It's been going on longer than we thought

The conventional wisdom about Robert Mugabe is that he was a reasonably fair, democratic ruler in his early years as President of Zimbabwe, and that he only recently became a murderous tyrant. But in this Independent story about a part of the country which supports the opposition (and is being starved of food and oil by the government), there is a disturbing passage which suggests Mugabe has been at this for many, many years:

No one needs to tell the people of Lupane how dangerous it can be to stand up to Mr Mugabe. In the two years between 1982 and 1984 as many as 50,000 people died in a vicious pogrom, dubbed euphemistically by Mr Mugabe himself as the Gukuruhundi: "The rain that washes away the chaff before the spring rains." The rain fell in the form of the notorious Korean-trained 5th Brigade. People were forced to dig their own graves and shot, or bodies were tossed into disused mines. Later the victims were herded into camps to be tortured and killed.

Their commander is now Perence Shiri, the chief of the Zimbabwean air force. He took his orders from Emmerson Mnangagwa, then head of state security, now speaker of parliament. Official figures put the death toll for dissidents - those that opposed Mr Mugabe's Zanu-PF party at 20,000. Locals say the real figure is more than twice that. One of the worst atrocities, the massacre of 62 men, women and children, was in 1983 at the (now dry) Cewala river in Lupane.

Watching Zimbabwe these past few years is like watching an entire nation slowly commit suicide - and the world, numb to tales of murder and corruption from Africa, seems content to let it happen.

Posted by damian at March 16, 2005 08:58 AM