Hundreds dead or missing, thousands in hiding or leaving the country ... Zimbabwe’s ‘democracy’ is soaked in blood. Now the world will watch helplessly as a ruthless tyrant tightens his reign of terror.
ROBERT MUGABE, firmly in power for another five years as president of Zimbabwe following the most Orwellian election in Africa's precarious post-independence history, will today fly to the African Union's annual summit in Egypt and dare any of his fellow heads of state to criticise him.
By the time Mugabe touches down at the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, he will have been sworn in again as state president. This follows the verdict by former Sierra Leone president Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, the head of the African Union election observer team, that Friday's farcical run-off presidential vote, during which more people queued for scarce bread than at polling booths, was well organised.
"I'm highly impressed by the orderly manner in which the election has been organised," Kabbah said, while declining to comment on the 100 or more opposition supporters who had been killed by Mugabe's militias prior to and during the poll, the hundreds still missing, the thousands in hospital with serious wounds and the 200,000 or more whose homes have been burned and destroyed during the past few weeks of state-licensed savagery.
Kabbah's view is not shared by those who dared to hope Mugabe might be toppled from power, thousands of whom are in hiding or crossing international borders to safety. "We have been decimated, we have been crushed to the ground," said Shepherd Mashonga, a top opposition leader in the traditional Mugabe stronghold province of Mashonaland Central, where more than 24 critics of the head of state have been murdered in the past few days.
Despite warnings from Archbishop Desmond Tutu - the feisty opponent of South Africa's historic apartheid and a Nobel peace prize winner - that Zimbabwe is on the verge of becoming the new Rwanda, no severe action will be taken against Mugabe as the 53 African leaders get down to business on Monday.
Some heads of state will embrace Mugabe, decisively rejected by Zimbabwe's people in the first round of the election on 29 March but "newly elected" in Friday's run-off ballot against no opponent. Most will shake his hand while others, predictably, will drape garlands around his 84-year-old neck.
A few - perhaps Zambian president Levy Mwanawasa, current chairman of the 14-nation Southern African Development Community (SADC), and Botswana president Ian Khama, the most trenchant critic of Mugabe among Africa's leaders, will speak out.
But Mugabe, 28 years in power and now destined to reign until he is nearly 90, will taunt his fellow leaders by asking how many of them have clean hands. He will point out he has held five elections and referendums already this century - all rigged, admittedly - while others of the African Union have not faced electorates for decades. Angola has not held an election for 16 years. Swaziland's absolute monarch, King Mswati, has banned all opposition parties. Egypt's president Hosni Mubarak, the summit's host, has been in power for 27 years after a series of elections in which he was unopposed. Britain has suspended aid to Ethiopia, whose leader Meles Zenawi was Tony Blair's potential point man for a flowering of African democracy, after state police shot dead students protesting against the country's most recent heavily rigged election. In Kenya, which was praised as a showcase of African democracy, scores of people were killed when violence followed the highly questionable re-election of the ruling party in December. Last year's April elections in Nigeria, the continent's most populous nation, were farcical, with widespread vote-rigging.
So Mugabe will be among people he understands, and who understand him - and who will collectively fail the biggest test of their continent's post-independence history when they avoid taking action against Zimbabwe's dictator and the military junta he used to destroy his opposition.
But if neither the African Union nor the SADC try to save Africa from this, they will be plunging their people into a dark age because white-knight outsiders - never mind the outraged statements from London, Washington, the United Nations and European Union - will not come riding to Africa's rescue to rid it of the turbulent, Jesuit-educated Zimbabwean despot.
To be re-elected, Mugabe launched a terror blitz on his own people. Women were raped, had their limbs and breasts sliced off and were burned alive; homes were burned down and whole rural communities marched to polling booths at gunpoint; and people were openly beaten by Mugabe's Nazi-style militias.
Archbishop Tutu last week said Mugabe had "mutated into something unbelievable. He has really turned into a kind of Frankenstein for his people."
Urging international intervention to end Zimbabweans' nightmare, Tutu said: "I just hope, I mean, that we don't wait until it is too late. You know, Rwanda happened despite all the warnings that the international community was given. They kept holding back and today we are regretting that we did not, in fact, act expeditiously."
History - very recent history - tells us that when General Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of the United Nations force in Rwanda in 1994, appealed to US president Bill Clinton and Kofi Annan - then the UN peacekeeping chief and soon-to-be secretary-general - he was not only turned down, but his force was also reduced. Within weeks, the 100-day Hutu rulers' genocide of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus had begun.
Neither Clinton nor Annan suffered any retribution. Clinton's smooth and grinning presence at last week's London celebrations of Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday demonstrated just how short-lived shame is among powerful statesmen.
Unfortunately for Tutu, the somewhat slower and more grinding genocide of Zimbabwe's people - in which women can no longer expect to live beyond the age of 34, compared with 62 just before the turn of the century - will go on without international intervention.
Mugabe and his generals will continue skimming off Zimbabwe's remaining cream - and there is still quite a lot of it, as Anglo American's controversial plan to invest £200 million in a new platinum mining project in Zimbabwe illustrates. Anglo American will be the target of huge demonstrations and demands to withdraw, and the company might well do so to avoid debilitating opprobrium, but knowing Chinese, Malaysian and Iranian companies will step in and pay even bigger sweeteners to Mugabe for the privilege of extracting the world's second-richest reserves of a metal in huge demand.
Tutu knows the pressures on his own country will increase as a result of the consolidation of power by Mugabe, whose deranged ego threatens the stability of southern Africa.
As the violence continues in Zimbabwe, fresh waves of refugees will begin flooding into neighbouring countries. Widespread ethnic cleansing last month against black African migrants in South Africa showed the ability of its society - in which more than 40% of people are unemployed - to absorb more refugees has moved beyond saturation point.
A quarter of Zimbabwe's population, three million people, has already fled to South Africa. At least another two million will soon begin arriving in the wake of Mugabe's stealing of fresh power.
"We simply cannot cope with that," said Allister Sparks, Africa analyst and former editor of the liberal Rand Daily Mail, which was closed when it became over-critical of South Africa's apartheid rulers. "It would mean a major destabilisation of our society, with devastating effects on our national image and our economy. With Zimbabwe's hyperinflation now accelerating beyond one million per cent and the UN saying mass starvation is imminent, the outflow is bound to increase.
"Even if the unrest subsides with Zimbabweans' exhaustion, the flood of refugees will continue, for there is no prospect of international aid to halt the country's precipitous economic collapse as long as Mugabe is president."
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