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archived: 20 - 26 Mar, 2005 Back Next UPDATED: March 22, 2005 BUSH’S MONSTER: ROBERT MUGABE George Bush and Condoleezza Rice are extremely proud of themselves. Lavishly, repeatedly and strenuously, they have spent much of the past three weeks congratulating themselves for bringing democracy to the Middle East. While these claims are fueled with little more than the rapidly disappearing fumes of propaganda and the public propensity for astonishingly brief spans of memory, it is ironic to note that the machinations of the Bush administration did have a definite impact on democracy that was not at all the one described by Bush and Rice. Upon assuming power in late 2000 and early 2001, the Bush administration signaled that the manipulation of election results – even those wherein the majority voted for your opponent – was A-OK with them. One of the very first cases to be modeled on the Bush 2000 election came from a previously unsuspected quarter. In March 2002, Robert Mugabe faced a mighty challenge for the presidency of Zimbabwe from a formidable candidate leading an immensely powerful African pro-democracy movement. Dubbed the most important African leader since Nelson Mandela, Morgan Tsvangirai, the President of the Movement for Democratic Change, led Robert Mugabe in the pre-election polling. Then in a political maneuver that has become familiar to American voters - with the exit polls predicting a Tsvangirai landslide - the official vote tallies of the bureaucrats on his payroll officially recorded a slender win for Mugabe. Bush and Rice do not wish for Americans to remember the circumstances of Mugabe’s rigged elections in 2002. Shameful as that was; he swiftly surpassed himself by ordering the arrest of Tsvangirai. Mugabe engineered a spurious charge of treason at Tsvangirai and three other MDC officials. In Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, treason carries a mandatory death sentence. The trial judge was treated to a parade of fabricated evidence that was little more than a charade. Former Mossad agent, Ari Ben Menashe, manufactured evidence that even the court could not take seriously. A video tape had been doctored, mis-read, and nobody on it – other than Ben Menashe – mentioned getting rid of Mugabe. Menashe’s testimony that Tsvangirai and company had attempted to contract his services to assassinate Mugabe was eventually laughed out of court. The tedious court case kept Mugabe’s most dangerous enemy, Tsvangirai, under house arrest for the past three years. Even so, he led a string of public protests in 2003 that led to a second treason charge from Mugabe’s government. By placing his opponent under the guillotine, Mugabe has gone Bush one better. Even Bush has not dared to charge Gore or Kerry with a capital crime, in spite of his enthusiastic predilection for the swift and frequent administration of the death penalty. What has Mugabe done for Zimbabwe in the past three years? Plenty. He has instituted state-authorized political ultra-violence of literally unprecedented proportions. He has launched a fascist youth organization dubbed the Green Bombers who have been empowered to pillage, loot, rape, torture and commit extra-judicial killings (read: assassinations) to enforce Mugabe’s political agenda. He has used food as a political weapon. In Zimbabwe, if you are a Mugabe supporter, you get food: if you are not; you can starve. Zimbabwe is now officially listed as the worst country on the face of the earth. In the past three years, the average life expectancy has dropped to 33 years even as Mugabe has now reached the exalted age of 80 and is luxuriating in a horribly monumental palace that he and his wife have constructed in the lush countryside of Zimbabwe. The international community has vented its opprobrium on Mrs. Mugabe for her tasteless, insensitive and extravagant shopping expeditions to the posh fashion shops lining the Place Vendome in Paris. Enflamed by the hubris and greed of Zimbabwe’s Mugabe family, who owe their shameful prosperity to the exploitation, torture and death of the poor and the powerless masses writhing, twisting and shriveling under the lash of the Green Bombers, the MDC has carried on their fight for democracy and free elections in face of overwhelming odds. Later this month, parliamentary elections will be held. Let me rephrase that last sentence. Later this month, parliamentary elections will be rigged to permit the escalating exploitation of the poor, downtrodden and long-suffering masses of Zimbabwe by the political forces loyal to Robert Mugabe, Bush’s most conspicuous monster. Politically, the Zimbabwean media has been Orwellianized to a nicety. Mugabean media manipulation is modeled on Bush’s post-9/11 media model for America. All opposition press and media have been closed or torched. All anti-government and MDC demonstrations have been suppressed. MDC posters have been painted over with black paint. MDC members of the Zimbabwean parliament have been tortured. That is right. Sitting members of Parliament have been tortured. One MDC Member of Parliament testified to the BBC that he was arrested, interrogated and beaten, until his jailers affixed electric leads to his genitalia and proceeded to shock him into unconsciousness just like