Mugabe is back to detaining opposition party officials. This seems like an actually hopeful sign--his electoral prospects must be pretty grim.
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
I really don't see how it can be described as "hopeful" since he already lost the last election.
and then there is this http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article4116638.ece
"An hour later they were back. They grabbed Mrs Chipiro and chopped off one of her hands and both her feet. Then they threw her into her hut, locked the door and threw a petrol bomb through the window."
Mrs. Chipiro is of course "the second wife of a junior official of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) [to be] burnt alive last Friday by Zanu (PF) militiamen. Pamela Pasvani, the 21-year-old pregnant wife of a local councillor in Harare, did not suffer mutilation but died later of her burns; his six-year-old son perished in the flames.
A closet optimist? I guess that is the fate of a pessimist. Anyway its either that or the beginning of a large proscription. The army is still loyal to Mugabe. Though perhaps your right in that "if he could've he would've" sense.
Mugabe is just another reminder of how the current role played by the UN is ineffectual at best, and at times evil. Mugabe has been banned from travel to the US and Europe since 2002, yet the UN frequently helps him to travel, including getting into Rome just a week or two ago to address a UN conference on, of all things, the international food crisis.
The UN gave Mugabe a chance to get up in front of world leaders and tell them how wonderful his land reform policy has been, while back home foreign aid workers were being thrown out of Zimbabwe so that they couldn't witness the starvation and murder.
As the British Foreign Minister said, "This is like inviting Pol Pot to a human rights conference."
It's time to take, say, 90% of the money the US pays into the UN and instead use it to form the League of Democracies that McCain is advocating. We also need to throw the UN headquarters out of the US so that monsters like Mugabe and Ahmadinejad can't come onto our soil.
Or, perhaps he's so secure in his victory that he no longer cares what his neighbors think.
I'm not sure I'd sure I'd call it optimism. If Mugabe *does* lose the election, I'm guessing at 500,000+ killed over the next year in retribution and the destruction of even the facade of democracy.
Megan, it's much worse than that.
Report: Zimbabwe opposition figure's wife mutilated, burned alive
http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2008/06/report-zimbabwe.html