South Africa

Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the main opposition party to Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF, has broken his rceent silence to explain why the increasingly splintered Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) acquiesced to the recent Constitutional changes that Thabo Mbeki helped broker. Speaking in Masvingo at the party’s eighth anniversary celebrations, Tsangirai argued that “The objective of talking to Zanu PF is to create a free and fair election environment in this country.” I still wonder if the MDC compromises qualify as pragmatism, optimism, or desperation and suspect that there is a convergence of the three elements involved. 

The proposed Constitutional changes to streamline (or consolidate ZANU-PF power, depending on your perspective) the political process in Zimbabwe have come to pass. Under the provisions of the legislation Zimbabwe will change its electoral boundaries, increase the number of MPs and accelerate by two years parliamentary elections.

In a gesture that makes a virtue out of necessity, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) decided not to contest the changes despite widespread opposition, because the party did not have enough votes to stop the vote from carrying in any case. MDC thus can claim that it is facilitating the negotiation process that Thabo Mbeki is overseeing for South Africa on behalf of SADC.  It is easy to detect resignation on the part of the opposition. But without any viable outlet to prevent the changes from taking place, the opposition hopes that the outcome of this Constitutional tinkering will be a more open political process. (The Foreign Policy Association has more links here.)

Acquiescence seems to be the coin of the realm north of the Limpopo these days. Despite the economic crisis (which now includes outbreaks of disease in Bulowayo), unions, for example, have been unable to gain any traction in their call for a general strike this week.

Meanwhile in South Africa retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called for more outside pressure on Zim from both the western powers and especially England, but also from South Africa. As long as there is progress, however tentative and cosmetic, an outside world that has been loath even to think about intervening in Zimbabwe is going to continue to stand pat. This is Thabo Mbeki’s roll of the dice. If these reforms prove effective, he will deserve a large proportion of the credit. But if they fail, and it is easy to succumb to pessimism and argue that they will, it all lands in Mbeki’s lap. Let’s hope for Zimbabwe, far more than for Mbeki, that his gamble proves to be a winning one.

The heads of state of the Southern African Development Community (SADC)  nations are meeting this week in Lusaka, Zambia. High on the agenda will be the crisis in Zimbabwe, though observers do not expect much on that front. It will be most interesting to see what, if anything, Thabo Mbeki, whom SADC charged with helping mediate the crisis in Zimbabwe, will have to say. I hope to be pleasantly surprised, but I would advise not to expect much traction to come from this week’s meetings.  

Do you remember the climactic scene from the Wizard of Oz? Dorothy, Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion are trapped by the Wicked Witch and her Praetorian guard. The Witch taunts Scarecrow with fire, as is her wont, and then sets him alight. Dorothy reacts instinctively, grabbing a handy pail of water from the castle wall and dousing both the scarecrow but also the Wicked Witch with it. The water liquidates the Witch. For a moment it is unclear what the Witch’s henchmen will do, but they announce “All Hail, Dorothy” and give the little girl the Witch’s broom to allow them to fulfill the great and Powerful Wizard’s task for them.

Of course, had the Witch’s personal defense force reacted differently, there would have been nothing left but straw and tin and lionine flesh and the tatters of a teenaged girl’s gingham dress. Dorothy, more than anything, got lucky.

Jeff Jacoby, the arch-conservative columnist of The Boston Globe, apparently never considered this lesson when watching the Wizard of Oz. In a column yesterday, Jacoby presented a well-written, ardent, impassioned, clear argument for either the United States or Great Britain invading Zimbabwe. He also could not be more wrong. 

Jacoby uses Pius Ncube’s recent statements about the prospects of a Zimbabwe invasion as a springboard to justify foreign miliary action (a belief that, as you may recall, Jacoby is not alone in considering, though he may be alone in his blind optimism). And Jacoby believes that such an invasion would be easy:

“Countless lives could be saved, and incalculable suffering ended, if Mugabe were forced from power. A detachment of US Marines, I wrote on this page in 2002, could do the job on its lunch break. The British could do it. South Africa could do it.”

First off, one would think that Jacoby would not be so blithe about the American military’s capacity to overthrow a dictator without any serious difficulties in light of what has gone on in Iraq. As we have seen, the overthrowing is the easy part. What comes next is what becomes a nightmare. Once lunch break is over, then what? How does a US or British (or South African) force then deal with the aftermath, which is sort of the important part? What will the succession struggle look like? Will chopping off the head end all of Zimbabwe’s problems, or will doing so serve as a multiplier effect and simply add to the misery? 

