Robert Mugabe Nominated for Peace Prize from Beijing

In one of the stranger headlines of the week, President of Zimbabwe and head of the African Union, Robert Mugabe, was nominated for the Confucius Peace Prize, China’s equivalent to the Nobel Peace Prize, last Thursday. Other candidates for the Prize included billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and South Korean President Park Geun-Hye. A Chinese group originally tied to the Ministry of Culture created the Confucius Prize in 2011. It was a rebuttal to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to a currently imprisoned Chinese dissident, Liu Xiaobo. Other winners of the Confucius Prize include Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

President Mugabe, 91, came to power as the leader of the Nationalist movement that helped end British rule in Zimbabwe, then known-as Rhodesia, in 1980, and was hailed as a hero of Pan-African nationalism. Thirty-five years later Mugabe is still in power, and despite what is technically parliamentary democracy, Mugabe is a quasi-dictator who uses intimidation and fraud to win election and stay in power. In 2011, according to BBC News, Mugabe and his ZANU-PF political party were accused of massive electoral voter fraud, with 300,000 voters turned away, 200,000 “assisted” with their voting and another one million who were on the ballot despite being listed as dead or age 120.

Additionally, Zimbabwe has seen a massive economic downturn during Mugabe’s time in power, despite being one of Africa’s more stable nations at the beginning of his rule in the 1980s. Per the Washington Post, the 2013 unofficial unemployment rate stood at 60%, although the CIA listed it at 90% as recently as 2009. Life expectancy has dropped fifteen years during his reign, and 25% of the Zimbabwean population has AIDS.

If these two examples did not justify the accusations levied against Mugabe, he also stands accused of genocide of 20,000 civilians in an attempt to crush resistance to his ZANU political party in 1982.

On Tuesday, in a suprise turn of events Mugabe announced that in facet he would not accept the Confucius Prize which he was nominated for.  According to Mugabe’s spokesperson, the President decided to reject the prize when he learned that it was not being awarded by the Chinese government, but by a private prize foundation.

Only time will tell whether this rejection will sour China’s previously positive relationship with Zimbabwe. Regardless of this development it is clear that Mugabe is not deserving of any award that includes the word “peace.”