Those are human beings in Zimbabwe

From Bridget Johnson at Pajamas Media today with my comments below the star line.

Johnson begins - - -

If you want to challenge Robert Mugabe — who once claimed that he’d be president until 100 years of age — you’ll be lucky to come out of the experience alive.

That’s what makes opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai a true survivor. Tsvangirai’s party announced Sunday that he will pull out of his presidential runoff race against Mugabe in the midst of mounting violence and intimidation.

Tsvangirai is president of the Movement for Democratic Change — something Zimbabwe is aching for after the catastrophic rule of Mugabe — and has survived, by his count, four assassination attempts at the hands of Mugabe’s goons, including a 1997 attempt to throw him out of a 10-story window and a savage beating last year as punishment for proceeding with a banned protest march.

After forcing Mugabe to a runoff in the presidential election this year — and let’s face it, the MDC probably won more than 50 percent outright, besides just edging out Mugabe as claimed — Tsvangirai’s return to Zimbabwe to campaign was delayed by word of an assassination plot that allegedly was organized by military intelligence.

Now the man who revealed the damning details of that plot — which allegedly involved 18 snipers being specially tasked with taking out Tsvangirai — will likely be killed by Mugabe.

Tendai Biti, secretary-general of the MDC, was hauled into a Harare court last Thursday, accused of penning documents that call Mugabe a criminal. Even though that shoe fits, the MDC claims the state’s “evidence” consists of forgeries with “not even an attempt to simulate the accused’s signature.”

This opposition is classified as subversion, with capital punishment as the convenient penalty. Biti has been refused bail.

Also last week, 27-year-old Abigail Chiroto, the wife of the mayor of Harare — Emmanuel Chiroto, a member of the MDC — was abducted along with her 4-year-old son; the couple’s house was also firebombed.

Abigail’s blindfolded body was discovered hours later, and the boy was released. “My son keeps on saying to me, ‘Daddy, go and get mummy from the forest, go and get her and bring her home’,” Emmanuel Chiroto told the Telegraph.

The MDC estimates that since the first round of voting on March 29, “about 70” opposition supporters have been tortured and killed by operatives of Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party. …

Johnson’s entire report’s here.
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Comments:

Mugabe’s terrorism is shocking, but nothing new. The world has known about it for decades thanks to courageous journalists and opposition leaders such as Morgan Tsvangirai, Emmanuel and Abigail Chiroto and many others who’ve endured threats, imprisonment, torture and death because of their democratic opposition to Mugabe.

Mugabe’s use of terrorism has been essential to his holding on to power as Zimbabwe has imploded into social and economic chaos that’s included chronic food shortages and famines in a country which, at the time it gained independence from Great Britain, was a net food exporter.

But it isn’t just terrorism that’s enabled Mugabe to wield power. Most Western experts agree that without the staunch support of his friend President Thabo Mbeki and Mbeki's South African government, Mugabe would long ago have been driven from power. But as recently as this past April, Mbeki made the unbelievable comment that there was “no crisis” in Zimbabwe.

When you look at Zimbabwe’s agony you have to ask yourself: “Where are the human rights groups?” “Where is the outrage of Western governments?”

We heard so much from human rights groups and Western governments at the time of Abu Ghraib.

We were told that was because of the rights groups and governments revulsion at the way human beings were treated in Abu Ghraib.

Well, the people of Zimbabwe are human beings, too.

So where’s the outrage?