How Mugabe plays the ace card

Mugabe, who purports to be a devout Catholic, took advantage of the beatification of Pope John Paul to take high maintenance wife Grace -"the First Shopper," as she is known -on a jaunt.

He and his regime are now so hemmed in by international sanctions limiting his travel that he never misses an opportunity such as a religious occasion or a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, when the restrictions are eased.


Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe (centre) and his wife Grace are greeted by officials as they arrive at the Vatican.
Photograph by: Andreas Solaro, AFP, Getty Images, Vancouver Sun

But if the world worked properly Mugabe would not have been allowed back on his plane in Rome to return to Zimbabwe, where he has been president since 1980.

Instead, he would have been clapped in irons and dispatched to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to account for three decades of sustained humanrights abuses and mass slaughter of his country's people.

And there is no better charge sheet than the latest book by Zimbabwean Peter Godwin, one of the finest foreign correspondents of this generation and a talented cataloguer of Mugabe's vileness since the early 1980s.

Godwin's new book, The Fear, charts in horrific detail the full extent of rape, torture and murder to which the Mugabe regime went to stay in power after he lost the 2008 presidential election to Morgan Tsvangirai.

And it worked. Mugabe is still in power after destroying what was once the only functioning country in Africa -and the one with by far the highest standard of living. Now it is a wasteland, with its once-thriving agricultural, resource and manufacturing industries either rotting or handed over to Chinese asset strippers in return for the weapons to suppress the country's people.

At least a quarter of Zimbabwe's 12 million people have fled abroad, many to South Africa. Thousands have been killed or maimed by Mugabe's gangs of thugs, his police and the hoods of his secret police, the Central Intelligence Organization (CIO).

Few people have jobs any more. The health, education and socialservice systems, once the finest in Africa, are now all but totally dysfunctional. The capital, Harare, formerly one of the most pleasant and livable cities on the continent, is now a crumbling wreck without any working utilities.

In the hope and expectation that the 2008 presidential elections would be the moment when his homeland changed course, Godwin and his sister Georgina left their exile homes in New York and London and returned to Zimbabwe "to dance on Robert Mugabe's political grave."

But instead they found themselves bearing witness to Mugabe's obscenely violent quest to cling to power after it became evident he'd lost the first, three-candidate round of the election at the end of March.

For weeks, the always-compliant elections commission withheld the results of the first ballot while Mugabe's police and goon squads subjected supporters of Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) to revenge and brutality on an industrial scale.

Mugabe's thugs set up torture camps in most electoral districts. MDC supporters who were not arbitrarily beaten to death in their homes or on the streets were taken to these places in the thousands. There they were raped, tortured or killed, and often all three.

The operation has a name, Ngatipedzenavo, in Shona, the language of Zimbabwe's majority. "Let us finish them off."

After several weeks of this, doctored results were produced which said there should be a runoff ballot between Mugabe and Tsvangirai in July. But as the violence grew worse as election day approached, Tsvangirai withdrew, saying he could not stand to watch this orgy of death continue.

So Mugabe remains president with, after some mediation by South Africa, Tsvangirai as prime minister. But all power remains in the hands of Mugabe and his thinly veiled military regime.

At Mugabe's side are the same men who, in the early 1980s, set Mugabe's North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade on the new president's political opponents among the minority Ndebele of Matabeleland in Zimbabwe's southwest.

The Fifth Brigade slaughtered thousands of people in a campaign called Gukurahundi -"the wind that cleanses." It took 10 years for the full truth of that genocide to come out, and Godwin was one of the journalists who played a major part in its exposure.

What keeps Mugabe and thugs in power is the sure knowledge that without it they will be called to account for three decades of massive abuse of human rights.

It was very brave of Godwin and his sister to return to Zimbabwe to document the aftermath of the March 2008 election. Given their gathering of vast numbers of statements from people who were victims of Mugabe's death squads, you knew it wouldn't be long before the CIO caught up with them. Godwin, however, managed to get to the airport and on a flight to South Africa just ahead of being snatched by the CIO goons.

This is an important book not only for anyone who knows and loves Zimbabwe, but for anyone who cares about human values.

But it is not an easy book to read. It is not for the squeamish. Here, for example, is just one story from a woman who gathered testimony from Mugabe's victims:

"Brenda Meister is haunted by the story of a woman who went out with one of her year-old twin boys to run errands, leaving the other baby at home with his father. When she returned, she found her husband dead on the floor next to her son, who had been decapitated. The Mugabe thugs who had done this then grabbed her and gang-raped her next to her headless baby and her husband's corpse."

This book, one must hope, will one day be the libretto when Mugabe and his men stand in the dock in The Hague. But until then it is a reminder, if any were needed, that there is only one weapon of mass destruction -and that is the evil hearts of men and women.