Before I start, I want to say what a hell Zimbabwe is, and it is all Mugabe’s fault. I have quite a few friends from South Africa, one of which was born and raised in Zimbabwe. There’s a reason he doesn’t live there anymore. And it seems like the people still there are sick of it. There are several stories about this, but I liked this article the best as it highlights in particular the massive electoral fraud.

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (CNS) — Zimbabweans will be “dancing in the streets” when President Robert Mugabe is gone, a Zimbabwean archbishop said.

Describing Zimbabwe’s president for 25 years as “the one big devil,” Archbishop Pius Ncube of Bulawayo said that “everybody is fed up with Mugabe, even the armed forces — but they keep paying the top brass good money so as to silence them in their opposition.”

The archbishop, who has in the past received death threats and been harassed for his opposition to human rights abuses, made his comments in a wide-ranging interview in Cape Town in mid-March with the South African Catholic weekly, The Southern Cross.

As Zimbabwe prepared for parliamentary elections March 31, Archbishop Ncube said the poll would not be free and fair. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change “will be cheated right, left and center,” he predicted.

“The electoral supervisory commission is handpicked by Mugabe. The oppressive laws are still in force. The government has persecuted the journalists and chased away the international press,” he said.

“Public meetings are banned without police permission,” except for church services, he said; unauthorized meetings are broken up violently, often with tear gas.

Archbishop Ncube alleged that the government had registered voters properly only in the rural areas, the party’s stronghold.

“In the towns we hear of people having been removed from the voters’ roll,” he said.

“Then there are almost 2 million ghost voters. Of those, 800,000 are dead, 300,000 don’t exist — if you go inquire at the listed address, the residents will never have heard of them — and 600,000 are duplicate voters who are listed in different constituencies. So, out of a population of 5.6 million voters, 2 million are fake,” he said, adding that public access to the voters’ roll is restricted.

Archbishop Ncube also repeated his claim that Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party had been using food aid as a political weapon.

“They are going up and down the country telling people, ‘If you don’t vote for us, you don’t get any food, and then we’re going to come back and burn your houses,’” he said.

Noting that large areas of Zimbabwe were experiencing a drought, the archbishop said that the government had obstructed international agencies from distributing food. Poor management of farms after a controversial land redistribution program exacerbated the country’s food crisis, he said.

“Meanwhile, the gap between rich and poor is absolutely unspeakable. Some people are stinking rich … while others stay three, four days without food. Some women come weeping to me with their babies. They tell me, ‘I haven’t eaten for three days, and my breast has no more milk,’” he said.

Last June Mugabe told a British TV station that Archbishop Ncube was an “unholy liar” for making claims of extreme food shortages and famine.

“But we know. We have a church hospital, we have clinics, and we know that people have died of malnutrition,” the archbishop said. Based on figures in Bulawayo, he estimated that 8,000 Zimbabweans had starved to death under Mugabe.

Asked whether he was concerned for his safety in light of his outspoken political views, Archbishop Ncube said he prayed every morning for his well-being.

“But I will not allow them to intimidate me,” he said. “Zimbabwe is my country, I have a right to it. I have a right to speak for my people who are being oppressed. I have the right to be sensitive to the suffering of my people. My position as churchman demands that I stand up for the rights of the people.”

He said he had received greater solidarity from the bishops of South Africa than he had from the Zimbabwean bishops, whom he said had “gone in for quiet diplomacy,” rather than outspoken criticism.

The Zimbabwean bishops’ conference has asked its southern African counterpart not to make statements criticizing the Mugabe government, so the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference has criticized the South African government for its policy of “quiet diplomacy” or appeasement.

Archbishop Ncube said that the policy might have worked “if the Zimbabwean government and Mugabe were honest people … but they are tricksters, saying one thing but doing another.”

“Quiet diplomacy can work with people who listen and who are sensitive to the people’s suffering, who look for solutions. But Mugabe’s attitude is that he’s the one in power, and nobody can tell him anything,” he said.

He said he does not believe that Mugabe, a baptized Catholic and reportedly regular churchgoer, should be excommunicated, a call voiced by many opponents of Mugabe within the Catholic Church.

“I don’t think it would help. He is so stubborn and power hungry, it might only worsen the man. It wouldn’t do any good,” he said.

However, he said he would not “feel at ease” administering Communion to Mugabe should he present himself. “I’ll let others do it.”

Asked what areas of ministry he would have liked to concentrate on instead of politics, Archbishop Ncube pointed out that he “never planned to be outspoken.”

“I’d very much like to fight the AIDS crisis. In Zimbabwe it is extremely pernicious and destructive. Every day 700 Zimbabweans are dying of AIDS. That’s a quarter of a million a year. So I’d like to work on stopping this whole madness and preach the Catholic ethos to change people’s behavior,” he said.

Archbishop Ncube said that he would like to retire when he reaches his mid-60s, “to live a life of contemplative prayer.”

“I would have liked to do that when I was young, before I became a student. But you can’t live twice — unless you’re James Bond,” he said.

And in retort, the ever-so-eloquent Mugabe responds…

Archbishop Ncube has accused 81-year-old Mugabe of starving opposition supporters in order to win Thursday’s polls. The country is in deep economic turmoil and there are widespread food shortages.

