Ten days ago, I was in Zimbabwe watching joy turn to heartbreak
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4152
By Graham Boynton
As the early election results came through, ordinary Zimbabweans – bank clerks, shop assistants, domestic servants – who have endured years of destructive, violent rule under Robert Mugabe and his Zanu PF cronies, were dancing in the streets with delight.
These were the people who had risked their necks to vote against a hated regime and they sensed an opposition victory.
By the end of the week, the mood had changed: it was obvious that the election was being stolen and, with the prospect of more years of poverty and suffering under http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4133’s kleptocracy, the dancing had stopped.
Once more, they have been abandoned by their African neighbours and by the world. Several young Zimbabweans whom I spoke to in the country’s second city, Bulawayo, said they were certain that the world would only take notice of their plight “when the streets are running with blood”.
Some old hands had known this was coming. Mugabe and his henchmen may have proved to be the worst leaders on the continent in terms of economic management and the betterment of their people, but they have been the most cunning and tenacious in terms of retaining power.Mugabe was always going to steal this election; the clues were there for those who knew what to look for.
We can only presume that South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki must have known this, too, even as he described the situation as “manageable” last week and claimed there was “no crisis in Zimbabwe” at the weekend.
Likewise, African leaders at the Southern African Development Community (SADC) meeting in Zambia at the weekend must also have seen the inevitable.
The first indication that trouble was to come could be seen in the week following the polls: a laughing and playful Mugabe bade farewell to the last of the election monitor groups, the African Union group led by Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, President of Sierra Leone.
At the time, the country was anticipating a landslide opposition victory. But Mugabe was smiling, happy in the knowledge that, with the monitors gone, he could get down to serious business.
Then, the “war veterans”, Mugabe’s very unpleasant informal army of thugs who had been invisible while the monitors were around, gave a press conference.
Their leader, Jabulani Sibanda, who was four or five years old at the end of the bush war – and hence an unlikely veteran – railed against “sanctions employed against us as a weapon by imperial countries trying to bend the minds of our people”.
This was Mugabe-speak for: the “British-backed MDC” will never rule Zimbabwe. Within days, gangs of “veterans” were roaming rural areas, burning down huts and grain silos, torturing and, from what we now hear, murdering people who had voted for the opposition.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/04/15/do1502.xml