Читать книгу The World's Ten Most Evil Men - From Twisted Dictators to Child Killers - Nigel Cawthorne - Страница 8

Robert Mugabe is a Jesuit-educated Marxist who cut his political teeth during a guerrilla war against white-minority rule in what was then Southern Rhodesia. In February 1980, with the negotiated settlement of the anti-colonial struggle, he became head of the first black-majority government in the newly named Zimbabwe. Within two years of assuming office, he sparked a tribal war where his Shona-speaking people crushed the Ndebele speakers in Matabeleland, leading to accusations of mass murder. Since then his rule has gone from bad to worse.

Through his land-reform policies, Robert Mugabe has turned his country, once the breadbasket of Africa, into a nation beset by famine. Economic mismanagement has seen unemployment climb to 85 per cent, though around a quarter of the population have fled the country. And, in December 2007, inflation had topped 150,000 per cent. Mugabe maintains his rule by brutally suppressing the opposition and denying his people any semblance of human rights. Fearing an insurrection among the dispossessed from the shantytowns springing up during his disastrous rule, he simply had their houses bulldozed in Operation ‘Drive Out Trash’ in 2005, dumping their denizens in the countryside, where many had no chance of survival.

Despite being in his mid-80s – in a country where the life expectancy for men has dropped to 37 (34 for women) – his grip on power shows no sign of loosening. He manipulates elections by distributing food aid only to his supporters and denying the outcome when he has clearly lost. Despite his disastrous rule, Robert Mugabe takes no responsibility for the state to which Zimbabwe has been reduced since he took control. Instead he blames British colonialism, which ended over 40 years ago. As a result, Ugandan-born Archbishop of York John Sentamu has condemned him as racist and South Africa’s Desmond Tutu states that he should be indicted in the International Court of Justice in The Hague for ‘gross violations’.

Robert Gabriel Mugabe was born on 21 February 1924 in the village of Matibiri, near Kutama Mission in the Zvimba District northeast of Salisbury, now Harare, capital of the then Southern Rhodesia. His father, Gabriel Mugabe Matibiri, was a carpenter who abandoned his family to find work in Bulawayo in 1934, when Robert was ten. This left the child tied to his mother’s apron strings.

A solitary and sickly youth, he avoided contact with other children by traipsing off to isolated grazing spots with the cows. Unlike other boys in the village, he did not scrap or play at hunting games. Instead, he would weave reeds and dry grass to make small nets, baited with feathers, moss and other nesting material. He would set these traps out down by a river, then settle down in the shade of a tree with a book, waiting for hours until a small bird or two ventured into his snares. It was his way of providing a bit of meat for the family pot.

Mugabe was raised Roman Catholic and he studied in Marist Brothers and Jesuit schools, including the exclusive St Francis Xavier College, part of the Kutama Mission. Considered to be among Africa’s top one hundred schools, it was run along the lines of an English public school. He was bookish and a swot, qualities that hardly endeared him to his fellow pupils.

After qualifying as a teacher, Mugabe left to study at Fort Hare in South Africa, where he met contemporaries such as Julius Nyerere, who became first president of Tanzania; Herbert Chitepo, who led the Zimbabwe African National Union until his untimely death (of more later); Robert Sobukwe, anti-apartheid campaigner and founder of the Pan African Congress and Kenneth Kaunda, first president of Zambia. After graduating in 1951, Mugabe went on to study at Driefontein in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1952; Salisbury in 1953; Gwelo, also in Rhodesia, in 1954; and in Tanzania from 1955–57. Along the way, and later in prison, Mugabe picked up seven academic degrees in all: a BA from the University of Fort Hare, a BSc in Economics, an LLB, an LLM and a MSc in Economics from the University of London, plus a BEd and a BA in Administration from the University of South Africa. He once boasted that he also possessed a ‘degree in violence’.

