Written on Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 9:36am by Alan Bedenko | 5 Comments

Mugabe: Godwin's Law Need Not Apply

Robert Mugabe is one thug who won’t let a little thing like an election stand in the way of brutal repression of any opposition.

The former freedom fighter who has clung to power for 28 years and sports an anachronistic, eyebrow-raising Hitler mustache, quite clearly lost re-election on March 29th. We know that with clear certainty. We know it despite the fact that official results of the election have not been released. We know it despite the fact that Zimbabwe’s election commission is conducting a “re-count” of votes despite the fact that there are no results announced yet.

Why and how do we know it? We’ll let Jendayi Frazer, assistant secretary of state for African Affairs take that one:

“This is a government rejecting the will of the people,” Ms. Frazer said, referring to the Zimbabwe electoral commission’s refusal to announce who won the March 29 presidential election. “If they had voted for Mugabe, the results would already have been announced. Everyone knows what time it is.”

Bingo. If Mugabe had won, it would have been announced instantly. Yet here we are almost a month later, and Mugabe’s ZANU-PF has taken to totalitarian, terrorist tactics to silence the victorious opposition. What better way to try and consolidate your absolute power than to raid the opposition’s HQ and arrest everyone in sight? Oh, and don’t forget to beat them within an inch of their lives.

As a leaflet being distributed in Harare points out, “just because ZANU-PF and Robert Mugabe are thrashing about like a fish on a hook, it doesn’t mean that we have lost.”

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5 Comments

  1. mike hudson says:
    April 25, 2008 at 9:55 am

    so again with the picture of the rev. jeremiah wright while trying to make a point about what used to be the peaceful and prosperous african nation of rhodesia? i still don’t get it.

  2. Buffalopundit says:
    April 25, 2008 at 9:56 am

    The only way you could confuse him with Wright is if….ah, never mind.

  3. Terry says:
    April 25, 2008 at 11:44 am

    Bizarre that the term “Freedom Fighter” (albeit prefaced by the word “former”) and “Thug” are both used to describe him. BP–you weren’t a supporter of his when he was a freedom fighter, were you? Perspective is a funny thing…..

  4. Buffalopundit says:
    April 25, 2008 at 11:52 am

    There are many former freedom fighters who morphed into thugs. Some quickly, some not so much. Mugabe was fighting a racist apartheid-like system set up by Smith after the unilateral Declaration of Independence. Upon coming to power, ZANU was at least nominally socialist, but didn’t implement its catastrophic land “reform” program until this past decade, whereby “war veteran” gangs forcibly evicted certain, mostly white, farmers from their property and Africa’s breadbasket became Africa’s basketcase.

  5. Colin says:
    April 25, 2008 at 12:52 pm

    1. It seems odd to quote someone from the Bush State Department as an authoritative source.

    2. We all know that Mugabe is a thug, but what do we know about the opposition? I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that their campaign was bankrolled by certain foreign governments with a history of doing that sort of thing.

    3. One of the simplest things we could do to help Zimbabwe would be to cancel their debt.

    4. The moustache is a truly odd choice.

 

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