INTROD U CTION
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London in 1999, Mugabe was the object of an attempted citizen’s arrest by Peter Tatchell, who was protesting about Zimbabwe’s illiberal sexuality laws. Foreign Office Minister Peter Hain attempted to assure Mugabe that the Government knew nothing about Tatchell’s stunt, but Mugabe felt set up and began to rail in his public speeches against Blair and his ‘gay gangsters’. This animosity was institutionalised when Mugabe was excluded from the UK – as well as from other European Union and like-minded countries – following his violent and arithmetically dubious re-election as president in 2002. The second crisis for Mugabe in the late 1990s was a revolt by veterans of the liberation war. Two decades after defeating the Rhodesian armed forces, these ‘war vets’ were aggrieved that they had not received what they saw as a fair share of the spoils. Some no doubt wondered why they had fought for a country in which most black people remained poor, while for most whites the good times rolled on. But they were particularly incensed that able-bodied senior members of Mugabe’s party were extracting resources from a fund supposedly set up to support injured combatants. Mugabe was in danger of becoming the target of this resentment. Always astute at managing his internal politics, Mugabe moved quickly to secure the loyalty of this key group of supporters by gifting each veteran $50,000 – an astonishingly large amount. The war vets were, however, only briefly satisfied with these payments and correctly concluded that they could make further demands. From that point on, Mugabe needed to find ever more booty to satisfy them, at great cost to the country. Even the first huge outlay pushed inflation from normal levels up to 26 per cent overnight, caused a public deficit amounting to 8.3 per cent of gross domestic product and reduced foreignexchange reserves to a point where Zimbabwe could not afford to pay for a single month’s imports. This economic damage could have been repaired and some work to restore public finances by raising taxes was done. But Mugabe learned a wrong-headed lesson, that he could address
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