From 1955–58, Mugabe taught at Chalimbana Teacher Training College in Zambia. Then he moved to Ghana, where he lectured at St Mary’s Teacher Training College at Takoradi from 1958–60. It was there that he met fellow teacher Sally Hayfron, who he married in Salisbury in 1961. While in Ghana, Mugabe was influenced and inspired by Ghana’s then-Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, of whom he claims to be a lifelong follower, though Nkrumah remains one of Africa’s most respected leaders and was voted that country’s man of the millennium by listeners of the BBC World Service in 2000.

Mugabe and some of his Zimbabwe African National Union Party cadres also received instruction at the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute at Winneba in Ghana. Then, at the behest of the leadership of the National Democratic Party (NDP), he quit teacher training in 1960 to return to Rhodesia as a full-time activist in nationalist politics.

The colonial government then banned the NDP. Going underground, it was renamed the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) under Joshua Nkomo in 1962 and followed the orthodox Soviet line on national liberation. Mugabe left ZAPU in 1963 to help the Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole form the rival Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) with Edson Zvobgo, Enos Nkala and his old friend, the lawyer Herbert Chitepo. ZANU took a pro-Chinese Maoist line following the Sino-Soviet split. It was also influenced by the ideas of the Pan Africanist Congress, founded in South Africa in 1959, while ZAPU aligned itself with South Africa’s mainstream anti-apartheid movement, the African National Congress. ZANU was also an uneasy alliance between the Ndebele and Mugabe’s own Shona tribe, and it was a constant struggle to maintain cross-tribal representation.

ZANU leader Ndabaningi Sithole nominated Mugabe as the party’s secretary general, but in 1964 he was arrested by the white minority government for making a ‘subversive speech’ and spent the next ten years in jail. During his incarceration, Mugabe returned to his books, earning his law degrees and a Bachelor of Administration through correspondence courses. While in jail, his only son Nhamodzenyika died of malaria in Ghana at the age of four. Prime Minister Ian Smith, who in 1965 had proclaimed Southern Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence from the British over the Labour Government’s sponsorship of black majority rule, refused to release Mugabe to attend the boy’s funeral. This left him with a lasting resentment. His wife went into exile in London for eight years, spending her time there campaigning for the release of her husband and other detainees.

Sithole had been arrested just days before Smith declared a Unilateral Declaration of Independence and was in prison with Mugabe, while Chitepo continued the struggle from exile in Zambia. The two detainees were released in 1974 and Mugabe fled to Mozambique, where he was reunited with his wife. On 18 March 1975, Herbert Chitepo was assassinated. A car bomb placed under his Volkswagen Beetle killed him and a bodyguard, injuring a second bodyguard. An hour later, a neighbour died from his injuries.

ZANU blamed the Rhodesian security forces. However, a commission set up by Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda to investigate Chitepo’s death blamed ZANU infighting. The assassins named in the report were leading members of ZANU, one of whom went on to become a minister in Mugabe’s government. Leader of the group was the former commander of the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) Josiah Tongogara, later tipped to become the first president of Zimbabwe.

Mugabe moved quickly to take over ZANU, ousting Sithole, who then formed the moderate ZANU (Ndonga) party, which renounced armed struggle and drew its support from the Ndebele. Meanwhile, the Shona, who make up two-thirds of the population of Zimbabwe, stayed with Mugabe’s militant ZANU.

The guerrilla war undertaken by the armed wings of ZANU and ZAPU began to take its toll on Ian Smith’s white-supremacist regime. Persuasion by South African B.J. Vorster, himself under pressure from US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, forced Smith to recognise that white minority rule could not go on forever. On 3 March 1978, Bishop Abel Muzorewa, leader of the United African National Council (a nationalist party that had renounced violence), Ndabaningi Sithole and other moderate leaders signed an agreement with Ian Smith at Governor’s Lodge in Salisbury. This paved the way for an interim power-sharing government, in preparation for elections. The elections were won by the United African National Council under Bishop Abel Muzorewa. However, international recognition did not follow and sanctions were not lifted because ZAPU under Nkomo and ZANU under Mugabe refused to participate in the elections and continued the guerrilla war as the Patriotic Front.

