South Africa's unseemly alliance
Los Angeles Times
Its president stands idly by as Mugabe and his thugs ruin Zimbabwe.
By James Kirchick
May 12, 2008
The tendency to compare contem****ary political events to the Third Reich
is
called reducto ad Hitlerum, so facile are the alleged similarities and so
often is this tactic employed. With that caveat, when I saw a photograph
Friday of smiling, garland-laden South African President Thabo Mbeki
holding
the hand of Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, I couldn't resist drawing a
mental parallel: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938 waving
his copy of the Munich treaty before a crowd of thousands, boasting that
he
had achieved "peace for our time."
That Mbeki, who last month insisted there was "no crisis" in Zimbabwe,
continues to glad-hand Mugabe represents a complete abandonment of moral
responsibility. As he provides diplomatic cover, Mugabe's armed thugs roam
Zimbabwe's countryside threatening, torturing and killing people
believed to
have voted for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. The MDC
claims
25 of its sup****ters have been murdered and 40,000 people have been
displaced since the March 29 parliamentary and presidential election. The
regime has detained journalists and trade union leaders as well as members
of the country's electoral commission, the body that verifies election
results.
The regime claims that MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, while besting Mugabe,
did not poll more than the 50% required for an outright win and has
mandated
a runoff. Given that the alternative would be an automatic Mugabe victory,
Tsvangirai has decided to take part. Yet conditions for a free and fair
election clearly do not exist in Zimbabwe. In an interview with the New
York
Times last week, a member of Mugabe's Politburo implicitly promised war:
"We're giving the people of Zimbabwe another op****tunity to mend their
ways,
to vote properly. This is their last chance."
And yet, as the world looks to South Africa for political leader****p (as
it
is the region's economic powerhouse), Mbeki stands idly by. In fact, his
methods of dealing with the tyrant to his north -- supplying cut-rate
electric power, issuing nary a word of criticism, siding with Russia and
China to prevent the dispatch of a U.N. envoy to re****t on postelection
violence -- has exacerbated the political and humanitarian crisis.
Why has Mbeki acted this way?
National liberation movements rule the roost in much of southern Africa:
Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa are all governed by
political parties that emerged from armed revolutionary movements, and
their
leaders tend to close ranks when one is threatened. The leaders of South
Africa's ruling African National Congress fear a domino effect, in which
the
fall of a sister liberation movement could ****tend a similar fate for its
own political fortunes. "If Zimbabwe 'falls,' South Africa will be the
next
target," South African historian R.W. Johnson wrote recently in the London
Review of Books.
Zimbabwean writer Blessing-Miles Tendi, writing in the Guardian, offered
another explanation for South Africa's inertia: Mbeki owes Mugabe a
political debt. Mugabe could have seized Zimbabwe's white-owned farms in
the
1990s but resisted, in part because of pressure from the ANC, then
trying to
convince South Africa's whites that they would not lose their land in a
post-apartheid dispensation.
On a plane ride from Johannesburg to Harare in 2006, I sat across the
aisle
from a South African military officer on a mission to train Zimbabwean
troops. Appalling as it may seem, post-apartheid South Africa maintains a
firm military relation****p with the Mugabe regime. They formed a joint
commission on military strategy and intelligence in 2005, for instance.
Both
are also members of the African Union and the Southern African Development
Community, regional alliances that discourage unwanted meddling and
encourage mutual sustainment. The AU even amended its constitution in 2003
to permit forceful intervention in any AU country to rectify "serious
threat[s] to legitimate order." This was widely seen -- correctly -- as a
form of regime preservation.
The March 29 election gave a reticent Mbeki every op****tunity he needed to
gently urge a peaceful transition of power in Zimbabwe. But his aversion
to
the opposition Movement for Democratic Change -- which the ANC's top brass
views as a "neocolonialist" threat partly because of the sup****t it has
from
the West -- led him to quietly sup****t the breakaway candidacy of Mugabe's
former finance minister, Simba Makoni, as a "third way" option to keep the
MDC boxed out.
Another complicating factor is that Mbeki faces internal opposition from
South African labor, which opposes his free-market economic reforms and is
allied with its anti-Mugabe Zimbabwean trade union brethren. Victory for
the
opposition in Zimbabwe would embolden Mbeki's domestic antagonists.
Mugabe has easily manipulated Mbeki, a strange set of affairs considering
that the former figure is a discredited dictator running a morally
bankrupt
kleptocracy, and the latter presides over a country brimming with
international goodwill and a strong economy. It is not in South Africa's
national interest, nor -- despite what he may think -- in Mbeki's personal
political interest that Mugabe's disastrous rule continue. No political
leader wants a failed state on his border, and Zimbabwe's collapse is
deeply
felt in South Africa, where more than 3 million Zimbabweans have fled in
recent years, crowding into a country with 40% unemployment.
As discredited as his role as mediator may be, Mbeki can still act for
good.
At the very least, he could demand an end to the regime's unceasing
violence
against its own people. He could threaten to cut off fuel and electric
supplies. He could publicly demand Mugabe step aside. If that's too
antagonistic, he could pressure Mugabe to allow journalists and election
observers from free countries (i.e., not just teams from China, Iran and
Venezuela, nations that Mugabe welcomed in March) to monitor the runoff.
But by refusing to perform even the easiest of these tasks, Mbeki has
exposed himself as an utterly feckless leader. The tragedy of Zimbabwe
falls
considerably on his head.
James Kirchick is an assistant editor of the New Republic.
|
