‘I am still the Hitler of the time. This Hitler has only one objective. Justice for his people. Sovereignty for his people. If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold.”
On March 26 last year, the Zimbabwean despot, Robert Mugabe, said these words at a political rally. There was immediate and outraged local response but, as I recall, articulated only in the media and by opposition voices. Reaction from the South African government came from its foreign minister, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who said the South African government ‘will never turn its back on Mugabe”. A prudent decision. If it did it would probably get a knife between its shoulder blades.
In the most charitable of interpretations, what Mugabe said could have been passed off as yet further evidence of his political derangement. But what recently has been revealed is that he is quite earnest in his gloating emulation of Hitler. The fuehrer hatred for Jews has an appreciable parallel in Mugabe’s own Nazi-style ‘final solution” to the ‘white problem” in Zimbabwe. Having in effect scrawled ‘Juden” over their farm entrances, Mugabe said he would like all whites ‘kicked out” of Zimbabwe. Quite wisely many of them have taken the hint and left, escaping from a country which in many respects is turning into a copy of the Germany of the late 1930s. Runaway inflation, fascist terror gangs on the streets, a Goering-like ‘information minister” eager to justify the diseased creeds of the Mugabe Reich.
Last Saturday BBC World re-broadcast the Panorama documentary that caused such an uproar in the United Kingdom where it was first shown two weeks ago. Entitled Secrets of the Camps, the documentary exposed Mugabe’s newest obscenity: the establishment of training and indoctrination camps for Zimbabwe’s youth. As with the Hitler Youth in 1945, young people are being conscripted, trained and sent into battle — here as the brainwashed storm troopers of Zanu-PF.
The ends are obvious. Mugabe wants all political opposition terrorised into submission. To describe what the documentary brought into the light as subhuman in intent and execution, would be to understate. This latest plunge takes Mugabe and his cronies even lower than most thought possible.
Young Zimbabweans, some still children, are being inducted, mainly by force, and sent to remote rural camps to be ‘broken down”, then indoctrinated into prevailing Zanu-PF political codes. This means teenagers are being taught how to terrorise — no more, no less — for terrorising will be their function when they are let loose on the citizenry. A Radio Nederland documentary — surprisingly broadcast by SAfm — confirmed this. In the first two weeks after completing their training in one of the camps, the first batch of ‘Green Bombers” (Brownshirts?) killed seven people. The crimes for which these seven were beaten to death were an unwillingness to bend to Zanu-PF in word or undertaking.
The regimen of the camps combines brutal physical training and vicious corporal punishment for those whose who can’t keep up. Girls as young as 11 are included, a specialised part of their training involving their being gang-raped daily. This is encouraged in the camps and, where trainees are also warned that if ever they tell of the practises in the camps, they will be killed. What doubts might arise as to the authenticity of the sources Panorama used — most of them anonymous for fear of retribution and therefore impossible to corroborate — were dispelled by the fact that the reports were so consistent. The Radio Nederland investigation told the same story. Other voices, the same appalling truth.
As it wasn’t afraid to broadcast the radio documentary, the SABC should follow up, acquire and re-broadcast the Panorama documentary on one of its television channels.
Whether such a re-broadcast would have any effect on the policies of the South African government vis-à-vis Zimbabwe is not hard to predict. As with the HIV/Aids pandemic, our government remains in surly denial of the terrible eloquence of the Mugabe evil. As Zimbabwean archbishop Pius Ncube said last weekend, ‘Mbeki’s quiet diplomacy has achieved absolutely nothing.” It could be argued that, in fact, it has encouraged Mugabe to do worse. When your neighbour won’t so much as peer over the fence to see why your wife and children are screaming with fear and pain, then you know you’re immune from restraint.
Most unconscionable of all has been the way the South African government has responded to calls for real pressure on Mugabe. Here Mbeki led the way by announcing that his administration would never consider violating the sovereignty of a neighbouring country with military force — unless, of course, it’s Lesotho.
It is an utterly fatuous argument. There are a legion of other ways to hasten Mugabe’s dispatch from power. As Ncube said, turn off the lights for a start. Seal the borders. Impose sanctions. Isolate the Mugabe regime. Military action is neither apt nor necessary.
To repeat Edmund Burke’s immortal line: ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Time to peer over the fence, Thabo?