From The Times (hat tip: Daniel Mattson):

The first time I fully realised that Mugabe did not care what he did to his people to stay in power was in May 2005. I had driven in from Botswana and arrived to see plumes of smoke and lines of bedraggled people clutching a few possessions. They looked like refugees from war. “Mugabe’s thugs are smashing up our homes,” they told me. This was Operation Murambatsvina, literally “clear the filth”. Mugabe was demolishing townships because they had voted against him.

I was so shocked that I ignored the fact I was in the country illegally (British journalists had been banned and I had been declared an “enemy of the state”) and drove to Mbare, the biggest township, clutching nothing but a Lonely Planet guide in a pathetic attempt to look like a tourist.

I could not believe what I was seeing. Police and thugs with bulldozers and axes were smashing homes, shops and beauty salons as stunned residents sat on the roadside, watching everything they had worked for being destroyed; 700,000 people lost their homes. At one point I saw police ask a man to help destroy his own house because it was taking too long. Only one man protested.

When people ask which of my assignments have given me the most nightmares, they are surprised when I reply Zimbabwe. Surely, they say, the worst places must be war zones — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, where so many people have been killed? Or the aftermath of terrorist attacks? Yes, I have witnessed some of the darkest deeds known to man, but they usually were done in the name of a wider cause — however much one might disagree with it. In the case of Zimbabwe, the death and destruction were because of one man’s determination to remain in power, not caring whether he brought down his country in the process. And he pretty much did.

He presided over the biggest contraction of any economy in peacetime and the world’s highest inflation rate as well as one of the most repressive states on earth. So much so that all day on Friday after his death was announced, I was sent memes by Zimbabwean friends suggesting he would run again as a ghost candidate in the next election, a reference to his use of “ghost voters” — manipulating results by using electoral rolls that included the dead.

Read the whole thing.