I too have less than certainty in Morgan Tsvangirai, but a local assassination of Mugabe (who, obviously, is not a Marxist in action) seems a good idea. Democracy there is broken and means of democratic change are unavailable. It seems to me that regarding Mugabe as the lesser of two evils is to look at him through rose tinted spectacles.

Nonetheless what Ake says about the imposition of Western democracy has some validity - but to fail to distinguish between democracy as such and Western democracy as an example is to make the same error that many do when they point to the USSR as a communist regime.