When Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe unleashed a wave of terror on his fellow Zimbabweans after his ZANU-PF party was soundly defeated in the March 29 elections and he himself gained fewer votes than opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, he was calculating that he could still steal another election and add another five years to his 28 years in power.

Mr Tsvangirai’s recent withdrawal from the run-off election to save the lives of his supporters, followed by his advice to MDC supporters to even vote for Mugabe if necessary to avoid paying with their lives for an honest vote, all but ensures that Mugabe will be soon be proclaimed the winner by his own officials. However, it will be a Pyrrhic victory, because the means by which it will have been achieved will have been so extreme that Mugabe has destroyed all chances of being able to claim legitimacy for his government.

For a start, according to the Zimbabwean election law, since officially neither of the candidates gained 50% or more of the votes, a run-off had to be held within 21 days . That did not happen. It took an astounding 5 weeks for the results to even be announced, raising suspicions of last minute ballot-stuffing to push Tsvangirai’s result under the 50% margin. When the government then announced the run-off for June 27, almost another two months later, it clearly violated that law, under which, if no run-off takes place within three weeks, the highest placed candidate from the first election automatically is the winner (see two papers on the website of the South Africa Litigation Centre for details).

Legally, Morgan Tsvangirai, who according to the official count got 47.8% of the vote compared to Mugabe’s 43.2%, became the elected president of Zimbabwe in April, when the 21 days expired without a re-run.

Mugabe used the three months between the two elections for a war on anyone opposed to his rule. Whole villages and neighbourhoods were forcibly marched to public assemblies where known or suspected MDC-supporters were viciously tortured and mutilated in front of the stunned crowds. Some 200,000 Zimbabweans are reported to having fled their homes to escape torture or death.

One of the most recent victims of the terror campaign was the wife of the newly elected mayor of the capital of Harare, who was kidnapped by ZANU-PF supporters along with her four year old son. Her battered dead body was found later, so badly disfigured that her family found it hard to identify her.

The world has finally taken notice of what’s going on. Presidents and well known voices from Africa, ranging from Kenyan Prime Minister, Raila Odinga to ANC leader Jacob Zuma have condemned Mugabe’s campaign of terror in no uncertain terms. An open letter signed by dozens of former heads of states in Africa, including several former close allies of Mugabe, called for an end to the violence.

Mugabe will survive this sham election only as a pariah, unwelcome anywhere in Africa or most of the rest of the world (North Korea might still support him, given that he relied on North Korean instructors for his infamous Fifth Brigade during atrocities in the 1980s). It looks like African leaders have been shocked into breaking any remaining political ties.

One notable exception is still South African president Thabo Mbeki, who finds himself increasingly isolated in his own party for it.

Zimbabwe is at a breaking point. Literally anything could happen now. It is not clear how a government of national unity can come about. Will it take a military intervention by fellow AU or SADC members to convince the hardliners around Mugabe, the JOC, that there is no way for them to hang on to power? There are moderate elements in ZANU-PF who would negotiate a change of power, but they don’t control the army and the thugs. Will it come to a Rwanda-style genocide before regime change?

The person, next to Mugabe himself, who carries the biggest responsibility for the further hellish chaos that Zimbabwe could descend into is Thabo Mbeki. If he recognizes Morgan Tsvangirai’s right to form a new unity government to organise a transfer of power in Zimbabwe, based on the outcome of the legitimate election results in March, there is no way Mugabe could hang on much longer.

Since the 1950 the ANC had struggled against racist violence for the principle of One Man, One Vote. This elementary right has now been stolen from Zimbabweans by Mugabe, who says “only God” could remove him from power. It reminds me of Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith, who stubbornly said that “not in a thousand years” did he believe in majority rule in Zimbabwe. Mugabe has become what he hated most, and worse.

In the 1970s, when the illegitimate minority government of then Rhodesia was fighting a war to maintain its racist system, it relied primarily on South African support. The sudden withdrawal of South African police troops from “Rhodesia” and later a cutback in fuel supplies was the beginning of the end for the white regime. Mugabe can not go it alone any more than Smith could before him. If anything, Zimbabwe is in a much weaker situation economically than Rhodesia was then.

I am hoping that the second liberation of Zimbabwe will become a watershed event for democracy and human rights in Africa, a continent that has suffered so much already.

• Zimbabwe: Mugabe trying to torture his way to victory
• Zimbabwe: Is Mugabe Blackmailing Mbeki? (The Reporter/Botswana)
• Free Zimbabwe on WorldTV.com
• Robert Mugabe’s militia burn opponent’s wife alive

A recently released report by Human Rights Watch about the situation in Zimbabwe before the second round of a presidential election makes for grim reading. The eyewitness reports of brutal beatings, torture and mutilations of suspected supporters of the oppositional Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) show in sickening detail how president Robert Mugabe is unleashing a campaign of terror on his own people to scare them into re-electing him, especially in rural areas that used to be bastions of support for the ruling ZANU-PF party.

28 years after Zimbabwe gained independence from Britain under black majority rule, Mugabe has squandered the respect and admiration that he had earned as a fighter against Apartheid during the 1960s and 70s. Now he is only fighting to preserve power and privileges for himself and his cronies in the army and police. His wife is known as “Gucci Grace” or the “First Shopper”. Many farms taken from commercial farmers were distributed to senior members of ZANU-PF.

It all could have been so different. At Independence, Zimbabwe had one of the best infrastructures in the region and had a well-developed agricultural and mining industry. There was racial reconciliation and many whites stayed on after Apartheid ended. Now one quarter of the population has fled abroad (mostly to South Africa), inflation is sky-high and people are starving.

