Tag: robert mugabe
Trump’s ‘Rigged Election’ Remarks Are ‘A Gift To Dictators,’ Say Africans

Trump’s ‘Rigged Election’ Remarks Are ‘A Gift To Dictators,’ Say Africans

By Ed Cropley

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – If Donald Trump is interested in rigged elections, Zimbabwean opposition leader Tendai Biti says he could teach him a thing or two. Biti was arrested for treason and detained for a month after daring to suggest his party had defeated President Robert Mugabe in a vote in 2008.

“They denied me food. They beat me up. They put me in leg irons. They beat me in the private parts,” Biti, a lawyer who later served as finance minister in an eventual unity government, told Reuters. “That’s real election rigging.”

To opposition figures in Africa, and in other parts of the world that lack the 240-year U.S. history of peaceful transitions of power, Trump’s assertion that November’s U.S. presidential election will be “rigged”, and his declaration that he may not accept the outcome, are dangerous words.

“Donald Trump is a gift to all tin-pot dictators on the African continent. He is giving currency and legitimacy to rigging because if it can exist in America, it can exist anywhere,” Biti said.

“He has no idea what he’s talking about, absolutely no idea,” said Biti, who speaks from the experience of three election defeats to Mugabe, a 92-year-old ex-guerrilla who has run Zimbabwe since independence in 1980. “It makes us cross because in Africa there’s real election rigging.”

Long-serving rulers who have faced U.S. criticism in the past are already using Trump’s remarks to counter Washington’s pro-democracy message.

When Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, in power for 30 years, won re-election to his seventh term in February, U.S. officials accused his government of arresting opposition figures, harassing their supporters and intimidating the media.

Trump’s comments, said Museveni’s spokesman Don Wanyama, “should be an eye-opener to them. As they sit down to lecture other countries, they should realize that it’s not easy.”

“Democracy is a process and it really takes time.”

Trump refused during a debate on Wednesday to say whether he would respect the result of the Nov. 8 poll. That sent a chill down the spine of Musikari Kombo, a former local government minister in Kenya, where 1,500 people were killed in a wave of ethnic bloodletting unleashed by disputes over the result of a 2007 election.

“I was shocked. I was horrified,” Kombo said. “People in Africa who have always challenged elections will say: ‘You see, we are vindicated. Even in the Mother of all Democracies, the presidential candidate is not willing to accept because there is rigging.'”

U.S. officials, including state governors from Trump’s own Republican Party, say there is no serious vote fraud problem in the United States and the election will be clean.

Nevertheless, Trump and some allies have alleged anomalies in the voter roll in cities such as Philadelphia and Chicago that could allow the votes of dead people to be counted on behalf of his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

It is hard to think what they would have made of this year’s election in Gabon, where opposition leader Jean Ping cried foul after narrowly losing to President Ali Bongo, whose family have ruled the oil-producing former French colony for half a century.

The focus of Ping’s concern was the province of Haut-Ogooue, where results showed 95.46 percent of voters backed Bongo on a turnout of 99.9 percent, more than double anywhere else.

Gabon’s constitutional court – led by the long-time mistress of Bongo’s father, Omar – upheld the result.

“I would say to Mr. Trump ‘Come to Gabon to see what a fake democracy looks like, to see what a stolen election looks like,'” said Alexandre Barro Chambrier, a senior Ping adviser. “There is no democracy here. There is the rule of one family and one man imposing a dictatorial regime,” he added. “Mr Trump is not serious.”

(Additional reporting by Edward McAllister, Edmund Blair and Elias Biryabarem; Editing by Peter Graff)

Zimbabwe’s Mugabe To Head African Union, Despite Rights Record

Zimbabwe’s Mugabe To Head African Union, Despite Rights Record

By Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

JOHANNESBURG — Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who came to power in 1980 and has been accused of significant human rights abuses in his country for much of his rule, was elected Friday as chairman of the African Union.

Mugabe’s election comes amid a backlash in Africa against Western leaders lecturing Africans on democracy and human rights — and while the continent cozies up to China, which is happy to pour in no-strings-attached aid.

It also comes with the continent appearing to backslide on democracy, with numerous presidents maneuvering to ditch constitutional limits on presidential terms in order to rule for life.

Mugabe, freedom fighter turned president, faces travel bans to the United States and Europe because of his country’s poor human rights record. In previous elections, opposition activists have been beaten or killed, questionable electoral rolls have been used and rights groups have alleged that food aid has been denied to opposition areas.

“By electing me to preside over this august body, with full knowledge of the onerous responsibility that lies ahead, I humbly accept your collective decision,” said the Zimbabwean president, who turns 91 next month.

He delivered one of his trademark slaps against the West, saying, “African resources should belong to Africa and to no one else, except to those we invite as friends. Friends we shall have, yes, but imperialists and colonialists no more.”

His spokesman, George Charamba, told Zimbabwe television on Thursday that Mugabe was concerned the continent’s leaders were trying to bend their policies to please the West and he would urge a more robust, independent stance from the African Union.

“He thinks that for a long time we have been kowtowing to Western interests,” said Charamba. “He thinks we have been trying, as it were, to bend our policies so as to win the goodwill of the West.”

Mugabe told African leaders his land reform program, criticized in the West after the collapse of agriculture set back the economy, had been successful because it put land in black hands and empowered black farmers. He said Zimbabwe’s tobacco industry was now thriving.

In 1984, Mugabe launched a military operation against opposition strongholds in southern Zimbabwe with the North Korean-trained 5th Brigade. The sweep killed an estimated 20,000 civilians.

In 2005, he attacked urban opposition strongholds by ordering mass evictions, leaving 700,000 people homeless, according to United Nations estimates. His government set up a youth militia, known as the “green bombers,” which abducted women as sex slaves and beat up, tortured and killed opposition activists, according to human rights groups, opposition figures and independent journalists. The violence was particularly pronounced before elections.

Mugabe, who is also currently chairman of the Southern African Development Community, took over the largely symbolic AU post because of a rotational system that meant the new leader had to come from southern Africa.

Zimbabwe’s independent Newsday newspaper criticized Mugabe’s widely expected election in an editorial Thursday.

“Mugabe, who has trampled on people’s human rights in Zimbabwe the greater part of his 35-year rule, will definitely not add any value to society,” the newspaper said. “Mugabe has stayed in power largely through election rigging and the arrest and intimidation of opponents. His reelection in the disputed and violent 2008 poll was especially controversial.

“But he has company in the AU,” the newspaper added. “Hence, his appointment simply shows the AU is a ‘dictators’ club’ given Equatorial Guinea President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo and Angola’s Jose Eduardo dos Santos have been in office longer than Mugabe himself.”

Mugabe has indicated he may run for election again in 2018 and once told journalists he planned to rule until he was 100.

Photo: Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe, attends the 12th African Union Summit Feb. 2, 2009 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Jesse B. Awalt via Wikimedia Commons)