Oliver JJ Lane
Breitbart London
After the news of the death of tyrant Robert Mugabe broke Friday, survivors of his rule gathered outside the Zimbabwean embassy in London to dance and sing to celebrate his passing, and to call for his legacy of murder and economic collapse to be destroyed.
Survivors of the 1980s Gukurahundi genocide of the Ndebele people, who were murdered in massive numbers by the Zimbabwean government after it achieved independence from white rule through a bloody insurrection, gathered in London over the weekend. While many mainstream media reports have written of Mugabe’s legacy in measured tones, his victims had a different story to tell.
One survivor told Breitbart London: “Mugabe’s legacy? He doesn’t have a legacy. What other people see as a legacy, I see as brutality… my father was murdered by his regime in 1983… I didn’t go to school because of him.
“I was tortured in 2001 [at the] police station… they came and dispersed everyone with police dogs and batons, beating everyone up. I was locked up for six hours at the police station, hung by one leg from the roof, put inside a drum, beaten… I didn’t know whether I was going to survive.”
Another said while Mugabe had left a legacy, it was not a positive one, remarking: “we are now fighting to destroy his legacy that he left with the Zanu-PF [Mugabe’s political party]… the legacy of torture, intimidation, killing people, abducting.”
Mugabe’s legacy was also economic.
During his brutal reign, the land went from being the richest and most productive country in Africa to one of the poorest, suffering massive hyperinflation and total collapse of basic services and unemployment. On the reasons for the former British colony and the ‘breadbasket of Africa’ Rhodesia having become the basket case of Zimbabwe, one demonstrator told Breitbart:
“…my aunties, my nephews, I lost a lot of my family members through the butchering of the Ndebele… there is no money, there is no employment. There is no electricity, there is no water. I do blame Mugabe for that because he’s the one who drove all the white farmers out of the country. If it wasn’t for him, we would be in a better state by now.”Despite the atrocities visited upon his own people, Mugabe never faced justice for his actions and, thanks to a global network of supporters and massive embezzlement of his country’s wealth, was able to die in comfort. For that reason, he died too soon, one said, remarking: “Some people are rejoicing he’s dead. For me, I’m sad because I wanted him to live so he could face [justice for] his criminal activities… we didn’t want him to die yet.”
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