugabe told youth members of his ruling Zanu-PF party in Harare that the veterans would launch a new bush war if the election was won by the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
"They said if this country goes back into white hands just because we have used a pen [to vote], `we will return to the bush to fight'," Mr Mugabe said.
His comments came as James McGee, the US ambassador in Harare, said 30,000 potential opposition supporters had been displaced from their homes as part of brutal tactics by the Mugabe government to swing the run-off in his favour.
Mr McGee, who was speaking by telephone from Harare, said the conditions ahead of the poll were the worst he had ever witnessed, while another western diplomat said Zanu-PF was determined to secure an election victory "at any cost".
"It's very, very obvious that there is political intimidation, there's thuggery, there's outright theft, murder, happening here in Zimbabwe," Mr McGee said. "In my long diplomatic career, I have never seen anything comparable to this."
It takes a special kind of Hellish character to hold an entire nation hostage to your own political whims. Mugabe has that character in spades. Milton would likely have found it easier to write of Lucifer's depredations than to recount the nightmarish deeds of Robert Mugabe.
After all, there is still a chance that Lucifer is purely a fictional character. Mugabe, alas, is all too real.
Posted in Begone I Say And Let Us Have Done With You | Contra Tyrannum | Robert Mugabe | Zimbabwe — Comments (26)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 1:38am on Jun. 13, 2008 Your Appalling And Grotesque Passage Of The Day
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
Via this story:
The men who pulled up in three white pickup trucks were looking for Patson Chipiro, head of the Zimbabwean opposition party in Mhondoro district. His wife, Dadirai, told them he was in Harare but would be back later in the day, and the men departed.
An hour later they were back. They grabbed Mrs Chipiro and chopped off one of her hands and both her feet. Then they threw her into her hut, locked the door and threw a petrol bomb through the window.
The killing last Friday - one of the most grotesque atrocities committed by Robert Mugabe's regime since independence in 1980 - was carried out on a wave of worsening brutality before the run-off presidential elections in just over two weeks. It echoed the activities of Foday Sankoh, the rebel leader in the Sierra Leone civil war that ended in 2002, whose trade-mark was to chop off hands and feet.
Mrs Chipiro, 45, a former pre-school teacher, was the second wife of a junior official of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) burnt alive last Friday by Zanu (PF) militiamen. Pamela Pasvani, the 21-year-old pregnant wife of a local councillor in Harare, did not suffer mutilation but died later of her burns; his six-year-old son perished in the flames.
Zimbabwe is going to get much, much, much worse before there is even a hope of it getting better.
Posted in Begone I Say And Let Us Have Done With You | Contra Tyrannum | Robert Mugabe | Zimbabwe — Comments (1)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 2:32am on Jun. 7, 2008 "The Reign Of Thuggery"
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
A long and comprehensive look at the tyrannical nightmare that is Zimbabwe. No excerpting, as this is one of those pieces where excerpting doesn't do the article any justice whatsoever. But do note the many African leaders--Thabo Mbeki being foremost among them--who are either passively or actively working to ensure the survival and continuation of the Mugabe regime. These "leaders" may not have as much blood on their hands as does Mugabe, but they have quite enough nevertheless.
Posted at 1:48am on Jun. 6, 2008 Robert Mugabe Actively Has It In For His Own Country
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
I mean, how else do you explain this?
AS ROBERT MUGABE, Zimbabwe's president, raised hackles at a United Nations food summit in Rome this week, his henchmen at home have been getting down to the violent business of making sure that their man wins the run-off presidential election scheduled for June 27th. Neighbouring countries continue to call plaintively for a peaceful vote. But on the evidence so far the election will be neither peaceful nor fair.
Arthur Mutambara, the leader of a splinter of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), was arrested on June 1st for writing an editorial criticising the president. Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC's leader and the man who bested Mr Mugabe in the first round in March, was detained by the police for nine hours on Wednesday while on the campaign trail. Many opposition rallies have been banned and scores of opposition activists arrested. A ruthless campaign of repression has, so the MDC claims, left 65 of its supporters dead since March. Thousands have been severely injured and perhaps 25,000 people displaced.
In an ominous sign of how the election campaign might affect those who are suffering most under Mr Mugabe, Care International, an aid agency, has had to suspend its relief operations after being accused by the government of supporting the opposition, a charge it denies. Human Rights Watch, a monitoring group, reports that the authorities have blocked some other aid agencies from distributing food in several provinces until after the election.
The beating, kidnapping and killing of MDC activists has gravely weakened the opposition party's local organisations. Areas that were former strongholds of ZANU-PF, the ruling party, which dared to switch to the opposition in March, have now been turned into no-go areas for the MDC. Mr Tsvangirai plans to visit the ZANU-PF heartland of Mashonaland but ensuring his safety there will not be easy, as his party has not been licensed to carry firearms or even radios. A prominent human-rights lawyer fled to South Africa this week following threats against his life.
See also this post and this one. As amazing as it may sound, the story of Robert Mugabe's repressive tactics has not nearly gotten as much play as it deserves to get.
Posted in Begone I Say And Let Us Have Done With You | Contra Tyrannum | Robert Mugabe | Zimbabwe — Comments (3)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 1:02am on Jun. 4, 2008 Like Letting Bonnie And Clyde Attend A Session On Banking Reform
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization is meeting in Rome and despite an EU ban on the attendance of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, Mugabe is able to attend the FAO conference because UN rules take precedence over EU rules. The irony of Mugabe's attendance at the conference is not lost on Anne Applebaum:
. . . According to Oxfam, 80 percent of Zimbabwe's population now lives on less than $1 a day, thanks to Mugabe's policies, and lacks access to basic foods and clean water. Inflation is at 100,000 percent, this year's harvest was poor, and Zimbabweans are fleeing their country in large numbers. Meanwhile, Mugabe is notorious for using food aid as a political weapon, distributing it only to those who reliably vote for him. Thus does his presence at a U.N. food summit contain layers of troubling irony. Stephen Smith, the Australian foreign minister and one of Mugabe's more vocal critics, put it less delicately: "Robert Mugabe turning up to a conference dealing with food security or food issues is, in my view, frankly obscene."
Posted in Begone I Say And Let Us Have Done With You | Foreign Affairs | Robert Mugabe | Zimbabwe — Comments (5)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 8:50pm on May 11, 2008 It's On
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
Morgan Tsvangirai will contest the runoff in Zimbabwe:
Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe's opposition leader, on Saturday sought to reclaim the initiative in his country's political crisis, saying he would return to his homeland in the next two days to contest a run-off election against President Robert Mugabe.
His pledge ended several weeks of public equivocation within the opposition Movement for Democratic Change over whether to take part in a second round in the face of a campaign of violent intimidation of MDC activists by Mr Mugabe's supporters.
Addressing a press conference in Pretoria, the capital of neighbouring South Africa, Mr Tsvangirai sounded a defiant note.
"I am ready, the people are ready," he said. "I intend to return as shortly as possible and intend to begin a victory tour."
Read on . . .
Posted in Begone I Say And Let Us Have Done With You | Foreign Affairs | Robert Mugabe | Zimbabwe — Comments (3)/ Email this page » / Read More »
