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whats happening in Zimbabwe

Mr Nay has just been telling me he's seen on TV that Mugabe has put thousands of troops on the streets, and has said that if the opposition declares victory that that will be treason, and also that if he loses, he's told the army to go back to being guerillas.

This contradicts the slightly positive reports I've read at the BBB over the past few days.

What the hell is going on? :(
 
orphia nay said:
Mr Nay has just been telling me he's seen on TV that Mugabe has put thousands of troops on the streets, and has said that if the opposition declares victory that that will be treason, and also that if he loses, he's told the army to go back to being guerillas.

This contradicts the slightly positive reports I've read at the BBB over the past few days.

What the hell is going on? :(
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If that's the case, maybe we can get some UN intervention, i.e. soldiers draggin Mugabe out by force. It'd be nice to see him on trial in someplace like the Hague.
 
Sefarst said:
If that's the case, maybe we can get some UN intervention, i.e. soldiers draggin Mugabe out by force.
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The only thing U.N. soldiers drag out is corpses after they stumble on another civilian massacre.
It'd be nice to see him on trial in someplace like the Hague.
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Yes, it would serve him right to die in bed like Slobodan Milosevic did during the fifth year of his trial.
 
All Major News Outlets are reporting that Mugabe is now raiding opposition headquarters and beating up foregin Journalists.
I can't say I am surprised. Mugabe never struck me as the kind who would leave peacefully. The only way he will leave office is feet first,which might be arranged.
 
Correction. Now he is rounding up Foreign Jounalists. Looks as though he is going full tilt into Idi Amin territory.
And he is giving The US,the Uk and a number of other countries a very good justification for intervention now.
 
dudalb said:
Correction. Now he is rounding up Foreign Jounalists. Looks as though he is going full tilt into Idi Amin territory.
And he is giving The US,the Uk and a number of other countries a very good justification for intervention now.
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One last roll of the dice. The opposition has been mainting it wants to take power peacefully. I wonder if they can or will hold to that position.
 
One of the questions that I have wondered about is just how low an approval rating can go for a national leader. It seems that there is always a significant percentage of the population that backs the current leader no matter what.

If we could get some honest election results out of the country Mugabe may have implemented the perfect plan to get an answer to my question. It is hard to see how a leader could be worse, but maybe they might have been. Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse Tung all were in net worse for their countries than Mugabe has been. So maybe he's still not the perfect guy for my test.
 
After reading the conceded defeat report from Reuters I had gotten my hopes up, I was about to come back here and say "looks like I was wrong", he won't try to cling to power. Then I went off to work and came back to this news. :(


eta: davefoc the reason some folks back him are
A. Fear - torture, beatings, detainment, destruction of proporty
B. Bribery - the Zanu PF handed out farm equipment to hungry people in exchange for political support
C. Dependancy on the state, eg the generals who got their land from him, the police who wouldn't be able to eat without their jobs etc.
 
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Whack01 said:
After reading the conceded defeat report from Reuters I had gotten my hopes up, I was about to come back here and say "looks like I was wrong", he won't try to cling to power. Then I went off to work and came back to this news. :(


eta: davefoc the reason some folks back him are
A. Fear - torture, beatings, detainment, destruction of proporty
B. Bribery - the Zanu PF handed out farm equipment to hungry people in exchange for political support
C. Dependancy on the state, eg the generals who got their land from him, the police who wouldn't be able to eat without their jobs etc.
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All true, but I suspect there is another group that supports him because they see him as their leader, they have come to have strong feelings for him or they equate support for him as a kind of patriotism.

My suspicion is that even in the case of Mugabe there is still a significant number of these kind of supporters. Stalin has still got fans in the Soviet Union. The fact seems to be that it is just not possible for a leader to be bad enough to completely eliminate at least some significant number of supporters.

IMHO, Bush is far and away the worst president of my life. The evidence is overwhelming. He has savaged the nation with massive debt. He has increased the level and depth of corruption throughout the federal bureaucracy. He has gotten the nation into a war with highly questionable justification and then proceeded to prosecute that war with incompetence and corruption for five years. He has attempted to undermine the rule of law in this country by the firing of US attorneys to further a partisan agenda. And yet he clings to a 30% approval rating. What could Bush do to reduce that further? It seems that he might look toward guidance on that question to Mugabe, but actually if he had even attempted some of Mugabe's most extreme actions he would have been removed from office and could not have done the damage that he has done to this country or to have gotten to the low approval rating that he now has.

