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Zimbabwe regime may continue
Alec Russell, Financial Times (UK)
August 14, 2007

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/1605bfce-4a8d-11dc-95b5-0000779fd2ac,_i_rssPage=ceecf842-3b01-11da-a2fe-00000e2511c8.html

When dictators finally lose their aura of power, their ejection from their presidential palace can be wonderfully swift. How many times in the past decade or so has the world agonised over how a people can be liberated from a tyrant, only to see his authority implode overnight? It happened in the Romanian capital Bucharest in December 1989, when just days after his forces had mown down anti-government demonstrators, an incredulous President Nicolae Ceausescu was booed off the Central Committee building balcony, deposed and then executed. Then again in Belgrade in 2000, weeks after rigging an election to stay in power, the Yugoslav president and warmonger Slobodan Milosevic was forced out by crowds on the streets.

The situation in Zimbabwe is very different to the Balkans. But recent events have led the Zimbabwean opposition - and many abroad - to dare to believe that after 27 years the Mugabe regime has also reached its "tipping point". They may yet be disappointed.

When the history of the Mugabe era is written, there is little doubt the events of these past few months will be deemed to have hastened his departure. The International Monetary Fund recently said that annual inflation could reach 100,000 per cent by the end of this year. Now the government is penalising casual importers of food, depriving many people of their primary source of supplies. Yet, despite all this, it is still unclear what will tip the regime over the edge.

What is increasingly clear, however, is that the implosion of the economy may not in itself be enough to bring Mr Mugabe down. A recent study by Professor Stephen Hanke of Washington's Cato Institute highlights how the former Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s suffered from far worse hyperinflation. Mr Milosevic still survived, in part by doing just what Mr Mugabe has been doing: blaming his economic woes on the outside world. There are plenty of countries in Africa where the economy and infrastructure have been far more systematically destroyed than in Zimbabwe without causing regime change.

Apart from dying, one of three things has to happen to Mr Mugabe to bring his departure: a popular uprising, the application of irresistible international pressure, or a palace coup.

A chance event, such as a police car crashing into a crowd and killing a child, could spark popular fury and lead to the first scenario. But Zimbabwe's opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, is in no shape to precipitate a revolution. Its members have been brutally oppressed by the security forces and it is split into two bitterly opposed factions. Also, of immense value to Mr Mugabe, the country has a pressure valve, the border with South Africa across which thousands of mutinous citizens flee in search of employment each month.

As for outside pressure forcing Mr Mugabe out, that scenario can be all but dismissed. South Africa has worked hard to mediate between the MDC and the ruling Zanu-PF, but Mr Mugabe retains a mesmeric hold over many of his regional peers, so there is little chance of any meaningful pressure coming from them.

That leaves a palace coup as the most likely conduit for change. Most of the Zanu-PF bigwigs appear to have lost their respect for Mugabe. But there are still plenty of reasons for them not to act. Many party chiefs are profiting handsomely from the meltdown. For the time being, the all-powerful security bosses appear to have calculated that until there is a clear post-Mugabe scenario that preserves their interests, the status quo is the safest option.

The outgoing US ambassador Christopher Dell recently predicted that economic meltdown would force Mr Mugabe out by Christmas. This rattled Mr Mugabe's inner circle, but the prospect of his clinging on, before stepping down in favour of a Zanu-PF successor, seems far more likely. Regional leaders would rush to the microphones to hail such a turn of events, delighted at a crisis averted.

The west should resist the temptation to do likewise. A successor government that gave the elite a second sitting at the state trough would be a tragedy for Zimbabweans. The west should dangle its recovery package for the post-Mugabe era as an incentive for a new start, but only under a genuinely "reformist" government. Romania's grim experience once the euphoria of the revolution died down was of several wasted years under rebranded members of the old guard. Sadly, at the moment that is the most likely outcome to the Zimbabwean crisis.

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