Mugabe Should Go Now, and the World Should Insist on This
It is time for ZImbabwe's Mugabe to go. Under 28 years of uninterrupted Robert Mugabe's brutal rule, the country has become a basket case -- inflation is staggering, the unemployment is at 80 percent level, poverty is grinding, violence has become routine and hopelessness is rising.
Under Mugabe's misrule, Zimbabwe has gone from African breadbasket to economic basket case. Mugabe blames the British colonials, long gone, for his nation's troubles. He is similarly delusional. Only God, he said last week, can remove him.
Finally, credible opposition has emerged. In the March Presidential elections neither Robert Mugabe nor the opposition candidate Morgan Tsvangirai won the majority, so a run-off has been set on Friday, June 27th. But Mugabe has let loose a reign of terror through his militia -- the militia have attacked and killed opposition sympathizers and workers. So much fear has been created that Tsvangirai has found it prudent to take refuge in the Dutch embassy. Mugabe refuses to postpone the Friday elections.
The country is disintegrating. Violence and brutality are unbearable. Mugabe is desperate. His party lost its majority in parliament in recent elections for the first time since independence in 1980. Mugabe was largely unable to rig those elections because other African countries had persuaded him to allow impartial observers and the posting of results at polling stations to prevent tampering.
Now Mugabe does not want to lose his Presidential elections. So he would do anything -- include kill political opponents -- to get elected and continue in power.
It is time that South Africa and other African nations to exert their influence and pressure on Mugabe to do the right thing -- release all the political prisoners, call off his militia, and conduct the elections under acceptable circumstances with adequate protection to Tsvangirai.
The United States, too, step up its pressure in concrete manner. It is sad to see so many despotic and degrading situations -- Myanmar, Darfur, Zimbabwe -- in the world suffer from our attention-deficit.
If the world community stands up to Mugabe, that will send a powerful signal to all Zimbabweans and Tsvangirai that the world stands ready to help Zimbabwe without intruding on its national sovereignty.
Related Tags: united states, zimbabwe, presidential elections, mugabe, tsvangirai, sout africa, african nations
© Gurumurthy Kalyanaram (2007)
Gurumurthy Kalyanaram is a management consultant and a professor. He can be reached at gurumurthy.kalyanaram@gmail.com.
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