South Africa

Robert Mugabe turned 84 on Saturday, and the wily old tyrant was in a typically feisty mood, announcing in the face of his increasingly emboldened opposition that “There will never be regime change here … Never.”

Simba Makoni, Mugabe’s challenger in the March 31 election, is unbowed by Mugabe’s intransigence and continues to forge ahead with a candidacy that at times seems Quixotic, at other times mad, and always brave. He continues to be optimistic about his chances of unseating Mugabe, speaking of “renewal” and healing the wounds that Mugabe has opened.

One wild card in this election might be the support Makoni is beginning to draw from members of the military, police, and security forces, a development that I have for some time argued might change the political calculus in Zimbabwe. Mugabe owes his status to the loyalty that he still inspires from the men with guns who surround them. If those people suddenly refuse blindly to follow him, if they choose to pursue democratic change, or simply opt for a new dispensation, democratic or not, Mugabe will find that “never” is not as long a time as he imagines. Security forces can easily wreak chaos. Perhaps they also can help bring about peaceful change in Zimbabwe. Now that would be a change that most of thought would happen, well, Never.

Africom is now up and running. I still am ambivalent about the US African Command in theory and especially in practice. The idea seems ok — it gives America a presence on a continent it has so long overlooked, ignored, or mismanaged. And maybe there is the chance that the US presence will augment AU troops on the ground in cases where augmentation is needed. But I tend to wonder whether the United States will be capable of looking beyond its own interests and will be willing to subvert those interests to the desires and needs of Africans. I do not, for example, trust the current administration to conceptualize or implement such a commend, and I suspect that Africom could quickly devolve into a mechanism for administering US foreign policy at the barrel of a gun. Still, now that Africom is a reality it is important both for Americans with a role in the foreign policy and security apparatus and a legitimate interest in Africa to work with African leadership to try to counter the almost inevitable attempts to misuse Africom forces.

Today marks the 30th anniversary of Steve Biko’s death while in police detention.  

Newsweek has a story on the United States’ efforts to step up anti-terrorism activities in the Horn of Africa as embodied in Africom, the military’s planned Africa Command.

The United States lauds the role that South Africa played in helping to bring about the conviction of Gerhard Wisser, who was deeply involved in the notorious Pakistani AQ Khan’s nuclear netowrk.

South Africa appears to have made some laudable progress on achieving a host of targets related to dealing with the country’s AIDS crisis. On the other hand, there is a cloud of mistrust that charecterizes much of the debate over AIDS policy that will have to be addressed for progress to continue to occur. 

Is division within the ANC largely a creation of the media? Or do members of the party agree? The Mail & Guardian has one perspective.

Your faithful scribe is in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas where I am participating in the US Army Combat Studies Institute’s symposium on Warfare in the Age of Non-State Actors. I gave a presentation on policing in contested states using the South African security forces in the Apartheid era to explore implications for future policies across the globe. This will, I hope, explain the relative silence this week. I will post as I can, even if only to provide links.