Look again at Zimbabwe

The article ‘In Appreciation of Tsvangirai’ (IE, Printline, March 16) is mischievous and misleading, perhaps because of its source (‘The Guardian’, Manchester). The facts of the recent incidents in Zimbabwe, which law enforcement agencies were quickly able to control to protect the general public, are that thugs of the opposition were deployed to attack the police and residents of some suburbs of Harare and to destroy property. Four members of the police were savagely attacked, including three policewomen, who have been hospitalised with severe burn injuries sustained when their home was firebombed. Eyebrows should be raised over the fact that some Western newspapers are suppressing the truth that the Opposition unleashed violence as an expression of its opposition to the rule of law in Zimbabwe.

That same motivated press has also been consistent in devaluing the lives and rights of ordinary Zimbabweans who are victimised by Opposition thugs, preferring to turn logic on its head and blame the Government of Zimbabwe, which was democratically elected by ordinary Zimbabweans, for both the actions and the results of the violent opposition.

The Zimbabwean electorate consider it an affront that the analogy of Nelson Mandela, after whom an important street in Harare is named, is invoked, however tentatively, when discussing people who deploy thugs to beat up people on the streets, to burn a lady’s skin off her face because she is a policewoman and to loot and ransack the family shops on which the poor depend. Zimbabwe’s solid democratic tradition under President Robert G. Mugabe upholds the principle that those who lose elections, if they feel that the electorate made a mistake in rejecting them, should try again in the next elections, and resist the temptation to employ subversive means to foist themselves upon the electorate. The editors of The Guardian seem to prefer the latter — violent and undemocratic method.

The writer is Zimbabwe’s ambassador in New Delhi