Rhodesia was an absolutely gorgeous country, an African jewel. Outnumbered 22:1, the white minority government knew majority rule was inevitable, but their desire for a go-slow approach was simply not acceptable to the international community after the black parties refused to budge and steadily ratcheted-up the military pressure...
By 1980, Moscow-trained Marxist-educator Robert Mugabe was allowed to take a dubious election... and he's had the drill down-pat for years. In retrospect, we should have sold the Rhodesian Army a couple dozen tanks and a B-52 and let them set the schedule- as what's ensued has been a shameful and unnecessary waste... comprehensive national failure at a ghastly human cost.
Can you imagine the horror of living in a country where -in a headlong rush to correct long-standing injustices overnight- almost unchecked power is forked-over to an anti-democratic communist who admires the Soviet Union... a narcissist and vengeful racist control-freak who's economically clueless...dangerous... and unqualified for the job...?
“This Hitler has only one objective: justice for his people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people and their rights over their resources.”
“If that is Hitler, then let me be Hitler tenfold,” he went on.
“Ten times, that is what we stand for.”
In fact, after 30 years in power, Mr. Mugabe has presided over the most dramatic collapse of any country in history since
Weimar Germany.
He has turned one of the most beautiful and bountiful lands in Africa into a disaster zone that mixes corruption, mismanagement, violence and human rights violations on a scale that almost ranks alongside the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur.
An aura of hope clung to Zimbabwe at its birth. Reggae rock star Bob Marley performed at an Independence Day concert in Harare and Prince Charles came to watch Southern Rhodesia morph into Zimbabwe.
The new country was presented to the world as a new model for Africa and Mr. Mugabe was hailed as a statesman who offered reconciliation to its white minority, telling them, “If yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend.”
Having endured nearly a decade of guerrilla warfare in which 30,000 people were killed, the new government promised to temporarily guarantee seats in Parliament for whites, while seeking a new partnership to build a new state.
But Mr. Mugabe’s penchant for crushing all possible dissent didn’t take long to surface.
In 1983, the Zimbabwean army’s North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, killed up to 20,000 Ndebele dissidents, members of a rival liberation group led by Joshua Nkomo, in Operation Gukurahundi, a Shona phrase for “the early rain that washes away the chaff.”
Over the years, as Mr. Mugabe struggled to stay in power, he endorsed one-party rule and increasingly relied on censorship and intimidation.
He adopted a catastrophic policy of land seizures in 2000, after he lost a referendum that had aimed to entrench his power in a new constitution.
Resuming the fiery rhetoric of the liberation struggle, he promised to “correct the colonialist legacy” by giving white-owned farms to landless blacks.
Once the bread basket of southern Africa, Zimbabwe became a basket case, as productive white-owned farms fell into the hands of members of Mr. Mugabe’s ruling Zimbabwean African National Unity-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party.
It soon had the world’s highest inflation rate – 231 million per cent a year – 90% unemployment and shortages of everything.
As government incompetence led to disaster, Mr. Mugabe blamed Zimbabwe’s nightmares on Britain and “white settlers,” whom he described as “thieving colonialists”...