PrairiePundit

NY Times: Robert Mugabe, Strongman Who Cried, ‘Zimbabwe Is Mine,’ Dies at 95 Until 2017, he was the only leader his country had known since independence in 1980. He presided over its long decline. Mugabe was a racist zealot who did more to destroy the economy of his country than any foreign enemy could have.  His rate of inflation was once the worst in the world until the communists in Venezuela said "Hold my beer."

Foreign Policy: Though economic conditions have improved in Zimbabwe since the days of 231 million percent inflation, this week brought some pretty disturbing news : After paying public workers' salaries last week, the balance in cash-strapped Zimbabwe's government public account stood at just $217, Finance Minister Tendai Biti said Tuesday.  "Last week when we paid civil servants there was $217 (left) in government coffers," Biti told journalists in the capital Harare, claiming some of them had healthier bank balances than the state.  "The government finances are in paralysis state at the present moment. We are failing to meet our targets.  "It's hard to think of a public servant than a less enviable job than Biti's, but despite this week's news, he deserves some credit for a pretty remarkable turnaround . The inflation that made the country world famous is now under control, thanks to his decision to abolish the country's curr...

Guardian: Robert Mugabe appointed as UN international envoy for tourism This is another reason to lose respect for the UN.  What were they thinking.  This guy produced inflation to the point that you could not go out to eat without bringing a suitcase full of cash.  His thugs tortured and beat anyone suspected of not voting to continue his despotic rule.  He took a country that was the breadbasket of Africa and turned it into a basket case.  He so starved his people that it made them think apartheid was the good old days.

Guardian: Zimbabwe outlaws sale of used knickers Keep that in mind the next time you are in Zimbabwe and hard up for cash.  BTW, knickers is Brit speak for underwear.   Zimbabwe is one if the poorest places on earth and its inflation rate may make underwear seem more valuable than it really is.

Guardian: In the evening gloom the vast complex emerges into view. Beyond a high security wall, insects dance in the beam of a giant floodlight. Men are still hard at work in the skeletons of concrete tower blocks, and standing at the centre of it all is the arch of a Chinese pagoda. Zimbabwe 's  national defence college is under construction  within a sprawling, heavily-guarded compound whose brooding presence sends a clear message to any would-be revolutionary. Some have dubbed it the " Robert Mugabe  national school of intelligence". The construction site north of Harare has also become the lightning rod for another source of simmering resentment – Chinese labour practices. Surrounded by a perimeter wall that runs for a kilometre through what was once farmland, the shadowy military academy is being built by a Chinese contractor whose managers are accused of meting out physical punishments, miserable conditions and meagre pay. "The beatings happen very o...

Telegraph: Mugabe refuses to step down He runs a fake democracy and beats up those who vote against him.  Why would anyone expect that he would voluntarily leave before he dies?

Daily Mail: Black magic sperm? Gang of women arrested for drugging, kidnapping and raping men to steal their semen I am surprised they could not find some volunteers, rather than having to steal the sperm.

Daily Mail: He enjoyed being Mugabe's torturer... but judge says it's his human right to stay here at taxpayer's expense This si the sign of a society almost as sick as that in Zimbabwe. If the International Criminal court has any meaning whatsoever, turn this guy over to it.

Guardian: Officer jailed for using Mugabe's loo When you got to go, don't go there in Zimbabwe.

Image via Wikipedia CNN: China's foreign minister pushed Friday for the lifting of sanctions against Zimbabwe , saying no country has a right to dictate the internal affairs of another nation, state-run media reported. Starting in 2002, the European Union and the United States imposed targeted sanctions on Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe and some senior party members amid rampant reports of stifling his political opposition, human rights violations and his controversial land reform policy that has targeted white commercial farmers. Mugabe blames the sanctions for his country's woes, which late last year included an unemployment rate of more than 90% and an inflation rate of 231,000,000%. Speaking Friday during a two-day visit to Harare, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said that "China believes that Africans have the right to choose their own way of development, as they are masters of the African continent. All others are just guests." ... Is this guy...

Image via Wikipedia Guardian: Violence has surged in Zimbabwe with reports of mob attacks, death threats, politically motivated arrests and at least one shooting ahead of possible elections, civil rights groups claim. The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) claims youth militias loyal to Robert Mugabe 's Zanu-PF party are "running amok" in poor townships, and accuses the police of siding with the offenders. Analysts regard the upsurge as a warning sign that Mugabe is gearing up for elections, possibly as early as June, and fear a repeat of the 2008 polls in which the MDC says 253 people died. ... A Zimbabwe election is a very dangerous time for civilians. Mugabe can't win a fair election so he engages in brutality to intimidate voters. If they aren't for him he will have them beaten or killed. It would actually be more humane for him to just skip the election and quit pretending Zimbabwe is a democratic country. Of course, the best results would be...

Image via Wikipedia NY Times: The exhibit at the National Gallery is now a crime scene, the artwork banned and the artist charged with insulting President Robert Mugabe . The picture windows that showcased graphic depictions of atrocities committed in the early years of Mr. Mugabe’s 30-year-long rule are now papered over with the yellowing pages of a state-controlled newspaper. But the government’s efforts to bury history have instead provoked slumbering memories of the Gukurahundi , Zimbabwe ’s name for the slaying and torture of thousands of civilians here in the Matabeleland region a quarter century ago. “You can suppress art exhibits, plays and books, but you cannot remove the Gukurahundi from people’s hearts,” said Pathisa Nyathi, a historian who lives here in the provincial capital. “It is indelible.” As Zimbabwe heads anxiously toward another election season, a recent survey has found that 70 percent of Zimbabweans are afraid they will be victims of political violence o...

