A "final push for freedom"
Which neocon is he quoting now with this "final push for freedom" jingo lingo you ask? The speaker, actually, is Morgan Tsvangirai and he's no armchair hawk in some well-feathered nest inside the Beltway. He is, rather, the leader of Zimbabwe's Movement for Democratic Change, and he uttered those words to his supporters following the party's victory Monday in two Harare by-elections.
Just because one tyrant is being edged closer to retirement doesn't mean that other members of the club are easing up on their coercion. If anything, Robert Mugabe has stepped up his intimidation since the war in Iraq began. This recent Amnesty International report, titled "Zimbabwe: Mass arrests signal new and dangerous phase of repression", states:
"Amnesty International is deeply concerned by the increasing scale of arbitrary detentions and for the safety of several hundred people including officials and supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) taken into custody in Zimbabwe since 18 March 2003. Although some of those arrested have been released, many remain in detention, whilst the whereabouts of others remain unknown. At least one person, Steven Tonera, a farmworker in Manicaland province has been killed, allegedly as a result of being beaten by state agents?In one incident, on 18 March, a group of soldiers and state agents beat and tortured three workers on the farm of Roy Bennet, MDC MP for Chimanimani. The three men were forced to lie on their stomachs on the ground and beaten with batons, sjamboks (whips) and pieces of wire. Their fingers and toes were also broken. As a result of the beatings and torture, one of the workers Steve Tonera died. The three men were accused of being MDC supporters and of burning a bus. On 20 March, a convoy of three trucks carrying up to 60 soldiers of the Zimbabwe National Army came back to the farm and severely assaulted up to 70 people."
THE HORRORS of Mugabe's regime are heartbreakingly documented in "The Jewel of Africa" by Doris Lessing, which appears in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. She begins:
"You have the jewel of Africa in your hands," said President Samora Machel of Mozambique and President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania to Robert Mugabe, at the moment of independence, in 1980. "Now look after it."Twenty-three years later, the "jewel" is ruined, dishonored, disgraced."
Lessing's poignant account of the ruin and disgrace of Zimbabwe makes for painful reading; her concluding paragraph is worth quoting is full, so well does it depict meglomania:
"The latest news is that Mugabe, under a contract with a Chinese company, is importing Chinese farmers to grow food, since the forcibly acquired white farms are not producing. He says this is because there is no farm machinery. Yet all the expelled white farmers had been forced to leave behind their machinery. If lack of machinery is the problem, then why not import some? But is the story true? It has the tone of zany, brutal, hasty improvisation that characterizes news from Mugabe. We can pity the Chinese, who may not be protected against Mugabe's arbitrary cruelties. And what about the poor blacks who will yet again watch their land being taken from them?"
The "final push for freedom" in Zimbabwe is on; interesting to see will be the amount of support Morgan Tsvangirai and the Movement for Democratic Change can expect from the UN, democratically elected governments the world over, and, of course, the global peace movement.
Diarist of the day: Eleanor Coppola, 2 April 1976[During the filming of Apocalypse Now in the Philippines] "The helicopters used in the film are from the Philippine Air Force. Today, in the middle of the rehearsal for a complicated shot, they were called away to fight the rebels in a civil war about 150 miles to the south. It is hard to know what is going on. There is no news of the war in the government-controlled press. I was talking to one of the Filipino crewmen. He said that a group of southern islands, which are predominantly Moslem, are fighting for independence. Francis has a government-supplied bodyguard at all times. There are guards at our house. The government seems to feel that if Francis were kidnapped by rebels, they might create an incident that could attract international attention."
