Too Long in Coming, but What Now, After the Coup in Zimbabwe?

The coup that should have happened 15 years ago has finally ended the bloody reign of Robert Mugabe. The thought of his wife succeeding him was too much, even for the military. But is there a plan from here? Or was it just about getting rid of the Mugabes - because, I'm OK with that!

Zimbabwe: Key players as the country enters new chapter

CBC News 

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and his wife Grace wave to supporters in Harare on Feb. 23, 2014. Any plans for Grace Mugabe to one day succeed her husband as president have seemingly been dashed. (Philimon Bulawayo/Reuters)

Zimbabwe has been thrown into uncertainly after 37 years of rule by Robert Mugabe, who reportedly has been confined to his home compound in Harare since Tuesday in the wake of the military takeover.

Here's what you need to know about some of the key players as the situation unfolds in the country in southern Africa.

​Robert Mugabe

Mugabe is not the longest running of the several African leaders who have maintained an iron grip on power — that would be Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea. But Mugabe is the most prominent, having been a figure of international attention dating over a half-century as he helped lead a movement against oppressive colonial rule in southern Rhodesia.

​Mugabe on the surface and in the first half of life drew comparisons to Nelson Mandela. Both were educated at Fort Hare University in South Africa and jailed for years — 11 in Mugabe's case — while opposing white minority rule in their countries. 

They were also celebrated throughout Africa for empowering, black-led movements, but comparisons ended after Zimbabwe won independence from Britain in 1980 as power corrupted the former teacher Mugabe.

Mugabe took office as the country's first prime minister and preached the need for a "broadly based" coalition to Western media at the time after being democratically elected. But he oversaw the brutal crushing of would-be opponents and rival ethnic groups, predominantly in Matabeleland. Government forces were accused of killing thousands of civilians.

While the country's economy was stable enough through those years of political turmoil, it has swooned since the late 1990s.

Around 2000, violent seizures of thousands of farms owned by white people began, causing agricultural production to plunge. A land reform program was supposed to take much of the country's most fertile land and redistribute it to poor blacks, but Mugabe instead gave prime farms to ZANU-PF leaders and loyalists.

Food shortages have followed, along with a number of alarming economic indicators: hyperinflation, an abandoned currency and rampant unemployment.

On Thursday, Zimbabwe's state-run newspaper published photos of Mugabe, now 92, meeting with army Gen. Constantino Chiwenga and officials from southern neighbour South Africa, leading to speculation as to the way forward.

Grace Mugabe

Now 52, she has been a controversial figure in her own right for extravagant spending in a country with significant poverty and unemployment, and for assault allegations from incidents the past decade in Hong Kong and South Africa. She escaped charges both times due to diplomatic immunity.

Born in South Africa, she met her husband while working in the Zimbabwean government as a secretary. They have three children. She also has a son from a previous relationship.

President Robert Mugabe and wife Grace leave the Kutama Catholic Church on Aug. 17, 1996 after exchanging their wedding vows. The couple were traditionally married shortly after the death of Mugabe's first wife Sally.

(Howard Burditt/Reuters)

On the political front, she leads the so-called Generation-40 faction of the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front party.

Over the years, she has moved to amass allies and marginalize rivals for the eventuality of her elderly husband's death. It was expected she would be appointed to the vacant vice-president's post at a special congress meeting in the coming weeks after the recent sacking of Emmerson Mnangagwa as vice-president.

"So I have said to the president: 'You can also leave me in charge,"' she said at a rally just days before the military stepped in. "'Give me the job and I will do it very well because I am good. I can do a great job.'" 

And she's humble, too.

It's not an unfamiliar development. In the paranoid style that has reflected Zimbabwean politics — Mnangagwa earlier this year claimed he was poisoned at a Zanu-PF party gathering — Grace Mugabe in late 2014 accused then VP Joice Mujuru of plotting to kill her "Gaddafi-style," referring to the  public death of the longtime Libyan dictator.

One month later, Mujuru was tossed from the party and position for disloyalty.

Grace Mugabe's current whereabouts have been a subject of speculation, given the properties the Mugabes own outside the country. 

