What possessed Robert Mugabe to start wearing the wispy little Hitlerian mustache? Fortunately he has the big saucer eyeglasses and the statesmanlike receding hairline to announce his grandfatherly intentions. We could send him to "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," but unfortunately the entire cast would be seized and imprisoned for 10 years as soon as they set foot in Zimbabwe, under the Robert Mugabe "worse than dogs or pigs" statutes. Those are the laws that were used to throw ex-president Canaan Banana into prison, claiming all gays contribute to the AIDS crisis (highest infection rate in the world, 20 percent of the Zimbabwean population, 2,000 dying each week). Besides having a name that SOUNDS like someone who would march in the Gay Pride Parade, Mr. Banana had been caught in flagrante aardvarkus and so the dignity of the state was at risk.

Robert Mugabe must get a lot of email from the Pope. As the last great Roman Catholic dictator, Mugabe can't risk the confessional in a nation full of spies and enemies and vengeance- seeking widows, so I would imagine he improvises. He uses the old "enemies of the state" stratagem. There were those who said that Canaan Banana--sorry, I can't help repeating the name--was simply a political enemy who was conveniently removed when he misused his banana. But normally Mugabe is not shy about simply saying "He's a traitor." Virtually none of the traitors are traitors in the western sense. They are traitors only under the narrow definition of failing to support the Zimbabwe African National Union-Popular Front Party. (And doesn't that just trip nicely off the tongue? It must be HELL at outdoor rallies. "All together now: Zimbabwe African National Union-Popular Front Forever! Okay, again! Zimbabe African . . .")

At any rate, Mugabe's willingness to designate virtually anyone, including the official weather forecaster, as an enemy of the state, is a fairly common occupational quirk among despots both ancient and modern. In Mugabe's case it's a self-deception, but I think it's an honest self-deception. He really does think that any enemy of him personally is an enemy of Zimbabwe. After all, he has all those United Nations citations to prove that he's a good guy, doing the best he can.

I think it's important to Mugabe to be remembered as a good guy. He's 80 years old and has so many ailments (cancer of the throat, cancer of the prostate, at least one stroke) that he must know he's dying, and yet he holds onto power like a possessed man. (Somehow you can't imagine Mugabe taking one of those Boston University retired-dictator-in-residence gigs.) He's reached that stage that corresponds to the last three years of Ivan the Terrible's life, when suddenly Ivan decided he needed to find the names of every single person he had ever killed, take them to a church, and have a priest read them out and bless them. This was a considerable undertaking, requiring thousands of bureaucrats inquiring in hundreds of places, but Ivan, like Mugabe, was a religious man and he sensed a reckoning. What's odd in Mugabe's case is that he's cracking up, but he's also still cracking down. Two of his most recent legal fictions--the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (to deal with the press) and the Public Order and Security Act (to deal with opposition parties)-- are reminiscent of Stalin in the 1930s. He's basically given himself the right to arrest, imprison, torture, suppress and-- that staple of Marxists everywhere--INVENT anything that he needs. I'm not kidding about the weather forecaster. When the national weather forecasting service recently predicted two more years of drought, Mugabe seized control of the service and ordered that all future forecasting be in the form of secret memos to himself, followed by rosy rewriting for the official press release. Mugabe's brain right now regards the weather itself as subversive. The last three years have pretty much ruined his international reputation, so all he has left to fight for is the idea that no one ever turned him out, that the people still want him, that Zimbabwe IS Mugabe.

Unfortunately, Zimbabwe is not even Zimbabwe anymore. Mugabe may get email from the Pope, but what the rest of us get is African spam from guys claiming to be Mugabe's relatives or Zimbabwean government officials who have stolen money they want to slip into your account. There are several reasons that Zimbabwe is the most popular country used for spam con games. One is that it's impossible to actually check anything in Zimbabwe. The government is in chaos, the telecommunications system barely works, and most of the honest bureaucrats have been driven out. The idea that a Zimbabwean official would even HAVE functional email is kind of a stretch. The second reason is that there are hundreds of relatives and cronies who HAVE stolen money from the nation, not to mention the high-ranking military officials and Mugabe relatives who have been trying to sell "blood diamonds" from the Congo on the black market. If you do a Google search on "Zimbabwe corruption," you get 454,000 links. Sure the spammers occasionally try a new face--Lawrence Taylor, Saddam Hussein--but they always return to the man whose name is high-concept for thievery.

