Robert Mugabe’s authoritarian regime has chosen to consolidate its recent election victory by bulldozing homes and demolishing markets, leaving vast swathes of the capital and other cities in ruins and creating hundreds of thousands of refugees with neither shelter nor livelihood. Locals are calling it the Zimbabwean tsunami.
“This is Pol Pot style depopulation of cities,” said David Coltart, legal affairs spokesman for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). “It’s a sinister pre- emptive strike designed to remove the maximum possible number of people from urban areas to rural areas where they are easier to control.”
In an earlier post I compared Mugabe's actions to those of Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung, and Stalin, architects of some of the past century's greatest horrors. Now the comparison is too blatant to be ignored.
The overt purpose is to destroy all possibility of political opposition to the mad tyrant's increasingly disastrous race and economic policies.
The opposition believe it is no coincidence that the targets have been the cities which voted overwhelmingly against Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party in the March 31 elections.
“It’s retribution against those who voted MDC,” said Nelson Chamisa, National Youth Chairman for the MDC and an MP whose own constituency in Harare is one of the most affected areas.
But there are deeper games being played -- ones with international significance.
Another suggestion was that the vendors had been cleared out to make way for Chinese traders. China has become Mugabe’s new best friend, supplying commercial and military planes and sending in advisers.
Read the whole thing here. Go ahead and read it. The vignettes are heart rending. Such is the legacy of the anti-colonialist left.
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