Old pals

HotAir reports that Mugabe held the run-off elections in Zimbabwe despite little turnout and no opposition, plus thug tactics:

The police have begun pressuring people to vote in order to bolster Mugabe’s standing. In an ironic twist, the dye on the fingers of those who have voted allows authorities to find refuseniks and intimidate them into the polling booths, a reverse of the situation in Iraq in 2004, when millions of Iraqis cast votes and had their fingers dyed in defiance of those who attempted to intimidate them into silence. And in a demonstration of Mugabe’s destruction of the Zimbabwean economy, far more people queued to buy bread than to vote.

Years ago, I read about an African tradition of the “empty chief”. When a village decides that a chief no longer should lead and the chief refuses to accept that decision, the people simply depart the village, leaving the chief in charge of himself and humiliated before the world. The people of Zimbabwe are trying to give us the modern equivalent of this tradition.

And the last two sentences of the report read:

The people of Zimbabwe are desperately trying to signal this to the rest of the world by refusing to participate in his latest attempt to cover his dictatorship in a sheen of democracy. When will the world act in solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe?

The people of Cuba have been signaling the world for almost half a century about Cuba's dictatorship in a "sheen of democracy" are we're still waiting for the world to even think about the possibility of maybe thinking about the thought of acting.

Dictators dont care about how they stay in power, just how long.

Posted by Val Prieto at June 27, 2008 11:41 AM

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