And yet it wasn't always that way. Despite his violent past- -ten years in prison under Ian Smith's Rhodesia, six years of guerrilla warfare in which he fought with Joshua Nkomo almost as much as Smith--he was acclaimed at his 1980 inauguration as the new breed of African leader who would bring white and black together, heal old wounds, and use the wealth of the country to bring education and job training to the masses. What no one noticed is that even then Mugabe had all the paranoiac traits of a tyrant. He could never accept that most basic idea that preserves democracy--the idea of the loyal opposition. (We shouldn't be too harsh on him. The French in 1789 didn't understand it either.) In Zimbabwe, a political enemy was a mortal enemy, so one by one he cut the various interest groups out of the picture.

First to go, of course, were the white farmers. In the 1979 deal brokered by England to allow majority rule, the whites were to retain 20 protected seats in a Parliament of 100. But Mugabe didn't like minority parties. He didn't like Ian Smith's minority party (banning him from politics in 1987, taking the 20 parliamentary seats away), and he especially didn't like his old revolutionary comrade Joshua Nkomo's minority party. In Nkomo's case he not only outlawed the party, but he commissioned the famous Fifth Brigade--military killers financed by China and trained by North Korea--to wipe out 25,000 pesky citizens from the minority Ndebele tribe. (These are the same Ndebele that Cecil Rhodes had to fight off, then buy off, then fight off again when he founded Rhodesia in the 1890s. By contrast, Rhodes pacified the nation with a body count of only 5,000.)

By the time the Movement for Democratic Change showed up in the late nineties, Mugabe was outflanked. Ian Smith was a member. The ailing elderly Nkomo was a member. And for once Mugabe's paranoia was justified: it seemed that a majority of Zimbabweans were members. With too many people to intimidate, torture or kill, he resorted to that tried and true formula for rousing the masses to your side--blame everything on the rich white farmers. It took Mugabe exactly three years to destroy his own country. Somewhere along the way he also dropped out of the British Commonwealth, thereby cutting off any chance of help from Tony Blair.

One of the remarkable things about the crumbling Zimbabwe was the strength of the judiciary. Time after time Mugabe's directives, policies and actions were declared illegal by the courts, forcing him to change course if for no other reason than to avoid international sanctions. It seems that some of those old British institutions, but especially the High Court, just wouldn't give up. Even controlling 147 of the 150 seats in Parliament, Mugabe was unable to hold onto laws that violated the original 1980 constitution. A government land seizure is such a complicated legal procedure that many of the white farmers-- including Ian Smith--had held onto their property simply by repeatedly proving to the court that the expropriation was illegal and, furthermore, there was no compensation. Even as Mugabe was jetting back and forth to hospitals in South Africa in January, he was declaring a new law--that all white farms could be seized at any time, without papers, without warning, and without compensation. Maybe THAT will get the job done.

And yet Mugabe is not a stupid man. He must know that running the white farmers off is tantamount to returning the land to useless savannah and barren granitic dust. Rhodesia was a miracle of scientific farming, coaxing crops out of soil so thin that it usually has to lie fallow every third year and where scrupulous crop rotation is the rule. (The best African tobacco always came from Rhodesia, but it was hell on the soil.) Like Texas, where it took 150 years to build up a body of science necessary to raise cattle without destroying the whole environment, Zimbabwe was a place for the professional agronomist, not the hayseed. Now the hayseeds rule: all of Mugabe's friends and supporters own farms--that will lie in ruins. Maize, the one crop that has been grown there for several centuries, must now be imported. He's on the verge of literal bread riots, ever since he set the official government price for bread at half the baker's cost of making it. His country is starving, and though he doesn't quite advocate letting them eat cake, he suggests in his speeches that the cakes SHOULD be there were it not for the knavery of Blair, the Commonwealth and greedy white citizens. What would he have the whites do, though? Stay on as ploughmen?

In other words, he appears to be losing it. As other African dictators have learned, the Marxist doctrine he was schooled on in the sixties doesn't hold up when an economy starts a downhill slide. Mugabe is one of the most overeducated despots in history- -he has six degrees IN ADDITION to his first one from Fort Hare University in South Africa--and yet some rear lobe of his brain has taken over and turned him into a tribalist. The only way you can explain the actions of the past three years are in terms of various blood feuds.

He denies it, of course. He trades on his Roman Catholicism, noting he's a product of Jesuit missionary schools. Even though his private secretary bore him two children and he continued to frolic with her while his wife was dying of cancer, he didn't actually DIVORCE the first Mrs. Mugabe, and he soon made an honest woman of the second, who is 41 years his junior, by the way. (By autocrat standards, these are mild sexual peccadilloes.) But although he's undoubtedly committed a number of mortal sins-- murder-by-proxy being the most common one--it's the venal ones that are bringing him down. His manipulation of the parliamentary election in 2000 and the presidential election in 2002 brought forth stories unheard of since Chicago in the 1920s: people voting at gunpoint, opposition voters being led off to wooded areas, police and soldiers being allowed to vote multiple times. What's remarkable is that Mugabe had this massive election fraud laid out in advance. He knew that his time had run out and he couldn't survive an honest poll.