Emmerson Mnangagwa

​Mnangagwa, one of two vice-presidents, was dismissed on Nov. 6, leading to the chain of events that has seen the military take control. The longtime ally had "exhibited traits of disloyalty," Robert Mugabe said at the time.

In other words, he wouldn't agree to Mrs Mugabe taking over after Mr Mugabe's demise.

Mnangagwa fled the country, reportedly to South Africa, and vowed to fight "tooth and nail" to return. 

"This party is not personal property for you and your wife to do as you please," he said in a statement after his ouster.

Emmerson Mnangagwa is shown on Aug. 25, 2015 while serving as one of the country's two vice-presidents. Mnangagwa promised to fight 'tooth and nail' after his ouster and may be part of a coalition going forward with Morgan Tsvangirai. (Philimon Bulawayo/Reuters)

Known as the Crocodile, with his supporters called the Lacoste group, he has reportedly been welcomed into the fold of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

Mnangagwa has long been tapped to be a potential successor as president and was reportedly the choice as leader of the plotters of an unsuccessful coup in 2007. He was selected as a vice-president in 2013, but the faction within the party led by Grace Mugabe pushed for months behind the scenes to oust him.

Were he to assume power as president, it would not represent a break from the past.

Like Mugabe, he was jailed for many years related to violent activities undertaken by the Zimbabwe African National Union during the 1960s fighting white rule in what was known as Rhodesia. A lawyer, he has held a number of positions within the government and ZANU-PF party since Mugabe seized power in 1980.

Thousands of citizens died in repressive violence and crackdowns under his watch as national security minister in the 1980s. But to many in the country, a role for a limited time for Mnangagwa — who is in his early 70s — would be more palatable than continued Mugabe rule, which has been characterized by economic woes that include massive unemployment and a worthless currency.

Gen. Constantino Chiwenga

​Chiwenga's news conference on Nov. 13 was a sign for astute watchers of the region that a change of some sort was potentially afoot in Zimbabwe.

A veteran of the struggle to free the country from British rule dating back to the early 1970s, the army commander publicly criticized what he saw as one-sided internal ZANU-PF

Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA) Cmdr. Constantine Chiwenga said the military was prepared to 'step in,' a threat that was carried through in short order.

(Aaron Ufumeli/EPA-EFE)

"The current purging, which is clearly targeting members of the party with a liberation background, must stop forthwith," he said.

Chiwenga said the army was prepared to "step in," without being specific as to what that entailed.

That question was partially answered hours later when armoured personnel carriers were seen nearing the capital of Harare. Soon, military leaders appeared on the state television network and it was announced that Robert Mugabe was confined to his home.

​Morgan Tsvangirai

Tsvangirai, 65, was prime minister of Zimbabwe from 2009 to 2013, and is now president of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). 

He has returned to Zimbabwe this week from South Africa, where had been receiving treatment for cancer.

He called on longtime foe Mugabe to resign in a news conference on Thursday.

Zimbabwe's Morgan Tsvangirai of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change is seen after receiving medical attention for being beaten in March 2007. (REUTERS)

Tsvangirai is a former trade unionist who formed the MDC in 1999, a party that quickly made gains in parliament.

Cancer has been just the latest of his trials. He has arrested several times over the years and suffered a beating from police in 2007 over what was deemed an illegal prayer meeting. Mugabe said he "deserved" the beating because he had violated laws.

He was charged with treason, and ultimately acquitted in 2004, after the notorious Montreal-based international lobbyist Dickens and Madson, working on behalf of Mugabe, passed along a videotape from a December 2001 meeting in which Tsvangirai takes part in a discussion of the "elimination" of Mugabe.

Tsvangirai led after the first round of presidential elections in 2008 over Mugabe, but then scores of his supporters were killed or injured, compelling him to bow out of the running before the next round.

A compromise was reached where he served as PM, but when the arrangement ended, Mugabe, not for the first time, blasted Tsvangirai as an "ignoramus."

Tsvangarai couched his comments on Thursday as being motivated by what's best for the future of the country.

"It was never a personal issue," he said. "I disagreed in the manner he [Mugabe] managed elections, I disagreed in the manner he conducted government business."

About the prospects of a transitional government Tsvangarai said "if we are approached to negotiate such a process, we will participate." 

