Mugabeast

Zimbabwe had its parliamentary election results announced yesterday. I find it mind boggling, that ZANU-PF, party that denies an ongoing famine,refuses foreign aid and lets people starve instead,denies access to free press, blackmails and tortures its population into obediance, and is ruled by a tyrant, should win overwhelmingly.
Mugabe is among the last of the freedom fighters - turned presidents in Africa. For that reason alone he is respected by many. Yet his practices were always violent and power-hungry. Even during the liberation movement. He was imprisoned for a long time. Conditions were cruel and inhuman. One would imagine that would spark some empathy in a political prisoner. But like Gomulka in Poland, Husak in Czechoslovakia,and surely many others, Mugabe turned into an inflexible rigid beast, waging politics of oppression and annihilation of opposition. Most of the population remembers his bloody campaign against the Ndebele tribes in 1980s, violent struggles with another clique of liberation movement, and ongoing tactics of handling food aid as tool of coercion. Only the urban youth, not old enough to remember the eighties, dares to form an opposition, often risking their own lives and livelihood.
South Africa and other neighbors endorse the election results, Britain issued a lukewarm statement denouncing the election and Mugabe's rule,I haven't heard much from elsewhere. The talk is about rigged election. It does not matter though, whether it was rigged or not. In an atmosphere of near-starvation, fear for one's life under an ever watchful eye of ZANU-PF, the results don't need to be tweaked too much. One of the world's worst-off countries may just take a turn... for the worse again. It is a frustrating and sad day.