Mugabe has stole the election in Zim. I received an email from the PH i know there he says the army(HEAVILY-ARMED) and policemen have been deployed in several cities and towns. He says no way local population will accept the vote this time and he does not think they will use the courts, but will take to the streets, he (the PH)is preparing to move to one of his hunt camps for an undetermined stay to get out of harms way. He runs a first class operation and his business has been trashed by this, if you ever wanted to hunt africa , you can get some great rates in Zim now as there have been a lot of cancelations. But you will need a .375 H&H for cape buff, they will shake off an AR round and then stomp you in to something resembling hamburger.

Did we expect anything else from this country?  After all, Mugabe legalized the theft of private property and the collectivist redistribution of wealth.

Saw it on the news last night. What is Blair going to do about it now?  And are we going to have to help? Personally I wouldn't mind if US troops were sent, but we ARE kind of busy at the moment...

Even fellow commies say mean things! What happened to the 8 point lead?

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Pravda.RU:  

11:05 2002-03-12

ZIMBABWE: CHAOS

Chaos reigns in Zimbabwe, after opposition party MDC called for an extension of the election process, which was granted by the high court but resisted by Mugabe.

There are reports that some polling stations are open on Zimbabwe’s third day of voting, after the Movement for Democratic Change complained that during the first two days, government employees at polling stations had been purposefully performing a go-slow, processing in some polling stations only 5 people per hour. The total number of polling stations in Harare was reduced from 249 to 167, meaning that more people had to be processed at each one. Those suppressed were mainly in areas controlled by the MDC.

During the weekend vote, ZANU-PF supporters (Mugabe’s party) were allow to vote in stations where they had not been registered, while thousands of MDC supporters found that their names had been deleted from the electoral register.

The resulting confusion was an enormous backlog of voters, amounting to some 30% of the electorate, mainly in areas which support the MDC.

On Monday afternoon, four US diplomats were seized and arrested by Mugabe’s police and taken to an undisclosed destination, while Adrian de Bourbon, a lawyer for the MDC, was arrested along with his wife for distributing food and drinks to the long lines of voters.

Opinion polls gave an 8-point advantage to the leader of the opposition, Morgan Tsvangirai.

What the fuck is this about arresting US diplomats!?! Is that for real?  THAT can be a act of war.

African calls for sanctions on Mugabe's Zimbabwe...

Time for African sanctions against Mugabe
By GEORGE B. N. AYITTEY
In 1996, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe supported President Nelson Mandela, when the South African President led an effort to expel Nigeria from the Commonwealth.

Nigeria was condemned for General Sani Abacha's brutal hanging of Ogoni human rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others on November 10,1995, defying international pleas for clemency.  

During that Auckland summit, Dr Mugabe said: "Nigeria is a disgrace". And he and called for punitive sanctions against the country.  

Today, only six years later, Dr Mugabe is equally impervious to reason and common sense and is resorting to Abacha-like tactics in a bid to cling to power as the economy collapses around him.

After a successful guerrilla campaign against British colonialists and a white-minority regime in the 1970s, Mugabe was hailed as a hero and swept into office as the first president in 1980.  

He vowed to make Zimbabwe a one-party state and vowed that his Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) would "ensure the charting of an irreversible social course and create a socialist ideology."

Darker, sinister side to Mugabe

In the beginning, his expansion of education, reconciliation with white minority and willingness to resolve inequitable distribution of land between whites and blacks through peaceful negotiations won him plaudits.  

But there was a darker political side: his lust for power. In what opponents deride as "coconut elections", he was re-elected in 1985, 1990 and 1996.

Essentially, they are farcical elections. The incumbent writes the rules and then serves as a player, the referee and the goalkeeper. The deck is stacked against the opposition candidates. They are starved of funds, denied access to state media and brutalised by thugs as the police watch.

In contrast, the incumbent enjoys access to enormous state resources: state media, vehicles, the police, the military and civil servants – all are commandeered to ensure his re-election.

Further, the entire electoral process itself is rigged. Voter rolls are padded with ruling party supporters and phantom voters, while opposition supporters are purged. The Electoral Commission is in the ruling party's, as are the judges who might settle any election disputes.

In the July 1985 elections, for example, thugs from Mugabe's Youth Brigade rampaged through the suburbs of Harare, brutalising opposition supporters. Homes were raided, and furniture and household possessions thrown out into the streets.  

Dr Mugabe has been running scared – afraid of his own record of broken promises, brutal repression, economic mismanagement and venal cronyism.

Contracts for public works went to cronies. The state bureaucracy swelled as the system of patronage spiralled out of control. Ministers amassed great wealth and even the military became tainted with corruption.

By the late 1990s, the economy was on the verge of collapse and the country rocked by a wave of strikes by workers, nurses and teachers, to protest rising food and fuel prices. In 1998, even doctors went on strike to protest shortages of such basic supplies as soap and pain-killers.

Fleet of new Mercedes vehicles

And while the urban poor were rioting about food prices, the Mugabe government ordered a fleet of new Mercedes cars for the 50-odd cabinet ministers while 77-year old Mugabe himself and his 36-year-old wife, Grace Marufu, attended lavish parties and conferences abroad.

In 1999, President Mugabe further angered voters by tripling and quadrupling the salaries of his ministers. Rampant shortages of basic commodities – such as mealie meal, the national staple diet, bread, rice, potatoes, cooking oil and even soap – now keep inflation raging at more than 110 per cent.  

With the flight of investors and closure of businesses due to attacks by militants – more than 30 businesses were attacked in May, 2001, alone – jobs are scarce, pushing Zimbabwe's unemployment to nearly 60 per cent.  

A quarter of the population is infected with the Aids virus. The United Nations says more than half a million of Zimbabwe's 12.5 million people need emergency food aid. The state treasury is empty, pillaged by kamikaze kleptocrats and drained at the rate of $3 million a month by a mercenary involvement in Congo's war.

Cabinet ministers, army generals, relatives of President Mugabe, prominent figures in the ruling party and a score of the well-connected have launched lucrative business ventures to plunder Congo's rich resources – diamonds, cobalt and gold.  

Angry rejection of criticism

Accordingly, the commander of the defence forces, Gen Vitalis Zvinavashe, warned recently that the country's military, police and intelligence chiefs would not accept a "Morgan Tsvangirai" as a national leader if he wins the election since he was not a veteran of Zimbabwe's independence struggle.

Dr Mugabe angrily rejects criticism of his government for the economic crisis. He blames British colonialists, greedy Western powers, the racist white minority and the IMF, which he denounced as that "monstrous creature."

But Zimbabwean voters know better. When Dr Mugabe asked them in a February 15, 2000 referendum for draconian emergency powers to seize white farms for distribution to landless peasants, they resoundingly rejected the constitutional revisions by 55 per cent to 45 per cent. Paranoid and desperate, Mugabe played his trump card. He sent his "war veterans" to seize white commercial farmland anyway.

To be sure, there is basic inequity in the distribution of land in Zimbabwe. Whites account for only about one per cent of Zimbabwe's population of 12.5 million, yet 4,500 white farmers continue to own nearly a third of the country's most fertile farmland. But the land issue has become a political tool, ruthlessly exploited by Mugabe at election time to fan racial hatred, solidify his vote among landless rural voters, to maintain his grip on power, and to divert attention from his disastrous Marxist-Leninist policies and ill-fated misadventures in the Congo.

 I could give two shits about the entire continent of Africa!

All they do is have civil wars with a few corrupt governments & dictatorships thrown
into the mix every once in a while.