"After leading a successful anticolonial war of liberation, Robert Mugabe was elected the first president of independent Zimbabwe. It was hoped that, like Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Mugabe would guide Africa to a new era of democracy. But with each year that has passed, he has turned increasingly dictatorial, and he has run his country into the ground. Since 1988, life expectancy in Zimbabwe has plunged from sixty-two years to thirty-eight. The destruction of the health of his people is as much as an abuse of human rights as arbitrary arrest and torture."