Zimbabwean leader Mugabe has history of violence against those who disagree

"Hate oppression but fear the oppressed"

June 28, 2008

Michelle Faul, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - In the mind of Robert Mugabe, reality is summed up by a massive banner hanging in the entrance to the presidential offices in Harare: Mugabe is Right.

The longtime Zimbabwean leader defied the world Friday to hold a one-man presidential run-off on the heels of a campaign of intimidation and violence in which dozens of opposition supporters have been killed and thousands injured and driven from their homes.

Mugabe fought to liberate a country of oppressed Africans from racist white rule and then built it into a much-hailed economic and social success. What would drive him to preside over its decline and ruin?

Under Mugabe, Zimbabwe fed itself and became a major exporter of food as well as of tobacco and minerals. Literacy and longevity rates shot up. Today, a third of the population is starving and the country has the lowest life expectancy in the world - just 34 years for women.

Twenty-eight years after he freed the country from white rule, he still depicts himself as a liberator fighting to keep Zimbabwe from white imperialists. He calls whites vermin and mongrels.

Heidi Holland, in her recently published book "Dinner with Mugabe," describes Zimbabwe's leader is an "emotionally weak man" who has never come to terms with some of life's earlier disappointments.

He has never forgiven the father who abandoned him when he was 10 to the women in the family - a heathen grandmother and an over-pious mother converted to Catholicism who proudly gave her son into the care of Jesuit priests at nearby Kutama mission. There, Mugabe found a surrogate father in Anglo-Irish headmaster Rev. Jerome O'Hea.

To this day, Mugabe models himself on a British gentleman - dark lounge suits, silk ties and handkerchiefs, a fondness for tea and cricket.

Holland said Mugabe was likely humiliated in the past week when the Queen stripped him of the honorary knighthood bestowed in 1994 when he was an anti-apartheid hero.

Yet it is Britain that Mugabe has chosen to demonize, accusing London of wanting to reclaim his southern African country as a virtual colony.

"When you hear Mugabe vilifying Britain, expressing hatred of Britain, underlying that is a love of Britain," said Holland, a Zimbabwean journalist living in South Africa who won a rare interview with Mugabe in November, meeting with him for 2 1/2 hours.

She did not think he was crazy, but "lives in the world in a mad kind of way."

"But I think it's deliberate," Holland said. "I think he's in denial. I think he can't face what he's done in Zimbabwe because that isn't what he intended to do. He did genuinely, I think, want be the saviour of his people, the liberator of an oppressed nation. What has happened is a source of deep pain to him, I think."

Holland believes Mugabe still is bitter that the apartheid Rhodesian regime refused to allow him out of jail, where he was a political prisoner for 11 years, to attend the funeral of his only son with his first wife, Ghanaian fellow teacher Sally Hayfron.

Even as a child, Mugabe could not bear to be criticized, she said. He was a loner with his head constantly stuck in a book and a scholar who earned six degrees while he was imprison.

Mugabe would have been fine if he'd remained a teacher, perhaps advanced to headmaster, Holland said. But "the problem is he has an army and police force to act out his anger."

And at 84, Mugabe has the strength, stamina and health of a 60-year-old, with no sign that age is slowing him down or softening his sharp brain.

Chenjerai Hove, a Zimbabwean poet, novelist and essayist who fled Mugabe's regime, says whenever Mugabe is challenged "he becomes a wounded lion and goes on the attack."

Those who have failed to see that pattern chose "to look the other way while the man was busy showing his dictatorial tendencies," says Hove, a writer in resident at Brown University.

Back in 1976, when Mugabe fled Rhodesia to take control of the war for black rule from Mozambique, "a lot of people were arrested and tortured for him to be accepted as a leader, so his cruel past started at that time, and he has always worked like that," Hove said.

When Mugabe's leadership was challenged after independence in 1980 by disgruntled military leaders of rival liberation leader Joshua Nkomo's movement, Mugabe sent his North Korean-trained elite Fifth Brigade on a rampage against Nkomo's minority Ndebele tribe. Some 20,000 people, most innocent civilians, were killed. Thousands starved to death as Mugabe withheld international drought relief from Ndebele civilians.

The international community looked the other way, still pleased that Mugabe had urged reconciliation with the whites who had oppressed his people, allowing former Rhodesian ruler Ian Smith to draw a government parliamentary pension and whites to continue living privileged lifestyles with domestic workers in mansions replete with pools and tennis courts.

When the white farmers started voting against him, it infuriated Mugabe.

Few could argue with the logic of redistribution when some 5,000 white commercial farmers owned two-thirds of the best arable land in a country of millions of blacks.

But when voters rejected a 1999 referendum that would have strengthened his presidential powers and allowed his government to seize white-owned farms without compensation for redistribution to black farmers, he again turned brutal.

Mugabe sent self-styled "war veterans" to violently take over farms, which were then given to his cabinet ministers, military leaders and other elite. Hundreds of thousands of black farm labourers lost their jobs, fertile lands turned fallow and nearly a third of the population fled the economic collapse and political oppression.

In 2005, Mugabe sent bulldozers to shantytowns and street markets where residents had voted overwhelmingly for the opposition.

This year, Mugabe unleashed his military and ruling party hooligans on his people after Zimbabweans rejected him in the first round of presidential elections in March, giving the most votes to opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. Dozens of opposition supporters have been killed and thousands injured.

As the violence intensified, fearing more blood on his hands, Tsvangirai withdraw from the run-off election held Friday.

Mugabe has shrugged off the growing chorus of criticism, which this week belatedly was joined by African leaders condemning him for pursuing his violent re-election.

Holland fears the violence won't end now.

"This is a man who does not forgive ... I think it's about revenge ... He now knows that his own people don't want him."