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25 J. Democracy 67 (2014)
The Military vs. Democracy

handle is hein.journals/jnlodmcy25 and id is 253 raw text is: A New Twilight in Zimbabwe? THE MILITARY VS. DEMOCRACY Charles Mangongera Charles Mangongera, a Zimbabwean human-rights and governance researcher, was a 2013-14 Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy. He has been a senior program officer at Freedom House; a program officer for human rights, democ- ratization, ICT, and media at HIVOS; and Chief Research Fellow at the Mass Public Opinion Institute. Just ahead of Zimbabwe's 2002 presidential election-the first in which a burgeoning opposition movement mounted a real challenge to long-rul- ing president Robert Mugabe of the Zimbabwe African National Union- Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF)-liberation-war hero Vitalis Zvinavashe, then head of the Zimbabwe Defense Forces (ZDF), proclaimed on na- tional television that: The security organizations will only stand in support of those political leaders that will pursue Zimbabwean values, traditions and beliefs for which thousands of lives were lost in the pursuit of Zimbabwe's hard-won independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and national interests. To this end, let it be known that the highest office in the land is a straitjacket whose occupant is expected to observe the objectives of the liberation struggle. We will therefore not accept, let alone support or salute, anyone with a different agenda that threatens the very existence of our sover- eignty, our country and our people.' The next morning, the headline Army Shoots Down Tsvangirai ap- peared on the front page of the Financial Gazette, a leading Zimbabwe- an weekly. Although Zvinavashe had not mentioned Mugabe's rival, Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), there was no prize for guessing that the remarks had been aimed at him. Opponents of the president, who had been in power since Zim- babwe gained independence in 1980, condemned the security agen- cies for meddling in political matters and called on the aging leader to rebuke them. Mugabe simply ignored these appeals. This episode Journal of Democracy Volume 25, Number 2 April 2014 © 2014 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press

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