Mugabe’s Generals

But Mugabe left stung by criticism from fellow African leaders, who were unmoved by his finger-pointing accusations that many of them had less-than-stellar democratic credentials themselves.  And while Zimbabwe's government mouthpiece, the Herald, reported that Mugabe was relieved to have Queen Elizabeth strip him of the knighthood she had given him decades earlier, the fact was he could have renounced it at any time. (A spokesman for the Foreign Office in London said he has still not complied with an official request to return the Grand Cross of the Illustrious Order of the Bath, which is the emblem of his knighthood).

"I suspect that under Mugabe's hatred for the British is a love for the British," says Heidi Holland, author of a recent biography, "Dinner with Mugabe." "When he talked to me about the British royal family he had tears in his eyes."

The trappings of British culture are easy to find in Zimbabwe, where school children wear uniforms with short pants and knee socks, judges sport powdered white wigs and cricket grounds abound. And despite his bitter statements about Britain, Mugabe clearly admires many facets of his country's former colonial rulers. Before he and his top officials were banned by European sanctions from visiting Britain, Mugabe frequented London's Savile Row for handmade suits and the finest accessories. And even now, he takes a high tea in the State House, including crustless cucumber sandwiches served on expensive china. "He's an Anglophile, profoundly so," says a Western diplomat. "His anger is the savagery of a child rejected, an Anglophile rejected."

Whatever his psychological issues from the past, Mugabe ran his last election campaign by harking back to his days as a liberation leader. His bon mots were increasingly outrageous. "The gun is more powerful than the ball point," he said. And since God put him in office, he said, "only God can remove me." A life-long practicing Catholic, Mugabe is also a committed Marxist--though he could never persuade his ZANU-PF party to institute a Communist-style regime.  Tsvangirai says the entire campaign smacked of Mugabe's formative period. "It's back to the guerrilla war years," he said.

Central in Mugabe's campaign was the JOC, an organization that had little formal role in previous years but was geared up into an efficient apparatus for campaign terror. The JOC directly funded ZANU-PF youth militias, 30,000 strong, coordinating their activities with police and military and sending them out on punitive expeditions against opposition politicians -- especially in the second, run-off round.  The MDC says more than 100 of its activists were killed in the violence and thousands more savagely beaten; a common tactic was to flail the skin off a victim's buttocks and then pour scalding water on the wounds.  Tsvangirai said he pulled out of the election to stop the violence, and because it was clear most voters were too intimidated to vote for him. Mugabe won by a landslide, even in areas that were traditionally opposition strongholds.

However, giving the JOC such centralized power may in the end prove to have been Mugabe's undoing.  "Everyone should stop focusing so much on Mugabe, because it's the JOC, the JOC is the key," says John Makumbe, a professor of political science at the University of Zimbabwe, who says he talks frequently to high-ranking regime officials.  "Instead of Mugabe's face on CNN and BBC, we should be seeing the faces of the [seven] leaders of the JOC. Mugabe is in fact a puppet of the security structures, the creature of the violence, as much a victim of their campaign as the MDC.  They hide under his skirts and before long they'll dump him and get another figure up there." The ZANU-PF official also confirmed that the leaders of the JOC carefully orchestrated the political violence during the campaign, but disagrees whether Mugabe will stand aside for one of their number.  It is also, this official says, unclear who the heir apparent would be, with jockeying among several officials.