Unfortunately for his "president for life" future, Mugabe left his opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, as a virtual martyr, with the added irritation of being a martyr who was technically still breathing. Mugabe set out to deal with that with a charge of high treason, setting up a show trial that is still unfolding and, much to Mugabe's chagrin, may be a better show for Tsvangirai and the Movement for Democratic Change. (It's that pesky independent judiciary again, still insisting on actual evidence.)

Mugabe's defenders--yes, there ARE still a few left--point out that it was the barbarism of Rhodesia that made the man what he is today. Ian Smith held him in jail for ten years. Mugabe's revolutionary cause was just. He was embittered by the six years of fighting from his base in Mozambique. Unfortunately, all these arguments collapse when you look at Mugabe's own willingness to be a colonialist. His intervention in the Congo has no strategic purpose for Zimbabwe, no goal other than personal enrichment. It was this folly, in turn, that brought on his hatred of journalists, especially foreign ones. As long as they were reporting on mere genocide, he was content to let them prattle on. As soon as they started naming diamond smugglers, most of whom were so close to Mugabe that he probably saw them each evening at dinner, there were a series of brutal interrogations of Harare journalists, and expulsion of the foreign ones. (The most famous case is that of Andrew Meldrum, an American reporter for the Guardian of London, who had lived in Harare for two decades before he was hustled onto a plane and sent to London. He had been previously protected by last-second High Court orders, but Mugabe's men finally simply KIDNAPPED him and put him on an Air Zimbabwe flight--torture in itself--before any lawyers could act. Oh yes, the official charge: "publishing falsehoods." There are no foreign journalists left in Harare, although occasionally a reporter will slip into the outlying provinces, since there's virtually no border protection.)

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who would technically be Mugabe's spiritual father, has said that Mugabe is now "a caricature of an African dictator." He plays the race card against Blair and Bush. He blames the 350 percent inflation rate on "foreign interests." Forced to explain why his health care system, once the greatest in Africa, can't even begin to deal with AIDS, he blames the whole thing on "unnatural sex acts" and virtually criminalizes the disease. (One of his ministers once went so far as to advocate withholding grain supplies from AIDS victims to speed up their death, saying it will make the country stronger if the population is quickly thinned from 13 million to 6 million.) He long ago alienated the International Monetary Fund to the point that there's virtually no possibility of a bailout as long as he's in office. In banker's terms, they've written off the country as a total loss that will bottom out regardless of what they do. To give you some idea, the Zimbabwean dollar--which trades at an official rate of 55 to the American dollar, 1600 on the black market--is expected to stabilize because Mugabe can't create any more of them. The actual presses that print the money don't work, and the country doesn't have enough foreign currency to buy INK.

And increasingly he has become a goon. During the March 2002 elections--which everyone except Mugabe believes were won by Tsvangirai--he dispatched police and military to ensure a 90 percent turnout in Mashonaland, his stronghold, while intimidating voters likely to vote for Tsvangirai. (This would include virtually every white, every trade unionist, and every high-school-educated black, plus 90 percent of the populations of Harare and Bulawayo.) By confiscating the farms, Mugabe had already exposed 1.5 million black farm workers to starvation, so in the run-up to the election, the local chiefs and headmen were told that if they didn't produce a ruling party victory in their areas, they would not be receiving any food. In the 2000 elections, Mugabe was so determined to keep Tsvangirai out of Parliament that Tsvangirai's election agent, Tichoana Chiminya, and another MDC activist were both burned to death by an officer of the Central Intelligence Organization.

That's the same CIO that is pretty much the only healthy government agency remaining. They're the ones that kidnapped Andrew Meldrum. They're the ones that systematically commit acts of violence against the press. The Harare Daily News, which may have the bravest staff of journalists in the world right now, has been bombed three times in the last two years. When the paper reported that Mugabe and Speaker of Parliament Emmerson Mnangagwa had received $3 billion in connection with the building of the new Harare International Airport, three reporters were jailed for criminal defamation.

But the jailing is the easy part. If you're a member of MDC or a journalist, you can also be targeted by Mugabe's "youth militias"--children with guns--who carry out abductions and have secret camps where torture takes place. They're fond of techniques like piercing the genitals with bicycle spokes, forced drinking of poison, beatings with iron bars and electric cables, electrocution, gang-raping farm workers' wives in order to force the workers to leave their jobs, and--most common--beating the soles of the feet with wooden planks studded with nails. The life expectancy in Zimbabwe today is 39, and it's not all caused by AIDS. Asked by Voice of America what he had to say about the torture of two journalists, Mugabe was defiant: "I will not condemn my army for having done that. They can do worse things than that."