Was UN Secretary General Assassinated?

Evidence may lead to new probe in 1961 death of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld

Documents, testimony add weight to case that plane crash was no accident

By Melissa Kent, CBC News 

Nearly 56 years after the plane carrying UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld crashed in the African bush during a peace mission to Congo, the accident remains one of the Cold War's greatest unsolved mysteries. 

New evidence to be submitted to the United Nations' General Assembly this week could help shed light on one of the enduring mysteries of the 20th century — namely, was the 1961 death of the second UN Secretary General an accident or an act of murder?

Dag Hammarskjöld died in a plane crash in Ndola, Northern Rhodesia — now Zambia — along with 15 others on Sept. 18, 1961.

The 56-year old Swedish diplomat was in Africa to try to unite the Congo, but faced resistance from a number of multinationals, often supported by mercenaries and openly hostile to the UN, who coveted the area's mineral wealth.

The crash has been a source of widespread speculation for decades, which has ramped up thanks to evidence uncovered in the last few years.

Searchers walk through the scattered wreckage of the DC6B plane that had
carried Dag Hammarskjöld, in a forest near Ndola, Zambia, Sept. 19, 1961.
(Associated Press)

That includes testimony from a former U.S. National Security Agency intelligence officer who claims he heard a recording of another pilot attacking the plane, as well as a Belgian pilot who says that he accidentally shot the plane down after being hired to merely divert it.

UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said a three-member panel appointed by current Secretary General Ban Ki-moon recently travelled to Zambia to interview new witnesses and gathered new documents from public and private archives in the United Kingdom, Sweden and Belgium.

Ban is examining the panel's report and will make his own recommendations on how to proceed before it is distributed to the General Assembly — expected to happen this coming week.

The evidence could result in a new UN probe into the crash, which would be the first since an inconclusive 1962 UN inquiry. But Dujarric says that decision will be left up to member states.

'They killed him'

Suspicions that the plane was shot down more than half a century ago are not new.

Just two days after the crash, former U.S. President Harry Truman told The New York Times, "Dag Hammarskjöld was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said, 'When they killed him,'" Truman emphasized, without elaborating.

At the time of the tragedy, Hammarskjöld was on a peace mission to unite the Congo, which had just gained independence from Belgium.

He was flying from the capital, Léopoldville (which later became Kinshasa), to meet with secessionist leader Moise Tshombé, who had declared the mineral-rich southeastern province of Katanga an independent state.

The men were to meet in Ndola, in the neighbouring British colony of Northern Rhodesia, because of ongoing fighting in Katanga.

But just after midnight on Sept. 18, Hammarskjöld's chartered DC6 crashed in a forested area about 14 kilometres from the Ndola airport. Hammarskjöld received a posthumous Nobel Peace Prize later that year.

Renewed speculation of foul play arose in 2011, on the 50th anniversary of his death, when Susan Williams published the book Who Killed Hammarskjold? The UN, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa.

It offered a new analysis of the evidence, including previously unseen documents, photographs, as well as testimony from eyewitnesses, many of them African, who had either not participated or not been taken seriously by Rhodesian officials or the UN.

Williams argues this was a direct result of the white minority regime in place in Northern Rhodesia at the time.

"[The locals'] testimony was dismissed, disqualified, ignored, in some cases changed," said Williams, adding that some people were afraid to come forward.

Williams said a number of local eyewitnesses told her that they saw a second, smaller aircraft "that dropped something that looked like fire" on top of the bigger plane right before it went down.

Queen Elizabeth addresses the General Assembly, as her husband Prince Philip,
sits at left, Oct. 21, 1957. Hammarskjöld sits on the far left,
behind the Queen. (John Rooney/Associated Press)

The crash killed the UN chief and 15 others, including Alice Lalande, Secretary to the head of the UN mission in the Congo, who was from Joliette, Que. She was the only Canadian and the only woman on board the aircraft.

Williams has two primary theories: that it was an assassination or a hijacking gone wrong.

The second theory is based on testimony from a former Belgian pilot known only as "Beukels," who claimed in 1967 that he accidentally downed Hammarskjöld's plane while trying to divert it with warning shots.

