Robert Mugabe: Difference between revisions
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Mugabe blames the food shortages on [[drought]].<ref name="telegraphban" /> Zimbabwe's state-owned press accused former British Prime Minister Tony Blair of using [[chemical weapons]] to incite droughts and famines in Africa.<ref name="telegraphban" /> |
Mugabe blames the food shortages on [[drought]].<ref name="telegraphban" /> Zimbabwe's state-owned press accused former British Prime Minister Tony Blair of using [[chemical weapons]] to incite droughts and famines in Africa.<ref name="telegraphban" /> |
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=== Mugabe's Rise to Power === |
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In April 1979, 64 percent of the black citizens of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) lined up at the polls to vote in the first democratic election in the history of that southern African nation. Two-thirds of them supported Abel Muzorewa, a bishop in the United Methodist Church. He was the first black prime minister of a country only 4 percent white. Muzorewa's victory put an end to the 14-year political odyssey of outgoing prime minister Ian Smith, the stubborn World War II veteran who had infamously announced in 1976, "I do not believe in black majority rule--not in a thousand years." Fortunately for the country's blacks, majority rule came sooner than Smith had in mind. |
In April 1979, 64 percent of the black citizens of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) lined up at the polls to vote in the first democratic election in the history of that southern African nation. Two-thirds of them supported Abel Muzorewa, a bishop in the United Methodist Church. He was the first black prime minister of a country only 4 percent white. Muzorewa's victory put an end to the 14-year political odyssey of outgoing prime minister Ian Smith, the stubborn World War II veteran who had infamously announced in 1976, "I do not believe in black majority rule--not in a thousand years." Fortunately for the country's blacks, majority rule came sooner than Smith had in mind. |
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To understand the genesis of that oft-forgotten 1979 election, it is necessary to revisit Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, when the British colony joined the United States as the only territory in history to separate successfully from the British Empire without its consent. Five years earlier, in a speech to the South African parliament, British prime minister Harold Macmillan had warned that the "wind of change" was blowing through Africa. "Whether we like it or not," Macmillan said, "this growth of national consciousness is a political fact." Rhodesian whites would not stand for the British policy of "No Independence Before Majority African Rule," however, and in 1964 they overwhelmingly elected Smith premier. When the Rhodesian government reached an impasse with the British over conditions for autonomy, Smith, widely supported by the country's whites, declared Rhodesia independent. And so, on November 11, 1965, the sun abruptly set on another outpost of the British Empire. |
To understand the genesis of that oft-forgotten 1979 election, it is necessary to revisit Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, when the British colony joined the United States as the only territory in history to separate successfully from the British Empire without its consent. Five years earlier, in a speech to the South African parliament, British prime minister Harold Macmillan had warned that the "wind of change" was blowing through Africa. "Whether we like it or not," Macmillan said, "this growth of national consciousness is a political fact." Rhodesian whites would not stand for the British policy of "No Independence Before Majority African Rule," however, and in 1964 they overwhelmingly elected Smith premier. When the Rhodesian government reached an impasse with the British over conditions for autonomy, Smith, widely supported by the country's whites, declared Rhodesia independent. And so, on November 11, 1965, the sun abruptly set on another outpost of the British Empire. |
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The move was immediately condemned as illegal ("an act of treason") by the British government, the Commonwealth, and the United Nations. Independent Rhodesia was not recognized by any country; even apartheid South Africa sent no ambassador to Salisbury, the capital. Britain and the U.N. imposed economic sanctions, and many Rhodesians worried that an oil embargo would cripple their landlocked country. |
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Over the next decade there followed a series of failed negotiations between the two sides. The British demanded majority rule, but would consider at most a phased plan that would gradually bring a black government to power. Smith, whose Rhodesian Front party was consistently reelected, would have none of it. He spoke of Rhodesia's defense of "Western, Christian civilization" and out-maneuvered a succession of British prime ministers, who all had to contend with the embarrassing "Rhodesia problem." Somehow, this tenacious little former colony held out against the world's once-great British Empire, busting sanctions, increasing white immigration, and keeping domestic black political opposition at bay with a succession of authoritarian laws that effectively banned political dissent. |
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Smith's obstinacy played a role in emboldening--and radicalizing--his enemies. The refusal of the country's whites to accept black rule created the vacuum in which leaders like Robert Mugabe, of the Chinese-backed Zimbabwean African National Union (ZANU), and Joshua Nkomo, of the Soviet-supported Zimbabwean African People's Union (ZAPU), emerged. In 1972, these two organizations started a civil war, aiming to overthrow the white regime by force. ZANU and ZAPU viewed Smith as a mortal enemy, but they were |
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hardly more pleasant to each other, in spite of forming an official alliance, the Patriotic Front, in 1976. With rival superpower backers and different staging grounds (ZANU in Mozambique, ZAPU in Zambia), the two groups spent about as much effort fighting for control of the revolutionary movement as they did against the white regime. Both the white government and the guerrillas demonstrated remarkable ruthlessness, and the seven-year Bush war would claim some 20,000 lives in a country of 7 million. |
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Moderates to the rescue |
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By 1977, it was clear that change was coming. Aided tremendously by the shuttle diplomacy of Henry Kissinger during the Nixon and Ford administrations (Kissinger enticed the apartheid government of South Africa with promises of greater international legitimacy if it would give the boot to the friendly white regime on its northern border), Smith finally came to accept the principle of majority rule, though with major conditions. He insisted that whites maintain control of key government institutions like the army, civil service, and judiciary. He also required that whites have a disproportionate number of seats in parliament so as to prevent any radical constitutional changes. And Smith ruled out serious land reform. |
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Despite these vestiges of the old regime, Smith's acceptance of majority rule was momentous: It opened the way for a peaceful transition. For years, Smith had tried to negotiate a settlement with several black nationalist leaders who had renounced violence in their campaigns for nonracial democracy. Primary among them was Muzorewa, a small, American-educated pastor who avoided the internecine fighting that had characterized Zimbabwean resistance politics throughout the 1960s. He was a forthright critic of the government's racial discrimination and had supported civil disobedience and mass protest in the past. The United Nations had honored him for Outstanding Achievement in Human Rights. "If religion just means to go to church and pray, then it is a scandal. The gospel is concerned about where a man sleeps, what a man earns, how he is treated by the government," he told congregants. The other black leaders with whom Smith pledged to work were the Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole, a Methodist founder of ZANU who had been imprisoned for 10 years for opposition activities--including an alleged assassination attempt against Smith--but who had forsworn violence, and Chief Jeremiah Chirau, a tribal elder who had long been amenable to white interests. Smith and his moderate black allies hoped that if a multiracial government could be cobbled together, black African states would withdraw their support for the guerrillas and make way for an anti-Communist black government. |
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Muzorewa and Sithole, contrary to the patronizing and ugly attacks that would soon come from the Carter administration and the Western left, were not stooges (although Chirau, it should be noted, was funded by the Rhodesian government and depended on it for his status as a recognized tribal leader). Sithole had actually led the guerrilla fight against the white regime until the power-hungry Mugabe deposed him. Muzorewa's speeches regularly drew crowds of hundreds of thousands, and he was widely considered the most popular black political leader in the country. He solidified his antigovernment bona fides when the Smith regime branded him a Soviet lackey (as it did all its opponents) even though he was staunchly anti-Communist. These moderate black leaders were motivated, first and foremost, by a desire to end the bloodshed. By contrast, Mugabe and Nkomo made it clear that their Patriotic Front would not give up the fight and participate in elections unless they were assured of victory. In so doing, the guerrilla leaders removed any doubt that they had no interest in democracy. |
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African politics, Carter-style |
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Into this picture stepped Andrew Young. Early in his tenure at the United Nations, Young, a former mayor of Atlanta, displayed a naive, if not baleful, outlook on southern African affairs, remarking that Cuban troops brought a "certain order and stability" to wartorn Angola. Young had earlier called Smith a "monster" and likened him to Uganda's mass-murdering Idi Amin. Nevertheless, Carter made Young his point man on Africa. According to Martin Meredith, a former southern Africa correspondent for the Sunday Times of London, "Young was not, perhaps, the best choice the Americans could have made" for negotiations in Rhodesia. "He had a reputation for being recklessly outspoken on subjects about which he appeared to know little, and Rhodesia was no exception." Time said some State Department careerists thought of Young as an "unguided missile." |
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In September 1977, the Carter administration announced its "Anglo-American plan," drawn up in conjunction with the Labour government of Prime Minister James Callaghan. The plan called for British administration of Rhodesia backed up by a U.N. peacekeeping force, a constitution ensuring universal adult suffrage, and majority rule by 1978. Majority rule was to be tempered, however, by the reservation of 20 out of 100 parliamentary seats for whites. The proposal also called for the incorporation of ZANU and ZAPU guerrilla units into the new country's army and, more important, the participation of the two nationalist movements in the country's elections. Smith, along with the moderate black leaders, opposed this plan because it would have led to a military dominated by Mugabe and Nkomo's forces. |
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Instead, Smith came up with what he and his popularly supported black allies termed the "internal settlement." In March 1978, they formed an executive council that would serve as a transitional government until democratic elections were held the following year. This internal settlement called for the promulgation of a new constitution establishing majority rule, but maintaining 28 out of 100 seats in the new parliament for whites. This was not a perfect proposal, but Muzorewa--no doubt expressing the desires of the country's justly impatient black majority--declared that it created "the machinery for dismantling the structure and practices of colonialism and racism and of minority rule." Muzorewa, Sithole, and Chirau understood the economic necessity of keeping the white population engaged in Zimbabwe's future, and hoped that an agreement acceptable to both black and white would discredit the guerrilla groups and help put an end to the Bush war. Eighty-five percent of the country's whites supported the agreement in a January 1979 referendum: The illusion of perpetual white rule was dead. Elections were scheduled for April 1979. Both Mugabe and Nkomo--in spite of their commitment to violence and opposition to democracy--were offered seats on the Executive Council along with the other black leaders but, fearing this would hurt their chances of ever gaining absolute control over the country, they refused. |
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It was not altogether unreasonable to protect the interests of the white minority, as the functioning of the Zimbabwean economy depended on the skills of educated whites who, by the late 1970s, were fleeing the country at the rate of 1,000 per month. To understand what sort of fate might befall a Rhodesia conquered by Marxist rebels, one had only to look to the former Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola, which, when overthrown in 1975 after the fall of the Caetano regime a year before, witnessed the immediate mass emigration of Portuguese citizens (about a quarter of a million from each country) and the collapse of those nations' economies. In light of these disastrous post-colonial developments, the desire to keep as many skilled whites as possible within Rhodesia after the transition to a black government was not just the selfish concern of the whites themselves; the presidents of African states that depended on Rhodesia for trade understood that white interests would have to be protected for an extended period of time. This was not an unusual consideration; Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia, former British colonies all, reserved extra parliamentary seats for whites for a transitional period. Alas, it did not stop the three countries from turning into dictatorships. |
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The 1979 election |
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The Carter administration, the Labour government in Britain, and the international left all insisted that Mugabe and Nkomo be part of the negotiating process--on its face a concession to terrorism. Presaging the edicts of Al Qaeda in Iraq, both guerrilla leaders pledged violence against any black Zimbabwean who dared take part in the April balloting. Nkomo called for a "bloodbath." A year earlier he had ridiculed the "all party nonsense" advocated by the moderate black leaders and said, "We mean to get that country by force, and we shall get it." Mugabe, not to be outdone, issued a public death list of 50 individuals associated with the internal settlement, including the three black leaders of the executive council. ZANU described these individuals as "Zimbabwean black bourgeoisie, traitors, fellow-travelers, and puppets of the Ian Smith regime, opportunistic running-dogs and other capitalist vultures." Mugabe also expressed his belief that "the multiparty system is a luxury" and said that if Zimbabwean blacks did not like Marxism, "then we will have to reeducate them." This was the same Mugabe whom Young, in that 1978 interview with the Times of London, had called "a very gentle man," adding, "I can't imagine Joshua Nkomo, or Robert Mugabe, ever pulling the trigger on a gun to kill anyone. I doubt that they ever have." |
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Nevertheless, in April 1979, in a scene reminiscent of the recent Iraqi elections, nearly 3 million blacks came out to vote under a state of martial law and with armed guerrillas actively seeking to disrupt the balloting. Although 100,000 soldiers protected the polling places, 10 civilians were killed by Mugabe and Nkomo's forces. Even so, the election was a resounding success and produced a clear verdict. An overwhelming majority of voters chose Muzorewa to become the first black prime minister of Zimbabwe Rhodesia, as the country was now called. |
