Sorry for the delay!
Splendid, back on track
Well, this thread sure got interesting in my absence...
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A point or two for Jens...
1. You are aware that in the process of "land reform", it just so happened that Mugabe and his cronies coincidentally grabbed all the best land for themselves, right?
1. I know and to make it even sillier some of the "Veterans" that claimed the land wasn't even born in 1980! I support the idea of a land reform in Zimbabwe but not the way Mugabe did. Yes, I've heard about those veterans! Insane, eh? And the best land reform I've ever heard of was Taiwan's, where they bought off the big landowners, who went into business and grew the economy while the common people got their land. Expensive, though...
I will not defend Mugabe nor ZANU's actions. The attacts on the Ndebele in the 80' was yet another example of brutal "nationbuilding" and should have been stopped. - But I still belive that he went bananas around 1996-97 when he witnessed other longtime dictators or semi-dictators like Banda in Malawi and Kaunda in Zambia lose their powers and face trial. [/quote]
From bad to worse...OK, that's possible, and for the reasons you state. Kaunda in Zambia is one of my favorites - the social democratic Movement for Multy-party Democracy uses some force to prevent the extreme left United National Independence Party from ever taking power again. The center-left vs. the far left! Fun!
You cannot compare Apartheid with favoritism towards one etnic group. Apartheid was a sick system based on separation between the "races" and the idea of white supremacy.
The ZANU fought most of the liberation war in Shona lands and much of the ideology merged with the traditional Shona symbolic world thus creating a strong connection between the Shonas and ZANU. [/quote]
Well, I tend to agree with the position that the Boers are, basically, a white African tribe. Don't they actually have considerable amounts of black African blood in them? I've heard their answer to that is "well, it's Zulu blood", which shows ya how silly it all was. Now of the Rhodesians aren't Boer, then whoops on my part.
A sick system, yes, but not that different from what tribes do to each other in places such as...Nigeria (Hausa-Fulani oppression against Ibos, Yorubas, etc.), Rwanda/Burundi (pick your flavor from the Tutsi and Hutu), and so on. And I didn't know about that second paragraph at all - thanks!
As said earlier Zimbabwe was during quite well in the 80' and 90' but yes with a lot of corruption and bad management.
I don't know what kind of money Mugabe has in offshore accounts but probably some (like Mobutu, Bukassa, Baby Doc, Mengistu or any other terrible man around the 3th world kept alive by people thinkin a bit too much about realpolitik and not about the people living in those countries).
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Fair enough - look what Obote, Amin, and Okello did to Uganda! And that was the fault of the Islamic/Arab world, in part, due to their support for Amin (who died in his gilded exile in Saudi Arabia). I didn't have much use for Nyerere's Tanzanian leftist one-party state, but thank God they beat Amin's forces in their war...of course, they reinstalled Obote, who then proceeded to match Amin's brutal record, but sometimes you just can't win - see Liberia and the Congo, which went into the abyss even after brutal dictators were overthrown...