A group of international jurists known as the Hammarskjöld Commission sums up Beukels' testimony in a 2013 independent investigative report by stating he claimed he was acting on behalf of a group representing "a number of European political and business interests" who wanted to "persuade [Hammarskjöld] of the case for Katanga's continued independence."

No shortage of suspects

Henning Melber, former director of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, explains the UN chief's mission to unite the Congo automatically pitted him against colonial settlers desperate to hold onto power and Katanga's vast mineral resources.

That included Belgians, French, the British and "mercenaries of all shapes and colours," said Melber, who also helped establish the Hammarskjöld Commission of Inquiry.

For the Rhodesian Federation, which included modern-day Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe, Katanga acted as a barrier against the southward migration of African nationalism. One year earlier, in 1960, the UN had admitted 17 new member states, 16 of which were newly independent nations in Africa — including the Congo.

While the European colonies were slowly dying, the U.S. and USSR were jockeying to expand their Cold War sphere of influence, as well as their share of the resources.

"One needs to remember that the uranium that was used in the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from the Katanga province," said Melber.

Feb. 15, 1961, Hammarskjöld attends a meeting
 at the UN headquarters in New York. That was
 7 months before he died in what is now Zambia,
a death still shrouded in mystery. (AP)

The commission said the "chaotic, contradictory, frequently inexplicable and in places irresponsible reaction (or lack of reaction) of the Federation authorities" following the crash has helped fuel the rumour mill.

For example, it took the Rhodesian RAF pilots 15 hours to "officially" locate the aircraft, while Daily Telegraph correspondent Ian Colvin said he had spotted the crash site — crawling with police — six hours earlier in a chartered Cessna.

Other oddities: Some of the bodies of the victims had bullet holes, and a playing card — rumoured to be the ace of spades — was found in Hammarskjöld's collar.

The sole survivor of the crash was American security officer Sgt. Harold Julien. In his testimony, he spoke of "sparks in the sky" and said the plane "blew up," but the lead inspector of the local investigation dismissed his statements as "rambling."

According to the Hammarskjöld Commission, hospital staff said that although he was badly burned, Julien was often coherent and lucid. He died six days after the crash.

'The Lone Ranger'

Some of the most compelling testimony of foul play comes from Charles Southall, who in 1961 was an intelligence officer stationed at the U.S. National Security Agency's naval communications base in Cyprus.

He said he heard a pilot shoot down Hammarskjöld's plane and that the CIA and/or the NSA have a recording of it.

"The watch supervisor called me and said, 'Come [into work] about midnight, something interesting is going to happen,'" Southall told CBC.

That's when he said he heard a recording of the crash that somebody told him was seven minutes old, which, according to Southall, "meant that somebody down there in the Ndola area, also waiting for this to happen, made a recording of it, put a date-time stamp on it and… sent it off."

In his statement to the Commission of Inquiry, Southall recalled the pilot saying, "I see a transport plane coming low. All the lights are on. I'm going down to make a run on it. Yes, it's the Transair DC6. It's the plane."

Then, the sound of cannon fire, at which point the voice, which he described as cool and professional, became animated: "I've hit it. There are flames. It's going down. It's crashing."

Southall, now 82, believes the voice he heard was that of a Belgian mercenary pilot nicknamed "The Lone Ranger."

Hours before the wreckage was officially located, the U.S. Ambassador in the Congo, Edmund Gullion, sent a cable to Washington speculating that the secretary general's plane might have been attacked by a known Belgian mercenary.

"There is possibility he was shot down by the single pilot who has harassed UN operations," Gullion wrote.

The document, which was released by the State Department following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on behalf of the Hammarskjöld Commission, identified the pilot as Vak Riesseghel, likely a misspelling of Katanga Air Force Commander Jan Van Risseghem.

A UN Military report stated that Van Risseghem, a former South African and Royal Rhodesian AF pilot, had been arrested and repatriated to Brussels 10 days before the crash, but had managed to return to Katanga.

"As long as he is still operating he may paralyze the air rescue operations," wrote Gullion in the 1961 cable.

The FOIA request, which asked for any recording, transcription or radio message intercepted the night of the crash, produced two additional documents.

But the Hammarskjöld Commission says that more than 50 years on, they remain "top secret" and sealed for national security reasons.