South Africa

[Crossposted from a much longer post on the Zimbabwe situation at the FPA Africa Blog.] 

While South Africa maintains its wary silence on the elections, the ANC has issued a predictable and unexceptional statement asking Zimbabweans of all parties to respect the results, however they turn out. One hopes this boilerplate does not ask Zimbabweans to respect any results just because the government announces them however. By playing so close to the vest it is tough to determine precisely where the government and the ruling party stand. Finally, Desmond Tutu has weighed in, praising Mugabe’s legacy in a perhaps transparent attempt to soften Tutu’s request for Mugabe to step down peacefully.

The Thabo Mbeki-Jacob Zuma divide in the party has mainly revealed political, ideological, and personal fissures within the African national Congress. But one area in which Zuma could significantly undermine Mbeki (and in the process do serious harm to the country) could be in the area of foreign policy. Zuma’s recent trip to Angola clearly sent contradictory signals as to South African policy in that country. Zuma is head of the ANC. But whether he is the chosen one or not (and one would think that Zuma would try to avoid showing quite so much hubris given the hurdles he faces) he is not currently head of state and he has no portfolio with regard to foreign policy. Even if Zuma wants better relations with Angola, such junkets serve Zuma, and not South Africa.

South Africans, like people the world over, are beginning to take a great deal of interest in the primary campaigns taking place in the United States. According to a story on NPR (Click on the link to hear the full report.):

South Africans have been consumed with crippling nationwide power outages and other issues closer to home, such as a much-condemned racial incident involving four white students and some black university employees. But when asked about the U.S. presidential race, the name they seem most familiar with is that of Barack Obama.

This brief report does not portray the election, or South African views of it, with a great deal of depth. It is a man-on-the-street series of brief interviews. Nnetheless, it is probably not a bit surprising that South Africans a) Do not have much regard for the Republicans, and b) Support Obama in light of his African roots. However, Bill Clinton was a popular figure in many parts of the continent, and one wonders if that does not redound to Hillary’s benefit. In the end, South Africans will almost certainly be rooting from afar for whoever wins the Democratic nomination.

Not everyone shares the general belief that president Bush deserves some credit for his Africa policies. Josh Kurlantznick is decidedly unimpressed with the President’s approach toward Africa, as he shows in this piece at The New Republic. Here is a sample:

Rather than supporting democratic institutions and criticizing a new generation of African authoritarians, the Bush administration has backed whatever African leader claims to be battling militant Islam. For example, the White House has developed a close relationship with Ethiopia’s thuggish leader Meles Zenawi, supposedly an ally in the war on terror and a partner in battling militancy in neighboring Somalia. The administration has provided military aid to Ethiopia with virtually no conditions on the assistance. It has also offered advisers to support Ethiopia’s invasion of neighboring Somalia, an invasion which only led to more chaos in that benighted nation. Meanwhile, in recent years Zenawi’s government has overseen a massive crackdown on opposition activists and a brutal offensive in the country’s Ogaden region; in 2005, after disputed elections, the Ethiopian government arrested over 30,000 of its own people.

 

As in Ethiopia, so too across the continent. In building a string of counterterrorism allies, the White House has strengthened its links with some of Africa’s most brutal regimes, from Algeria to Chad.

For me, again, the case for Bush’s Africa policy is a relative one. From an absolute standpoint, this administration’s policies toward Africa have been fairly marginal. But from a historical perspective, Bush’s engagement still warrants some praise. I would like to see a foreign policy toward Africa that takes into consideration African needs and interests and in which Africans are partners, in the truest sense of the term, rather than appendages. But relative both to other administrations and to president Bush’s policies elsewhere, his approach to Africa warrants, if not praise, at least some recognition.

My apologies for the light posting this week. I’ve been down and out with a nasty case of the flu for the last few days. Things will pick back up as I recover from my current zombie status.

In the meantime, you should read this piece on President Bush’s trip to Africa by the Foreign Policy Association’s Robert Nolan. His views in some ways dovetail with mine, though his assessments are perhaps ultimately more charitable than are mine, as I contend that the bar has been set so low with regard to American foreign policy toward Africa that Bush’s mixed record seems perhaps better than it is. Still, it is nice to know that I am not the only person giving the President some respect on this issue, however tepid and begrudging (in my case, at least).

The Council on Foreign Relations has a useful primer on American policies toward the five countries President Bush is visiting this week.

