Posted on 05/09/2003 1:12:13 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Job Sikhala has been arrested 20 times. Maybe more.
He's been beaten by the police. Tortured by having electric shocks applied to his tongue, genitals and toes. Forced to drink toxins. Urinated on by his torturers.
He's an elected Member of Parliament in Zimbabwe.
Sikhala, who's 30, belongs to opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). And he's not the unluckiest MDC supporter. Nearly 60 have been murdered.
"My horrendous experience has hardened my resolve," he told the Mail & Guardian newspaper, "that it is better to die for the freedom of the Zimbabwean people than to remain silent."
Comrade President Robert Mugabe's officials promise to bring Sikhala's police torturers to book. But few are betting on it.
After all, Tsvangirai himself is on trial for plotting to kill Mugabe, on dubious evidence, and could be sentenced to death.
Little wonder if 12 million Zimbabweans despair of seeing Mugabe's divisive, increasingly brutal 23-year reign lurch to a close any time soon.
Still, pressure is building for a negotiated resolution to Zimbabwe's worst political and economic crisis since independence in 1980.
U.S. President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are pushing for "regime change." So is the Commonwealth, which suspended Zimbabwe in 2002 after Mugabe's supporters narrowly stole the presidential election from Tsvangirai through murder, intimidation and fraud.
Presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and Bakili Muluzu of Malawi were in Harare this week trying to bring Mugabe and Tsvangirai together for talks. They failed. But Obasanjo found "on both sides ... earnestness for negotiations to be resumed." Clearly, Mugabe is feeling some heat.
Alert to their growing isolation, members of Mugabe's own ruling Zimbabwe African National Union - Popular Front (Zanu-PF) party are reaching out.
Parliamentary speaker Emmerson Mnangagwa and army chief Gen. Vitalis Zvinavashe have approached Tsvangirai to serve in a post-Mugabe transition government. Other Zanu-PF figures have also called for power sharing.
And inside Zimbabwe, trade unions have launched crippling political strikes demanding change.
This undermining of Mugabe from within is an encouraging development.
Zimbabweans shouldn't have to suffer five more years of autocratic, inept rule.
Mugabe's coercive land reform - dispossessing white farmers - has slashed output by half. Just a few hundred white farmers remain, from 4,000 two years ago. Food, power and fuel are in short supply. Three-quarters of the population is jobless. Half are hungry. Every week 2,500 die of AIDS-related illness.
Yet amid this suffering, Mugabe spends $500 million on the military.
Zimbabweans have now lived with three years of state-sanctioned political violence, fierce suppression of dissent and harassment of the press.
The only way forward is for Mugabe to agree to bow out early, so that some transitional power-sharing arrangement can be struck between Zanu-PF and the MDC leading to early, credible, internationally supervised elections.
But that will require regional politicians to crank up the pressure, something they have been reluctant to do.
Mbeki, whose country supplies much of Zimbabwe's power on credit, could unseat Mugabe with a flick of the switch. But Africa's revolutionary liberation leaders are notoriously loath to break with their own.
That is a betrayal not only of Zimbabweans but also of Africans who are struggling to reform their governments and economies, hoping to qualify for more generous foreign investment, debt relief and aid. It also encourages autocrats to hang on.
"The process has begun but I fear there will be ... more blood spilled before Mugabe actually steps down," says John Makumbe of the Zimbabwe in Crisis Coalition.
That Mugabe, at 79, is doing such terrible damage is a tragedy. For the country. For him. Some still hail Comrade President as one of the nation's liberators. But their voices grow fainter with every passing day.
Gord Barthos writes the Star's editorials on foreign affairs.
So we may infer that Mugabe is in trouble when the Toronto Star prints a column like this.
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