Politics: Zimbabwe: 'Mugabe a monster,' says New Republic

New Republic online has an important editorial, "A Dictator on the Brink" (Apr2,2k7), from which I quote only the opening paragraph. It's an important piece, and I urge readers to click it up to read in full. The scary G-word comes up: genocide. So, there's a huge moral frame around the statistics cited compactly and briefly and tellingly.

Robert Mugabe is a monster. The world ought to have realized this back in the 1970s, when he began preaching the wisdom of the Maoist revolution, or at least in the 1980s, after he ascended to Zimbabwe's presidency and slaughtered the minority Ndebele tribe by the thousands. But there can be no doubt, at this late date, that Mugabe has become one of the world's most grotesque dictators.

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Another editorial, this time in Christian Science Monitor, "Cutting loose from an African dictator" (Mar29,2k7) sums up the situation ten days ago, citing the sad case of South Africa's hesitance to hold accountable Mugabe and his thug-ridden ruling political party ZANU-PF.

A decade. That's all it has taken for Africa's fastest growing economy to become the world's fastest shrinking one that's not at war. And for the continent's "breadbasket" to empty, leaving widespread hunger. Zimbabwe can't take much more of this.

Hopefully, it won't have to. Pressure as never before is building on the octogenarian president, Robert Mugabe, to give way after 27 years as strongman leader.

Mr. Mugabe may still be revered by many Africans as the great liberator of the former Rhodesia from white rule, but he has made a mess since then. Inflation clocks in at more than 1,700 percent. The unemployment rate is a staggering 80 percent. Food is scarce, as are fuel and foreign currency. The 12 million people in this country survive through barter, or by leaving.

An estimated 3 million have fled, many to South Africa. One would think this influx would have prompted South African President Thabo Mbeki to exchange his ineffective policy of "quiet diplomacy" with his neighbor for one with more teeth. South Africa is, after all, Zimbabwe's largest trading partner.

Still, fresh diplomacy is afoot after photographs of brutally beaten opposition leaders, taken earlier this month, sparked indignation around the world and where it counts most – with Zimbabwe's neighbors. Not letting up, police raided the main opposition headquarters on Wednesday and made arrests.

Interestingly, Mugabe's earlier Maoism has transformed into an alliance with presentday Communist China's unique brand of capitalist imperialism, which guides a society under an anti-democratic one-party rule.