Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe has stepped up his war against Western "white racist bullies" by accusing Britain of using the Internet to destroy his country. Laughing Bob, addressing the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva, asserted that information technology is dominated "by a few countries in the selfish interests of those countries which are in quest of global dominance and hegemony". He singled out Britain, the US and Canada as attempting to "challenge our sovereignty through hostile and malicious broadcasts calculated to foment instability and destroy the state through divisions".
| Been reading Rantburg, has he? |
Email and the Internet are pretty well the only lines of communication still open to Mugabe’s opponents - among them the much-harrassed Movement for Democratic Change - and, despite controlling all broadcasting and press in Zimbabwe, the embattled and impoverished president simply doesn’t have the resources to control the flow of electronic dissent.
It’s natural, then, that Mugabe would finger IT as a tool of colonial bogeymen. |