I was not at all surprised when I read this morning that the Zimbabwe National Army has threatened the few remaining white commercial farmers with war if polling stations on their farms net even one vote for Morgan Tsvangirai.

Now this, I feel, is proof enough to initiate some sort of peacekeeping force into Zimbabwe. Perhaps there should even be thoughts on how to quell the anti-foreign (xenophobic) violence going on in South Africa at the same time.

Mugabe’s penchant for violence is well known and dates back well into the 1960’s.

We, as a country, first became aware of it with the beginning of the Rhodesian bush war, also known as the ‘chimurenga’, and whilst I understand the ideals for which the ‘freedom fighters’ stood, I have never fully understood nor accepted that the revolution needed to be as bloody as it was, or that the people most affected - the rural peasants - deserved the brutal treatment that they did.
But this is not about that conflict.

Since 1980, the Zimbabwean people have been the target of many of Mugabe’s military gems… amongst them, I can think of the Gukurahundi, Operation Murambatsvina and the present post-election campaign carried out with such hatred that many people have died, and many more are injured, traumatised, homeless, displaced and unsettled.

So when an officer in the National Army makes a threat like this, although his claim is definitive and, without question, barbed and explosive, I do not see the officers sworn to uphold the law in the land rushing to apprehend this man.

In Zimbabwe it is illegal to threaten anyone with physical harm or death. But if the threat is made by a pro-ZANU PF member, then obviously, that threat is acceptable.

And for a police officer in Zimbabwe not to make at least an arrest when a matter like this is reported, is a serious dereliction of duty. But because the police are under strict instructions from their Mugabe-loving senior officers, that dereliction is overlooked…

I now question as to whether Mugabe intends to chance all and go to war against the people. Let’s face it, he is about half way there already, although he claims that the violence in perpetrated and sustained by the Movement for Democratic Change. (I see one report today that claims a gang of MDC members has been apprehended with a load of simple weapons - chains, ropes, shamboks, and axes - although I fail to see how these ‘weapons’ are any defence against firearms…)

I grow more and more concerned that the situation in Zimbabwe will deteriorate into anarchy, at which time Mugabe’s forces will run amok and many people will lose their lives.

His forces will ensure that his tenure at the top of the tree is cemented in place, that his rule will be established by force.

Once he is in place, his forces will set about sniffing out his opponents, who will either meet a gruesome end, or worse, land in the stinking, filthy jails of Zimbabwe - and left there.
I ask two questions.

Will Mugabe play the highest stakes of all, putting it all on the line to remain head of a failed State; using the national mechanisms for his own personal agenda?

Or - and I ask again, and probably not for the last time - when will the developed, free world finally decide that enough is enough, and takes steps to stop the campaign of violence against the Zimbabwean people and stop the torture, the abductions, the killing?

Robb WJ Ellis
The Bearded Man