I am going to make a controversial assertion: Although President Bush has, by just about any measure, been a pretty bad president, he ranks among the upper echelons in terms of policy toward Africa. Now this is not much of an accomplishment, to be sure. American policy toward Africa has ranged from the loathsome to the negligent to the indifferent. And I’m not certain that the United States has ever had an administration with an even passably good foreign policy toward the continent. So Bush is among the best of a bad bunch, despite essentially countenancing genocide in Darfur, the lack of delivery on some grand promises, and some questions about intent with regard to AFRICOM. Still, both President Cinton and President Bush at least had Africa within the periphery of their vision, which is a far cry from the noxious “Constructive Engagement” that preceded them.

All this tells me is that Americans must demand more when it comes to United States policy toward Africa. If Bush is among the best we’ve had, we have a pretty shameful record.

It almost certainly comes as a shock to absolutely no one that Robert Mugabe has acted in bad faith and announced unilaterally (even as he has been in the midst of negotiations with the factions of the Movement for Democratic Change) that elections will be held on March 2. Now the MDC is scrambling to figure out what to do. Their options are circumscribed: The opposition can choose to boycott the elections, guaranteeing another Mugabe victory, which the wily tyrant will depict as a mandate, or to participate in elections that are pretty certain to be a sham, in which Mugabe secures victory, thus claiming a mandate. This frustrating hobson’s choice encapsulates the frustration of politics in Robert Mugabe’s brutocracy.

Stephanie Hanson, news editor for the Council on Foreign Relations, recently interviewed Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC’s most visible leader. Tsvangirai gives thoughtful answers to questions on a host of issues, though at time the hopelessness of the opposition’s plight seems almost tangible in his words. He expressed his wish for the world’s response to the situation in Zimbabwe:  “The elections that are forthcoming in Zimbabwe must be raised to the same level like Darfur. There must be an international outcry.” But what has the west’s supposed outcry (which frankly seems rather muted and is by any measure ineffectual) accomplished in Darfur? About as much as it has in Zimbabwe.

Tyrants only know one language, and that is the universal lingua franca of power. Power does not have to mean force, though force is never far from power. Until Mugabe is forced to change, to relent, or to cede control, he will do none of those things. The same can be said for Omar al-Bashir and the thugs he empowers in Darfur. Hand wringing is not enough. It never is.

Sorry for the silence the last few days. Life (in this case a trip to see friends in the Rocky Mountains) intervened as it so often does.

South Africa’s electricity shortages have become increasingly acute, and now her neighbors are scrambling, with mixed results, to fill the void left by Eskom’s decision to pull the plug on power delivery across South Africa’s borders As a result, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Botswana have all reported power failures, as each of those countries relies heavily on the electricity they import from Eskom, which made its decision largely because it has had difficulty even keeping the lights on in South Africa.

Robert I. Rotberg, director of Harvard’s Kennedy School Program on Intrastate Conflict and Conflict Resolution and World Peace Foundation president, has an op-ed piece in today’s Boston Globe in which he praises those world leaders who have stood up against Robert Mugabe, most notably Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel Great British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. He concludes:

Zimbabwe’s long, dark night of despair will not soon end unless Washington, London, and Brussels join forces to put massive private pressure on Mbeki. He and Jacob Zuma, his likely successor as South African president, hold the future of the remaining hungry, dispossessed, and afflicted of Zimbabwe in their so far temporizing hands.

Rotberg is certainly on to something, although his prescription, which includes his belief that South Africa must help “ease [Mugabe] out through jawboning, effective diplomacy, or the exercise of persuasive force,” embodies the vagueness that characterizes most of the criticism of South Africa’s approach to Zimbabwe. Rotberg is rather unclear as to what he means by “jawboning” or “effective diplomacy” (as opposed, I imagine, to a plan of ineffective diplomacy?) or “the exercise of persuasive force.”  

The EU-Africa summit kicks off tonight in grand style. The central figure in the drama that plays out will still be Robert Mugabe whose very inclusion in the meeting has been the source of much debate in the past few months. Still a hero to a few but a pariah to most, the wily despot, who recently announced that only “friendly nations” will be allowed to observe next year’s elections, will almost assuredly be the center of attention for much of the meeting.

Gordon Brown has every right to boycott the summit, and quite a lot of justification, but an even better approach might be for those leaders who do attend the summit to confront Mugabe frontally. This would give Mugabe the platform that many will dread him having, and will inevitably give him a chance to denounce his critics as imperialists and puppets, but he’s likely to do that anyway. What would be most reassuring would be if some African heads of state, even those who believed Mugabe has every right to attend the meeting, broke their silence to condemn Mugabe’s brutal regime.