Robert Mugabe, longtime Zimbabwe leader, dies at 95
Robert Mugabe, who as Zimbabwe’s first post-independence leader ruinously took his country down a path of economic and democratic destruction before being driven from power, has died, it was confirmed Friday.after an inglorious exit from leadership. Once a respected liberation leader, he had become an international pariah and the nation cheered when the military took him into custody. He retired in 2017 rather than face the humiliation of impeachment.
His tenure came to be defined by a question: How did this intelligent, promising leader turn out to be such an embittered, ruthless leader? As liberation movements mushroomed across Africa during the Cold War, when America and the Soviet Union divided up the continent and fought proxies wars on foreign soil, South Africa’s African National Congress drew its Marxist inspiration from Moscow, but Mugabe turned to China and North Korea, which trained his notorious Fifth Brigade.
In 2007, facing election defeat, Mugabe unleashed another campaign, setting up military base camps across the country, kidnapping and beating and killing opposition supporters. In 1975, Mugabe fled into exile in Mozambique where he led ZANU-PF in its bush war against Smith’s white-minority government.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, determined to implement a one-party state, he sent senior party cadres to North Korea, where they were supposed to be impressed by the system. Instead, they were horrified by what they saw and returned opposed. Veterans, who had been promised land in return for their independence war effort, grew restless and demanding. In 1997, he agreed to pay 50,000 Zimbabwean dollars apiece to each of the 45,000 unemployed war veterans and a monthly pension of 2,000 Zimbabwean dollars. The dollar crashed overnight and the economy was crippled.
Feeling betrayed by Britain after the repudiation of the deal to pay compensation to white farmers, he invited war veterans to take farms. Thousands of white farms were seized by war veterans without compensation, white farm families were terrorized and some 300,000 black farm workers were left jobless. Many were beaten, raped or killed.
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