Not In This Africa.(World Affairs)(Zimbabwe)

Byline: ByJonathan Tepperman; With Rod Nordland in Harare, and Andrew Bast and Barrett Sheridan in New York

Once the continent would have kept mum as one of its leaders stole an election. Not today.

There was a time when a stolen election in an African state, with a few hundred dead, would hardly have raised eyebrows--let alone been condemned by leaders of neighboring countries. In the days of Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko and Uganda's Idi Amin, mass murder was more the rule than the exception; so it was in Rwanda 14 years ago, and, more recently, in Congo and Sudan. Throughout it all, most African leaders kept carefully quiet, loath to publicly criticize their colleagues.

But Africa has changed profoundly since then, and Robert Mugabe might be feeling a little nostalgic. As the violence in Zimbabwe exploded recently in the run-up to the second round of the presidential election--which Mugabe was determined to steal--the chorus of condemnation became deafening. From fellow Marxist revolutionaries like Jose dos Santos of Angola to former supporters like Tanzania's President Jakaya Kikwete, leaders in most nearby countries expressed revulsion at the way Mugabe turned the June 27 runoff into a blood-drenched farce. Even Nelson andela, who's famously reticent to remonstrate other African leaders, decided he'd had enough. On June 25, he used the occasion of his 90th birthday to publicly condemn the "tragic failure of leadership" in Zimbabwe. Mandela didn't mention any names, but it was clear whom he was talking about.

This unprecedented criticism is partly a testament to Mugabe's thuggery. In the six-week-long campaign, at least 80 and as many as 500 opposition figures were murdered by thugs from the ruling ZANUPF, according to human-rights activists; the victims included the wife of the mayor of Harare, a member of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. The MDC itself pulled out of the vote with just days to go after its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, took refuge in the Dutch Embassy and decided further campaigning would only get more of his supporters killed. In a phone interview, Tsvangirai accused Mugabe of pressing a campaign of terror against the party, which won a parliamentary majority in the first round of voting in March. "Most of our M.P.s are in hiding now or have left the country," he says.

As Mugabe squeezed, Zimbabwe's already desperate economic crisis worsened. Inflation, which topped 165,000 percent in February (according to Reuters)--already the highest in the world--recently hit a mind-boggling 30 million percent, according to Harare's Financial Gazette. Bread sells on the black market for 3.5 billion Zimbabwean dollars a loaf. As the U.S. ambassador in Harare, James McGee, put it, "Mugabe turned Zimbabwe from the breadbasket of southern Africa into its basket case."

Yet none of this quite explains the growing African contempt for a man once seen as a revolutionary hero. After all, Mugabe's brutal behavior is hardly new. Although in 1980, at the time of his election, Mugabe was hailed by President Jimmy Carter as "a notable world leader," he was never the model citizen his positive press suggested. He did show surprisingly clemency to the white citizens of the former Rhodesia, including their leader, Ian Smith, after overthrowing white rule in 1979. But by 1983 Mugabe had declared his dream of a one-party state that ZANUPF would "rule forever," and he quickly set about massacring his opponents.