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Sadly, this democratic outcome was a chimera. Muzorewa--spurned by the West, deemed illegitimate by the African dictatorships, and forced to contend with Communist-armed insurgents--would hold power for a mere matter of months. The betrayal of Muzorewa is one of the more craven episodes in American foreign policy. |
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Liberal international opinion condemned the election before it ever took place. Andrew Young called the interim government "neofascist," and the New York Times editorialized that the election would be a "moral and diplomatic disaster." In March 1979, 185 individuals signed a statement calling it a "fraud" and opined that "free elections require . . . freedom for all political parties to campaign," presumably even parties committed to one-party rule and violence if they do not win. Then, once the election took place, the left discredited it as a charade. A cover story in the Nation by British journalist David Caute, entitled "The Sham Election in Rhodesia," featured a cartoon with a smiling white man in safari outfit holding a gun as sheep with black faces ("electoral livestock," in Caute's words) lined up to vote. Caute likened the new black government to Vichy France. |
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The appearance of a popularly elected, black-led, anti-Marxist government in Africa confronted Western liberals with a challenge: Would they accept this interim agreement, widely endorsed by the country's blacks, as a step on the path to full majority rule, or would they reject the democratic will of the Zimbabwean people in favor of guerrilla groups that supported Soviet-style dictatorship? Caute at least had the honesty to admit that "Mugabe, indeed, openly espouses a one-party state and makes no secret of the fact that any election won by ZANU would be Zimbabwe's last." |
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Bayard Rustin, the black civil rights leader who had been the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington and the national chairman of the Social Democrats USA, observed the April election as part of a Freedom House delegation. A founder of the Committee to Support South African Resistance, Rustin was outraged at the response of those on the left. "No election held in any country at any time within memory has been more widely or vociferously scorned by international opinion than the election conducted last April in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe Rhodesia," he wrote in Commentary. The Freedom House delegation, whose members had previously monitored elections in 26 countries, interviewed over 600 black voters and visited more than 60 polling stations throughout the country. Rustin determined the elections to be "remarkably free and fair." Even the Nation editorial board conceded that the elections had "undeniably mobilized a genuine outpouring of sentiment for peace among black Rhodesians." The New York Times, like Mugabe and Nkomo, however, did not care about the democratic means employed, only the end result. "The real issue is not how the election was conducted, but what it was about," the Times intoned, snidely referring to the black political organizations participating in the elections as the "collaborating parties." |
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"The contrast between how the election was viewed by most Zimbabweans (the name preferred by blacks) and how it was described by critics outside the country is nothing less than extraordinary," Rustin wrote. With the United States openly deferring to the wishes of ZANU, ZAPU, and their enablers among the African tyrannies, Rustin said, "We have found ourselves, until now, tacitly aligned with groups armed by Moscow, hostile to America, antagonistic to democracy, and unpopular within Zimbabwe Rhodesia itself." Rustin appropriately referred to the Patriotic Front as a "paper political alliance" that claimed not only a base of popular support it did not have, but also, and more ominously, a natural right to everlasting power it certainly did not merit. Rustin was hardly the only liberal supportive of the interim government; it should be noted that accompanying him on the Freedom House delegation was the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Al Lowenstein (the founder of the 1968 Dump Johnson movement), who aggressively lobbied Congress to support the nascent, democratic Zimbabwe Rhodesia. |
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After the election, the Patriotic Front continued to wage war on the new multiracial government, which proceeded to defend itself with an army and police force that were, respectively, 85 percent and 75 percent black. But the government also extended an olive branch to the guerrillas in hopes of achieving a ceasefire and promised that any and all guerrillas willing to put down their guns would have a "safe return" to civilian life without fear of punishment. Would the guerrilla groups maintain their campaign against Zimbabwe Rhodesia now that a black prime minister had been elected? The government got its answer in May. Four of Prime Minister Muzorewa's envoys to the guerrillas were seized by Mugabe's forces, displayed before 200 tribesmen, and shot as an example of what would become of those who negotiated with the new black government. Six weeks later, 39 representatives of Rev. Sithole were also murdered. |
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The question remained of how the United States would relate to the new democratically elected black government. In 1978, Congress had passed the Case-Javits Amendment, which compelled the president to lift the sanctions on Rhodesia (in place since a 1966 U.N. Security Council resolution) if the regime held free and fair elections and showed a good-faith effort to negotiate with guerrilla leaders. Undoubtedly, the April 1979 election and the interim government's invitation to the Patriotic Front to participate met these conditions. Appropriately, two weeks after the election, the Senate passed a nonbinding resolution 75-19 calling on the Carter administration to lift sanctions. Unable to challenge the validity of the Zimbabwe Rhodesia government on the merits as stipulated by Congress, Carter persuaded congressional allies to pass a new bill that would allow him to maintain sanctions in order to protect America's national interests in Africa, which he believed would be threatened if the United States recognized a government not favored by the thugs and tyrants on the continent. |
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In July, Muzorewa came to the United States determined to "remove the blindness" of the Carter administration. He said that there were "some people who are sick in the head in the international world" for maintaining sanctions against a country that had transitioned peacefully from white power to majority rule. Muzorewa was far too sanguine about his ability to persuade Jimmy Carter and Andrew Young; their blindness was incurable. In October, all four members of the Zimbabwe Rhodesia executive council traveled to the United States to plead for recognition, and Carter refused to meet with them. Disappointed by the West's rebuff, Muzorewa noted that while Zimbabweans "are prepared to forget the past and work together with our white brethren, . . . some people in Britain, America, Africa, and other parts of the world appear unwilling to allow us to do so." |
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Of the election that had catapulted Muzorewa to power, Martin Meredith wrote, "However much disappointment there was with a constitution which entrenched white privilege, the opportunity to vote for a black leader who promised peace was worth having." But as Muzorewa immediately discovered, to the Carter administration, no government without Robert Mugabe in charge was worth having. |
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The shame of 1980 |
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Ultimately, what guided the thinking of the British and the Americans was the fear that siding with Muzorewa and other black moderates over Mugabe would alienate black African states and thus imperil Western diplomatic objectives in sub-Saharan Africa. Because of a narrow Cold War calculus insistent on the notion that black Africa be prevented from turning pro-Soviet (at least those states that were not already in the Soviet camp) and a postcolonial guilt that awarded moral superiority to the first generation of African leaders (many of whom were no better, and in some cases worse, than their colonial oppressors), the pronouncements and interests of the African states weighed far too heavily in the Carter administration's foreign policy. |
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But the decision to oppose the internal settlement was faulty for two reasons. First, if the United States and Britain had supported the pact, there is no telling what further diplomatic pressure they might have brought to bear on Smith to wrangle more concessions for the country's black majority. Western support for the internal settlement would have elevated Muzorewa's standing as a legitimate black leader and thus further deprived the guerrilla groups of the ideological oxygen needed to sustain their war. And with Western backing, Muzorewa would have been better equipped to convince his African neighbors to end their support for Mugabe and Nkomo. In 1978, Chester Crocker (who would later serve as Reagan's assistant secretary of state for African affairs) wrote in the pages of the New Republic that, "given the weak, war-torn economies and minimal military strength of its neighboring states, a black Zimbabwe government which issued from the internal talks would have a good opportunity to establish itself." Sadly, because of misguided Western policy, that black government never had a fighting chance. |
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Second, the Carter administration's preening before black African countries was morally bankrupt. Few of the nations that made up the pro-Patriotic Front Organization of African Unity showed much concern for democracy; it was quite rich to see presidents Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, both of whom had instituted one-party rule soon after independence, giving instructions on democracy to America and Britain. The military dictatorship of Nigeria, threatening to cut off oil to the United States, had the audacity to term one of the rare African democracies "the outcast puppet regime of Bishop Abel Muzorewa." The one-party, pro-Soviet dictatorship of Mozambique (host to Mugabe) offered similar invective. Rustin aptly wrote that "if the presidents of Zambia, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Angola have their way, majority rule will take a form more or less similar to what exists in their own countries; which is to say that it will be a dictatorship by a small black elite over a destitute black population." In response to Carter's refusal to accept the legitimacy of the April 1979 election, the Washington Post editorialized that the administration was "ignoring fairness and impartiality in order to court those black African states, mostly petty dictatorships or paper democracies." |
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And so the guerrilla war against Zimbabwe Rhodesia went on unabated. His country laboring under continuing sanctions, Muzorewa could do little to reassure the black population that he had the ability to bring the peace he had promised. Demoralized by the rejection of Great Britain, the United States, and their African neighbors, the leaders of Zimbabwe Rhodesia agreed in late 1979 to a new set of negotiations to be held at Lancaster House in London, in which the Patriotic Front would participate. The agreement that emerged was essentially the same as the internal settlement, except that it reduced the number of white parliamentary seats from 28 to 20, established a land reform policy of "willing buyer, willing seller" funded by the British and Americans, and, most fatefully, allowed ZANU and ZAPU to participate in a new election, to be held in February 1980. |
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If the international community had rejected the 1979 election, it should have been utterly disgusted with the one held less than a year later. Mugabe insisted that the two wings of the Patriotic Front run separately; he knew that with 75 percent of the country's blacks belonging to his Shona tribe, he would be catapulted into power and could shunt Nkomo (a member of the Ndebele tribe) to the sidelines. Lord Christopher Soames, charged by the British with overseeing the election, found, according to Meredith, that "the scale of intimidation in eastern Rhodesia [bordering Mozambique, which had sheltered Mugabe's ZANU guerrillas] was massive. . . . The mere presence of Mugabe's guerrillas in the villages was enough to deter the local population from showing support for any party other than ZANU." ZANU apparatchiks once again compiled "death lists," making clear to black servants and local tribesmen that they would pay the consequences for not supporting Mugabe. |
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In the weeks leading up to the February election, the British Combined Operations Headquarters was informed of at least one political murder every day. Ultimately, Soames's election observers concluded that in five of Rhodesia's eight electoral provinces, "conditions for a free election no longer existed." Both Muzorewa and Nkomo demanded that Mugabe not be allowed to participate in the elections, but, fearing that any rebuke to Mugabe would restart the guerrilla war, the British and American governments insisted on his participation. In an early indication of what sort of ruler he would become, Mugabe demanded that a Kalashnikov rifle be the ZANU election symbol. At least the interim British administration rejected this ominous request. |
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To top matters off, Mugabe announced in advance that he would abide by the elections only if he won. According to Martin Meredith, throughout the Lancaster House negotiations, Mugabe's "real fear, as it had been all along, was that a negotiated settlement threatened his aim of achieving revolutionary change in Rhodesia." Mugabe finally agreed to the British terms only because the African leaders could no longer put up with the consequences of the Bush war (during the conference, Smith's army bombed crucial railways in Zambia and Mozambique) and because Nkomo went along with the settlement, isolating ZANU. Everything in Mugabe's history indicates that if he had lost the 1980 election, he would have reverted to war. For Rhodesia's beleaguered blacks--who had suffered more than anyone else not only from the oppressive counterinsurgency operations of the white minority government but also from the unforgiving tactics of the guerrillas--the threat of a worsening, protracted civil war all but assured victory for Mugabe. |
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The election result was announced on March 4, 1980.Mugabe took 64 percent of the vote, with over 90 percent of eligible blacks voting. No doubt the higher participation in 1980 had to do with the fact that, in contrast with 1979, guerrillas did not violently suppress turnout. Nevertheless, British election commissioner Sir John Boynton reported that death threats, the murder of candidates and their supporters, property destruction, violent intimidation, and, most portentously, the threat of continued war all occurred with disturbing frequency in the two-month campaign. Mugabe's forces were responsible for 70 percent of ceasefire violations. |
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And lest anyone doubt that Mugabe was the favorite of the front-line states that had aided him in his war against Muzorewa, he left the country during the balloting for meetings with the leaders of Mozambique and Tanzania, a presumptuous act for a would-be president. In the midst of the election, Mugabe announced he would "seek the aid of our friends in Africa if needs be." Freedom House found that "the open or implicit threat by the formerly externally based parties [ZANU and ZAPU] that they would renew the insurgency should they not win represented an important indirect form of intimidation" and that "threats by black and white African states of nonrecognition or intervention in the event of particular electoral outcomes were an external form of intimidation." |