So it still seems that there might be a floor for the approval rating of a national leader that is just impossible to fall below no matter how bad the national leader is. Mugabe seems to have followed a course that could give us some insight into what that floor might be. It does not seem to be as low as might have been imagined given his apparent power to have won enough votes that he can make some kind of claim that a runoff election is required. Even conceding that there is massive corruption in the election system it seems that he must still continue to have some popular support.
 
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Mugabe wants immunity. Maybe he has given up after all.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/defiant-mugabe-demands-immunity/2008/04/04/1207249457817.html

ROBERT Mugabe's aides have told Zimbabwe's opposition leaders that he is prepared to give up power in return for guarantees, including immunity from prosecution for past crimes.
But the aides have warned that if the Movement for Democratic Change does not agree, Mr Mugabe is threatening to declare emergency rule and force another presidential election in 90 days, according to senior opposition sources.
The opposition said the MDC leadership was in direct talks with the highest levels of the army but was treating the approach with caution because they were distrustful of the individuals involved and called for direct contact with the President, fearing delaying tactics.
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davefoc said:
So it still seems that there might be a floor for the approval rating of a national leader that is just impossible to fall below no matter how bad the national leader is. Mugabe seems to have followed a course that could give us some insight into what that floor might be. It does not seem to be as low as might have been imagined given his apparent power to have won enough votes that he can make some kind of claim that a runoff election is required. Even conceding that there is massive corruption in the election system it seems that he must still continue to have some popular support.
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All you really need is the support of enough of the military to terrify the civilian population and hold sway over the portion of the military that doesn't support you. Everyone else can hate you, for all the difference it would make.
 
BPSCG said:
All you really need is the support of enough of the military to terrify the civilian population and hold sway over the portion of the military that doesn't support you. Everyone else can hate you, for all the difference it would make.
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Only works in the short term. To keep it up you need a support base amoung the more general population.
 
geni said:
Only works in the short term. To keep it up you need a support base amoung the more general population.
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Mugabe has managed to pull it off for 28 years. We'll see if he can continue to pull it off.
 
BPSCG said:
All you really need is the support of enough of the military to terrify the civilian population and hold sway over the portion of the military that doesn't support you. Everyone else can hate you, for all the difference it would make.
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This goes directly to what I was talking about and I am not sure it is true.

It, at first glance, seems to be true. A national leader with sufficient power can scare and otherwise force the general population to accept pretty much whatever it wants to without the need for any popular support whatever.

My guess is that this is not true on two levels.

1. Almost no matter what a government does it will retain a significant smattering of popular support.

2. If it did actually lose nearly all popular support and was left only with its power apparatus it could not retain its power.

It is a weakly supported hypothesis and one of which I might be wrong about but I can't think of any counter examples that I know would contradict it. Kim Jong Il appears to have been amongst the worst national leaders in the world for many years in a row now. Do you think that he is not without some popular support in North Korea?

My thought is that the current situation in the US leads some support for my proposition. Regardless of circumstances and negative events Bush's approval rating has remained relatively stable for quite awhile. His supporters are capable of all sorts of mental gyrations to explain away the various scandals and missteps. There just does not appear to be a situation where Bush or any other leader is likely do anything that would alienate his dedicated base because it is just very difficult to do and doing those things seems unlikely to be in the interest of even the most malevolent dictator.
 
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Sefarst said:
Mugabe has managed to pull it off for 28 years. We'll see if he can continue to pull it off.
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Mugabe has had quite a significant support base in the general population over the years. For the first 20 of those years the elections were won fairly legitimately.
 
Sorry to start a thread and run off, so to speak.I have been offline for a few days.

Although I am, as is the rest of world, still no wiser.
Looks like it will be a run off between the both sides. Thabo Mbeki, the South African president seems not too be worried about the situation.

I worry that the whole situation will end up like Kenya.
 
You know, I do wonder how much the average standard of living in Sub-Saharan Africa has dropped over the last 20 to 30 years. And I despair. Frequently.
 
Architect said:
You know, I do wonder how much the average standard of living in Sub-Saharan Africa has dropped over the last 20 to 30 years. And I despair. Frequently.
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Sub Sahara Africa is the only major world region to have actually experienced negative growth over the last three decades... And HIV is an absolute timebomb for any hope of short-term economic growth in affected countries. According to news reports the life expectancy in Zimbabwe now has dropped to the midthirties, which is a shocking statistic. Made all the worse by the fact that Zimbabwe was one of the better placed countries in terms of infrastructure and natural resources..

Despite the fact that there was immediate rejoicing in the Western media following the elections, I would still put my money on Mugabe riding out the current furore...... I think the country will only be rid of him when he's dead, though I would be glad to be wrong.
 
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