[CSMONITOR] Bob MuggsyMugabe
Octogenarian President-for-Life of Zim-bob-we who turned the former Breadbasket of Africa into the African Basket Case...
today told those challenging his July 31 re-election to get lost or worse, and not to waste his time with courts and the law.
"Those who can't stomach the defeat, you can commit suicide. Even dogs will not sniff their carcass," Mr. Mugabe piquantly told a Zim-bob-we veterans group, according to CNN.
Mugabe, a former liberation leader turned dictator, has held tight control of Zim-bob-we for 33 years and on the last day of July in a long delayed national vote, appeared to win a resounding 61 percent.
Today he swept aside court challenges that his election was fraudulent -- even as many in Zim-bob-we are bracing for a return of one-party rule in Zim-bob-we that could see banks, land, mines, churches, and other properties expropriated as in earlier periods of Mugabe rule.
Today is "Heroes Day," a kind of Fourth of July for Zimbabwe, and Mugabe told veterans of the 1970s independence struggle that his political rivals can "go hang."
"Those who were hurt by defeat can go hang if they so wish," he said, according to the BBC.
Last week Morgan Tsvangirai, Mugabe's chief political opponent, filed a case of voter fraud that centered partly on the fact that no voter rolls were given to the opposition until the day of the election, and that the rolls that were given were in paper, not digitized in a way that made checking their veracity possible.
Mr. Tsvangirai and his party cite the Zimbabwe Election Commission, the official agency that declared Mugabe the winner, which reports that some 300,000 people were turned away from voting, mostly in urban areas, and that more than 200,000 were "assisted" in voting.
The Zimbabwe Election Support Network, a watchdog group, says more than 850,000 votes were not recorded.
It was unclear whether Tsvangirai will have enough traction in the courts in Harare for his election fraud claims.
Indeed, Mugabe can point to the African Union assessment that the vote was "free and peaceful," even though this was a revision of their earlier assessment of "free and fair."