In 1979, a new Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher came to power in the UK. Determined to settle the problem once and for all, it set up the Lancaster House talks in London. Among others, these were attended by Bishop Abel Muzorewa, Ian Smith, Robert Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo, Edson Zvobgo and Josiah Tongogara. Eventually the parties to the talks agreed on a new constitution for the new Republic of Zimbabwe, which meant 20 seats were reserved for whites in the new parliament and prevented the new government from altering the constitution for ten years. Elections were to be held in February 1980 and this time ZANU and ZAPU would participate.

Mugabe emerged from the talks triumphant. On his return to Zimbabwe in December 1979, he was greeted by enormous crowds. With the backing of the majority Shona people, ZANU looked set to win the elections. However, within ZANU, Josiah Tongogara was still clearly a rival. On 26 December, just six days after the Lancaster House Agreement was signed, Robert Mugabe went on the Voice of Zimbabwe radio station to give, ‘all the fighting people of Zimbabwe… an extremely sad message’ – Tongogara was dead.

According to the ZANLA High Command’s political commissar Josiah Tungamirai, he and Tongogara had been travelling at night with others in two vehicles from the Mozambique capital Maputo up to Chimoio and the border with Zimbabwe. The roads were bad and of course it was dark. Tungamirai was in the first vehicle. It passed a military vehicle abandoned at the side of the road with no warning sign. After that, he said, he could no longer see the headlights of the car following in his rear-view mirror. Turning back to see what had happened, they found Tongogara’s car had run into the abandoned vehicle. He had been sitting in the front passenger seat and was badly injured. Tungamirai said that, as he lifted Tongogara out of the wrecked car, he heaved a huge sigh and died in his arms.

Two days later, the US Embassy in Zambia reported: ‘Almost no one in Lusaka accepts Mugabe’s assurance that Tongogara died accidentally. When the ambassador told the Soviet ambassador the news, the surprised Soviet immediately charged “inside job”.’ The CIA noted that Tongogara was a potential political rival to Mugabe because of his, ‘ambition, popularity and decisive style.’

Ian Smith, who knew from Lancaster House that Tongogara was under threat, discussed his death with Rhodesia’s police commissioner and head of special branch. ‘Both assured me that Tongogara had been assassinated,’ he said.

ZANU released an undertaker’s statement saying Tongogara’s injuries were consistent with a road accident, but no formal post mortem or pictures were released. However, a former Rhodesian detective said he saw photographs of Tongogara’s body and that three punctures in his upper torso were ‘consistent with gunshot wounds’.

Few people believe ZANU’s account of Tongogara’s death. Josiah Tungamirai went on to become a major general in the newly formed Zimbabwe National Army, then took command of the Air Force and joined the Politburo. However, he later began to deviate from the party line. While Mugabe advocated forcibly seizing white farms, Tungamirai bought one on a ‘willing-buyer, willing-seller’ basis. In 1995, he and Edson Zvobgo were seriously injured in a car accident. To calm a nationwide frenzy of speculation, both were forced to issue strong statements that no foul play was involved. After Tungamirai died in South Africa in 2005, his wife claimed that he had been poisoned.

In February 1980 the elections were held in an atmosphere marked by mistrust from the security forces and intimidation from all sides. There were reports that full ballot boxes had been found dumped on country roads. Despite international misgivings, the Shona majority ensured Mugabe’s victory. ZANU-PF won 57 out of the 80 black seats in the new parliament and Mugabe became first prime minister of the new Republic of Zimbabwe on 4 March 1980.

At first Mugabe sought to build a coalition with ZAPU, whose support came from the Ndebele-speaking south. He gave ZAPU’s leader, Joshua Nkomo, a series of cabinet positions and incorporated ZAPU’s military wing, the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA), into the new national army.

