In this week’s New Yorker, Jon Lee Anderson makes the important point that Robert Mugabe, supposed anti-colonial liberator, is by now indistinguishable from a colonial emperor. The piece makes for painful, infuriating reading:
In 2005, Mugabe and his wife moved into a new twenty-five-bedroom mansion in Borrowdale Brook, a Harare suburb, which cost a reported ten million U.S. dollars to build. Nobody knows exactly how he paid for it, but in Harare it is received wisdom that the mansion was financed by the Chinese, to whom the President had granted lucrative mining and trade concessions. Mugabe said openly that he had the help of “foreign governments.” (He added that Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad, a personal friend [and virulent antisemite – DA], had donated tropical timber for the roof; China was reported to have supplied the shiny blue roof tiles.)
The unemployment rate in Zimbabwe is 80 percent. A half-liter bottle of water costs nearly two trillion Zimbabwean dollars ($19 U.S.).
It is well known that Mugabe is an orchestrator of torture, murder and targeted rape. Still, this passage makes your heart stop:
Three local women, the wives of M.D.C. officials, had been gang-raped. In the worst incident, one of the women was raped by eighteen men. “Probably she will contract H.I.V.,” [opposition parliament member] Muchauraya said. “Given Zimbabwe’s statistics, as many as six of the men who raped her were probably infected.”
And yet Mugabe remains a hero to people smart enough to know better. Anderson concludes with an account of Mugabe’s late September address to the UN General Assembly:
In the press gallery, an African man began clapping loudly, particularly at criticisms of the U.S. When Mugabe’s speech ended, a few moments later, the man was joined by twenty or thirty others — journalists from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia — who gave Mugabe a sustained round of applause.
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