By JEFF ZELENY and CELIA W. DUGGER
Published: November 23, 2009
New York Times - WASHINGTON — In honoring Zimbabwe’s tenacious women protesters at the White House on Monday, President Obama gave his sharpest critique yet of President Robert Mugabe, the octogenarian who has ruled the southern African country with repressive zeal since 1980. Mr. Obama bluntly referred to him as a dictator.
“In the end, history has a clear direction and it is not the way of those who arrest women and babies for singing in the streets,” he said. “It is not the way of those who starve and silence their own people, who cling to power by the threat of force.”
Mr. Obama’s decision to publicly recognize Women of Zimbabwe Arise, or Woza, whose members have taken to the streets for years to demand democracy, will probably confirm Mr. Mugabe’s belief that the United States and the West are out to topple him, already a recurrent theme in the state-run media he controls.
Though engaged in a power-sharing government since February, Mr. Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party have deployed state security forces to arrest and jail rival politicians and party workers, human rights lawyers and civic leaders.
Regional heads of state, worried that the government led by Mr. Mugabe and his nemesis, Morgan Tsvangirai, will crumble, have insisted the men settle their differences in coming weeks, but so far Mr. Mugabe has shown no inclination to bend.
The United States has limited political leverage in southern Africa, but Mr. Obama has repeatedly spoken out about Mr. Mugabe’s misrule — notably when he welcomed Mr. Tsvangirai to the White House in June, when he addressed the Ghanaian Parliament in July and in his remarks on Monday.
Mr. Mugabe and his military commanders reacted angrily to the Sept. 30 congressional testimony of Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson that the United States was providing support to Mr. Tsvangirai’s office “for communications and capacity building.” Likewise, they resented the testimony of Earl Gast, a senior official with the U.S. Agency for International Development, that the United States “will help democratic political parties rebuild their structures.”
In his remarks, Mr. Obama seemed to be trying to give heart to Woza’s leaders, Magodonga Mahlangu and Jenni Williams, each arrested more than 30 times over the years, and to thousands of other Woza women who he said have faced being “abducted, threatened with guns, and badly beaten,” and have shown “they can sap a dictator’s strength with their own.” At the ceremony in the East Room, Woza was awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. To an audience filled with generations of the Kennedy family, including Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Obama noted the death over the summer of Senator Edward M. Kennedy.
It was the first time in the award’s 24-year history that Senator Kennedy did not present the honor in memory of his brother. “Ted knew that Bobby’s legacy wasn’t a devotion to one particular cause, or a faith in a certain ideology — but rather, a sensibility,” Mr. Obama said. “A belief that in this world, there is right and there is wrong, and it is our job to build our laws and our lives around recognizing the difference.”
Mr. Obama himself talked not just about the recent repression under Mr. Mugabe, but also about past crimes, noting that Ms. Mahlangu, as a young girl in the 1980s, had witnessed the Matabeleland massacres, which he described as “the systematic murder of many thousands of people, including her uncle and several cousins, many of whom were buried in mass graves they’d been forced to dig themselves.”
Jeff Zeleny reported from Washington, and Celia W. Dugger from Johannesburg.
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