Second, how does such an invasion take place? Zimbabwe is, if Jacoby has not noticed, landlocked. Which African countries allow a foreign troop presence to use their country as a staging ground for military action that might work to remove Mugabe from power but that almost certainly will fuel chaos across the border? And which countries allow the troop presence of either a former colonial power or of a United States that has not exactly acquitted itself well in recent years when it has come to foreign invasions?

Third, the mission matters. Observers (myself included) have long said that a few thousand troops could have prevented the genocide in Rwanda. Similarly, many believe that a similar number of troops could ease the suffering in Darfur. But these would be preventative measures — the troop presence would serve to stop members of paramilitaries from attacking and killing civilians. That is a far cry from forcing regime change, even if regime change is necessary and justified.  

But most significantly, will such a presence get lucky, as Dorothy and her friends did in the castle? Will Mugabe’s military and police, will his private guard, simply accede to the death of their leader? Surely some will. But many won’t. And those that won’t will come from the revolutionary generation, the generation that knows the bush, that has fought in the bush, that has benefitted from Mugabe’s cronyism and kleptocracy, and that will want to have a serious say in what is to follow. Dorothy, remember, got lucky.

This is not to say that the military option should not be on the table. But it is to say that blithe assertions of the ease with which a British or American military effort could solve the crisis should not be taken seriously.  If SADC or the African Union choose to pursue the military option and if they ask the US or UK for support, that is one thing. But to propose such action to derive from Washington or London, Pius Ncube’s frustrated talk notwithstanding, is to live in Oz, a wonderland detached from reality where the roads are golden, the scarecrows talk, and monkeymen fly. It is, in short, to live in a fantasy world.    

So what do I wake up to this morning, just a few hours after yesterday’s cynical post about Zimbabwe? A report in the Mail & Guardian that Robert Mugabe is nearing a deal that will “end a political crisis in his country.”Naturally, if an agreement, which will largely involve the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)  and Mugabe’s ZANU-PF, is pending that is a good thing. And if it is true, as the M&G story indicates, that the potential truce is the result of Thabo Mbeki’s work as SADC’s chosen broker, all the better.

But let’s not get carried away. Mugabe has spoken of conciliation in the past only to continue on his chosen path whenever he felt it necessary to do so. Mugabe can afford to display largesse. By and large he has won. Giving some concessions to an opposition he has effectively broken is a far cry from Zimbabwe’s crisis being over.

After all, also in this morning’s papers came news that Mugabe’s government is threatening to arrest white farmers resisting evictions from new land targeted for black farmers. Land reform in the former settler colonies of Africa is a vexatious issue. Africans have every right to look for reform policies that will allow blacks, and especially farmers, to secure land on which to work and live. But those policies need to be coherent and, as much as possible, fair and without the threat of violence and coercion. Mugabe’s land reform policies were so long a chimera that only appeared periodically as a threat against white farmers whenever Mugabe felt the need to mobilize his base that when he finally began to enact slapdash policies, they proved to be capricious and chaotic. Whatever the necessity of land reform in Zimbabwe, Mugabe’s policies have proven disastrous and have fueled the economic collapse that has characterized most of the last decade.

Furthermore, whatever the good news coming from Thabo Mbeki’s political mediation, most Zimbabweans are little concerned with politics-qua-politics right now. And so while the M&G  carried that good news forward, it also reminds us that fundamentally, Zimbabwe is an authoritarian state. A new report from the Human Rights Forum argues that torture, assault, unlawful detention and other violations of human rights are increasing apace. 

The HRF report indicates that much of the source for this human rights crisis stems from the political instability, and so perhaps the deal that Mbeki hath wrought will help to stabilize the political situation and in so doing alleviate the human suffering across the country.  Any positive progress is a cause for at least tempered optimism. And if Mbeki’s work really is bearing fruit, it will once again prove the essential role that South Africa must play in the region. But success in Zimbabwe is more than likely going to come in small, incremental, and sometimes barely discernible steps. And even as the country takes those steps, there will be steps backward as well. Indeed, as long as Mugabe is in charge, the question as to whether the shifts in momentum take the country forward or in reverse might be impossible to differentiate.