Yup, do it quickly and unambiguously. Car accident in Cuba whilst visiting Fidel for ultimate lols
Let him go visit Mandela on Robben Island. Ferry sinks on the way.
Oops.
Yup, do it quickly and unambiguously. Car accident in Cuba whilst visiting Fidel for ultimate lols
Let him go visit Mandela on Robben Island. Ferry sinks on the way.
Oops.
Mugabe had some reasonable success during the 1980s. If you could get him to step down in 1988, he would probably be remembered as a good leader...
If Robert Mugabe had died in 1988, he would be remembered for a bitterly murderous campaign against his political rivals and their ethnic kin that resulted in the deaths of some 20,000 people and the torture of tens of thousands of others. His legacy would have been the despoiling of parliamentary government and the permanent enshrining of ethnic bitterness and rivalry in Zimbabwean politics.
Reagent's right, if Mugabe had stood down anywhere between 1985 and 1995 he would have been considered a Mandela-lite.
With, perhaps revisionist historians sullying his name when they review his actions outside of a nationalist hero-worshiping mindset.
Well, 1995's pretty late, the rot was setting in as early as 1990. But. Ya.Disagree.
People were quite happy to ignore Mugabe's many, many flaws. The West and the international human rights community only took notice of him when he started treating white people as badly as he had treated black people.
Reagent's right, if Mugabe had stood down anywhere between 1985 and 1995 he would have been considered a Mandela-lite.
Well, 1995's pretty late, the rot was setting in as early as 1990. But. Ya.
Zimbabwe went from being one of the best run black african states to its present hellhole status.
While Abel Muzorewa's compromise government probably could never have survived, it would have given Zimbabwe an even better chance at surviving.
My brother, a physician, was there in the late 80s, and he raved about how Zimbabwe actually had black doctors in the medical school, even as department heads. Which was almost unheard of for most of subsaharan Africa. That Zimbabwe had the best educated black workforce (outside of South Africa), and that they were going places.
Unfortunately, with 'Bob on the Wall' (I don't know if anyone but my other brother used that term - based on his picture EVERYWHERE), the places the country were going were not good. Sigh.
If he had retired any time up until 2000, Mugabe would have been a hero, trust me. Zimbabwe was chugging along nicely, and things only started going south when the economy started going south in the late 1990s and the first real opposition to Mugabe began to emerge.
The only reason Mugabe is considered this monster by the West is because he went after white people. There are dictators who are as bad as Mugabe, if not worse then him - Mswati, Biya, Obiang, Dos Santos, yet they don't have EU sanctions placed on them or if they are members, get expelled from the Commonwealth.
The rule for African dictators is basically, leave your visible minorities alone (whites, Indians, Lebanese etc.) and don't commit genocide too openly. Oh, and if you have oil, expect a red carpet welcome at the White House next time you are in Washington.
African dictators
While Abel Muzorewa's compromise government probably could never have survived, it would have given Zimbabwe an even better chance at surviving.
Could a Mandela type figure have won control of the Patriotic front in 1979?
In any event some land redistribution was unavoidable, could it have been done so actual farmers took over land that had been expropriated by colonists in the late 19th and early 20th Century