Tag: Robert Mugabe

Zimbabwe, as regular readers of this site are aware, is in the midst of famine due to the corrupt leadership of Robert Mugabe who has done everything from seizing land from white farmers, instituting strict censorship, fixing elections, etc.

Indepundit has a brief snippet from a speech from Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) defending this despot, but here is the full text of McKinney’s statements in opposition to a bill that imposed sanctions against Zimbabwe,

SPEECH OF HON.
CYNTHIA A. McKINNEY OF GEORGIA IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Tuesday, December 4, 2001

* Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, at the international Relations Committee meeting of November 28, 2001, which considered the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001, I asked a question of my colleagues who were vociferously supporting this misdirected piece of legislation: “Can anyone explain how the people in question who now have the land in question in Zimbabwe got title to the land?”

* My query was met with a deafening silence. Those who knew did not want to admit the truth and those who didn’t know should have known–that the land was stolen from its indigenous peoples through the British South Africa Company and any “titles” to it were illegal and invalid. Whatever the reason for their silence, the answer to this question is the unspoken but real reason for why the United States Congress is now concentrating its time and resources on squeezing an economically-devastated African state under the hypocritical guise of providing a “transition to democracy.”

* Zimbabwe is Africa’s second-longest stable democracy. It is multi-party. It had elections last year where the opposition, Movement for Democratic Change, won over 50 seats in the parliament. It has an opposition press which vigorously criticizes the government and governing party. It has an independent judiciary which issues decisions contrary to the wishes of the governing party. Zimbabwe is not without troubles, but neither is the United States. I have not heard anyone proposing a United States Democracy Act following last year’s Presidential electoral debacle. And if a foreign country were to pass legislation calling for a United States Democracy Act which provided funding for United States opposition parties under the fig leaf of “Voter Education,” this body and this country would not stand for it.

* There are many de jure and de facto one-party states in the world which are the recipients of support of the United States government. They are not the subject of Congressional legislative sanctions. To any honest observer, Zimbabwe’s sin is that it has taken the position to right a wrong, whose resolution has been too long overdue–to return its land to its people. The Zimbabwean government has said that a situation where 2 percent of the population owns 85 percent of the best land is untenable. Those who presently own more than one farm will no longer be able to do so.

* When we get right down to it, this legislation is nothing more than a formal declaration of United States complicity in a program to maintain white-skin privilege. We can call it an “incentives” bill, but that does not change its essential “sanctions” nature. It is racist and against the interests of the masses of Zimbabweans. In the long-run the Zimbabwe Democracy Act will work against the United States having a mutually beneficial relationship with Africa.

That’s really amazing. Politicians in South Africa understand that Mugabe is a despot — the African National Congress actually went to the trouble of explicitly saying it would never try to enforce the sort of theft of land from white farmers that Mugabe has forced on Zimbabwe.

But McKinney has no problem at all defending one of the worst contemporary African dictators. Her paragraph about the elections and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change are laugh out loud hilarious and could have easily come from Mugabe-controlled newspapers.

It is ironic that McKinney gave her remarks about Zimbabwe’s laudable democracy on Dec. 5, 2001. According to Human Rights Watch, in Dec. 2001 in Zimbabwe there were 7 politically motivated murders, 22 kidnappings/disappearances, 14 unlawful arrests/detentions and 119 cases of torture carried about by the government or government supporters.

It’s hard to believe a woman this ignorant and oblivious can hold a national office.

Source:

ZIMBABWE DEMOCRACY AND ECONOMIC RECOVERY ACT
OF 2001 (Extensions of Remarks – December 05, 2001. Cynthia McKinney, December 5, 2001.

The BBC reports that a Zimbabwean correspondent for The Daily Telegraph was arrested and charged with “publishing false information.”

Peta Thornycroft, 57, was apparently arrested because she was investigating alleged acts of violence carried out by government supporter against Zimbabwe’s opposition parties.

Anything which might be critical of Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe is now officially a crime under that nation’s laws.

In a real shocker, Robert Mugabe won the election he rigged this week. This guy has the same sort of job security that “elected” Soviet officials had back in the day.

I’ve said more than enough about Mugabe and Zimbabwe, but noticed something very peculiar. Is it just me or is Robert Mugabe really Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav? You be the judge.

Robert Mugabe

Flavor Flav

Zimbabwe has elections coming up — elections that would almost certainly result in a loss of power for Robert Mugabe if they were fair and free. Mugabe’s got a problem, and this week a solution appeared in the form of a videotape supposedly showing opposition leaders plotting to kill Mugabe.

The setup is this: opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai recently met with Ari Ben-Menashe. That meeting was surreptitiously taped, apparently by Zimbabwe secuirty forces.

Ben-Menashe used to work for Mugabe, though was apparently passing himself off now as an independent consultant. At the meeting, the two discuss a variety of issues related to the upcoming elections until Ben-Menashe proposes assassinating Mugabe, at which point Tsvangirai claims he left the room and refused to have anything more to do with Ben-Menashe.

But Mugabe is selling a different story — that Tsvangirai proposed the assassination plot and Ben-Menashe turned the opposition union leader in, saying he was shocked when Tsvangirai proposed the political murder.

So how do we know that Tsvangirai’s version is correct — and that Ben-Menashe was working with Zimbabwe’s security forces to set all of this up? Because Mugabe’s government released a videotape of that meeting. An extensively edited videotape. No, make that an idiotically edited videotape. Here’s how the BBC sums up the problems with the edited video, citing the point at which Tsvangirai appears to agree to the murder of Mugabe,

Although this sounds like damning evidence, after each question or answer, the film suddenly jumps and the figures switch their seating positions, showing that the clip has been heavily edited.

The Media Monitoring Project of Zimbabwe has analysed the video tape and says that a version broadcast relentlessly on Zimbabwe television has a video timer on the screen, which also demonstrates “that the video had been cut and rearranged in a manner that appeared to suit the assassination conspiracy theory”.

“The timer… changed repeatedly from, 9.45am to 9.25am; and from 9.25am to 9.43am and then back to 9.27am; and from 9.52am to 9.44am,” says the MMPZ.

Mugabe’s security forces are so stupid they left the damn timecode stamp in the edited video the released to the public! Sure puts a better perspective on his mismanagement of Zimbabwe.

Source:

What lies behind Zimbabwe’s treason tape. The BBC, February 26, 2002.