Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘robert mugabe’

• Does anyone really still believe that Mugabe will go quietly? Didn’t think so.
• Here we go again: The construction on St-Laurent launches full steam ahead into round 2… as though round 1 wasn’t a strong enough demonstration of the city’s incompetence.
• Duh alert: Allophones have a harder time getting jobs than Francophones do in Quebec. Really? Is the sky blue, too?
• You know it’s hockey fever when… even the police cars are flying Habs flags. Too bad our idiot mayor doesn’t give the same fan-dom rights to the firefighters.
• The Habs decimated the Bruins on Thursday, but just barely eked out a win last night. 2-0 is 2-0 and we’ll take it, surely. But we’re going to have to step it up quite a bit tonight. Go Habs Go!
• Hockey fever on the road: Boston is being invaded by supporters of the Bleu-Blanc-Rouge. Should be an interesting mix in the stands tonight at the TD Banknorth Centre. Then again, the Bruins fans deserve it for inadequately supporting their team. As of Friday when I last checked, there were still tickets available for tonight’s game on the Bruins’ official website. Shameful.
• Did someone forget to tell it that it’s spring? After teasing us with gorgeous balmy weather, it’s been overcast, chilly, rainy and even threatening snow this weekend. Come back, sunshine!
• Good friends… good crepes… goodbyes. Well, two out of three ain’t bad.

Robert Mugabe: Dictator, Tyrant… and third-greatest African of all time:

Zimbabwe’s controversial President Robert Mugabe was voted the third-greatest African of all time, topped only by South Africa’s Nelson Mandela and former Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah, in a survey for New African magazine announced.

Mugabe, widely criticized outside Zimbabwe for stifling dissent and crippling the economy of his once prosperous southern African nation, was an “interesting” choice because “a high-profile campaign in the media has painted him in bad light”, the New African wrote.

The London-based magazine said responses flooded in after the survey was launched last December to nominate the top 100 most influential Africans or people of African descent.

That’s almost as absurd, as, say, La Presse nominating Yasser Arafat as “Person of the Year”… oh wait, that really happened.

This survey result really calls into question what the readership of this magazine must have been thinking. Too much of Africa remains plunged into poverty, war and conflict, disease (the highest percentage of HIV and AIDS in the world), and tyranny. With much of the world almost ready to write off Africa as beyond being able to be saved, the continent is in desperate need of cultural role models. Mugabe, needless to say, is not exactly an inspired choice.

(By the way, none of this will stop African countries from continuing to attack Israel on a regular basis).

Paul Jané has the latest horror stories from Zimbabwe about brutal “training camps” that use gang-rape as a tool to indoctrinate youngsters to torture and kill. A BBC documentary got a chilling inside story reminiscent of their exposé on North Korean prison camps:

Debbie was taken to one of the so-called training camps for President Robert Mugabe’s Green Bombers youth brigades. That night the camp boys came into her dormitory. They locked the doors, then took it in turns to rape her. “The boys… told me: ‘If you cry, if you make a noise, we’ll beat you.’ ” The ordeal didn’t end there. Debbie said she was raped again – and again, every night for the next six months. She shared her blanket with an 11-year-old girl called Sitembile. The little girl would scream night after night as she too was raped.

The morning after being gang-raped for the first time, Debbie asked the camp commander for medical help. He told her not to complain and sent her on a 20km run. Like many of the other youths in the camp, she was often deprived of food for days at a time, and frequently beaten.

One day Debbie was caught trying to escape, and was sadistically punished. She was buried up to her neck in the ground. When she was dug out hours later she was made to roll in raw sewage. “The water, it was dirty,” she said. “My head was rolling inside.” The commanders then forced Debbie to eat her meal with the other inmates without being allowed to wash. “The commanders, they laughed,” she said.

Debbie, now 22, is understandably a deeply traumatised young woman. She fled to South Africa after speaking publicly about her experience in Zimbabwe. As a consequence, she now lives isolated and in hiding, in fear of Mugabe’s secret police. At least two Zimbabweans have been tortured, one to death, for telling the truth about the camps.

But Mugabe is Zimbabwe’s “democratically-elected” leader, right?