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The Carter administration had declared that though the 1979 election of Muzorewa had been conducted in a "reasonably fair way," it did not merit the United States' support because Mugabe was not involved. The 1980 election, on the other hand, which Mugabe won largely by threatening violence, the Carter administration declared to be "free and fair," leading to the lifting of sanctions. Mugabe, it seems, would have liked to return the favor. In 1980, mere months before Carter would resoundingly lose his reelection bid to Ronald Reagan, Zimbabwe's new prime minister told African-American leaders at a White House ceremony that if Carter "were running in our territory, he would be assured of victory." |
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The defeat of Muzorewa and the triumph of Mugabe cast the West's Rhodesia policy in stark relief: If Muzorewa had chosen Marxist revolution over diplomacy and had endeared himself to African dictators, he would have won Western support. Critics of Muzorewa alleged that his inability to stop the civil war during his brief tenure as prime minister demonstrated ineffectual leadership. In fact, it reflected the determination of Mugabe and Nkomo to keep fighting until they secured power for themselves. The United States and Great Britain gave Mugabe and Nkomo legitimacy by indulging the demands of the African dictators. |
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Muzorewa warned what would happen if Mugabe won: "Any talk of democracy, freedom, and independence will be turned into an impossible dream. . . . This country will find itself wallowing in the dust of poverty, misery, and starvation." To Mugabe's Western enablers, particularly Andrew Young, this must have seemed like the jealous sniping of a man who had been turned out of office. Yet from the vantage point of 2007, Muzorewa's prescience is plain for all to see. |
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Tyranny sets in |
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The Carter administration's victory in Rhodesia was a hollow one. It is true that not every fearsome forecast was immediately borne out: Mugabe did not turn out to be the Soviet or Chinese agent many thought him, and the conflagration raging in Angola did not spread into Zimbabwe. But fatal damage was done. As early as August 1981, just over a year after taking power, Mugabe called for a referendum on whether Zimbabwe should be a one-party state. In 1982 he proclaimed, "ZANU-PF will rule forever," just as he had promised throughout the Bush war. And writing in the New Republic in early 1983, Xan Smiley, an editorial writer for the London Times, reported that Mugabe's "rhetoric of egalitarianism and the demands of traditional authoritarianism mean that individuals are going to get crushed." Not just individuals, but whole groups of people would be crushed. From 1983 until 1987, Mugabe unleashed his North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade troops against supposed Ndebele plotters in the Matabeleland massacres, slaughtering an estimated 25,000 people. |
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The country's black leaders who dared to oppose Mugabe received the treatment inevitably meted out by a paranoid tyrant. In 1983 Mugabe jailed Muzorewa for 10 months, accusing him of plotting with South Africa and Israel to overthrow the regime. He now lives quietly in Zimbabwe, ignored by the world that spurned him nearly 30 years ago. The same year Nkomo, Mugabe's erstwhile ally, fled the country fearing assassination. Mugabe persuaded his old comrade to return and in 1987 forced him to agree to a virtual one-party state, in which ZANU absorbed ZAPU and took 147 out of 150 seats in parliament. Nkomo spent the next 12 years of his life in obscurity. Also in 1987, rightly fearing for his safety, Sithole sought political asylum in the United States. He later returned to Zimbabwe and was elected to parliament. But in 1997, Sithole was convicted of attempting to assassinate Mugabe and was barred from returning to office. Other political opponents either fell into line or have been imprisoned or killed. |
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For some years, Mugabe kept his promise to leave the whites alone. But in 2000 he instigated the forcible seizure of private farmland, which has brought Zimbabwe economic collapse, famine, and a massive refugee crisis. One-third of the country's population is estimated to have fled in the past seven years. The dictator, now 83, having brought his country to its knees, is hanging on only by the support of his armed forces and his fellow African leaders, who share a residual admiration for this hero of African "liberation." |
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Carter is unrepentant about his administration's support for Mugabe. At a Carter Center event in Boston on June 8, he said that he, Young, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had "spent more time on Rhodesia than on the Middle East." Carter admitted that "we supported two revolutionaries in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo." He adopts the "good leader gone bad" hindsight of Mugabe's early backers, stating that "at first [Mugabe] was a very enlightened president." While conceding that Mugabe is now "oppressive," Carter stressed that this murderer of tens of thousands "needs to be treated with respect and assured that if he does deal with those issues [democratization and human rights], he won't be punished or prosecuted for his crimes." Though it has supervised elections in over 60 countries, the 25-year-old Carter Center has no projects in Zimbabwe, nor has Carter (who demonstrates no compunction about lecturing others) attempted to atone for the ruin that his policies as president wreaked. |
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History will not look kindly on those in the West who insisted on bringing the avowed Marxist Mugabe into the government. In particular, the Jimmy Carter foreign policy--feckless in the Iranian hostage crisis, irresolute in the face of mounting Soviet ambitions, and noted in the post-White House years for dalliances with dictators the world over--bears some responsibility for the fate of a small African country with scant connection to American national interests. In response to Carter's comment last month that the Bush administration's foreign policy was the "worst in history," critics immediately cited those well-publicized failures. But the betrayal of Bishop Muzorewa and of all Zimbabweans, black and white, who warned what sort of leader Robert Mugabe would be deserves just as prominent a place among the outrages of the Carter years. |
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=== Subsequent Elections === |
=== Subsequent Elections === |
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Revision as of 19:00, 29 April 2008
Robert Gabriel Mugabe | |
|---|---|
 Mugabe at the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Jan. 31, 2008 | |
| President of Zimbabwe | |
| Assumed office 31 December 1987 | |
| Vice President | Simon Muzenda Joshua Nkomo Joseph Msika Joyce Mujuru |
| Preceded by | Canaan Banana |
| Prime Minister of Zimbabwe | |
| In office 18 April 1980 – 31 December 1987 | |
| President | Canaan Banana |
| Preceded by | Abel Muzorewa (Zimbabwe Rhodesia) |
| Succeeded by | Post abolished |
| Secretary General of Non-Aligned Movement | |
| In office 06 September 1986 – 07 September 1989 | |
| Preceded by | Zail Singh |
| Succeeded by | Janez Drnovšek |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 21 February 1924 Kutama, Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia |
| Political party | ZANU-PF |
| Spouse(s) | Sally Hayfron (deceased) Grace Marufu |
| Alma mater | University of Fort Hare University of London University of South Africa |
| Signature |  |
Robert Mugabe, KCB (born on February 21, 1924) is the autocratic President of Zimbabwe. He has served as the head of government in Zimbabwe since 1980, as Prime Minister from 1980 to 1987 and as the first executive President since 1987.[1] He rose to prominence in the 1960s as a Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) in guerrilla warfare against white-minority rule in Rhodesia in the Bush War (1964–1979).
Emerging from the war, he was hailed by Africans as a hero.[2][3] After a costly intervention in the Second Congo War and mass expropriation of white-owned farmland, Western opinion turned sharply against Mugabe, and various forms of economic sanctions and reductions in aid were imposed. Zimbabwe's economy spiraled downward, leading to food and oil shortages, hyperinflation, and massive emigration. During this recent period his policies have been denounced in the West and at home as racist against Zimbabwe's white minority.[4][5][6] Mugabe has described his critics as "born again colonialists,"[7][8] and both he and his supporters claim that Zimbabwe's problems are the legacy of imperialism,[9] aggravated by Western economic meddling. On 3 April 2008, it was announced in the world press that the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change was claiming to have won control of the parliament. This was confirmed when the results were released, but is currently being disputed.[10]
Early life
Mugabe was born in Matibiri village near Kutama Mission in the Zvimba District northeast of Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia. He had two older brothers, one of them, Michael, was very popular in the village. Both his older brothers died, leaving Robert and his younger brother, Donato.[11] His father, Gabriel Mugabe Matibiri, a carpenter,[12] abandoned the Mugabe family in 1934 after Michael died, in search of work in Bulawayo.[13] Mugabe was raised as a Roman Catholic, studying in Marist Brothers and Jesuit schools, including the exclusive Kutama College, headed by an Irish priest, Father Jerome O'Hea, who took him under his wing. He was bookish and very close to his mother in his youth.[12]. He qualified as a teacher, but left to study at Fort Hare in South Africa graduating in 1951 while meeting contemporaries such as Julius Nyerere, Herbert Chitepo, Robert Sobukwe and Kenneth Kaunda. He then studied at Driefontein in 1952, Salisbury (1953), Gwelo (1954), and Tanzania (1955–1957).
Originally graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Fort Hare in 1951, Mugabe subsequently earned six further degrees through distance learning including a Bachelor of Administration and Bachelor of Education from the University of South Africa and a Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of Laws, Master of Science and Master of Laws, all from the University of London External Programme.[14] The two Law degrees were taken whilst he was in prison, whilst the Master of Science degree was taken during his premiership of Zimbabwe.[15]
After graduating, Mugabe lectured at Chalimbana Teacher Training College, in Zambia from 1955–1958, thereafter he taught at Apowa Secondary School at Takoradi, in the Western Region of Ghana (1958 – 1960) where he met Sally Hayfron, who later became his first wife. During his stay in Ghana, he was influenced and inspired by Ghana's then-Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah. In addition, Mugabe and some of his Zimbabwe African National Union party cadres received instruction at the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute, then at Winneba in southern Ghana.[16][17]
Early political career
Mugabe returned to Southern Rhodesia and joined the National Democratic Party in 1960.[18] The administration of Prime Minister Ian Smith immediately banned the NDP when it later became Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU). Mugabe left ZAPU in 1963 to join the rival Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) which had been formed in 1963 by the Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole, Edgar Tekere, Edson Zvobgo, Enos Nkala and lawyer Herbert Chitepo. ZANU was influenced by the Africanist ideas of the Pan Africanist Congress in South Africa[19] and influenced by Maoism while ZAPU was an ally of the African National Congress and was a supporter of a more orthodox pro-Soviet line on national liberation. Similar divisions can also be seen in the liberation movement in Angola between the MPLA and UNITA.It would have been easy for the party to split along tribal lines between the Ndebele and Mugabe's own Shona tribe, but cross-tribal representation was maintained by his partners. ZANU leader Sithole nominated Robert Mugabe as his Secretary General.
In 1964 he was arrested for “subversive speech” and spent the next 10 years in prison. During that period he earned three degrees, including a law degree from London and a bachelor of administration from the University of South Africa by correspondence courses. Smith did not allow Mugabe out of prison to attend the funeral of Mugabe's three-year-old son.[12] In 1974, while still in prison, Mugabe was elected -- with the powerful influence of Edgar Tekere -- to take over the reigns of ZANU after a no-confidence vote was passed on Ndabaningi Sithole (Mugabe himself abstained from voting). His time in prison burnished his reputation and helped his cause.[12]
Mugabe unilaterally assumed control of ZANU from Mozambique. Later that year, after squabbling with Ndabaningi Sithole, Mugabe formed a militant ZANU faction, leaving Sithole to lead the moderate Zanu (Ndonga) party, which renounced violent struggle.[citation needed] Many opposition leaders mysteriously died during this time, including one who died in a car crash but was allegedly riddled with bullet holes.[12] An opposing newspaper's printing press was bombed and its journalists tortured.[12]
Lancaster House Agreement
Persuasion from B.J. Vorster, himself under pressure from Henry Kissinger, forced Smith to accept in principle that white minority rule could not continue indefinitely. On 3 March 1978 Bishop Abel Muzorewa, Ndabaningi Sithole and other moderate leaders signed an agreement at Governor's Lodge in Salisbury, which paved the way for an interim power-sharing government, in preparation for elections. The elections were won by the United African National Council under Bishop Abel Muzorewa, but international recognition did not follow and sanctions were not lifted. The two 'Patriotic Front' groups under Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo refused to participate and continued the war.
The incoming government did accept an invitation to talks at Lancaster House in September 1979. A ceasefire was negotiated for the talks, which were attended by Smith, Mugabe, Nkomo, Edson Zvobgo and others. Eventually the parties to the talks agreed on a new constitution for a new Republic of Zimbabwe with elections in February 1980. Mugabe had to concede to accepting 20 seats reserved for whites in the new Parliament and to the inability of the new government to alter the constitution for ten years. His return to Zimbabwe in December 1979 was greeted with enormous supportive crowds.
Prime Minister and President
After a campaign marked by intimidation from all sides, mistrust from security forces and reports of full ballot boxes found on the road, the Shona majority was decisive in electing Mugabe to head the first government as prime minister on 4 March 1980. ZANU won 57 out of 80 Common Roll seats in the new parliament, with the 20 white seats all going to the Rhodesian Front.
Mugabe, whose political support came from his Shona-speaking homeland in the north, attempted to build Zimbabwe on a basis of an uneasy coalition with his Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) rivals, whose support came from the Ndebele-speaking south, and with the white minority. Mugabe sought to incorporate ZAPU into his Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) led government and ZAPU's military wing into the army. ZAPU's leader, Joshua Nkomo, was given a series of cabinet positions in Mugabe's government. However, Mugabe was torn between this objective and pressures to meet the expectations of his own ZANU followers for a faster pace of social change.
In 1983 Mugabe fired Nkomo from his cabinet, triggering bitter fighting between ZAPU supporters in the Ndebele-speaking region of the country and the ruling ZANU. Between 1982 and 1985 the military crushed armed resistance from Ndebele groups in the provinces of Matabeleland and the Midlands, leaving Mugabe's rule secure. Mugabe has been accused by the BBC's Panorama programme of committing mass murder during this period of his rule.[20] A peace accord was negotiated in 1987[21]. ZAPU merged into the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) on December 22, 1988.[22] Mugabe brought Nkomo into the government once again as a vice-president.
In 1987 the position of Prime Minister was abolished and Mugabe assumed the new office of executive President of Zimbabwe gaining additional powers in the process. He was re-elected in 1990 and 1996, and in 2002 amid claims of widespread vote-rigging and intimidation. Mugabe's term of office expired at the end of March 2008.
