From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

Brooke Ladstone is away this week.

I'm Bob Garfield.

Quote, few African countries have followed a more disappointing trajectory over the past two decades than Zimbabwe.

Once a model of democracy, law, and tolerance, this nation is becoming a fearful militarized

autocracy. President Robert Mugabe's latest diatribes against journalists and judges are particularly

troubling. That's from a New York Times editorial in 1999. Fast forward a decade to the Zimbabwe of today.

Zimbabwe has banned foreign journalists from covering this election and its aftermath. We're not sure how alert they are to journalists trying to cross here, but we do know they've arrested several journalists, both foreigners and Zimbabweans.

Robert Mugabe was sworn in yesterday following a campaign of violence and voter intimidation.

Government thugs are now hunting down Zimbabweans who can't prove they voted for Mugabe.

Zimbabwe is no longer, as the Times put it back then, sliding into tyranny.

A most brutal dictatorship has long since arrived.

Only now the diatribs against journalists, political opponents,

and others have turned into jailings, beatings, and worse. Freeland's correspondent Joshua

Hammer wrote about Zimbabwe recently for the New York Review of Books. He says the country

began its dramatic dissent back in 2000 when President Mugabe initiated

a so-called land reform program, seizing thousands of farms from white Zimbabweans and giving

the land to friends and cronies with virtually no farming experience at all.

The economy collapsed, unemployment rose to staggering levels. Foreign exchange dried up,

health and education, and virtually every sector of society began a steep, dramatic downward

slide into the near chaos and total destitution that we have today.

So amid all this chaos comes the election back in the spring, an election Mugabe clearly lost to Democratic opposition leader Morgan Changari. Then what happened?

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