From the beginning ZANLA and ZIPRA had trouble integrating into the new Zimbabwean army. Both sides had hidden weapons and former ZANLA elements attacked civilian areas in Mutoko, Mount Darwin and Gutu. To his secure rule, Mugabe had announced the need for a militia to ‘combat malcontents’, though there was little civil unrest in Zimbabwe at the time.

In October 1980, Mugabe signed an agreement with North Korean President Kim Il Sung to have the North Korean military train a brigade for the Zimbabwean army. He told the dissidents that they should ‘watch out’ as the brigade would be called the Gukurahundi – Shona for ‘the early rain, which washes away the chaff before the spring rains.’

The following month, at a rally in Bulawayo, Defence Minister Enos Nkala warned ZAPU that ZANU would deliver a few blows against them. The result was an uprising in the western suburb of Ntumbane uprising, where ZANLA and ZIPRA fought a two-day pitched battle. In February 1981, the fighting recommenced. This time, it spread to the northern suburb of Glenville and on to Connemara in the Midlands. From all over Matabeleland, ZIPRA troops flocked to join the battle. White-led ex-Rhodesian Army and Air Force units were despatched to crush them. At least 300 were killed. Their bodies were stored in refrigerated railway wagons in the sidings at Bulawayo.

The government appointed the former Chief Justice of Zimbabwe Enoch Dumbutshena to hold an Inquiry into the uprising. He was often a vocal critic of Mugabe but so far, his report and its findings have never been released.

Many ZIPRA soldiers left the army after the Ntumbane uprisings. Joshua Nkomo complained that members of ZANLA were given preference when it came to promotion. Many feared their colleagues were disappearing mysteriously.

When arms caches were found in February 1982, ZANU-PF now openly accused ZAPU of plotting a civil war. ZAPU leaders were sacked from cabinet or arrested, while Nkomo was accused of plotting a coup d’état. In a public statement Mugabe said: ‘ZAPU and its leader, Dr Joshua Nkomo, are like a cobra in a house. The only way to deal effectively with a snake is to strike and destroy its head.’

The following spring Mugabe’s government announced: ‘ZAPU leader, Joshua Nkomo, fled in self-imposed exile to London after illegally crossing the Botswana frontier disguised as a woman on 7 March 1983, claiming that his life was in danger, and that he was going to look for “solutions” to Zimbabwean problems abroad.’

Nkomo stated: ‘…nothing in my life had prepared me for persecution at the hands of a government led by black Africans.’

Deputy commander of the Zimbabwe National Army Lookout Masuku, ZIPRA’s head of intelligence Dumiso Dabengwa and four others were charged with treason, but acquitted. They were released, though Masuku and Dabengwa were held without trial for another four years under emergency regulations. Thousands more ZIPRA men deserted the army, fearing that, with their leaders in jail, there was no one to protect them.

By September 1982, the training of the new Fifth Brigade was complete. Their number was drawn from the 3,500 ZANLA troops once commanded by Josiah Tongogara. There were a few ZIPRA troops among them at the start, but they were weeded out before the end of the training. A number of foreigners in the unit, probably Tanzanians, were also removed. The first Commander of Fifth Brigade was Mugabe’s cousin Colonel Perence Shiri, who called himself the ‘Black Jesus’.

Fifth Brigade was not integrated to the normal army command structures. It answered directly to the Prime Minister’s office. Their codes, radios and equipment were not compatible with those of other army units and their uniforms were also different. The most distinguishing feature was their red berets, although there were many reports of Fifth Brigade soldiers operating in civilian clothes in the field. Once in the field Fifth Brigade seemed a law unto themselves.