Mugabe has been the Chancellor of the University of Zimbabwe since Parliament passed the University of Zimbabwe Amendment Bill in November 1990.[23]
Gukurahundi
More than 20,000 Ndebele civilians were killed by Mugabe's North-Korean trained 5th Brigade during the Gukurahundi (“the early rain that washes away the chaff”)[12] ethnic massacres.[24][25] Their leader was Perence Shiri who called himself 'Black Jesus'.[26] Mugabe is said to fear prosecution for this massacre, with bills calling for inquiries into the incident sometimes introduced into Parliament.[12] The opposition Movement for Democratic Change has said that if it comes to power, it will call for an international trial of the massacre.[12] Most of the 20,000 killed were innocent civilians.[27]
Social programs
According to a 1995 World Bank report, after independence, "Zimbabwe gave priority to human resource investments and support for smallholder agriculture," and as a result, "smallholder agriculture expanded rapidly during the first half of the 1980s and social indicators improved quickly." From 1980 to 1990 infant mortality decreased from 86 to 49 per 1000 live births, under five mortality was reduced from 128 to 58 per 1000 live births, and immunisation increased from 25% to 80% of the population. Also, "child malnutrition fell from 22% to 12% and life expectancy increased from 56 to 64. By 1990, Zimbabwe had a lower infant mortality rate, higher adult literacy and higher school enrollment rate than average for developing countries."[28]
In 1991 the government of Zimbabwe, short on hard currency and under international pressure, embarked on an austerity program. The World Bank's 1995 report explained that such reforms were required because Zimbabwe was unable to absorb into its labour market the many graduates from its impressive education system and that it needed to attract additional foreign investments. The reforms however undermined the livelihoods of Zimbabwe's poor majority; the report noted "large segments of the population, including most smallholder farmers and small scale enterprises, find themselves in a vulnerable position with limited capacity to respond to evolving market opportunities. This is due to their limited access to natural, technical and financial resources, to the contraction of many public services for smallholder agriculture, and to their still nascent links with larger scale enterprises."
Moreover, these people were forced to live on marginal lands as Zimbabwe's best lands were reserved for mainly white landlords growing cash crops for export, a sector of the economy favoured by the IMF's plan. For the poor on the communal lands, "existing levels of production in these areas are now threatened by the environmental fragility of the natural resource base and the unsustainability of existing farming practices."[28] The International Monetary Fund later suspended aid, saying reforms were "not on track."
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), life expectancy at birth for Zimbabwean men is 37 years and is 34 years for women, the lowest such figures for any nation.[29] The World Bank's 1995 report predicted this decline in life expectancy from its 1990 height of 64 years when, commenting on health care system cuts mandated by the IMF structural adjustment programme, it stated that "The decline in resources is creating strains and threatening the sustainability of health sector achievements."[28]
The Zimbabwe dollar suffers from the highest Inflation rate of any currency in the world. Zimbabwe official statistics reveal that the annualised inflation rate for September 2006 was 1000%. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), in its World Economic Outlook database, reported inflation in 2006 at 1216%.[30] Inflation reached 9,000% on June 21,[31] and 11,000% on June 22, 2007[32]. It continues to climb rapidly, and reportedly exceeds 100,000% as of April 2008. [33]
While Zimbabwe has suffered in many other measures under Mugabe, as a former schoolteacher he has been well-known for his commitment to education. [12] However, Catholic Archbishop of Zimbabwe Pius Ncube decried the educational situation in the country, saying, among other scathing indictments of Mugabe, "We had the best education in Africa and now our schools are closing."[34]
Views on homosexuality
Mugabe has waged a violent campaign against homosexuals, arguing that prior to colonisation Zimbabweans did not engage in homosexual acts.[35] His first major public condemnation of homosexuality came in 1995 during the Zimbabwe International Book Fair in August 1995.[36] He told the audience that homosexuality
degrades human dignity. It's unnatural and there is no question ever of allowing these people to behave worse than dogs and pigs. If dogs and pigs do not do it, why must human beings? We have our own culture, and we must re-dedicate ourselves to our traditional values that make us human beings... What we are being persuaded to accept is sub-animal behaviour and we will never allow it here. If you see people parading themselves as lesbians and gays, arrest them and hand them over to the police![37]
In September 1995, Zimbabwe's parliament introduced legislation banning homosexual acts.[36] In 1997 a court found Canaan Banana, Mugabe's predecessor and the first President of Zimbabwe, guilty of 11 counts of sodomy and indecent assault.[38] Banana's trial proved embarrassing for Mugabe, when Banana's accusers alleged that Mugabe knew about Banana's conduct and had done nothing to stop it.[39]
Second Congo War
Mugabe was blamed for Zimbabwe's participation in the Second Congo War in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At a time when the Zimbabwean economy was struggling, Zimbabwe responded to a call by the Southern African Development Community to help the struggling regime in Kinshasa. The Democratic Republic of the Congo had been invaded by Rwanda and Uganda, both of which claimed that their civilians, and regional stability, were under constant threat of attack by various terrorist groups based in the Congo.[40] However, the Congolese government, as well as international commentators, charged that the motive for the invasion was to grab the rich mineral resources of eastern Congo.[41][42] The war raised accusations of corruption, with officials alleged to be plundering the Congo's mineral reserves. Mugabe's defence minister Moven Mahachi said, "Instead of our army in the DRC burdening the treasury for more resources, which are not available, it embarks on viable projects for the sake of generating the necessary revenue."[43]
Land reform
When Zimbabwe gained independence 46.5% of the country's arable land was owned by around 6,000 commercial farmers.[44] Mugabe accepted a "willing buyer, willing seller" plan as part of the Lancaster House Agreement of 1979, among other concessions to the white minority.[45] As part of this agreement, land redistribution was blocked for a period of 10 years.[46]
In 1997, the new British government led by Tony Blair unilaterally stopped funding the "willing buyer, willing seller" land reform programme on the basis that the initial £44 million allocated under the Thatcher government was used to purchase land for members of the ruling elite rather than landless peasants. Furthermore, Britain's ruling Labour Party felt no obligation to continue paying white farmers compensation, or in minister Clare Short's words, "I should make it clear that we do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe. We are a new Government from diverse backgrounds without links to former colonial interests. My own origins are Irish and as you know we were colonised not colonisers."[47]
Some commentators, such as Matthew Sweet in the London Independent, hold Cecil Rhodes ultimately responsible:
But it was Cecil Rhodes who originated the racist 'land grabs' to which Zimbabwe's current miseries can ultimately be traced. It was Rhodes who in 1887 told the House Of Assembly in Capetown,South Africa that 'the native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise.We must adopt a system on despotism in our relations with the barbarians of Southern Africa... I personally prefer land to niggers.'[48]
On 12 to 13 February 2000, a referendum was held on a new constitution. The proposed change would have limited future presidents to two terms, but as it was not retroactive, Mugabe could have stood for another two terms. It also would have made his government and military officials immune from prosecution for any illegal acts committed while in office. In addition, it allowed the government to confiscate white-owned land for redistribution to black farmers without compensation. The motion failed with 55% of participants against the referendum.[49] The referendum had a 20% turnout fuelled by an effective SMS campaign. Mugabe declared that he would "abide by the will of the people". The vote was a surprise to ZANU-PF, and an embarrassment before parliamentary elections due in mid-April. Almost immediately, self-styled "war veterans", led by Chenjerai 'Hitler' Hunzvi, began invading white-owned farms. Those who did not leave voluntarily were often tortured and sometimes killed. Many were forced to drink diesel fuel as a form of torture.[50] On April 6, 2000, Parliament pushed through an amendment, taken word for word from the draft constitution that was rejected by voters, allowing the seizure of white-owned farmlands without due reimbursement or payment[51].
Since these actions, agricultural production has plummeted and the economy is crippled. Once the "bread basket" of southern Africa and a major agricultural exporter, Zimbabwe now depends on food programs and support from outside to feed its population.[52] A third of the population depends on food supplies from the World Food Programme to avoid starvation.[52]
On December 8, 2003, in protest against a further 18 months of suspension from the Commonwealth of Nations (thereby cutting foreign aid to Zimbabwe), Mugabe withdrew his country from the Commonwealth. Mugabe informed the leaders of Jamaica, Nigeria and South Africa of his decision when they telephoned him to discuss the situation. Zimbabwe's government said the President did not accept the Commonwealth's position, and was leaving the group[53].
The United Nations provoked anger when its Food and Agriculture Organisation invited Mugabe to speak at a celebration of its 60th anniversary in Rome. Critics of the move argued that since Mugabe could not feed his own people without the UN's support, he was an inappropriate speaker for the group, which has a mission statement of "helping to build a world without hunger."[52]
In 2005 Mugabe ordered a raid conducted on what the government termed "illegal shelters" in Harare, resulting in 10,000 urban poor being left homeless from "Operation Murambatsvina (English: Operation Drive Out the Rubbish)." The authorities themselves had moved the poor inhabitants to the area in 1992, telling them not to build permanent homes and that their new homes were temporary, leading the inhabitants to build their own temporary shelters out of cardboard and wood.[54] Since the inhabitants of the shantytowns overwhelmingly supported the Movement for Democratic Change opposition party in the previous election, many alleged that the mass bulldozing was politically motivated.[54] The UK's Daily Telegraph noted that Mugabe's "latest palace," in the style of a pagoda, was located a mile from the destroyed shelters.[54] The UN released a report stating that the actions of Mugabe resulted in the loss of home or livelihood for more than 700,000 Zimbabweans and negatively affected 2.4 million more.[52]
As of September 2006, Mugabe's family owns three farms: Highfield Estate in Norton, 45 km west of Harare, Iron Mask Estate in Mazowe, about 40 km from Harare, and Foyle Farm in Mazowe, formerly owned by Ian Webster and adjacent to Iron Mask Farm, renamed to Gushungo Farm after Mugabe's own clan name.[55] These farms were seized forcibly from their previous owners[56].
Mugabe blames the food shortages on drought.[52] Zimbabwe's state-owned press accused former British Prime Minister Tony Blair of using chemical weapons to incite droughts and famines in Africa.[52]
Mugabe's Rise to Power
In April 1979, 64 percent of the black citizens of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) lined up at the polls to vote in the first democratic election in the history of that southern African nation. Two-thirds of them supported Abel Muzorewa, a bishop in the United Methodist Church. He was the first black prime minister of a country only 4 percent white. Muzorewa's victory put an end to the 14-year political odyssey of outgoing prime minister Ian Smith, the stubborn World War II veteran who had infamously announced in 1976, "I do not believe in black majority rule--not in a thousand years." Fortunately for the country's blacks, majority rule came sooner than Smith had in mind.
Less than a year after Muzorewa's victory, however, in February 1980, another election was held in Zimbabwe. This time, Robert Mugabe, the Marxist who had fought a seven-year guerrilla war against Rhodesia's white-led government, won 64 percent of the vote, after a campaign marked by widespread intimidation, outright violence, and Mugabe's threat to continue the civil war if he lost. Mugabe became prime minister and was toasted by the international community and media as a new sort of African leader. "I find that I am fascinated by his intelligence, by his dedication. The only thing that frustrates me about Robert Mugabe is that he is so damned incorruptible," Andrew Young, Jimmy Carter's ambassador to the United Nations, had gushed to the Times of London in 1978. The rest, as they say, is history.
That second election is widely known and cited: 1980 is the famous year Zimbabwe won its independence from Great Britain and power was transferred from an obstinate white ruler to a liberation hero. But the circumstances of the first election, and the story of the man who won it, have been lost to the past. As the Mugabe regime--responsible for the torture and murder of thousands, starvation, genocide, the world's highest inflation and lowest life expectancy--teeters on the brink of disaster after 27 years of authoritarian rule, it is instructive to go back and examine what happened in those crucial intervening months.
To understand the genesis of that oft-forgotten 1979 election, it is necessary to revisit Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, when the British colony joined the United States as the only territory in history to separate successfully from the British Empire without its consent. Five years earlier, in a speech to the South African parliament, British prime minister Harold Macmillan had warned that the "wind of change" was blowing through Africa. "Whether we like it or not," Macmillan said, "this growth of national consciousness is a political fact." Rhodesian whites would not stand for the British policy of "No Independence Before Majority African Rule," however, and in 1964 they overwhelmingly elected Smith premier. When the Rhodesian government reached an impasse with the British over conditions for autonomy, Smith, widely supported by the country's whites, declared Rhodesia independent. And so, on November 11, 1965, the sun abruptly set on another outpost of the British Empire. The move was immediately condemned as illegal ("an act of treason") by the British government, the Commonwealth, and the United Nations. Independent Rhodesia was not recognized by any country; even apartheid South Africa sent no ambassador to Salisbury, the capital. Britain and the U.N. imposed economic sanctions, and many Rhodesians worried that an oil embargo would cripple their landlocked country.
