Mugabe continues attacks on MDC

The ruling ZANU-PF party's Robert Mugabe has been President of Zimbabwe since the first post-independence election in 1980. Here are a few links on the recent detentions and tortures of members of the MDC, Zimbabwe's major opposition party.

Sokwanele/Zvakwana features a good slideshow recap of media reports. There are some rather graphic images of people who have been beaten by police, but this is a really good capsule on the recent spate of beatings. Things like this make the internet valuable - highly recommended.

The BBC offers this roundup of blog opinion from Zimbabwe.

This background article on Zimbabwe's prospects for political change from the Globe and Mail is more realistic than the chirpy and somewhat ill-informed backgrounder from CBS News. If a transition of power was simply based on the public's recognition of growing problems in Zimbabwe, there might have been a change of power in Zimbabwe some 15 or 20 years ago, before hyperinflation, before shortages in food, oil, and concrete, before massive refugee flows, and government-sponsored demolition of housing, and so many cases of rape and torture of citizens.

Here are some better background articles from the Guardian on Zimbabwe's political crisis.

People like Mugabe rule with the correct calculation that - at best - people outside of Zimbabwe are simply not paying attention - and at worst - that people outside of Zimbabwe operate on the assumption that Africans are unable to govern themselves and that whatever happens in one Southern African nation will have a negligible impact elsewhere. I am doing a paper this term on Zimbabwean refugees and I hope to post more on the subject soon.