With Nkomo and other ZAPU leaders out of the way, Mugabe unleashed the Fifth Brigade on Nkomo’s Matabeleland homeland in Operation Gukurahundi, in an attempt to destroy ZAPU and create a one-party state. Within weeks of being deployed, the Fifth Brigade had murdered more than 2,000 civilians, beaten thousands more and destroyed hundreds of homesteads. Most of the dead were shot in public executions, often after being forced to dig their own graves in front of their family, friends and fellow villagers. The largest number of dead in a single killing involved the deliberate shooting of 62 young men and women on the banks of the Cewale River, Lupane, on 5 March 1983. Seven survived with gunshot wounds, the other 55 died.

The Fifth Brigade also killed large groups of people by burning them alive in their huts. Instances occurred in Lupane and Tsholotsho. Elsewhere, the Fifth Brigade would round up dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of civilians at a water hole or a school, where they would be forced to sing songs in Shona, praising ZANU-PF while being beaten with sticks. After that there would be public executions during which ZAPU officials and ZIPRA soldiers would be killed, but often the victims were defenceless civilians. These were supporters of dissidents, Mugabe claimed, though he admitted mistakes were made.

‘We eradicate them,’ he revealed in April 1983. ‘We don’t differentiate when we fight because we can’t tell who is a dissident and who is not.’

Operation Gukurahundi, it is estimated, claimed the lives of between 10,000 to 30,000 civilians in Matabeleland and the Midlands. By the time the Fifth Brigade was disbanded in 1986, another 400,000 Ndebele were left on the brink of starvation. This was when Mugabe began using food aid as political weapon.

In an attempt to save his people, on 22 December 1987 Nkomo signed a Unity Accord with Mugabe, which effectively dissolved ZAPU and created a one-party state. On 18 April 1988, Mugabe announced an amnesty for all dissidents and Nkomo called on his men to lay down their arms. This was all part of a deal that abolished the post of prime minister and allowed Mugabe to become executive president, accruing more powers along the way. Nkomo came back into government as vice-president. As if being president was not enough, Mugabe then made himself the Chancellor of the University of Zimbabwe after Parliament passed the University of Zimbabwe Amendment Bill in November 1990. Those who opposed him were ruthlessly suppressed. The printing presses of a newspaper critical of his regime were bombed and its journalists seized and tortured. Young opponents of the regime were dragged off to camps, where men were beaten and women raped. Citing human rights violations in Zimbabwe, other universities have revoked the honorary degrees they have bestowed on Mugabe.

On becoming president, Mugabe shrugged aside Canaan Banana, a founder of the African National Council and a leading member of ZANU, who became Zimbabwe’s first president in 1980. Two years later, he signed a law that forbade people from making jokes about his name. Once he had fallen from office, Banana fell foul of Mugabe’s campaign against homosexuality which, Mugabe claimed, did not happen in Zimbabwe before colonisation.

In August 1995 Mugabe told an audience at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair that homosexuality ‘…degrades human dignity. It’s unnatural and there is no question ever of allowing these people to behave worse than dogs and pigs. If dogs and pigs do not do it, why must human beings? We have our own culture, and we must rededicate ourselves to our traditional values that make us human beings… What we are being persuaded to accept is sub-animal behaviour and we will never allow it here. If you see people parading themselves as lesbians and gays, arrest them and hand them over to the police!’

The following month, Zimbabwe’s parliament introduced legislation banning homosexual acts. Canaan Banana was arrested and convicted of 11 counts of sodomy and indecent assault. His subsequent trial proved an embarrassment for Mugabe, when his accusers admitted that Mugabe knew all along about Banana’s misbehaviour and had done nothing to curtail it. Banana denied all charges, claiming they were a pretext to end his political career. He was sentenced to ten years imprisonment, but fled the country, fearing Mugabe would kill him.

Ndabaningi Sithole also feared for his life and went into self-imposed exile in the US in 1983. He returned to Zimbabwe in 1992 and was elected a Member of Parliament for Chipinge, stronghold of his minority Ndau tribe in south-eastern Zimbabwe in 1995. In 1997 he was tried and convicted of conspiring to assassinate Mugabe. An appeal was filed, but never heard. He was bailed on the grounds of his deteriorating health and died in the US in 2000. The farm near Harare that he bought in 1992 was confiscated.