Over the next decade there followed a series of failed negotiations between the two sides. The British demanded majority rule, but would consider at most a phased plan that would gradually bring a black government to power. Smith, whose Rhodesian Front party was consistently reelected, would have none of it. He spoke of Rhodesia's defense of "Western, Christian civilization" and out-maneuvered a succession of British prime ministers, who all had to contend with the embarrassing "Rhodesia problem." Somehow, this tenacious little former colony held out against the world's once-great British Empire, busting sanctions, increasing white immigration, and keeping domestic black political opposition at bay with a succession of authoritarian laws that effectively banned political dissent.
Smith's obstinacy played a role in emboldening--and radicalizing--his enemies. The refusal of the country's whites to accept black rule created the vacuum in which leaders like Robert Mugabe, of the Chinese-backed Zimbabwean African National Union (ZANU), and Joshua Nkomo, of the Soviet-supported Zimbabwean African People's Union (ZAPU), emerged. In 1972, these two organizations started a civil war, aiming to overthrow the white regime by force. ZANU and ZAPU viewed Smith as a mortal enemy, but they were hardly more pleasant to each other, in spite of forming an official alliance, the Patriotic Front, in 1976. With rival superpower backers and different staging grounds (ZANU in Mozambique, ZAPU in Zambia), the two groups spent about as much effort fighting for control of the revolutionary movement as they did against the white regime. Both the white government and the guerrillas demonstrated remarkable ruthlessness, and the seven-year Bush war would claim some 20,000 lives in a country of 7 million.
Moderates to the rescue
By 1977, it was clear that change was coming. Aided tremendously by the shuttle diplomacy of Henry Kissinger during the Nixon and Ford administrations (Kissinger enticed the apartheid government of South Africa with promises of greater international legitimacy if it would give the boot to the friendly white regime on its northern border), Smith finally came to accept the principle of majority rule, though with major conditions. He insisted that whites maintain control of key government institutions like the army, civil service, and judiciary. He also required that whites have a disproportionate number of seats in parliament so as to prevent any radical constitutional changes. And Smith ruled out serious land reform.
Despite these vestiges of the old regime, Smith's acceptance of majority rule was momentous: It opened the way for a peaceful transition. For years, Smith had tried to negotiate a settlement with several black nationalist leaders who had renounced violence in their campaigns for nonracial democracy. Primary among them was Muzorewa, a small, American-educated pastor who avoided the internecine fighting that had characterized Zimbabwean resistance politics throughout the 1960s. He was a forthright critic of the government's racial discrimination and had supported civil disobedience and mass protest in the past. The United Nations had honored him for Outstanding Achievement in Human Rights. "If religion just means to go to church and pray, then it is a scandal. The gospel is concerned about where a man sleeps, what a man earns, how he is treated by the government," he told congregants. The other black leaders with whom Smith pledged to work were the Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole, a Methodist founder of ZANU who had been imprisoned for 10 years for opposition activities--including an alleged assassination attempt against Smith--but who had forsworn violence, and Chief Jeremiah Chirau, a tribal elder who had long been amenable to white interests. Smith and his moderate black allies hoped that if a multiracial government could be cobbled together, black African states would withdraw their support for the guerrillas and make way for an anti-Communist black government.
Muzorewa and Sithole, contrary to the patronizing and ugly attacks that would soon come from the Carter administration and the Western left, were not stooges (although Chirau, it should be noted, was funded by the Rhodesian government and depended on it for his status as a recognized tribal leader). Sithole had actually led the guerrilla fight against the white regime until the power-hungry Mugabe deposed him. Muzorewa's speeches regularly drew crowds of hundreds of thousands, and he was widely considered the most popular black political leader in the country. He solidified his antigovernment bona fides when the Smith regime branded him a Soviet lackey (as it did all its opponents) even though he was staunchly anti-Communist. These moderate black leaders were motivated, first and foremost, by a desire to end the bloodshed. By contrast, Mugabe and Nkomo made it clear that their Patriotic Front would not give up the fight and participate in elections unless they were assured of victory. In so doing, the guerrilla leaders removed any doubt that they had no interest in democracy.
African politics, Carter-style
Into this picture stepped Andrew Young. Early in his tenure at the United Nations, Young, a former mayor of Atlanta, displayed a naive, if not baleful, outlook on southern African affairs, remarking that Cuban troops brought a "certain order and stability" to wartorn Angola. Young had earlier called Smith a "monster" and likened him to Uganda's mass-murdering Idi Amin. Nevertheless, Carter made Young his point man on Africa. According to Martin Meredith, a former southern Africa correspondent for the Sunday Times of London, "Young was not, perhaps, the best choice the Americans could have made" for negotiations in Rhodesia. "He had a reputation for being recklessly outspoken on subjects about which he appeared to know little, and Rhodesia was no exception." Time said some State Department careerists thought of Young as an "unguided missile."
In September 1977, the Carter administration announced its "Anglo-American plan," drawn up in conjunction with the Labour government of Prime Minister James Callaghan. The plan called for British administration of Rhodesia backed up by a U.N. peacekeeping force, a constitution ensuring universal adult suffrage, and majority rule by 1978. Majority rule was to be tempered, however, by the reservation of 20 out of 100 parliamentary seats for whites. The proposal also called for the incorporation of ZANU and ZAPU guerrilla units into the new country's army and, more important, the participation of the two nationalist movements in the country's elections. Smith, along with the moderate black leaders, opposed this plan because it would have led to a military dominated by Mugabe and Nkomo's forces.
Instead, Smith came up with what he and his popularly supported black allies termed the "internal settlement." In March 1978, they formed an executive council that would serve as a transitional government until democratic elections were held the following year. This internal settlement called for the promulgation of a new constitution establishing majority rule, but maintaining 28 out of 100 seats in the new parliament for whites. This was not a perfect proposal, but Muzorewa--no doubt expressing the desires of the country's justly impatient black majority--declared that it created "the machinery for dismantling the structure and practices of colonialism and racism and of minority rule." Muzorewa, Sithole, and Chirau understood the economic necessity of keeping the white population engaged in Zimbabwe's future, and hoped that an agreement acceptable to both black and white would discredit the guerrilla groups and help put an end to the Bush war. Eighty-five percent of the country's whites supported the agreement in a January 1979 referendum: The illusion of perpetual white rule was dead. Elections were scheduled for April 1979. Both Mugabe and Nkomo--in spite of their commitment to violence and opposition to democracy--were offered seats on the Executive Council along with the other black leaders but, fearing this would hurt their chances of ever gaining absolute control over the country, they refused.
It was not altogether unreasonable to protect the interests of the white minority, as the functioning of the Zimbabwean economy depended on the skills of educated whites who, by the late 1970s, were fleeing the country at the rate of 1,000 per month. To understand what sort of fate might befall a Rhodesia conquered by Marxist rebels, one had only to look to the former Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola, which, when overthrown in 1975 after the fall of the Caetano regime a year before, witnessed the immediate mass emigration of Portuguese citizens (about a quarter of a million from each country) and the collapse of those nations' economies. In light of these disastrous post-colonial developments, the desire to keep as many skilled whites as possible within Rhodesia after the transition to a black government was not just the selfish concern of the whites themselves; the presidents of African states that depended on Rhodesia for trade understood that white interests would have to be protected for an extended period of time. This was not an unusual consideration; Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia, former British colonies all, reserved extra parliamentary seats for whites for a transitional period. Alas, it did not stop the three countries from turning into dictatorships.
The 1979 election
The Carter administration, the Labour government in Britain, and the international left all insisted that Mugabe and Nkomo be part of the negotiating process--on its face a concession to terrorism. Presaging the edicts of Al Qaeda in Iraq, both guerrilla leaders pledged violence against any black Zimbabwean who dared take part in the April balloting. Nkomo called for a "bloodbath." A year earlier he had ridiculed the "all party nonsense" advocated by the moderate black leaders and said, "We mean to get that country by force, and we shall get it." Mugabe, not to be outdone, issued a public death list of 50 individuals associated with the internal settlement, including the three black leaders of the executive council. ZANU described these individuals as "Zimbabwean black bourgeoisie, traitors, fellow-travelers, and puppets of the Ian Smith regime, opportunistic running-dogs and other capitalist vultures." Mugabe also expressed his belief that "the multiparty system is a luxury" and said that if Zimbabwean blacks did not like Marxism, "then we will have to reeducate them." This was the same Mugabe whom Young, in that 1978 interview with the Times of London, had called "a very gentle man," adding, "I can't imagine Joshua Nkomo, or Robert Mugabe, ever pulling the trigger on a gun to kill anyone. I doubt that they ever have."
Nevertheless, in April 1979, in a scene reminiscent of the recent Iraqi elections, nearly 3 million blacks came out to vote under a state of martial law and with armed guerrillas actively seeking to disrupt the balloting. Although 100,000 soldiers protected the polling places, 10 civilians were killed by Mugabe and Nkomo's forces. Even so, the election was a resounding success and produced a clear verdict. An overwhelming majority of voters chose Muzorewa to become the first black prime minister of Zimbabwe Rhodesia, as the country was now called.
Sadly, this democratic outcome was a chimera. Muzorewa--spurned by the West, deemed illegitimate by the African dictatorships, and forced to contend with Communist-armed insurgents--would hold power for a mere matter of months. The betrayal of Muzorewa is one of the more craven episodes in American foreign policy.
Liberal international opinion condemned the election before it ever took place. Andrew Young called the interim government "neofascist," and the New York Times editorialized that the election would be a "moral and diplomatic disaster." In March 1979, 185 individuals signed a statement calling it a "fraud" and opined that "free elections require . . . freedom for all political parties to campaign," presumably even parties committed to one-party rule and violence if they do not win. Then, once the election took place, the left discredited it as a charade. A cover story in the Nation by British journalist David Caute, entitled "The Sham Election in Rhodesia," featured a cartoon with a smiling white man in safari outfit holding a gun as sheep with black faces ("electoral livestock," in Caute's words) lined up to vote. Caute likened the new black government to Vichy France.
The appearance of a popularly elected, black-led, anti-Marxist government in Africa confronted Western liberals with a challenge: Would they accept this interim agreement, widely endorsed by the country's blacks, as a step on the path to full majority rule, or would they reject the democratic will of the Zimbabwean people in favor of guerrilla groups that supported Soviet-style dictatorship? Caute at least had the honesty to admit that "Mugabe, indeed, openly espouses a one-party state and makes no secret of the fact that any election won by ZANU would be Zimbabwe's last."
Bayard Rustin, the black civil rights leader who had been the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington and the national chairman of the Social Democrats USA, observed the April election as part of a Freedom House delegation. A founder of the Committee to Support South African Resistance, Rustin was outraged at the response of those on the left. "No election held in any country at any time within memory has been more widely or vociferously scorned by international opinion than the election conducted last April in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe Rhodesia," he wrote in Commentary. The Freedom House delegation, whose members had previously monitored elections in 26 countries, interviewed over 600 black voters and visited more than 60 polling stations throughout the country. Rustin determined the elections to be "remarkably free and fair." Even the Nation editorial board conceded that the elections had "undeniably mobilized a genuine outpouring of sentiment for peace among black Rhodesians." The New York Times, like Mugabe and Nkomo, however, did not care about the democratic means employed, only the end result. "The real issue is not how the election was conducted, but what it was about," the Times intoned, snidely referring to the black political organizations participating in the elections as the "collaborating parties."
"The contrast between how the election was viewed by most Zimbabweans (the name preferred by blacks) and how it was described by critics outside the country is nothing less than extraordinary," Rustin wrote. With the United States openly deferring to the wishes of ZANU, ZAPU, and their enablers among the African tyrannies, Rustin said, "We have found ourselves, until now, tacitly aligned with groups armed by Moscow, hostile to America, antagonistic to democracy, and unpopular within Zimbabwe Rhodesia itself." Rustin appropriately referred to the Patriotic Front as a "paper political alliance" that claimed not only a base of popular support it did not have, but also, and more ominously, a natural right to everlasting power it certainly did not merit. Rustin was hardly the only liberal supportive of the interim government; it should be noted that accompanying him on the Freedom House delegation was the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Al Lowenstein (the founder of the 1968 Dump Johnson movement), who aggressively lobbied Congress to support the nascent, democratic Zimbabwe Rhodesia.
After the election, the Patriotic Front continued to wage war on the new multiracial government, which proceeded to defend itself with an army and police force that were, respectively, 85 percent and 75 percent black. But the government also extended an olive branch to the guerrillas in hopes of achieving a ceasefire and promised that any and all guerrillas willing to put down their guns would have a "safe return" to civilian life without fear of punishment. Would the guerrilla groups maintain their campaign against Zimbabwe Rhodesia now that a black prime minister had been elected? The government got its answer in May. Four of Prime Minister Muzorewa's envoys to the guerrillas were seized by Mugabe's forces, displayed before 200 tribesmen, and shot as an example of what would become of those who negotiated with the new black government. Six weeks later, 39 representatives of Rev. Sithole were also murdered.
