In March 2003 the dictator of Zimbabwe welcomed a comparison of him with Hitler. Ahead of elections he is widely considered to have stolen by intimidation, bribery and violence he had been likened to Hitler by the British press. In the middle of a campaign of brutality and arrests of opposition politicians from the Movement for Democratic Change he said:
“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.”
Today Mugabe is even more like Hitler in his final days. Surrounded by cronies too afraid to let him know the real position and mired in megolomania, he is like Adolf about to descend into his bunker for the last time. Even worse, his country is almost as devastated as Germany in 1945. When his rule ends it will even be as difficult to find enough fuel to burn his political corpse as it was to cremate the Feurer. If he is lucky he will haul his sorry self into exile to enjoy the wealth he has stolen from his country. I do not wish him luck. The evil that men do lives after them. It will take years for Zimbabwe to recover.
On 27 January 1980 Robert Mugabe returned to the then Salisbury from exile in Mozambique from where he had fought a successful guerilla campaign to bring down the minority white regime headed by Ian Smith. He was greeted as a hero by a crowd estimated at 200,000 in the Zimbabwe ground in the black township of Highfield.
This week Mugabe has been back in Mozambique for a summit of African leaders. I am very much afraid that the memory of his triumph 27 years ago still colors their public statements about him. In what must surely be the greatest self delusion since Bush looked for WMD in Iraq, the southern African leaders have charged South African President Thabo Mbeke with mediating between the parties in Zimbabwe, presumably to ensure a smooth transition after Mugabe is due to leave office next year.
Mbeki could have led a move to oust Mugabe from office as he controls the pursestrings and much of the power going into Zimbabwe. On Friday Mugabe returns to Harare in an attempt to persuade his party to give him another term in office. In that he is likely to be sorely disappointed as even his closest cronies are starting to see the trainwreck that Mugabe has become. While there are reports of behind the scenes pressure for him to step down at the SADC conference, the public shows of support are disgraceful. Mbeki no longer deserves the honor of being referred to as “Nelson Mandela’s successor”. As the second President he and his obnoxious deputy (whose rape trial revealed he believed that showering after sex protects against AIDS) have stained the reputation of the rainbow nation. I am very much afraid his support for the Hitler of Harare will have an effect throughout the southern Africa for decades as the economies slowly recover from the masses fleeing his northern neighbour.
Mugabe has turned his nation from an exporter of food to one where the latest crop failure means that it will be dependant on food aid for at least the next year. “Operation drive out the filth” drove his political rivals from the cities into the countryside where many perished. Its inflation rate at over 1800% per annum is the highest in the world. Life expectancy is the lowest in the world. Millions have left for exile in South Africa and beyond. The buses travelling into the country are full … of food parcels sent by exiles often working illegally in South Africa but where they can actually find and afford to buy mealie or rice.
Highfield, where Mugabe was greeted so enthusiastically, is now better known for the brutality of his security forces breaking up meetings organized by the opposition. Political rivals attempting to get medical treatment for the injuries they got at the hands of his police have been stopped at the border. Another attempting to leave for a meeting with the EU was beaten up at the airport The opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai was re-arrested on Wednesday following a raid on the MDC offices – a fitting start for Mbeki’s mission! Mugabe’s own cronies are rallying round to prevent him retaining power and to protect their own ill-gotten gains:
Citing widespread unrest within the Government, International Crisis Group said that the situation in Harare was “reminiscent of the last stage of the last stages of Mobutu’s reign in the Congo”, a reference to the overthrow of the former dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who fled his country in 1997 after almost three decades of corrupt and violent rule.
“Economic issues, discontent among underpaid police and troops and the increasing willingness of opposition parties and civil society to protest in the streets, all increase the risk of sudden major violence,” the Brussels-based ICG said.
The think-tank said that the realisation among the top echelon of Zanu (PF), the ruling party, that the economic crisis was destroying their own business interests, is likely to persuade them to combine to block President Mugabe’s attempt to extend his rule by two more years beyond 2008, as a first manoeuvre to shift him out of office. Mr Mugabe, 83, has been in power since independence from Britain in 1980.
Neither am I optimistic that Mugabe’s departure would bring much improvement for he has his own Hitler Youth. Brutal training camps turn out armed members of the ZANU-PF youth wing “Green Bombers”. This was written before the 2005 elections. You can Google more about the training techniques in these camps but they are quite frankly too distressing to repeat.
Until five years ago, youth violence in Zimbabwe had been confined mostly to the electoral season. After elections, youth ceased their violent ways and dissolved back into mainstream society. Even during elections, youth rarely had access to the kind of conventional weapons that the Green Bombers use today. Nor was their training so militaristic.
Today, the violence of the Green Bombers is always in season. “Traitors” pay dearly. Traitors are people who want democracy, who demand their rights and freedoms. No one should question the Third Chimurenga, the war of liberation by which the land previously expropriated by white colonialists is being seized. Zimbabweans should be grateful. They owe ZANU PF an eternal debt of gratitude for their liberation. Indeed, the party has not really changed from the guerilla movement it was 25 years ago. It still sounds and acts like an uncompromising, undemocratic guerilla force. In a speech President Mugabe gave on August 11, 2003, during the commemoration of heroes of the liberation struggle, he said: “Those who seek unity must not be our enemies. No, we say to them they must repent… They must first be together with us, speak the same language with us, walk alike and dream alike.” And of course, failure to do so may well merit a visit from the Green Bombers.
The creation and arming of the Green Bombers along with the war veterans was a desperate but well-calculated ploy by Mugabe to arrest the current winds of change and sabotage the opposition and any successive government. This militia for a long time to come will fight to retain ZANU PF in power as a continuing guarantee for immunity from punishment under the law. The militia acts with absolute impunity. In an interview with the Solidarity Peace Trust, Zimbabwe and South Africa, in late 2003, a militia member said: “We got a lot of power. Our source of power is the encouragement we’re getting, particularly from the police and others. It was instilled in us that whenever we go out, we’re free to do whatever we want and nobody was going to question that.”
Recently, a Green Bomber was quoted in the local papers as saying, “We’re ZANU PF’s `B’ team. The army is the `A’ team, and we do the things government does not want the `A’ team to do.”
With food shortages and an inevitable power vacuum after Mugabe finally leaves, these militias are likely to go on the rampage. The result will be a true genocide with Mugabe’s favoured Shona fighting the other tribal groups.
Now some may think that my venom directed towards this thug is to much but it is moderate compared to some African commentators. This about “Operation drive out the filth”:
With a diligence akin to that of Hitler’s Germany, where valuable resources were diverted from the war effort–even as the Eastern Front collapsed under the onslaught of the Red Army–in order that the trains could continue to transport their pitiful cargos to the death camps, the Mugabe regime squanders what few assets it is still able to squeeze out of the freefalling Zimbabwean economy, to fuel a policy that aims at the elimination of all potential opposition, an opposition that Augustine Chihuri, the Zimbabwean Police Commissioner, has described as a, “crawling mass of maggots bent on destroying the economy.”
If you have a god, pray for this benighted people forgotten by the North and betrayed by the South. If you have a spare dollar, pound, yen or euro; use it to make sure they do not starve this coming winter season.