In 1997, the new British government under Tony Blair stopped funding the ‘willing-buyer, willing-seller’ land reform programme agreed at Lancaster House on the grounds that the £44million set aside had delivered the land formerly owned by whites into the hands of the ruling élite rather than landless peasants. As a result, Mugabe sent ‘war veterans’, led by Chenjerai ‘Hitler’ Hunzvi, to seize white farms. Mugabe’s family owns three farms, all forcibly seized from their previous owners. The economy, already damaged by government mismanagement, was further disrupted by the consequent collapse of agriculture. So, in 1998, Mugabe took Zimbabwe into the war in the Congo in an attempt to plunder the country’s rich mineral reserves.

In 2005 Mugabe began Operation Murambatsvina, meaning ‘Drive out the Filth’ – or Operation Restore Order, as the government translated it. His men began to demolish what the government termed ‘illegal shelters’, which it had previously encouraged the urban poor to build. Some 20,000 street vendors were arrested, their pitches destroyed and their goods confiscated. These were then put on sale in ‘auctions’. Thousands more escaped arrest, but lost their livelihoods. Licensed businesses were closed down on the grounds that they were illegal. Sculpture parks along the main roads, which had been there for decades and featured in guide books, were destroyed. Roadside vendors, who complained about the destruction of their works, were confronted with riot squads. In one township Irish missionaries were forced to dismantle a clinic and a crèche for children orphaned by the Aids epidemic, while the police demolished shacks inhabited by impoverished orphans.

This happened not just in Harare and Bulawayo. In Victoria Falls, the government press reported that 3,368 houses were knocked down, in some cases these were not casual dwellings but proper houses built of concrete blocks with corrugated iron roofs. Four miles of vending stands that had been used to sell carvings to tourists for three decades were torched. This is estimated to have displaced more than 20,000 people in a tiny town with fewer than 100,000 residents. While in Beitbridge in Matabeleland, more than 100 dwellings were knocked down, a substantial proportion of the small town. Again, vending stands were destroyed.

Homeless families were forced to sleep under trees or on the pavements, with no protection from the winter weather or thieves. They had nowhere to wash, and nowhere to cook food or store it properly. Tiny babies, the sick, the elderly and people on their deathbeds were left out at the mercy of the elements. Bus stations were filled to overflowing with families sitting hopelessly next to furniture and building materials salvaged from the destruction. They waited in vain for buses prepared to carry the loads to rural areas. Those with trucks struggled to find scarce diesel, which now cost up to Z$50,000 a litre, though the official price was Z$4,000 a litre. Those with fuel charged extortionate rates to move desperate families short distances (it cost Z$200,000 to move one wardrobe by bus). Desperate families without the money sold off their possession at a tenth of the transportation cost in the hope of raising the fares for their wives and children to travel to stay with relatives in the countryside. Those who made the trip arrived in remote, starving rural areas without a job, without food, without furniture and without a house in winter, only to be at the mercy of the local ZANU-PF leadership.

Mugabe’s government had no contingency plans whatsoever to move people, or to build new houses for them even though it was winter. The deliberate destruction of homes – in a nation already plagued with unemployment, hunger and economic collapse – came about for purely political reasons. Operation Murambatsvina was, Mugabe said in June 2005, ‘a long-cherished desire.’ Quite simply, he was enraged that these people would not vote for him. The inhabitants of Zimbabwe’s shantytowns and small businessmen had supported the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change. Most of the 41 parliamentary seats that the MDC had won in previous elections were in urban constituencies. Mugabe’s aim was to displace MDC supporters from urban centres into rural areas, where they would be forced to tow the line by the local ZANU-PF leadership, who controlled access to food, housing and other communal resources.