The question remained of how the United States would relate to the new democratically elected black government. In 1978, Congress had passed the Case-Javits Amendment, which compelled the president to lift the sanctions on Rhodesia (in place since a 1966 U.N. Security Council resolution) if the regime held free and fair elections and showed a good-faith effort to negotiate with guerrilla leaders. Undoubtedly, the April 1979 election and the interim government's invitation to the Patriotic Front to participate met these conditions. Appropriately, two weeks after the election, the Senate passed a nonbinding resolution 75-19 calling on the Carter administration to lift sanctions. Unable to challenge the validity of the Zimbabwe Rhodesia government on the merits as stipulated by Congress, Carter persuaded congressional allies to pass a new bill that would allow him to maintain sanctions in order to protect America's national interests in Africa, which he believed would be threatened if the United States recognized a government not favored by the thugs and tyrants on the continent.
In July, Muzorewa came to the United States determined to "remove the blindness" of the Carter administration. He said that there were "some people who are sick in the head in the international world" for maintaining sanctions against a country that had transitioned peacefully from white power to majority rule. Muzorewa was far too sanguine about his ability to persuade Jimmy Carter and Andrew Young; their blindness was incurable. In October, all four members of the Zimbabwe Rhodesia executive council traveled to the United States to plead for recognition, and Carter refused to meet with them. Disappointed by the West's rebuff, Muzorewa noted that while Zimbabweans "are prepared to forget the past and work together with our white brethren, . . . some people in Britain, America, Africa, and other parts of the world appear unwilling to allow us to do so."
Of the election that had catapulted Muzorewa to power, Martin Meredith wrote, "However much disappointment there was with a constitution which entrenched white privilege, the opportunity to vote for a black leader who promised peace was worth having." But as Muzorewa immediately discovered, to the Carter administration, no government without Robert Mugabe in charge was worth having.
The shame of 1980
Ultimately, what guided the thinking of the British and the Americans was the fear that siding with Muzorewa and other black moderates over Mugabe would alienate black African states and thus imperil Western diplomatic objectives in sub-Saharan Africa. Because of a narrow Cold War calculus insistent on the notion that black Africa be prevented from turning pro-Soviet (at least those states that were not already in the Soviet camp) and a postcolonial guilt that awarded moral superiority to the first generation of African leaders (many of whom were no better, and in some cases worse, than their colonial oppressors), the pronouncements and interests of the African states weighed far too heavily in the Carter administration's foreign policy.
But the decision to oppose the internal settlement was faulty for two reasons. First, if the United States and Britain had supported the pact, there is no telling what further diplomatic pressure they might have brought to bear on Smith to wrangle more concessions for the country's black majority. Western support for the internal settlement would have elevated Muzorewa's standing as a legitimate black leader and thus further deprived the guerrilla groups of the ideological oxygen needed to sustain their war. And with Western backing, Muzorewa would have been better equipped to convince his African neighbors to end their support for Mugabe and Nkomo. In 1978, Chester Crocker (who would later serve as Reagan's assistant secretary of state for African affairs) wrote in the pages of the New Republic that, "given the weak, war-torn economies and minimal military strength of its neighboring states, a black Zimbabwe government which issued from the internal talks would have a good opportunity to establish itself." Sadly, because of misguided Western policy, that black government never had a fighting chance.
Second, the Carter administration's preening before black African countries was morally bankrupt. Few of the nations that made up the pro-Patriotic Front Organization of African Unity showed much concern for democracy; it was quite rich to see presidents Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, both of whom had instituted one-party rule soon after independence, giving instructions on democracy to America and Britain. The military dictatorship of Nigeria, threatening to cut off oil to the United States, had the audacity to term one of the rare African democracies "the outcast puppet regime of Bishop Abel Muzorewa." The one-party, pro-Soviet dictatorship of Mozambique (host to Mugabe) offered similar invective. Rustin aptly wrote that "if the presidents of Zambia, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Angola have their way, majority rule will take a form more or less similar to what exists in their own countries; which is to say that it will be a dictatorship by a small black elite over a destitute black population." In response to Carter's refusal to accept the legitimacy of the April 1979 election, the Washington Post editorialized that the administration was "ignoring fairness and impartiality in order to court those black African states, mostly petty dictatorships or paper democracies."
And so the guerrilla war against Zimbabwe Rhodesia went on unabated. His country laboring under continuing sanctions, Muzorewa could do little to reassure the black population that he had the ability to bring the peace he had promised. Demoralized by the rejection of Great Britain, the United States, and their African neighbors, the leaders of Zimbabwe Rhodesia agreed in late 1979 to a new set of negotiations to be held at Lancaster House in London, in which the Patriotic Front would participate. The agreement that emerged was essentially the same as the internal settlement, except that it reduced the number of white parliamentary seats from 28 to 20, established a land reform policy of "willing buyer, willing seller" funded by the British and Americans, and, most fatefully, allowed ZANU and ZAPU to participate in a new election, to be held in February 1980.
If the international community had rejected the 1979 election, it should have been utterly disgusted with the one held less than a year later. Mugabe insisted that the two wings of the Patriotic Front run separately; he knew that with 75 percent of the country's blacks belonging to his Shona tribe, he would be catapulted into power and could shunt Nkomo (a member of the Ndebele tribe) to the sidelines. Lord Christopher Soames, charged by the British with overseeing the election, found, according to Meredith, that "the scale of intimidation in eastern Rhodesia [bordering Mozambique, which had sheltered Mugabe's ZANU guerrillas] was massive. . . . The mere presence of Mugabe's guerrillas in the villages was enough to deter the local population from showing support for any party other than ZANU." ZANU apparatchiks once again compiled "death lists," making clear to black servants and local tribesmen that they would pay the consequences for not supporting Mugabe.
In the weeks leading up to the February election, the British Combined Operations Headquarters was informed of at least one political murder every day. Ultimately, Soames's election observers concluded that in five of Rhodesia's eight electoral provinces, "conditions for a free election no longer existed." Both Muzorewa and Nkomo demanded that Mugabe not be allowed to participate in the elections, but, fearing that any rebuke to Mugabe would restart the guerrilla war, the British and American governments insisted on his participation. In an early indication of what sort of ruler he would become, Mugabe demanded that a Kalashnikov rifle be the ZANU election symbol. At least the interim British administration rejected this ominous request.
To top matters off, Mugabe announced in advance that he would abide by the elections only if he won. According to Martin Meredith, throughout the Lancaster House negotiations, Mugabe's "real fear, as it had been all along, was that a negotiated settlement threatened his aim of achieving revolutionary change in Rhodesia." Mugabe finally agreed to the British terms only because the African leaders could no longer put up with the consequences of the Bush war (during the conference, Smith's army bombed crucial railways in Zambia and Mozambique) and because Nkomo went along with the settlement, isolating ZANU. Everything in Mugabe's history indicates that if he had lost the 1980 election, he would have reverted to war. For Rhodesia's beleaguered blacks--who had suffered more than anyone else not only from the oppressive counterinsurgency operations of the white minority government but also from the unforgiving tactics of the guerrillas--the threat of a worsening, protracted civil war all but assured victory for Mugabe.
The election result was announced on March 4, 1980.Mugabe took 64 percent of the vote, with over 90 percent of eligible blacks voting. No doubt the higher participation in 1980 had to do with the fact that, in contrast with 1979, guerrillas did not violently suppress turnout. Nevertheless, British election commissioner Sir John Boynton reported that death threats, the murder of candidates and their supporters, property destruction, violent intimidation, and, most portentously, the threat of continued war all occurred with disturbing frequency in the two-month campaign. Mugabe's forces were responsible for 70 percent of ceasefire violations.
And lest anyone doubt that Mugabe was the favorite of the front-line states that had aided him in his war against Muzorewa, he left the country during the balloting for meetings with the leaders of Mozambique and Tanzania, a presumptuous act for a would-be president. In the midst of the election, Mugabe announced he would "seek the aid of our friends in Africa if needs be." Freedom House found that "the open or implicit threat by the formerly externally based parties [ZANU and ZAPU] that they would renew the insurgency should they not win represented an important indirect form of intimidation" and that "threats by black and white African states of nonrecognition or intervention in the event of particular electoral outcomes were an external form of intimidation."
The Carter administration had declared that though the 1979 election of Muzorewa had been conducted in a "reasonably fair way," it did not merit the United States' support because Mugabe was not involved. The 1980 election, on the other hand, which Mugabe won largely by threatening violence, the Carter administration declared to be "free and fair," leading to the lifting of sanctions. Mugabe, it seems, would have liked to return the favor. In 1980, mere months before Carter would resoundingly lose his reelection bid to Ronald Reagan, Zimbabwe's new prime minister told African-American leaders at a White House ceremony that if Carter "were running in our territory, he would be assured of victory."
The defeat of Muzorewa and the triumph of Mugabe cast the West's Rhodesia policy in stark relief: If Muzorewa had chosen Marxist revolution over diplomacy and had endeared himself to African dictators, he would have won Western support. Critics of Muzorewa alleged that his inability to stop the civil war during his brief tenure as prime minister demonstrated ineffectual leadership. In fact, it reflected the determination of Mugabe and Nkomo to keep fighting until they secured power for themselves. The United States and Great Britain gave Mugabe and Nkomo legitimacy by indulging the demands of the African dictators.
Muzorewa warned what would happen if Mugabe won: "Any talk of democracy, freedom, and independence will be turned into an impossible dream. . . . This country will find itself wallowing in the dust of poverty, misery, and starvation." To Mugabe's Western enablers, particularly Andrew Young, this must have seemed like the jealous sniping of a man who had been turned out of office. Yet from the vantage point of 2007, Muzorewa's prescience is plain for all to see.
Tyranny sets in
The Carter administration's victory in Rhodesia was a hollow one. It is true that not every fearsome forecast was immediately borne out: Mugabe did not turn out to be the Soviet or Chinese agent many thought him, and the conflagration raging in Angola did not spread into Zimbabwe. But fatal damage was done. As early as August 1981, just over a year after taking power, Mugabe called for a referendum on whether Zimbabwe should be a one-party state. In 1982 he proclaimed, "ZANU-PF will rule forever," just as he had promised throughout the Bush war. And writing in the New Republic in early 1983, Xan Smiley, an editorial writer for the London Times, reported that Mugabe's "rhetoric of egalitarianism and the demands of traditional authoritarianism mean that individuals are going to get crushed." Not just individuals, but whole groups of people would be crushed. From 1983 until 1987, Mugabe unleashed his North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade troops against supposed Ndebele plotters in the Matabeleland massacres, slaughtering an estimated 25,000 people.
The country's black leaders who dared to oppose Mugabe received the treatment inevitably meted out by a paranoid tyrant. In 1983 Mugabe jailed Muzorewa for 10 months, accusing him of plotting with South Africa and Israel to overthrow the regime. He now lives quietly in Zimbabwe, ignored by the world that spurned him nearly 30 years ago. The same year Nkomo, Mugabe's erstwhile ally, fled the country fearing assassination. Mugabe persuaded his old comrade to return and in 1987 forced him to agree to a virtual one-party state, in which ZANU absorbed ZAPU and took 147 out of 150 seats in parliament. Nkomo spent the next 12 years of his life in obscurity. Also in 1987, rightly fearing for his safety, Sithole sought political asylum in the United States. He later returned to Zimbabwe and was elected to parliament. But in 1997, Sithole was convicted of attempting to assassinate Mugabe and was barred from returning to office. Other political opponents either fell into line or have been imprisoned or killed.
For some years, Mugabe kept his promise to leave the whites alone. But in 2000 he instigated the forcible seizure of private farmland, which has brought Zimbabwe economic collapse, famine, and a massive refugee crisis. One-third of the country's population is estimated to have fled in the past seven years. The dictator, now 83, having brought his country to its knees, is hanging on only by the support of his armed forces and his fellow African leaders, who share a residual admiration for this hero of African "liberation."
Carter is unrepentant about his administration's support for Mugabe. At a Carter Center event in Boston on June 8, he said that he, Young, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had "spent more time on Rhodesia than on the Middle East." Carter admitted that "we supported two revolutionaries in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo." He adopts the "good leader gone bad" hindsight of Mugabe's early backers, stating that "at first [Mugabe] was a very enlightened president." While conceding that Mugabe is now "oppressive," Carter stressed that this murderer of tens of thousands "needs to be treated with respect and assured that if he does deal with those issues [democratization and human rights], he won't be punished or prosecuted for his crimes." Though it has supervised elections in over 60 countries, the 25-year-old Carter Center has no projects in Zimbabwe, nor has Carter (who demonstrates no compunction about lecturing others) attempted to atone for the ruin that his policies as president wreaked.
History will not look kindly on those in the West who insisted on bringing the avowed Marxist Mugabe into the government. In particular, the Jimmy Carter foreign policy--feckless in the Iranian hostage crisis, irresolute in the face of mounting Soviet ambitions, and noted in the post-White House years for dalliances with dictators the world over--bears some responsibility for the fate of a small African country with scant connection to American national interests. In response to Carter's comment last month that the Bush administration's foreign policy was the "worst in history," critics immediately cited those well-publicized failures. But the betrayal of Bishop Muzorewa and of all Zimbabweans, black and white, who warned what sort of leader Robert Mugabe would be deserves just as prominent a place among the outrages of the Carter years.
