Mugabe worse than Smith, Verwoerd, Vorster, Botha

Peter Thatchel the prominent gay left wing activist who twice tried to execute citizens arrests on Robert Mugabe while the latter was in London has written a hard hitting piece comparing Mugabe to apartheid leaders and finding him worse.

'Mbeki wanted international solidarity when he and the ANC needed it, but he is denying solidarity to Zimbabweans when they need it. This is rank hypocrisy.

For me, it is a big personal disappointment. I liaised with Thabo Mbeki in the struggle against apartheid during the 1980s. He even sent me a telegram thanking me for my (rather modest) campaigning against the white racist regime. I saw him as a man of vision, compassion and sincerity. Power, it seems, has since corrupted him, like so many others. His principles and idealism have faded fast.

Mbeki cannot feign ignorance. Mugabe's human rights abuses stretch back many years. The writing was already on the wall in the mid-1980s, when Mugabe's men slaughtered 20,000 civilians in Matabeleland. This is the equivalent of a Sharpeville massacre every day for over nine months. Yet Thabo Mbeki and most other top ANC leaders said nothing about this bloodfest - and nothing about the many subsequent murders by Zanu-PF.

Mugabe is worse than the white supremacist leader, Ian Smith, who he overthrew. He has murdered more black Africans than the apartheid villains Hendrik Verwoerd, John Forster and P W Botha. Yet we never hear a squeak of protest against Mugabe from Mbeki. He and his fellow ANC leaders sit on their hands and look the other way while Zimbabwe burns.'

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