I can’t help thinking that a reason that nobody talks about intervening in Zimbabwe is that it’s not considered strategic. So it lacks the two trigger exports that would gain an intervention, and those exports are oil and international terrorism. It doesn’t export either of those two things that tend to attract Western intervention.

— Journalist Peter Godwin, on watching NATO and the U.S. intervene in Libya

Journalist Peter Godwin secretly went to Zimbabwe to witness the 2008 President Election. This is what he saw: “They tortured tens of thousands of people. But interestingly, they didn’t kill thousands of people. They killed hundreds of people but they tortured vast numbers of people. And then they released them back to their communities so they acted like human billboards — they were advertisements for what happens if you oppose the regime.” [complete interview and book excerpt here]

1976 interview with Robert Mugabe

stucni:

mugabe2 (Siegfried Woldhek)

An illustrated portrait of Robert Mugabe

foreversavage:

Kudzanai Chiurai. (Zimbabwean, born 1981). We Always Have Reason to Fear. 2008. Two lithographed posters, 23 15/16 × 16 15/16”. Image courtesy MoMA.

Read more: http://www.dwell.com/slideshows/impressions-from-south-africa.html?slide=17&c=y&paused=true#ixzz1GU5eV7Sa

Politicide is the practice of wiping out an entire political movement. The murders here are accompanied by torture and rape on an industrial scale, committed on a catch-and-release basis. When those who survive, terribly injured, limp home or are carried or pushed in wheelbarrows or on the backs of pickup trucks, they act like human billboards, advertising the appalling consequences of opposition to the tyranny.

— An excerpt from The Fear by Peter Godwin, tomorrow’s guest. 

“A billboard for ‘The Zimbabwean Newspaper’ made entirely of worthless Zimbabwean bank notes. What more proof do you need of a country’s total economic collapse than being able to paste trillions and trillions and trillions of dollar notes onto a billboard and it is still cheaper than if you had used paper?”

Tomorrow: journalist Peter Godwin, who grew up in Zimbabwe. His book The Fear is about Robert Mugabe’s torture campaign to intimidate those who would vote against him.