Zimbabwe Update

In an earlier post I speculated that the democracy imperative currently toppling regimes in the Middle East and Central Asia might reach as far as Mad Bobby Mugabe's terror state in Zimbabwe. Read it here.

Parliamentary elections are scheduled there at the end of this month.

Yesterday's Times reported on some of the extraordinary measures Mugabe has been taking to ensure that his party, Zimbabwe African National Union - Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), wins.

Read my post here. In it I noted that despite predictions that ZANU would sweep the elections Mugabe's all-out and somewhat zany efforts indicated that he feared otherwise.

Yesterday's Scotsman made a similar point, noting that a unified opposition was forming and was polling well. Read it here.

Today the Independent reports:

Starve the voters: the human cost of Mugabe's election

By Meera Selva in Bulawayo, Matabeleland
26 March 2005

Four million people are starving in Zimbabwe, a quarter of the population, and thousands of Robert Mugabe's political opponents are being turned away empty-handed from emergency food stations, The Independent can reveal.

Only five days before a crucial general election, the embattled president is deliberately starving opposition supporters in a desperate bid to prop up his discredited Zanu-PF Party. What little food is available is being ruthlessly used in a cynical food-for-votes policy to force people to vote for the pariah president.

Read the whole horrifying thing here.

We should also probably note that the subsistence crisis was wholly created by Mugabe's government. Before he instituted his insane brand of racist socialism Zimbabwe was an exporter of food. Now it cannot feed its own people.