Subsequent Elections
Mugabe faced Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in presidential elections in March 2002.[57] Mugabe defeated Tsvangirai by 56.2% to 41.9% amid violence and the prevention of large numbers of citizens in urban areas from voting. The conduct of the elections was widely viewed internationally as having been manipulated.[58][59] Many groups, such as the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), assert that the turnout was rigged.[57]
On July 3, 2004 a report adopted by the African Union executive council, which comprises foreign ministers of the 53 member states, criticized the government for the arrest and torture of opposition members of parliament and human rights lawyers, the arrest of journalists, the stifling of freedom of expression and clampdowns on other civil liberties. It was compiled by the AU's African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, which sent a mission to Zimbabwe from June 24 to 28 2002, shortly after the presidential elections. The report was apparently not submitted to the AU's 2003 summit because it had not been translated into French. It was adopted at the next AU summit in 2005[60].
Mugabe's ZANU-PF party won the 2005 parliamentary elections with an increased majority. The elections were said by (again) South African observers to "reflect the free will of the people of Zimbabwe", despite accusations of widespread fraud from the MDC.[61]
On February 6, 2007 Mugabe orchestrated a cabinet reshuffle, ousting ministers including five-year veteran finance minister Herbert Murerwa[62].
On March 11, 2007 opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was arrested and beaten following a prayer meeting in the Harare suburb of Highfields. Another member of the Movement for Democratic Change was killed while other protesters were injured.[63] Mugabe claimed that "Tsvangirai deserved his beating-up by police because he was not allowed to attend a banned rally" on March 30 2007.[64]
General elections 2008
Template:Future election candidate
Mugabe launched his election campaign on his birthday in Beitbridge, a small town on the border with South Africa on 23 February 2008 by denouncing both the opposition MDC and Simba Makoni's candidacy. He was quoted in the state media as saying: "Dr Makoni lacked majority support while Mr Tsvangirai was in the presidential race simply to please his Western backers in exchange for money."[65] These are the charges he has used in the past to describe the leader of the opposition.
In the week Dr. Makoni launched his campaign for the presidency, he accused Mugabe of buying votes from the electorate. This was a few hours after Dumiso Dabengwa had come out and endorsed Dr. Makoni's candidature. [66]
On 2 April 2008, The Zimbabwe election commission confirmed that Mr. Mugabe and his party, known as ZANU-PF, lost control of Parliament. According to unofficial polling, Zanu-PF took 94 seats, and the main opposition party MDC took 96 seats.[67]. On 3 April 2008 Zimbabwean government forces began cracking down on the main opposition party and arresting at least two foreign journalists covering the disputed presidential election, including a correspondent for The New York Times. [68][69]
When British Prime Minister Gordon Brown attempted to intervene into the election controversy, Mugabe dismissed him as "a little tiny dot on this planet." [70]
In the aftermath of the election evidence of widespread retribution against people who supported Zimbabwe’s opposition party has begun to stream out despite the government’s efforts to restrict press access to the worst of the violence [71]. Scores of children and babies have been locked up in filthy prison cells in Harare as Mugabe, tried to force the opposition into exile before an expected run-off in presidential elections. [72]
Criticism and opposition
Mugabe's critics accuse him of conducting a "reign of terror",[54][73] and being an 'extremely poor role model' for the continent, whose 'transgressions' are 'unpardonable'.[74] In solidarity with the April 2007 general strike called by the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), British Trades Union Congress General Secretary Brendan Barber said of Mugabe's regime: 'Zimbabwe's people are suffering from Mugabe's appalling economic mismanagement, corruption and brutal repression. They are standing up for their rights, and we must stand with them." Lela Kogbara, Chair of ACTSA (Action for Southern Africa) similarly has said: "As with every oppressive regime women and workers are left bearing the brunt. Please join us as we stand in solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe in their struggle for peace, justice and freedom."[75]
Robert Guest, the Africa editor for The Economist for seven years, argues that Mugabe is to blame for Zimbabwe's economic freefall. "In 1980, the average annual income in Zimbabwe was US$950, and a Zimbabwean dollar was worth more than an American one. By 2003, the average income was less than US$400, and the Zimbabwean economy was in freefall.[76] "[Mugabe] has ruled Zimbabwe for nearly three decades and has led it, in that time, from impressive success to the most dramatic peacetime collapse of any country since Weimar Germany".[12]
In the The Daily Telegraph of London, Mugabe was criticised for comparing himself to Hitler. Mugabe was quoted as saying "This Hitler has only one objective: justice for his people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people and their rights over their resources. If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold."[77]
In recent years, Western governments have condemned Mugabe's government. On 9 March 2003, U.S. President George W. Bush approved measures for economic sanctions to be leveled against Mugabe and other high-ranking Zimbabwe politicians, freezing their assets and barring Americans from engaging in any transactions or dealings with them. Justifying the move, Bush's spokesman stated that the President and Congress believe that "the situation in Zimbabwe endangers the southern African region and threatens to undermine efforts to foster good governance and respect for the rule of law throughout the continent." The bill was known as the Zimbabwe Democracy Act.[78]
In reaction to human rights violations in Zimbabwe, students at universities from which Mugabe has honorary doctorates have sought to get the degrees revoked. So far, the University of Edinburgh has stripped Mugabe of his honorary degree[79] after years of campaigning from their student union. In addition, the student body at Michigan State University (ASMSU) unanimously passed a resolution calling for this. The issue is now being considered by the university[80].
Mugabe's office forbade the screening of the 2005 movie The Interpreter, claiming that it was propaganda by the CIA and fearing that it could incite hostility towards him.[81]
An official from Chatham House suggested that Mugabe was unlikely to leave Zimbabwe, but that if he were to leave, he might go to Malaysia, where some believe that he has "stashed much of his wealth." [82].
In response to Mugabe's critics, former Zambian leader Kenneth Kaunda was quoted blaming not Mugabe for Zimbabwe's troubles, but successive British governments.[83] He wrote in June 2007 that "leaders in the West say Robert Mugabe is a demon, that he has destroyed Zimbabwe and he must be got rid of - but this demonising is made by people who may not understand what Robert Gabriel Mugabe and his fellow freedom fighters went through."[2] Similarly, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade, responded to his critics by saying that Zimbabwe's problems are the legacy of colonialism.[84]
European Union travel ban
After observers from the European Union were barred from examining Zimbabwe's 2002 elections, the EU imposed a ban on Mugabe and 94 members of his government. The United States instituted a similar ban. The EU's ban has a few loopholes, resulting in Mugabe taking a few trips into Europe despite the ban. Mugabe is allowed to travel to UN events within European and American borders.[85]
On April 8, 2005, Mugabe attended the funeral of Pope John Paul II, a move which could be seen as defiance of a European Union travel ban that does not, however, apply to Vatican City. He was granted a transit visa by the Italian authorities, as they are obliged to under the Concordat. However, the Catholic hierarchy in Zimbabwe have been very vocal against his rule and the senior Catholic cleric, Archbishop Pius Ncube is a major critic, even calling for Western governments to help in his overthrow.[86][85] Mugabe surprised Prince Charles by shaking his hand during the service. Afterwards, the Prince's office released a statement saying, "The Prince of Wales was caught by surprise and not in a position to avoid shaking Mr Mugabe’s hand. The Prince finds the current Zimbabwean regime abhorrent. He has supported the Zimbabwe Defence and Aid Fund which works with those being oppressed by the regime. The Prince also recently met Pius Ncube, the Archbishop of Bulawayo, an outspoken critic of the government."[87]
Prior to the ban, one of Mugabe's favourite pastimes was to travel to London.[12]
US travel ban
Robert Mugabe and senior members of the Harare government are not allowed to travel to the United States because it is the position of the US government that he has worked to undermine democracy in Zimbabwe and has restricted freedom of the press.[88] Despite strained political relations, the United States remains a leading provider of humanitarian assistance to Zimbabwe, providing roughly $400 million in humanitarian assistance from 2002-2007, mostly food aid.[89]
Succession
As one of Africa's longest-lasting leaders, speculation has built over the years as to the future of Zimbabwe after Mugabe leaves office. His age and recurring rumours of failing health have focused more attention on possible successors within his party as well as the opposition. The March 11, 2007 crackdown against a religious gathering sponsored by the opposition attracted scrutiny.[90]
In June 2005 a report that Mugabe had entered a hospital for tests on his heart fueled rumours that he had died of a heart attack;[91] these reports were dismissed by a Mugabe spokesman. This coincided with Operation Murambatsvina (or "Drive Out Trash"), a police campaign to demolish houses and businesses that had been built without permission on land previously taken from white landholders and intended for redistribution. Opponents called this an attempt to disperse urban centres of dissent into rural areas where the government had more control. Former information minister Jonathan Moyo attributed the events to a power struggle within the party over who would succeed Mugabe.
Joyce Mujuru, recently elevated to vice-president of ZANU-PF during the December 2004 party congress and considerably younger than Joseph Msika, the other vice-president, has been mentioned as a likely successor to Mugabe. Joyce Mujuru's candidacy for the presidency is strengthened by the backing of her husband, Solomon Mujuru, who is the former head of the Zimbabwean army.
In October 2006, a report prepared by Zimbabwe's Ministry of Economic Development acknowledged the lack of coordination among critical government departments in Zimbabwe and the overall lack of commitment to end the crisis. The report implied that the infighting in Zanu-PF over Mugabe's successor was also hurting policy formulation and consistency in implementation.[92]
In late 2006 a plan was presented to postpone the next presidential election until 2010, at the same time as the next parliamentary election, thereby extending Mugabe's term by two years. It was said that holding the two elections together would be a cost-saving measure.[93] However, this plan was not approved and there were reportedly objections from some in ZANU-PF to the idea. In March 2007 Mugabe said that he thought the feeling was in favour of holding the two elections together in 2008 instead of 2010. He also said that he would be willing to run for re-election again if the party wanted him to run.[94] Other leaders in Southern Africa were rumoured to be less warm on the idea of extending his term to 2010; recently, at the independence celebrations in Ghana, South African President Thabo Mbeki was rumoured to have met with Mugabe in private and told him that "he was determined that South Africa's hosting of the Football World Cup in 2010 should not be disrupted by controversial presidential elections in Zimbabwe."[95]
On March 30 2007, it was announced that the ZANU-PF central committee had chosen Mugabe as the party's candidate for another term in 2008, that presidential terms would be shortened to five years, and that the parliamentary election would also be held in 2008.[96] Mugabe was chosen by acclamation as the party's presidential candidate for 2008 by ZANU-PF delegates at a party conference on December 13 2007.[97]
Personal life
His first wife, the former Sally Hayfron, died in 1992 from a chronic kidney ailment[98]. Their only son, Nhamodzenyika, born 27 September 1963, died on December 26, 1966 from cerebral malaria, while Mugabe was in prison. Sally Mugabe was a trained teacher who asserted her position as an independent political activist and campaigner[99] who was seen as Mugabe's closest friend and adviser, and some critics suggest that Mugabe began to misrule Zimbabwe after her death.[12]
Mugabe married his former secretary, Grace Marufu, 40 years his junior and with whom he already had two children,[100] on August 17, 1996. Mugabe and Marufu were married in a Roman Catholic wedding Mass at Kutama College, a Catholic mission school he previously attended. Nelson Mandela was among the guests. A spokesman for Catholic Archbishop Patrick Chakaipa, who presided over the ceremony, said the diocese saw "no impediment" to the nuptials.[citation needed] His wife, Grace, is known sarcastically as "Gucci Grace" or "The First Shopper" in reference to her numerous, lavish European shopping sprees[101][102].
The Mugabes have three children: Bona, Robert Peter Jr. (although Robert Mugabe's middle name is Gabriel) and Bellarmine Chatunga. As First Lady, Grace has been the subject of much criticism for her lifestyle. When she was included in the 2002 EU travel sanctions on her husband, one EU parliamentarian was quoted as saying that the ban "will stop Grace Mugabe going on her shopping trips in the face of catastrophic poverty blighting the people of Zimbabwe."[103] The Daily Telegraph called her "notorious at home for her profligacy" in a 2003 coverage of a trip to Paris.[104] The Mugabes' children are not included in the EU travel sanctions.[citation needed]
Awards and honours
In 1994 Mugabe was bestowed an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath by Queen Elizabeth II. This entitles him to use the postnominal letters KCB, but not to use the title "Sir." UK Foreign Affairs Select Committee called for the removal of this honour in 2003, but no action was taken.[105]
He also holds several honorary degrees and doctorates from various international universities, though in June 2007, he became the first international figure ever to be stripped of an honorary degree by a British university, when the University of Edinburgh withdrew the degree awarded to him in 1984.[106][107]
Further reading
- Chan, Stephen. Robert Mugabe: A life of power and violence, 2003. IB Taurus, London. ISBN 9781860648731.