the torturers at Abu Ghraib. Imagine the reaction if – during the Clinton administration – Newt Gingrich or Tom DeLay or Trent Lott had been arrested in the dead of night; taken to a military base and subjected to the torture of genital-electro-shock. Imagine the outcry. Or, imagine that Ted Kennedy, John Conyers or Joe Biden were on the receiving end of a genital-electro-shock torture and interrogation procedure today. Bush’s ruthless ascent to power, and his ruthless exploitation of power, and his shameless retention of power in 2004 have inspired and empowered the excesses of Robert Mugabe. In the Bush Era, Zimbabwe and its Monster-in-Chief, Robert Mugabe, offer a powerful testament to the planetary disintegration of democracy that was triggered as a direct result of the electoral putsch that took place in Florida in 2000. The repercussions of that travesty will reverberate long into the onrushing night of a darkening stain on the fabric of history. Robert Mugabe is Bush’s Monster as surely as Abu Ghraib is Bush’s legacy of pain and exploitation for the Middle East. That a group of US politicians, including some Democrats, want to commend Bush on the growth of democracy in the Middle East is an Orwellian fantasy worthy of Shakespeare, that harsh and cruel playwright whose tragic dramas ended with the most ultra-violent brutality in world literature. Somewhere right now in Zimbabwe, poor people are starving; a woman is being raped, and a man is being tortured. Somewhere right now in Zimbabwe, a political assassination is being plotted. Somewhere right now in Zimbabwe, an election is being stolen in the name of democracy, stability and national security. Somewhere right now in Zimbabwe, Bush’s monster, Robert Mugabe, is dreaming of his palatial surroundings, his offshore bank accounts, his paramilitary goon squads, his boot on the face of his people and his boundless capacity to mimic the politics of his liberator, his creator, his political demigod - George Walker Bush. SOURCE MATERIAL The items in blue are active hyperlinks to resource materials: Welcome to Mugabeland, where hope wilts in the sun People are bone-weary of the capricious, mendacious, pocket-stuffing old lunatic. And the honest figures do, indeed, tell their story. Robert Mugabe is 81. Life expectancy in Zimbabwe is 33. . . . The vote-counting will be administered by the army. The ballot-boxes are made of transparent plastic. Counting will be done after nightfall. Rural voters make up 65 per cent of the population. Counting after nightfall in most places means counting in huts by candle or torchlight, by hungry soldiers whose guns and food are paid for by the government, counting out votes from transparent ballot-boxes. No fewer than 800,000 dead people are on the electoral register. Exiles cannot vote. Opposition candidates cannot get hold of the register: one I spoke to said he had been promised a copy in mid-April, a little while after he's been defeated. Zimbabwean election 'cannot be free and fair' Highly repressive laws and an overwhelming climate of fear make it impossible for Zimbabwe's forthcoming parliamentary election to be free and fair, according to a report to be issued today by Human Rights Watch. . . . In the 10 days before the election, the US-based organization urges leaders from neighboring African countries to press President Robert Mugabe to assure voters that their ballots will be secret and that all acts of political violence will be prosecuted. It is not democracy that's on the march in the Middle East Managed elections are the latest device to prop up pro-western regimes. For weeks a western chorus has been celebrating a new dawn of Middle Eastern freedom, allegedly triggered by the Iraq war. Tony Blair hailed a "ripple of change", encouraged by the US and Britain, that was bringing democracy to benighted Muslim lands. . . . The first decisive rebuff to this fairy tale of spin was delivered in Beirut on Tuesday, when at least 500,000 - some reports said it was more like a million - demonstrators took to the streets to show solidarity with embattled Syria and reject US and European interference in Lebanon. Mobilised by Hizbullah, the Shia Islamist movement, their numbers dwarfed the nearby anti-Syrian protesters by perhaps 10 to one; and while the well-heeled Beiruti jeunesse dorée have dominated the "people power" jamboree, most of Tuesday's demonstrators came from the Shia slums and the impoverished south. Bush's response was to ignore them completely. Whatever their numbers, they were, it seems, the wrong kind of people. . . . But the Hizbullah rally did more than demolish the claims of national unity behind the demand for immediate Syrian withdrawal. It also exposed the rottenness at the core of what calls itself a "pro-democracy" movement in Lebanon. __________________ Since 1968, Michael Carmichael has been a professional political consultant. Beginning as a Student Coordinator for Robert F. Kennedy, he has worked in five US presidential campaigns as well as over 100 major American political campaigns for federal and state offices. In 1985, he founded The Oxford Centre for Public Affairs in the United Kingdom. In 2003, he founded The Planetary Movement Limited, a global political action organization based in the United Kingdom.
Last Update: 03/23/2006 |