Already a few years after Independence a brutal counter-insurrection campaign in the southern region of Matabeleland known as Gukurahundi was a first ominous sign how unscrupulous Mugabe could act if he saw a challenge to his power. At least ten thousand people were killed when former members of the ZIPRA guerilla force of rival nationalist party ZAPU and other members of the southern Ndebele tribe were hunted down by the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade of the Zimbabwe Army, given carte blanche to violate human rights on a massive scale with impunity. The campaign ended in 1987, when ZAPU leader Joshua Nkomo agreed to his party effectively being swallowed up by ZANU.

What I find most disheartening about the situation in Southern Africa is the hands-off attitude of fellow African leaders such as South African president Thabo Mbeki. When black democracy activists were persecuted by the white Apartheid regime in South Africa, all of Africa provided support to their brothers and sisters in need, often at great cost to themselves (such as in Angola and Mozambique, where South Africa supported rebel groups to destabilize these countries). Now that Africans are being tortured, beaten and killed by fellow Africans, many of these African leaders are turning a blind eye.

The victims of torture and violence at the hand of Mugabe’s gangs of thugs deserve solidarity every bit as much as the victims of the South African police and army did before Liberation. By betraying powerless Zimbabwean victims, the current leadership in South Africa and other nations in the region is betraying the ideals of the generations who fought and eventually brought down Apartheid.

What you can do: Find the address of the embassy of the Republic of South Africa in your country and write a letter or a fax to the Ambassador to urge President Thabo Mbeki to use his influence with the government of Zimbabwe to get them to halt the violence now!

Further reading:

• “Bullets for Each of You”
  State-Sponsored Violence since Zimbabwe’s March 29 Elections (HRW)
• Confessions of a Zimbabwe torturer (BBC)
• Mandela Envy (Slate)

For months there has been talk about an Obama-Clinton or Clinton-Obama “dream ticket” (in the words of its proponents), that supposedly would draw in strong support from all the electoral groups that supported either Democratic candidate. It now looks unlikely to happen, for a number of good reasons.

As former President Jimmy Carter points out, it would be more likely to combine the perceived weaknesses of both candidates than their strengths:

“That would just accumulate the negative aspects of both candidates,” Carter told the Guardian, saying that both candidates’ vulnerabilities could overshadow that the ticket if the two team up together.

“If you take that 50 percent who just don’t want to vote for Clinton and add it to whatever element there might be who don’t think Obama is white enough or old enough or experienced enough or because he’s got a middle name that sounds Arab, you could have the worst of both worlds,” he said.

In late 2007 Hillary Clinton was widely seen as by far the most likely choice of the Democrats for the presidential election. Then came the primaries and she stumbled. Clinton would have us believe that she was ready for the highest office in the US “from day one”, but she wasn’t ready when Super Tuesday didn’t deliver a knockout blow to Obama as she had expected.

Despite being accused of lacking in political experience, Obama had managed to recruit and build an effective organisation that delivered a string of 11 victories in a row and he out-fundraised Clinton.

After she hit her drought, Clinton kept reinventing herself until she finally managed to find an image that resonated with enough voters. Meanwhile Obama remained himself.

What’s more, he showed class and character thoughout those months, from when he addressed racial issues after the Pastor Jeremiah Wright controversy to partially accomodating Clinton in her unreasonable demands about the disputed primaries in Florida and Michigan. I shook my head in disbelief when Clinton claimed all the Michigan votes for herself, even though voters in Michigan had not even been able to vote for Obama, as he had not been on the ballot, following rules agreed upon by all candidates beforehand.

She was fighting to win at all costs, prepared to take no prisoners. Even when Obama had reached the majority of pledged delegates and super delegates, she did not have the grace to concede his victory and join hands for November. She had to be pushed by senior party leaders.

If there is one thing Barack Obama is good at, it is listening to advice from experienced people. I trust he will listen to those who understand it’s time to turn a new page for a Democratic party no longer under the spell of the Clintons and their political and personal baggage.

Links:

• Carter says unity ticket would be ‘worst mistake’
• Even In Defeat, It’s All About Her

When Japanese suicide pilots (known as kamikaze in Western countries or tokkōtai in Japanese) bid farewell to their comrades before their final missions, they would say: “See you at Yasukuni!”

A bronze statue of a tokkōtai pilot at Yasukuni commemorates the numerous young men who died this way during the final months of the already lost war.

For close to 140 years, Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo has been a place where the souls of dead soldiers were venerated. Neither a secular war memorial like numerous tombs of the unknown soldier or national cemeteries, nor a Shinto shrine like any other, it is a place of hero worship and historical white-wash. A museum on the shrine grounds promotes a revisionist version of history, claiming that Japan was not an aggressor but was fighting in self-defence and to liberate Asia from Western colonialism. In the parallel universe of that museum, the rape of Nanjing in China that cost 100,000-300,000 lives never happened. The more than 2.4 million souls whose names on the shrine’s books also include the names of 14 class A war criminals sentenced to death in the Tokyo trials after World War 2. These criminals were originally excluded, but then enshrined decades later. It was at that point that Emperor Hirohito (referred to as “the late Emperor Showa” by the Japanese) stopped visiting the shrine. His son, the present emperor has not visited it either.

In 1945 the Occupation administration issued a ban against the Japanese government forcing citizens to attend state -sponsored Shinto rituals and against promoting militarism. Four years later the Japanese government then issued a ban against school excursions by public schools to Yasukuni and other Shinto shrines for the purpose of worship.

On May 23, 2008 the Japanese government declared this ban null and void, explaining that the original occupation ban had expired when Japan regained its sovereignty in the 1952 San Francisco peace treaty and that it was now OK for schools to organize trips to Yasukuni.

In other words, because an American prohibition against violating the separation of church and state and against militaristic propaganda was no longer in force, both were now apparently acceptable as far as the Japanese government was concerned.