Winning the African Prize for Repression: Zimbabwe

from Worst of the Worst: Dealing with Repressive and Rogue Nations

After much delay, the “official” presidential election results in Zimbabwe were finally announced last week (May 2, 2008). While opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, won the majority vote (47.9% to Robert Mugabe’s 43.2%), because the 50% minimum that is needed to win outright was not reached, a run-off will take place. This second round leaves Zimbabweans and the international community certain that Robert Mugabe will continue his use of intimidation, force, and violence to secure his re-election.

For an explanation of how Zimbabwe reached its present impasse, consult Robert I. Rotberg (ed.), Worst of the Worst: Dealing with Repressive and Rogue Nations (Washington, D.C., 2007). The following is a synopsis from the book.

Robert Gabriel Mugabe has issued no “little green book” of sayings to be memorized. Nor is he referred to as “Dear Leader,” as in North Korea—but then neither was Pol Pot of Cambodia or Ne Win of Burma, both of whom Mugabe tends despotically to resemble. His unprovoked, seemingly mindless destruction of periurban shanty towns and informal business premises near Harare in 2005 left at least 700,000 and up to 1.2 million Zimbabweans without shelter, livelihood, or the accumulated furnishings of homes and businesses.³⁴ At the same time, throughout 2005 and well into 2007, millions of Zimbabweans went hungry, some starving, because Mugabe and his henchmen used dwindling food supplies as a direct political weapon. Ruthlessly, Mugabe has systematically been punishing urban dwellers and other supporters of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Zimbabwe’s opposition, for their impudence in contesting elections (and winning many seats) against himself and his dominant party in 2000, 2002, and 2005. In March 2007, Mugabe also unleashed a brutal assault on the leaders and key operatives of the MDC, killing a few and maiming at least 200 others.

The 2000, 2002, and 2005 elections were rigged and the results falsified. Mugabe has nevertheless waved away criticism and rebuffed diplomatic intervention from African neighbors, Britain, the European Union, South Africa, and the United States. Meanwhile, he has tightened economic and political screws within the country, kept tight media bans and deported all foreign journalists, subverted the once independent supreme court and high court, used police and informal militia to inhibit opposition political rallies and all citizen protest, employed the tools of assassination and political imprisonment where necessary, and attempted to sell sections of Zimbabwe for personal profit to concessionaires from China, Libya, Malaysia, and South Africa. Mugabe’s regime routinely brutalizes both its opponents and persons or groups critical of the policies and procedures of the government—as the events of March 2007 clearly demonstrated.

Mugabe has successfully eradicated civil society, just as he has destroyed the free press, neutered the independent judiciary, muted foreign criticism, emasculated the opposition, curtailed local protest by the meting out of exemplary punishments, and deflected external African criticism via a vigorous nationalistic propaganda campaign.

Although there are no gulags, a combination of Central Intelligence Organization, military, and police operations successfully intimidates Zimbabwe’s people. Demoralizing and disheartening, too, widespread corruption under Mugabe has sapped the country of its entrepreneurial vitality and poured sand on the wheels of national progress.