Why do the people of Africa tolerate these parasite dictators that keep the continent poor, miserable and backward?
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Zimbabwe Rounds Up Opposition Members
By CELIA W. DUGGER, The New York Times
JOHANNESBURG — Truckloads of heavily armed police officers rounded up scores, if not hundreds, of people at the headquarters of Zimbabwe’s opposition party on Friday as plainclothes investigators descended on independent monitors of the nation’s disputed elections last month, according to opposition officials, witnesses and the police. Friday’s raid on the opposition’s nerve center and the election monitors signaled a sharp and very public escalation of the country’s deepening and increasingly violent political crisis, one that has been concentrated to date in far less visible rural areas. Both raids began around 11 a.m. in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare. Harvest House, the rundown, six-story headquarters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, was still cordoned off by the police at mid-afternoon. Computers and documents were seized. The opposition’s offices had become an informal refugee camp for party supporters, some visibly wounded, who had fled what human rights groups describe as political repression in the countryside. Witnesses said they had watched as the police herded more than 200 of these bedraggled people, including pregnant women and children, onto buses. At the same time, a smaller contingent of police investigators raided the offices of the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, an alliance of civic groups that enraged the government by analyzing polling data and projecting that the opposition had won the March 29 election, perhaps by enough to avoid a runoff in the race for president. Its findings were cited Thursday by the top American diplomat for Africa as the best evidence that the opposition was the clear victor… Continue reading >>