- East, R. and Thomas, Richard J. Profiles of People in Power: The World ́s Government Leaders, 2003 ISBN 185743126X.
- Holland, Heidi. Dinner with Mugabe, 2008. Penguin, South Africa. ISBN 9780143025573.
- Meredith, Martin : Mugabe: Power and Plunder in Zimbabwe, 2003. Oxford [rev. updated ed.] ISBN 1586482130 (American ed.: Our votes, our guns
- Nolan, Cathal J. Notable U.S. Ambassadors Since 1775: A Biographical Dictionary, 1997 ISBN 0313291950
- The Times (SA) Online. 'The angry little boy who showed them all'. Published: 01 Mar 2008.
- Who's Who : African Nationalist Leaders in Rhodesia by Robert Cary and Diana Mitchell, 1977,1980,1994 Reprinted by Mardon Printers (PTY) Ltd, Harare.
- Mwakikagile, Godfrey. Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era, 2006, Chapter Eight: "The Rhodesian Crisis: Tanzania's Role." New Africa Press, South Africa. ISBN 9780980253412.
References
- ^ Chan, Stephen (2003). Robert Mugabe: A Life of Power and Violence. p. 123.
- ^ a b Viewpoint: Kaunda on Mugabe BBC 12 June 2007
- ^ Biles, Peter (2007-08-25). "Mugabe's hold on Africans". BBC News.
- ^ "UK anger over Zimbabwe violence". BBC News. 2000-04-01.
- ^ McGreal, Peter (2007-04-02). "Corrupt, greedy and violent: Mugabe attacked by Catholic bishops after years of silence". The Guardian.
- ^ Bentley, Daniel (2007-09-17). "Sentamu urges Mugabe Action". The Independent.
- ^ "Mugabe: US must disarm". BBC News. 2007-02-25.
- ^ Egbuna, Obi (2003-07-31). "Zimbabwe: Who else but Mugabe?". The Black Commentator (51).
- ^ "Colonial history tugs at EU-Africa ties". People's Daily. 2007-12-05.
- ^ "Robert Mugabe's reign set to end in Zimbabwe, but World fears a bloodbath", The Mirror
- ^ Staff reporter (2007-05-21). "Mugabe mourns reclusive brother". newzimbabwe.com. Retrieved 2008-04-03.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Staff (2007-03-29). "Robert Mugabe: The man behind the fist". The Economist.
- ^ Nyarota, Geoffrey (2006). Against the Grain. p. 100.
- ^ "President bio contents". Zimbabwean government website. Government of Zimbabwe. Retrieved 2008-04-04.
- ^ Christine Kenyon Jones, The People's University: 150 years of the University of London and its External students (University of London External System, 2008) pages 148-149 ISBN 0955768918
- ^ "I am still a disciple of Nkrumah - Mugabe". General News of Monday, 2 July 2007. Ghana Home Page. Retrieved 2007-07-03.
- ^ Lectured at Chalimbana Teacher Training College, Zambia (1955–1958)
- ^ Olson, James Stuart. Historical Dictionary of the British Empire. p. 764.
{{cite book}}: Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help) - ^ Glaude Jr., Eddie (2002). Is It Nation Time?: Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism. p. 105.
- ^ Mugabe: The price of silence, BBC, 10 March 2002
- ^ Zimbabwejournalists.com: Calls for justice 20 years after massacre
- ^ Golenpaul, Ann. Information Please Almanac, Atlas and Yearbook. p. 290.
{{cite book}}: Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help) - ^ Human Rights Watch (2000). Abdication of Responsibility: The Commonwealth and Human Rights. p. 343.
- ^ Hill, Geoff. The Battle for Zimbabwe: The Final Countdown. p. 78.
- ^ Breckenridge, Robert Edgerton. Africa's Armies: From Honour to Infamy. p. 95.
- ^ St. John, Lauren. Rainbow's End: A Memoir of Childhood, War, and an African Farm. p. 234.
- ^ "The virtues of isolationism". The Economist. Retrieved 2007-07-08.
{{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in:|publisher=(help) - ^ a b c [1]
- ^ Country Health System Fact Sheet 2006 Zimbabwe World Health Organisation
- ^ World Economic Outlook: World Economic and Financial Surveys, September 2006, Page 65 International Monetary Fund.
- ^ CCN News Zimbabwe currency crashes; inflation as high as 9,000% retrieved July 4 2007
- ^ BBC News US says Zimbabwe change is afoot retrieved July 4 2007
- ^ Reuters Africa [2] retrieved April 3 2007
- ^ Zimbabwe’s top cleric urges Britain to invade The Sunday Times, July 1, 2007
- ^ Page 213 Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender: Men and Women in the World's Cultures
- ^ a b Page 180 Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa
- ^ Under African Skies, Part I: 'Totally unacceptable to cultural norms' Kaiwright.com
- ^ Page 93 Body, Sexuality, and Gender v. 1
- ^ Canaan Banana, president jailed in sex scandal, dies The Guardian
- ^ Congo At War: A Briefing of the Internal and External Players in the Central African Conflict, International Crisis Group, 17 November 1998
- ^ Lasker, John, Resource Wars in Africa: AFRICOM and the Reach of US Corporations, Toward Freedom, April 18, 2008
- ^ DR Congo troops 'to repel Rwanda', BBC, Dec. 3, 2004
- ^ Mugabe's costly Congo venture BBC
- ^ Chigara, Ben (2002). Land Reform Policy. Ashgate Publishing. p. 52. ISBN 0754622932.
- ^ Page 302 Big Men, Little People: The Leaders Who Defined Africa
- ^ 619 The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence
- ^ Zimbabwe: The Spark...Claire Short's letter of November 1997, by Baffour Ankomah, 31 March 2003
- ^ Sweet, Matthew, "A Bad Man in Africa," London Independent, March 16, 2002
- ^ Page 372 Africa Review 2003/2004
- ^ [http://www.powells.com/review/2008_01_07.html "In the Pit of Africa" A Review by Joshua Hammer. New York Review of Books, January 7th, 2008
- ^ Constitution of Zimbabwe, Chapter III, Section 16, p. 10.
- ^ a b c d e f "Mugabe to speak at hunger debate as he defies EU travel ban again". Telegraph. Retrieved 2007-07-08.
{{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in:|publisher=(help) - ^ PM - Zimbabwe leaves the Commonwealth
- ^ a b c d "Mugabe's raids leave townships in tatters". 2005-03-06.
{{cite web}}: Unknown parameter|Publisher=ignored (|publisher=suggested) (help) - ^ Mugabe seizes third farm for himself, IOL, 10 September 2006
- ^ Harare Losing Key Allies
- ^ a b West boycotts Mugabe ceremony CNN
- ^ Mugabe wins as tension hangs over Zimbabwe Christian Science Monitor
- ^ Zimbabwe: A Dream Betrayed Association of Concerned Africa Scholars On the Edge Commentary
- ^ The African Union: what's in a name? | openDemocracy
- ^ Let's turn the screw on Robert Mugabe Peter Kagwanja and Alba Lamberti. European Voice via International Crisis Group
- ^ The Zimbabwe Situation
- ^ Zimbabwe's Tsvangirai Has Brain Scan, Was Hurt While in Custody, Bloomberg, 14 March 2007
- ^ MUGABE THUG RANT, Mirror, 31 March 2007
- ^ President writes off opposition[3](accessed 02/25/2008)
- ^ Makoni accusses Mugabe of vote buying[4](accessed on 03/02/2008)
- ^ Mugabe's Zanu-PF loses majority BBC News 3 April 2008
- ^ Raids target Zimbabwe opposition party CNN 3 April 2008
- ^ New Signs of Mugabe Crackdown in Zimbabwe New York Times 3 April 2008
- ^ Robert Mugabe: Gordon Brown just ‘a tiny dot’ Times Online April 13 2008
- ^ Signs of Attacks on the Opposition Rise in Zimbabwe New York Times, April 28, 2007
- ^ Babies seized by Robert Mugabe's forces as Zimbabwe hounds voters Times Online, April 27, 2008
- ^ The Spectator Dictators' legacies retrieved from FindArticles.com on July 7 2007
- ^ Tribune India Commonwealth at crossroads 52 heads failed to look beyond Zimbabwe! retrieved July 7 2007
- ^ National Union of Mineworkers TUC Backs Zimbabwe's Trade Unions retrieved July 7 2007
- ^ Guest, Robert. The Shackled Continent: Africa's Past, Present and Future. Pan Books, 2005.
- ^ 'Hitler' Mugabe launches revenge terror attacks - Telegraph
- ^ President Signs Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act 21 December2001
- ^ Mugabe stripped of degree honour, BBC, 6 June 2007
- ^ UMass students aim to revoke honorary degree for Mugabe - The Boston Globe
- ^ Rainbow Banned From Screening "Anti-Mugabe" Movie, ZimDaily, 23 September 2005
- ^ Robert Mugabe 'unlikely to flee Zimbabwe', Daily Telegraph, 4.4.2008
- ^ Peter Biles: "Mugabe's hold on Africans." BBC News website, 25 August 2007. Retrieved 27 August 2007.
- ^ "Colonial history tugs at EU-Africa ties," People's Daily
- ^ a b "•MUGABE DEFIES EU, FLIES TO ROME". MSNBC. Retrieved 2007-07-08. Cite error: The named reference "popefuneral" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
- ^ Mugabe warns Catholic bishops over politics Reuters retrieved 4 July 2007
- ^ "Charles shakes hands with Mugabe at Pope's funeral". Times. Retrieved 2007-07-08.
{{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in:|publisher=(help) - ^ Recent OFAC Actions, US Dept. of Treasury, November 23, 2005 (accessed 02/07/2008)
- ^ http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/5479.htm U.S. Department of State, Bureau of African Affairs, February 2008 (accessed 04/02/2008)
- ^ "Activist held in Zimbabwe crackdown"
- ^ Zimbabwe denies reports Robert Mugabe is dead, CTV, 7 June 2005
- ^ Zim government in chaos, says secret report IOL
- ^ "Mugabe set to rule until 2010", IRIN, 14 December 2006.
- ^ "Mugabe ready for 2008 elections", DPA (IOL), 12 March 2007.
- ^ BBC News S Africa changes tune on Zimbabwe retrieved July 4 2007
- ^ "Zimbabwe's Mugabe to stand in 2008 poll", Reuters (Sydney Morning Herald), March 31, 2007.
- ^ "Mugabe to run again for Zanu-PF", BBC News, December 13, 2007.
- ^ The New Yrok Times, "Obituaries: Sally Mugabe, Zimbabwe President's Wife, 60", January 28, 1992
- ^ FO's fight over Mugabe's wife | Politics | The Guardian
- ^ "Where We Have Hope: A Memoir of Zimbabwe By Andrew Meldrum"
- ^ Brook, Sally, The Sun, UK, March 4, 2004
- ^ [http://www.eastandard.net/archives/cl/hm_news/news.php?articleid=1143958026&date=10/9/2006 Ng’ang’a, Nixon, The Standard, Kenya, September 10, 2006
- ^ Mugabe's wife on EU sanctions list, BBC, 22 July 2002
- ^ Truffle dinners for £190 at the Mugabes' glittering hideaway, Telegraph, 2 February 2003
- ^ Daily Mail The battle to ban Mugabe's men retrieved July 7 2007
- ^ The Times Mugabe stripped of degree by Edinburgh retrieved July 4 2007
- ^ The Observer Edinburgh University revokes Mugabe degree Paul Kelbie, July 15, 2007
External links
- "Mugging Mugabe" (a commentary in defence of Mugabe)
- "The truth about Mugabe" (an anti-Mugabe commentary)
- "Zimbabwe election – a defeat for imperialism"
- "Zimbabwe's silent selective starvation"
- "Robert Mugabe's War to Crush Press Freedom in Zimbabwe"
- Reporters Without Borders profile on Mugabe
- Freedom House report on Zimbabwe
- IFEX - Media Coverage Favours Mugabe
- "Robert Mugabe at UMass" from the WGBH series, Ten O'clock News
- Indict Zimbabwe's demagogue before the International Criminal Court
- "Zimbabwe and the Politics of Torture"
- Human Rights Watch on Zimbabwe
- “Comrade Mugabe is our leader”,War Vets million man march for Mugabe,"Zimbabwe Metro"
- 1924 births
- Alumni of the University of London External System
- Cold War leaders
- Current national leaders
- Heads of government of Zimbabwe
- Knights Commander of the Order of the Bath
- Living people
- Non-South African anti-apartheid activists
- Presidents of Zimbabwe
- University of South Africa alumni
- Zimbabwean politicians
- Zimbabwean revolutionaries
- Zimbabwean Roman Catholics
- ZANU-PF members
- ZANU-PF leaders