by Charles Rukuni

Created on: December 18, 2008   Last Updated: January 15, 2009

Mugabe may be evil, but Tsvangirai is no saint either

Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe is considered one of the most evil men in the world today. He has been called all sorts of names tyrant, dictator and monster. He is said to be ruthless with his own people. Local pastors even at one time described him as a biblical "beast of anarchy" because of the way he terrorised his own people.

A South African Anglican bishop likened him to the 21st century Adolph Hitler, after the German leader who killed thousands of Jews during the Second World War. Parade magazine ranked him one of the worst dictators in the world.

Mugabe who has ruled Zimbabwe since independence in 1980, first as Prime Minister and then as President, was once a respected African statesman winning accolades the world over, but he is now a pariah. He is now a punching bag for anyone who wants to grab a world headline. As far as the world is concerned he cannot do anything right. The economic collapse of his country has made things worse.

British academic and writer George Monbiot wrote in 2002, that as far as the Western media was concerned, Mugabe was the most evil man after then Iraq President Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Monbiot said that Mugabe's greatest sin was that he had upset the natural order of things by embarking on his fast-track land reform programme in which he kicked out thousands of mainly white commercial farmers to resettle landless blacks.

"Robert Mugabe is portrayed as the prince of darkness, but when whites expel black people from their lands, nobody gives a damn," Monbiot wrote in the British daily, The Guardian.

"There is no doubt that Mugabe is a ruthless man, or that his policies are contributing to the further impoverishment of the Zimbabweans. . The seizure of the white farms is both brutal and illegal. But it is merely one small scene in the tragedy now playing all over the world.

"Every year, some tens of millions of peasant farmers are forced to leave their land, with devastating consequences for food security. For them there are no tear-stained descriptions of a last visit to the graves of their children. If they are mentioned at all, they are dismissed by most of the press as the necessary casualties of development

"These are dark-skinned people being expelled by whites, rather than whites being expelled by black people. They are, as such, assuming their rightful place, as invisible obstacles to the rich world's projects. Mugabe is a monster because

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