Airstrip One

Zimwatch: Common Bedfellows - 1st December 2002, 20.12

Socialism and genocide were handmaidens of the state in the last century and their union has not yet ended. Didymus Mutasa, administrative secretary of ZANU-PF, is the latest in along line of monsters to spell out why death is necessary for the enemies of the state.

Mutasa declared to the press during the weekend that “We would be better off with only six million people, with our own (Shona) people who support the liberation struggle. We don’t want all these extra people”. By “extra people” Zimbabwe’s leading civil servant means the people who live in non-Shona-speaking areas, who in their majority supported the opposition party, Movement for Democratic Change.

And as any socialist state requires, it begins by indoctrinating the young. But as Paul Taylor writes in his column on these lunatics, "We will remember and we will judge."