The world's worst dictators...

Robert Mugabe is at the top of the list of the ten worst dictators in the world according to Parade Magazine’s annual list which was released today.  Mugabe moved up six places from last year’s list—the flawed election and cholera outbreak probably had a lot to do with it.

Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir came, unsurprisingly, in second place.  Further down the listIsayas Afewerki, Eritrea’s dictator who has shown little interest in democratic elections, ranked eight. 

One of the more interesting, and surprising, aspects of Parade’s lists is the section on US-involvement with each nation.  There are some surprising facts here.

Tsvangirai walks into the lion’s den

It was a bittersweet moment at best today when Morgan Tsvangirai, the long-time leader of Zimbabwe’s main opposition party the Movement for Democratic Change, was sworn in as Prime Minister by his nemesis Robert Mugabe. It’s supposed to be a ‘unity government’ and, after nearly a year of bitter and sometimes violent struggle over flawed elections, at least the government is now actually in place.

But this cannot be what Tsvangirai and most of his supporters imagined would happen when they began the struggle against Mugabe’s ruthless and tyrannical rule many years ago. The last thing that they wanted to see was Tsvangirai being sworn into Mugabe’s government. Tsvangirai asserts that he will be able to do more for Zimbabwe inside of Mugabe’s government rather than fighting against it. Let’s hope that he’s right.

It seems more likely, however, that Mugabe has Tsvangirai right where he wants him—his former foe is now an emasculated ‘leader’ within Mugabe’s own realm. Wasn’t it Sun Tzu who said ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer’?

It will be interesting to see if this new governmental arrangement results in any noticeable improvement in the lives of Zimbabweans. It’s hard to image things getting any worse but that’s what we thought a few years ago when, by comparison to today, Zimbabwe looked like paradise.

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In the interest of making African Update more informative, more interesting, and easier to use for everyone we’ve made some changes to our website.

We will be providing a larger variety of content from a wider range of sources, including more African-based sources. Additional multimedia content and a cleaner and easier to use design should help to make things more interesting too.

There will be some additional changes coming soon and, with any luck, much more commentary too.

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The House at Sugar Beach

Here’s a review for Helene Cooper’s excellent new memoir The House at Sugar Beach that I wrote for the Washington Times.