The rare occasion where I can't use the headline I want to
When I saw the title of the linked article in my RSS reader my first, rather sardonic, thought was "Did Mugabe learn it from Bush, or did Bush learn it from Mugabe?"
Well, of course, Bush is Bush-league compared to the intensity of Mugabe's crew. Or maybe it's the techniques…I don't think the neocon approach would work in Zimbabwe any more than Mugabe's approach (which involves more than brutality; it involves letting everyone know the source of it as well) would work here. I'm fairly convinced there a difference of degree rather than kind between the two administrations.
But you can't just say stuff like that, you know? So I couldn't use the headline I had in mind.
Anyway…
Mugabe Said to Use Law as Political Tool
Dissidents Face Zimbabwe's Justice System
By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 18, 2004; Page A18
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe -- Remember Moyo, a burly man with sad, withdrawn eyes, was arrested on Nov. 11, 2001, and beaten repeatedly and savagely over the next several days. He was charged with murder.
The day after the arrest, Moyo said, police pummeled and stomped him by the side of a road. At a police station outside this southern city, he was stripped, his hands were tied behind his back and his feet were shackled to a metal ring hooked to a wet cell floor, he said. Several times, he said, thugs let themselves in at night and beat him bloody and mute.
"This thing, you cannot forget," said Moyo, who had been an intelligence official and bodyguard for Zimbabwe's main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change. "You can try, but it just sticks."