Mugabe said: “I don’t know to which God he prays. His prayers are not as pious as his name suggests apparently. He is..a half-wit. I don’t know why the Vatican tolerates prayers of that nature.”

What a classy guy. With the elections campaigning coming to its peak, Mugabe and the opposition opponent Tsvangirai are campaigning in one of the largest electoral districts — where Mugabe murdered tens of thousands.

BULAWAYO – Mugabe and Tsvangirai take their election campaigns to an area where tens of thousands of people were killed by the president’s troops.
President Robert Mugabe and his key opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, both took heir election battles last weekend into a province where a crack army unit directly answerable to Mugabe slaughtered an estimated 30,000 men, women and children 20 years ago.

To this day the Mugabe government has not acknowledged the tens of thousands of murders the Fifth Brigade committed in Matabeleland, nor have those responsible been called to justice. General Shiri, who was known as “Black Jesus”, was promoted to head of the air force and remains one of Mugabe’s closest supporters.

The impact of the Gukurahundi on Matabeleland has proved ineradicable. It has left a huge, raw, unhealed wound among the people of the region who remember the many massacres.

Another good article, with more electoral information.

I’ve been watching this blog since A.M. Mora y Leon posted it. Here is an interesting story regarding tear gassing at a rally.

I was part of the large and peaceful crowd that attended the MDC Rally at White City Stadium, Bulawayo, on Saturday. While seated on the grass waiting quietly to hear Morgan Tsvangirai speak I noticed a group of people running in my direction, obviously in some distress. It turned out that they had been tear gassed. Their eyes were streaming and they were in great discomfort. Fortunately I had brought with me some water and I and others nearby used that to relieve some of the worst symptoms of the tear gas.

At this point I noticed there were some members of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission watching the commotion from just a few meters away. I picked them out by the insignia they were wearing. It struck me that they should be doing something about this unwarranted attack upon innocent members of the public who gathered lawfully and peacefully to hear the opposition leaders.

I walked up to the nearest member of the ZEC, and said to him: “Why are we being tear-gassed? What have we done that is wrong?”

The man did not say one word in reply. Instead he glared at me, giving me one of the most cold, evil and menacing looks I have ever seen.

So much for the neutrality and independence of Zimbabwe’s electoral commission!

Indeed. Read this rest — they seem like very good people. There is an entry mentioning how they will try to live up to being compared to the freedom fighters of Ukraine. If you haven’t read the rest of the blog roundup that A.M. Mora y Leon did, check it out here.

The New York Times ran a surprisingly good piece the other day about the underground resistence movement.

HARARE, Zimbabwe, March 26 – She is in her 40’s and the mother of four, though in the dappled sunlight of an outdoor restaurant here, clad in a floppy hat and a thin cardigan, she looks too young to be either. Nobody would see her as a provocateur, much less a revolutionary.

But when Rebecca took one child to the doctor on a recent morning, she left behind a clinic restroom plastered with stickers urging resistance to the 25-year reign of Zimbabwe’s president, Robert G. Mugabe. Later, she littered her bus seat with condoms emblazoned with a large Z and a call to “Get up! Stand up!” against the government.

“There are more than 10,000 of us,” she said. “And every one is excited, because you know you are playing a part in something you believe in.”

The Z stands not for Zimbabwe, but for Zvakwana, an underground movement that aims to resist – and eventually undermine – Mr. Mugabe’s authoritarian rule. With a second, closely related group called Sokwanele, Zvakwana’s members specialize in anonymous acts of civil disobedience – a meld of guerrilla theater and the philosophies of Gandhi and King.

In ideology, and sometimes even in identity, Zvakwana mirrors grass-roots efforts in any number of authoritarian nations. From Zubr in Belarus to Ukraine’s victorious Pora to nascent groups in Egypt and Lebanon (whose names, in English, mean “enough”), such civic movements may be the hottest phenomenon in global democratic politics. Many take their inspiration from Otpor, the movement that played a major role in ousting Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia.

The groups sprang to life here three years ago, shortly after Mr. Mugabe won a re-election campaign that many international election observers said had been stolen from his democratic opponents. Their rationale is embodied in their names: in Shona and Ndebele, Zimbabwe’s two main languages, both names also mean “enough.”

That the groups truly number 10,000 seems doubtful. Yet the government is nettled enough to paint over much of their graffiti, and news media reports say the police assembled a team of senior investigators 14 months ago to find and destroy Zvakwana.

The police have failed. In fact, one Zvakwana member in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city, said members of the movement stole into a police station in January to slip antigovernment messages under supervisors’ doors.
…
Although many speculate that movements like Zvakwana are Western inventions, Mr. McFaul said the opposite appeared to be true, at least for the moment.

In Lebanon, “They’re modeling what they’re doing on the Ukrainians,” he said. “And they’re watching the Ukrainians on Al Jazeera, of all places. It’s not an American-centric thing that’s being channeled through the White House. It’s more global.”

Some movements do receive foreign money, but no amount of money will sustain a democratic movement, he added, if a nation’s dissidents lack the passion and numbers to carry the battle on their own.

Read the rest, I love it when they run good, good articles like this.