 Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai returned to Zimbabwe on Saturday for an election run-off with President Robert Mugabe and said the veteran leader wanted to "decimate" MDC structures.
| "Decimation" doesn't involve killing everybody in sight, just one in ten. Maybe that's what Morgan actually means in this case. |
Tsvangirai arrived at Harare airport aboard a regular South African Airways flight around 6:30 a.m. EDT (1030 GMT) after cancelling his homecoming a week ago after his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) said it had learnt he was the target of a military intelligence assassination plot. The government dismissed the plot as a propaganda stunt.
| They woulda dismissed his bullet-riddled corpse as a propaganda stunt, too, secure in the knowledge nobody was gonna do anything about it. |
Tsvangirai told a news conference that Mugabe and the ruling ZANU-PF party had launched a concerted campaign against the MDC, which has seen 42 people killed and tens of thousands displaced. "ZANU-PF wants to decimate MDC structures," Tsvangirai said, adding that many opposition officials were in hiding.
| I think ZANY/PF's time has gone and that Morgan (or his immediate successor, assuming he ends up a bullet-riddled corpse in a propaganda stunt) is going to win in the end. I'm not so sure he's going to be all that different from Bob in method, the precedent having been set. Probably ten years from now we'll be writing things like "he seemed such a nice man." That's assuming the limitations of attention span allow us to remember at all. Able Muzorewa seemed like such a nice man, too. And Joshua Nkomo, though he did have his dark side, which was tut-tut regrettable, but you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs and grating some cheese and heating the pan, can you? |
He said he was confident of victory, although conditions are not conducive for a free and fair election and ZANU-PF was trying to destroy his MDC before the run-off. "The conditions on the ground for a run-off are not perfect, and will never be perfect. But we are saying with the support of SADC (Southern African Development Community), putting in election observers and peacekeepers, we can instill confidence in the people of Zimbabwe". |