Soon after Operation Murambatsvina vendors’ licences were reissued, but only to those with a valid ZANU-PF membership card. In areas razed to the ground, lots were allocated to members of the army and police, while ZANU-PF supporters took over vacated businesses.

A UN report stated Mugabe’s actions had resulted in the loss of home or livelihood for more than 700,000 Zimbabweans and negatively affected 2.4million more. Subsequently the MDC claimed that its supporters were denied access to the vote by ‘Hitler’ Hunzi and his ‘war veterans’: protests were met with brutal suppression. Foreign observers regularly report that elections in Zimbabwe are rigged. Even Mugabe’s long-time colleague Edson Zvobgo criticised sweeping media laws curtailing the freedom of the press, calling them, ‘the most serious assault on our constitutional liberties since independence.’ Mugabe even banned the 2005 film The Interpreter – a thriller set in the UN building in New York – claiming it was CIA propaganda designed to incite hostility against him.

On 11 March 2007 opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was arrested and beaten up after attending a prayer meeting in the Harare suburb of Highfields. Another member of the MDC was killed and other protesters injured. Mugabe said simply: ‘Tsvangirai deserved his beating-up by police because he was not allowed to attend a banned rally.’

Mugabe’s Police Commissioner Augustine Chihuri described the opposition as a ‘crawling mass of maggots bent on destroying the economy.’

While the shantytowns were destroyed, Mugabe was overseeing the construction of his own palace, built in the style of an imperial pagoda, not a mile from one of the bulldozed townships. His notoriously profligate second wife Grace was making one of her regular shopping trips to Paris before the EU travel ban put a stop to them.

Since the seizure of the white-owned farms, agricultural production has plummeted. A third of the population of South Africa depends on food aid from the World Food Programme to avoid starvation. Supplies are denied those who do not support the government. Mugabe blamed the food shortages on drought, while Zimbabwe’s state-owned press accused former British Prime Minister Tony Blair of using chemical weapons to create droughts and famines in Africa (Blair had only just come to power when there were food riots in Zimbabwe in 1998).

AIDS is pandemic and women’s life expectancy has fallen from 65 under British colonial rule to 34 – the lowest anywhere in the world. The World Health Organisation believes that even that figure could be an overestimate and the real age may be as low as 30. Men’s life expectancy has also declined to 37.

According to the charity Solidarity Peace Trust trauma is also killing people before their time: ‘The stress and misery mean people are keeling over and dying. The health system has totally collapsed. Now access to education is going the same way and girls are the first to miss out.’

Despite the fact that Mugabe was once a teacher, he has done nothing to prop up the education system.

‘We had the best education in Africa,’ said Archbishop of Zimbabwe Pius Ncube, head of Zimbabwe’s one million Catholics. ‘Now our schools are closing.’

In 2007, the situation was so bad that the Archbishop Ncube urged Britain to invade Zimbabwe to topple Mugabe as he presented a ‘massive risk to life.’ The Archbishop said that, while people struggle to get by on less than £1 a week, Mugabe had spent £1m on surveillance equipment to monitor phone calls and e-mails: ‘How can you expect people to rise up when even our church services are attended by State Intelligence people? People in our mission hospitals are dying of malnutrition. Most people are earning less than their bus fares. There’s no water or power. Is the world just going to let everything collapse in on us?’

In 1980, the average annual income in Zimbabwe was US$950 and a Zimbabwean dollar worth more than an American one. By 2003, the average income was less than US$400, and the Zimbabwean economy was in free fall. According to Robert Guest, the Africa editor for The Economist, Mugabe is responsible for this. ‘He has ruled Zimbabwe for nearly three decades and has led it, in that time, from impressive success to the most dramatic peacetime collapse of any country since Weimar Germany,’ he wrote.