Through all of this, Mugabe manages to keep some public semblance of being a democrat. He tells the world he's anxious to hold talks with Tsvangirai's opposition party--although the talks never seem to get scheduled. He stays in touch with Thabo Mbeki, President of South Africa, assuring him that peace, prosperity and democratic elections are just around the corner. He tells the British Home Office that he's offering an olive branch to all those 600,000 Zimbabwean expatriates crowding the Isles--and, amazingly, the Home Office believes him! "It has now been deemed safe for Zimbabweans to return to Zimbabwe," the bureaucrats wrote in a recent press release. (Most of those expatriates would commit suicide first. One of Zimbabwe's star football players is a street sweeper in Luton and very happy to stay there.)

Meanwhile, Mugabe's message for local consumption is fear and loathing. Tsvangarai himself has been thrown into prison, beaten unconscious, and hurled from a 10-story window. If he loses his court case, he'll be executed. Beatrice Mtetwa, a Harare lawyer who was named Human Rights Lawyer of the Year, was taken into custody and beaten up shortly after winning one of Andrew Meldrum's acquittals. Trade unionists are routinely rounded up, since they represent the source of Tsvangarai's power. And increasingly the security forces are cannibalistic, with police officers themselves being arrested for failing to take aggressive action against political opponents or other undesireables. Refusing to report for work--in a country with 70 percent unemployment--is often a pretext for a beating or detention, although there's nothing Mugabe can do to the doctors because they stand by for lack of equipment, drugs, and bandages. The one medical school in the country now graduates eight students per year, four of whom go abroad to work.

The man who was once the symbol of evil in Zimbabwe--Ian Smith--runs his 4,000-acre farm, raising oranges, potatoes and cattle about 220 miles southwest of Harare. Technically he's banned from politics, but he works quietly behind the scenes to bring some semblance of normalcy to the nation he still loves. The fact that he still farms there is probably Mugabe's strongest asset. He can point to Smith as evidence that he's not persecuting the whites, while at the same time looting the farms of people who bought their property AFTER 1980. (Eighty percent of the white farmers acquired their land legally after the new constitution was written.) And yet the outside world, for the most part, doesn't perceive this as persecution. When Mugabe speaks in America, it's usually at a church in Harlem, where he's treated like a Mini-Me Nelson Mandela. The whites are all racist interlopers and conquerors. The blacks are simply taking back what's theirs.

And yet history doesn't really bear this out. The original inhabitants of Zimbabwe were the San, or Bushmen, not the Shona an Mdebele who live there now. The Shona and Ndebele took the land by conquest. (Most of the surviving 100,000 San live in Botswana, in the western Kalahari, with others in Botswana, Namibia and southeastern Angola. There are none in Zimbabwe.) In fact, possession by conquest was the nature of Zimbabwe right up to and including Cecil Rhodes' expedition on behalf of his British South Africa Company, and he was not even the first European to do it. The Portuguese had claimed parts of it as early as the 15th century. Then the Ndebele, fleeing the Zulu chief Shaka, rampaged northward, killing, pillaging, and eventually dispossesing the Shona of the land. The Shona had been sedentary farmers, but for half a century the Ndebele continued to enslave and plunder them, a pattern that didn't end until Rhodes brought stability to the region. From the Ndebele point of view, Rhodes was a conqueror, but from the Shona point of view, Rhodes was a liberator. He was not THAT different from other conquerors and liberators who had come and gone during the previous 15 centuries.

By the time Southern Rhodesia became a self-governing colony in 1923, the whole region had been transformed--by copper, gold, minerals, corn, tobacco and cattle. Contrary to the way history has been rewritten, the colony was set up at the beginning as a meritocracy--or, in the words of the most famous of its prime ministers, Sir Godfrey Huggins, a place where there were "equal rights for all civilized men." (The key word is civilized, but it does not denote race.) That land is vanished under Mugabe, and that kind of idealistic thinking is vanished as well. Mugabe's slogan, if he had one, would be "equal rights for all my friends." Zimbabwe is dying and Mugabe is dying. You could probably compute the number of bodies that must be sacrificed for each day Mugabe remains alive. Those bodies have a value, though. One of the few ways to get gasoline for your car is to prove to the government that you need it for a funeral procession. Thanks to enterprising entrepreneurs, you can rent a dead body for the day, just long enough to fill up.