I think it’s safe to say that when a Nobel Peace Prize winner calls for the threat of force to remove you from power, you’re on the proverbial “wrong side of history.” Hopefully it also means that Robert Mugabe’s days as president of Zimbabwe are numbered.
I had the honor and privilege of meeting and interviewing Archbishop Desmond Tutu, just following his Nobel Prize, as part of a PBS student panel TV program. (One of the fellow panelists that morning was Rachel Swarns, now the Washington correspondent for the NY Times.) I’ll never forget how, even in discussing the plight of South African blacks under apartheid, there was pathos but no hatred in his voice, and how a playful gleam never left his eyes.
It says a lot about how thoroughly irredeemable Mugabe is to hear this coming from the same man who sat before us twenty-five years ago.