Assignment: Legitimacy on Dictatorship

NOW F OR AN ORIGINAL PAPER ASSIGNMENT:Assignment: Legitimacy on Dictatorship

Elections in Zimbabwe are empty exercises in “democracy” designed to put the stamp of legitimacy on dictatorship. In 2002, for example, Mugabe had his leading opponent arrested for treason. A popular opposition leader named Morgan Tsvangirai was beaten and hospitalized in 2007 after Mugabe ordered police to break up a protest rally in the capital of Harare. When, despite all, Tsvangirai managed to beat Mugabe in a popular vote, Mugabe unleashed a spasm of violence that saw 163 people killed and some 5,000 tortured or brutally beaten.

Under enormous international pressure and facing a reenergized domestic opposition, Mugabe agreed to a power sharing deal, allowing Tsvangirai to become prime minister in a new dual-executive arrangement—but true to form, he installed his cronies in every ministry. In 2013, the 90-year-old autocrat PARADE magazine once named the world’s worst living dictator was reelected to a seventh term. When outgoing Prime Minister Tsvangirai declined to attend the inaugural ceremonies in 2013, a spokesman was quoted as saying, “Expecting Tsvangirai to attend the inauguration is like expecting a victim of robbery to attend a party hosted by the robber.”

During his three decades in power, Mugabe has plunged Zimbabwe into utter ruin. When he finally goes, he will leave a bitter legacy of chronic unemployment, hyperinflation (the highest in the world), and an impoverished society where the oft-repeated promise of democracy was repeatedly broken.

Mugabe is an example of the kind of corrupt and incompetent leadership that has plagued sub-Saharan Africa since the end of the colonial era. Sadly, at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, what distinguishes Zimbabwe’s government from that of most other countries in the region is a difference in degree, not in kind.

Afghanistan

The United States invaded Afghanistan when it became known that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by a militant Islamic group called al Qaeda and that the Taliban, Afghanistan’s fundamentalist political regime, was allowing al Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, to use Afghanistan territory as a base of operations. What was less well known at the time (and what decision makers in Washington appear to have forgotten or overlooked) is the historical background. For nearly three decades prior to the landing of U.S. Special Forces on Afghan soil, Afghanistan had been one of the world’s most dysfunctional states. Even prior to the overthrow of the monarchy in the 1970s, the country was poor and backward, but thereafter it spiraled into two decades of bloody turmoil. By 2001, the entire country was in shambles and millions of people—especially women and children—were living on the very edge of a precipice.