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Showing Mugabe the door
Peter Godwin
April 03, 2007

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/03/opinion/edgodwin.php

Ever since Zimbabwe began imploding in 2000, the conventional punditry about its president, Robert Mugabe, has largely been of the good-leader-turns-bad variety.

Now, as the country's economy enters its death throes - hyperinflation at 1,700 percent and expected to exceed 5,000 percent by year's end; unemployment at 80 percent; the average person's purchasing power at 1953 levels; life expectancy the lowest in the world; an exodus of Africa's most educated population - it would seem a good time to re-examine that orthodoxy and decide what the West can do to ease the dictator's departure.

In fact, Mugabe has been a completely consistent leader. It's the West that has changed. During the Cold War, we in the West were so grateful that this militant Marxist had instantly become a benign capitalist that we ignored his history of political violence within his own party, and intimidation at the 1980 elections that brought him to power upon Zimbabwe's independence.

We supported him in the same way we supported venal leaders like Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire - our friends simply because they were not Moscow's.

The other parapet behind which Mugabe found convenient shelter was apartheid, which persisted in his southern neighbor for the first 13 years of his rule. As the leader of the so-called front-line states facing a hostile white government in South Africa, he deserved our support, and we gave him the benefit of the doubt even after his hands were bloodied in his southern province of Matabeleland - where his North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade killed as many as 25,000 civilians in 1983 and 1984.

It was a massacre I saw and reported on, but not a big story in news terms, and there was barely a peep out of the international community. Somehow, to attack Mugabe was to appear to be giving succor to white South Africa, and Zimbabwe's strongman was a master at spinning it that way. (When I wrote about the massacres, he immediately claimed I was a South African spy and had me declared an enemy of the state.)

Then things went quiet - but only because he'd bludgeoned the opposition into quiescence and established a one-party system. The next time Zimbabweans had the temerity to question Mugabe's absolute rule was in 2000, when they voted against him in a referendum to extend his presidential term limits, a vote that in his complacency, he hadn't even bothered to rig. He reacted to his defeat with violence and intimidation: his thugs began killing opposition supporters, evicting white commercial farmers, and intimidating voters at subsequent rigged elections.

In recent months, Mugabe has stepped up the violence against opposition members and leaders in Zimbabwe. On Friday, he quashed a challenge to his rule from within his own party.

What can outside powers do to help oust an 83-year-old leader who, after 27 years in power, would rather destroy his country than step down voluntarily?

International sanctions on Zimbabwe are now minuscule. We could ramp up "smart sanctions" against Mugabe and his coterie, for example by freezing their ill-gotten external assets, but any wider sanctions would probably only hurt those at the bottom of the food chain, not the elite kleptocracy.

The real key to the Zimbabwe stalemate is to be found in South Africa, which has an economic choke hold on its landlocked northern neighbor. But thus far, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa has refused to do anything. His policy of "quiet diplomacy" has, in truth, been a silent one. And he has paid a high price for such tacit support of Mugabe, whose embarrassing exploits ensured that Mbeki's much-vaunted African Renaissance was stillborn.

It has long been a political parlor game to figure out why Mbeki hasn't done more about Zimbabwe. He sometimes pays lip service to the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of another sovereign state, but South Africa quickly sent its army into Lesotho in 1998 after a rigged election there. Part of Mbeki's reluctance to act may have to do with Mugabe's residual status as a liberation hero. But mostly, I believe, it stems from Mbeki's distaste for the Zimbabwean opposition, the Movement for Democratic Change and its main leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, who used to head up the Zimbabwean trades union movement.

Therein lies the problem: Mbeki's governing African National Congress party is actually a troika, and one of its legs is the Congress of South African Trade Union, which is getting increasingly fractious. The group has strongly backed Zimbabwe's Movement for Democratic Change, and if Tsvangirai were to come to power in Zimbabwe, it would embolden the South African union confederation, encouraging it to secede from the African National Congress and pose a challenge to Mbeki. Thus has Zimbabwe become a function of South African domestic politics.

In so far as diplomacy is the art of the possible, Pretoria still provides us with the main fulcrum for change. South Africa controls and has the power to obstruct transportation links, lines of credit and electricity supplies, and it alone has the power and regional clout to face down Mugabe.

Mbeki may soon be in a position to do more. In a woeful display of the inadequacies of pan-African institutions, the 14 members of the South African Development Community last week came out in support of Mugabe's dictatorship. But they nominated Mbeki to facilitate talks between Mugabe and his opposition.

The international community should make it clear to Mbeki that he, and the new South Africa, have a special moral obligation to help a nearby people who are oppressed, having been assisted in its own struggle by just such pressure. And that "quiet diplomacy" is nothing less than the appeasement of a violent dictatorship. If Mbeki continues it, South Africa will squander the good will of the world.

*Peter Godwin is the author of a forthcoming memoir, "When a Crocodile Eats the Sun."

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