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H13264

Headlines : International

Summary:

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe will celebrate his eighty-third birthday on Saturday. The elaborate ceremony will be attended by swarms of sycophantic bureaucrats and parades of hand-picked children, who will be inserted into the state-televised theatrics in a vain attempt to present the aging leader in a positive light. The capital has been placed under a state of emergency. Public demonstrations and ‘political gatherings’ have been banned.

In a nation reeling from 1,600 percent annual inflation, skyrocketing unemployment rates and an absolute breakdown in basic public services, the audacious decadence and egotism displayed by Mugabe – who has ruled Zimbabwe with an increasingly authoritarian grip for the last twenty-seven years – is setting the stage for a popular uprising.

Let them eat cake.

[Posted By Heatscore]

By Michael Wines
Republished from The International Herald Tribune

The dictator who fiddled while Zimbabwe burned

President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe turned 83 Wednesday to the strains of the song “God Bless President Mugabe” on state-controlled radio, a broadcast interview on state television, a 16-page paean to his rule in Harare’s daily newspaper and the prospect of a birthday party costing 300 million Zimbabwe dollars — about $65,000 at black market currency rates — Saturday.

Across the country, bread vanished from store shelves Wednesday after bakeries shut down, saying government price controls were forcing them to sell loaves at a loss. The price controls are supposed to shield consumers against inflation, which now averages nearly 1,600 percent annually.

In Harare, the capital, the police banned demonstrations and political gatherings in the city’s sprawling townships, citing the threat of looting and vandalism. Slum-dwellers had clashed with police Sunday after the police blocked a court-approved rally by Mugabe’s political opponents.

Mugabe’s critics called the ban an act of desperation, and some said that Zimbabwe’s deepening economic crisis was beginning to goad ordinary citizens into political action despite the threat of arrest and beating.

[end excerpt]

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Posted by Heatscore
A jaded Raskolnikov waiting in disgust for this sick society's imminent paradigm shift.

H13264

Mugabe Celebrates as Zimbabweans Seethe

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