"Robert Mugabe: Man or Monster" is the title of a series of dispatches by an undercover reporter for the Economist who visited Zimbabwe recently.
He meets with, among others, Jonathan Moyo at his home (who, for the reporter, is not entirely convincing, when he states with an unmistakeable tone of authority that "Mugabe will be gone within a year").
He also meets "an opposition leader at a trendy cafe" whom the reporter silently reproaches (he admits, "entirely unfairly") to himself for "drinking capuccino when there is a dictator to unseat."
Entirely unfair, to say the least, at a time when the Mugabe regime is midstream in a meticulously calculated and ruthlessly executed plan to eliminate the main opposition party, Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
Unfortunately, this illicit reporter spends too little time exposing the ongoing campaign of terror that consists of abductions, torture and arbitrary arrests of hundreds of activists from the democratic civil society movement and political parties.
In fact this wave of repression has spread and is now targetted not only to known civil society and MDC members of the democratic forces but to ordinary blokes on the street, especially in high density areas.
An example of this new generalization of the state-sponsored terror hit particularly close to home when my own night guard, who lives in Chitungwiza, was accosted last week by 2 men who demanded that he produce his ZANU-PF card and, when he was not able to do so, beat him to a pulp with metal bars. He received 7 stitches to the head.
Our illicit reporter and many of his brethren in the international media are astoundlingly derelict in their duty to report on the ongoing and systematic campaign of violence and repression that Robert Mugabe and his thugs are directing to anyone suspected of potentially having opposition sympathies.
CIO officers and other of Mugabe's thugs have been telling activists, as they beat them, that they have the names of all MDC and civil society officers, from top to bottom and that, in the words of one of the ZANU PF sadists, "by the end of June, we will have tortured every member of Tsvangirai's MDC."
We will post photos of some of Mugabe's torture victims since March 11th in later posts on this blog as well as details with regard to the numbers of persons arrested, beaten, tortured, kidnapped and killed in the hopes that the members of the fourth estate will feel moved to report on this appalling reign of terror.
The illicit Economist reporter's article can be linked to here.
