However, everybody was full of hope and confidence when Robert Mugabe became president in 1980, after years of civil war under a white minority regime. He promised national unity, peace and democracy but power soon seemed to ruin his original intentions. Complete control became his declared objective. Therefore, in the early 1980s, he did not even hesitate from killing thousands of people in a region where the oppositional party Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) had its stronghold. In order to avoid further violence its leader agreed to merge his party with Robert Mugabe’s into Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF).
In 1999 a new oppositional party was founded: The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). It wanted to challenge Mugabe and restore peace and human rights which ZANU-PF had severely hurt. Since then and especially in the run-up to the presidential elections in 2002, MDC-supporters were arrested arbitrarily and imprisoned without trial, beaten with cables and deprived from food aid during droughts.
As a consequence Mugabe won the election with 56% and will stay president at least until 2007. The election was so evidently tainted that Zimbabwe was suspended from the Commonwealth.
Mugabe and his corrupt party officials still continue with their ruthless policy and have even reinforced it. Whites were blamed for the economic hardship and expelled from their farms in order to give them to Mugabe’s followers who did not have an idea of how to use a spade or how to milk a cow. The adopted measures reinforced economic problems – as if an inflation rate of 500% and an unemployment rate of 70% were not bad enough. Many farmers (also blacks supporting the MDC) experienced horrible scenes where drunken black gangs beat and harassed them and then took over the farms. President Mugabe openly declared he did not want to have the whites in his country any longer: “This country is our country and this land is our land. The white man is not indigenous to Africa. Africa is for Africans, Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans.” The whites are not the only victims of state suppression: Journalists, political activists and judges also suffer. A journalist of an independent Sunday newspaper wrote a critical article on the war in Congo that made Zimbabwe completely poor. He was arrested, beaten with a plank and given electric shock treatment on his genitals.
The Daily News, Zimbabwe’s most popular and only independent daily newspaper, stopped publishing last month after the Supreme Court stated that it was a crime to publish a newspaper without a government-issued licence. This decision only was possible because several judges were forcefully replaced by loyal ones.
This president cannot stand to be criticised and thus passed a law making it illegal to criticise him. He enjoys being the most important man of the country and, as it seems, cannot live without his privileges. Although he is already 80 years old, he denied all rumours that he might retire soon but even if he did, another ZANU-PF official could continue Mugabe’s authoritarian regime. At least there is a courageous opposition that does not give up despite of violence, repression and fraud. Hopefully, there will be a better future for this country, the “Jewel of Africa” as the ex-president of Tanzania Julius Nyerere put it.

last change: 09.03.2004 17:50