To make ends meet, teachers have resorted to prostitution. In June 2007, schoolmistress Stella Sithole earned Z$2.1million – the equivalent of £3.50 – a month. That was not enough to pay her bus fare to school. When she quit teaching class to turn tricks, she found no shortage of takers in Harare. Her clients were government ministers, ZANU-PF officials, top police and army officers, and High Court judges, all of whom benefit from Mugabe’s despotic rule. Many have been awarded property that was violently seized from white farmers, but their real wealth comes from access to foreign exchange at less than 1,000th of the rate on the streets.

In June 2007, the official exchange rate was 250, while the rate on the street was 300,000.

‘Imagine the money you can make,’ a merchant banker told The Times. ‘Say you buy US$100 at the official rate – that costs you Z$25,000. Then you sell that US$100 on the streets and get Z$30m. With that Z$30m, at the official rate you can buy more than US$100,000 – all for your initial outlay of about 8 cents.’

On top of that, officials get fuel vouchers. A litre of fuel for the privileged costs just Z$400 while everyone else must pay Z$185,000.

‘If you’re one of Mugabe’s cronies, you can live in fantastic wealth,’ he continued.

Others struggle to survive on less that £1 a week and more than four million have left the country. That does not bother Mugabe’s government – those who have left were more likely to have voted for the MDC than ZANU-PF.

‘We would be better off with only six million people, with our own people who support the liberation struggle,’ said Didymus Mutasa, Zimbabwe’s Minister of State for National Security, Lands, Lands Reform and Resettlement. ‘We don’t want all these extra people.’

And things are getting worse. According to Steve H. Hanks, Professor of Applied Economics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, inflation reached a staggering 80 billion per cent a month in December 2008. That’s an annual rate of 6.5 quindecillion novemdecillion per cent a year – or 65 followed by 107 zeros. In other words, inflation was running at 98 per cent a day. Prices doubled every 24.7 hours and shops simply stopped accepting Zimbabwean dollars. Only government officials or others with access to foreign currency can buy even the basic necessities of life. However, Zimbabwe’s police and soldiers are paid in local currency, but under banking rules no one is allowed to withdraw more than Z$500,000 – 18p – a day. When soldiers in Harare in November 2008 failed to get even that, they rioted.

With the collapse of the sewage system and no fresh water, an epidemic of cholera began to spread. The disease is easily treated, but medicines are only given to ZANU-PF members and hospitals are closed as medical staff have not been paid. Mugabe blamed Gordon Brown, George Bush and Nicolas Sarkozy, saying they wanted to use cholera as an excuse for military intervention, but he denied the existence of cholera, though the World Health Organisation estimated some 18,000 people had been infected by December 2008. That number was expected to treble as the rainy season approached.

At the time of writing, there seems no hope for Zimbabwe. In March 2008, the country held its presidential and parliamentary elections. Generally it was acknowledged that the MDC had achieved a significant majority in Parliament. According to the official results, Morgan Tsvangirai also beat Mugabe by 120,000 votes in the presidential election, but Mugabe refused to concede. Instead he insisted on a run-off in June. Just five days before the ballot, Tsvangirai was forced to pull out because of the increasing levels of violence. According to the MDC, some 200 had been killed and at least 25,000 forced to flee their homes. A power-sharing deal was signed in September 2008 and in February 2009 opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was sworn in as prime minister. However, we have yet to see any real change.

In February 2009, Robert Mugabe spent £350,000 on a party celebrating his 85th birthday in lavish style. Mugabe and guests gorged themselves on 8,000 lobsters, 4,000 portions of caviar and 100 kilograms of prawns – all washed down with 2,000 bottles of champagne. Meanwhile his people starved.

Mugabe’s critics accuse him of continuing his ‘reign of terror’ against all who dare to oppose him. Unrepentant, he is even happy to compare himself to Adolf Hitler. At the funeral of a cabinet minister in 2003, he boasted: ‘I am still the Hitler of the time. 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 a Hitler tenfold.’

He even has the moustache.