From the Guardian: Third of Zimbabwe voters 'are dead' The people who don't go along with Mugabe may be added to the rolls of the dead.

Frank Dikotter goes through some local records of the "man caused famine."  Famines are actually the weapon of choice for mass murder.  It is what Stalin used in the Ukraine, and it is what Mugabe has used in Zimbabwe.  Hitler was a piker compared to the communist killers

Image via Wikipedia Guardian: Zimbabwe's president, Robert Mugabe , and his allies have seized nearly half the country's commercial farms in a land grab widely blamed for economic collapse , an investigation claims today. Mugabe has bought the loyalty of cabinet ministers, senior army and government officials and judges with nearly 5m hectares (12.5m acres) of agricultural land , including wildlife conservancies and plantations, according to the national news agency ZimOnline. The 86-year-old president and his wife, Grace, are said to own 14 farms spanning at least 16,000 hectares. ZimOnline's investigation undermined the central claim behind Mugabe's land reforms : that they are give the majority of black Zimbabweans their rightful inheritance. "Even though Mugabe has consistently maintained that his land reform programme is meant to benefit the poor black masses, it is him and his cronies who have got the most out of it," it argued. A "new, ...

Times: WAVING iron bars and pickaxes, the Red Ants, a rented mob of thugs in bright red overalls and crimson helmets, used the half-light of dawn for cover as they marched into the slum. Stamping out the first cooking fires of the day with heavy boots, they spread out in a long line. Then they attacked. Bleary immigrant women dropped plastic water containers and ran in panic towards their corrugated iron homes. “Grab the children,” they screamed. By sunrise their shacks on the outskirts of Johannesburg had been razed. They were forced to watch as their few possessions were burnt. The Red Ants, described as state-sponsored mercenaries by their critics, have become a growing force in the past few months as South African cities have begun a campaign of “beautification” before the World Cup begins in June. This means clearing away unsightly immigrant squatter camps. This month, more than 100 Zimbabweans were beaten and evicted by Red Ants from a derelict building on the main...

Sunday Telegraph: The agreement was sealed last month during a visit to Tehran by a close aide to Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean president who last weekend celebrated 30 years in power, The Sunday Telegraph has learned. In return for supplying oil, which Zimbabwe desperately needs to keep its faltering economy moving, Iran has been promised access to potentially huge deposits of uranium ore – which can be converted into the basic fuel for nuclear power or enriched to make a nuclear bomb. "Iran secured the exclusive uranium rights last month when minister of state for Presidential affairs, Didymus Mutasa visited Tehran," said a Zimbabwean government source. "That is when the formal signing of the deal was made, away from the glare of the media." Mr Mutasa is the former lands minister in the Zanu-PF administration and one of Mr Mugabe's most senior aides. The revelation came after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian pr...

Nicholas Kristof: Here’s a measure of how President Robert Mugabe is destroying this once lush nation of Zimbabwe: In a week of surreptitious reporting here (committing journalism can be a criminal offense in Zimbabwe), ordinary people said time and again that life had been better under the old, racist, white regime of what was then called Rhodesia. “When the country changed from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, we were very excited,” one man, Kizita, told me in a village of mud-walled huts near this town in western Zimbabwe. “But we didn’t realize the ones we chased away were better and the ones we put in power would oppress us.” “It would have been better if whites had continued to rule because the money would have continued to come,” added a neighbor, a 58-year-old farmer named Isaac. “It was better under Rhodesia. Then we could get jobs. Things were cheaper in stores. Now we have no money, no food.” Over and over, I cringed as I heard Africans wax nostalgic about a nasty, oppre...

BBC: In many ways, the Lemba tribe of Zimbabwe and South Africa are just like their neighbours. But in other ways their customs are remarkably similar to Jewish ones. They do not eat pork, they practise male circumcision, they ritually slaughter their animals, some of their men wear skull caps and they put the Star of David on their gravestones. Their oral traditions claim that their ancestors were Jews who fled the Holy Land about 2,500 years ago. It may sound like another myth of a lost tribe of Israel, but British scientists have carried out DNA tests which confirm their Semitic origin. These tests back up the group's belief that a group of perhaps seven men married African women and settled on the continent. The Lemba, who number perhaps 80,000, live in central Zimbabwe and the north of South Africa. And they also have a prized religious artefact that they say connects them to their Jewish ancestry - a replica of the Biblical Ark of the Covenant known as the ngoma lungundu, mea...

AFP: Oil-rich Venezuela ushered in 2010 with new measures rationing electricity use in malls, businesses and billboards, as Hugo Chavez's government aimed to save power amid a crippling drought. The new regulations came into effect January 1, with businesses required to comply with reduced consumption limits and authorities warning of forced power cuts and rate hikes if the measures are not followed. A decree published on Christmas Eve states that commercial centers may operate from 11:00 am to 9:00 pm on the electricity grid, but beyond that establishments would have to operate off-grid, using their own generators. Venezuela is flush with oil -- the country's primary export -- and natural gas, but relies mainly on hydroelectric generation to meet domestic energy demand. With the country in a widespread drought, late last year Chavez announced a sweeping campaign to reduce widespread energy "waste," stressing that rationing was necessary to avoid a systemic "coll...