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South Africa: Blindly ruling out the options
Sean Muller, Business Day
May 25, 2007

http://allafrica.com/stories/200705250157.html

MUCH has been said recently, since the assault on Movement for Democratic Change leaders, about SA's foreign policy on Zimbabwe. Consensus in the media appears to be tending toward approval of Southern African Development Community- (SADC-) supported talks. The justification for this, however, seems tenuous. It is not as if President Robert Mugabe has not committed himself to talks before, only to renege on the agreement.

His public statements since the SADC meeting in Dar es Salaam, combined with reports of increased human rights abuses, suggest that the pressure that was applied behind closed doors is not having much impact, and neither is it likely to.

"So what?" say the critics scornfully. "What should we do, invade? Cut off the power supply? There is no precedent for such actions by a legitimate African government against a sovereign state." Actually, there is. At the height of Idi Amin's murderous regime and after much provocation, one of the heroes of the African independence movement, Julius Nyerere, sent Tanzanian forces into Uganda, and Amin was overthrown. True, he was replaced by Milton Obote, who was by all accounts not a great improvement, but on the other hand we do not know how much worse Amin would have become.

In addition, while Nyerere was provoked by cross-border attacks

and we have not been, it is quite reasonable to argue that a flood of millions of refugees across a border is also provocation of sorts.

The refugees are, of course, merely the symptom of the deeper problem. Yet instead of attempting to assuage the symptoms while attacking the root cause, current policy does the opposite. Instead of dealing humanely with refugees, it effectively attacks them (putting them in repatriation centres, exposing them to dangerous illegal border crossings and depriving them of even vaguely certain livelihoods), while mollycoddling the administration that is the core of the infection.

But perhaps we should still rule out invasion on pragmatic grounds; given the one botched incident in Lesotho we certainly do not seem to have the capacity for such an operation anyway.

What about severing all economic and infrastructure relations and support with the Mugabe regime? "Oh no," say the critics, "that will just hurt the Zimbabwean people." But what if the Zimbabwean people are prepared to pay that price?

During apartheid, this claim -- that sanctions would "hurt innocent people" -- was often thrown in the face of antiapartheid activists campaigning for an end to international relations with the apartheid government.

In the mid-1980s, Mark Orkin, the first head of Statistics SA after 1994, led a team of researchers whose express aim was to get the opinion of "the people" on sanctions.

They did this through a carefully designed survey across various regions of the country to get as close as possible to the views of the majority. Their finding: the vast majority of respondents supported sanctions aimed at bringing down the apartheid regime.

Two things stand out here. First, that once again we have a precedent -- contrary to the claims of the "quiet diplomacy" naysayers. Second, we might pause for a moment and ask ourselves what might happen if someone tried to conduct a similar kind of survey in Zimbabwe right now -- whatever the findings might be. The answer is that it would likely not be pleasant, if the brutal attacks on all forms of dissent and free media are anything to go by. What does that say about what is happening in Zimbabwe relative to what happened in apartheid SA?

The critics of more forthright policies on Zimbabwe are merely one consequence of a crude reactionary element in post-independence Africa which opposes every view put forward by "the west". The ironic result of this is that as Africans we continue to define our policies by the views of the developed world, rather than striking out on an independent, principled path of our own.

Contrary to what you might be thinking, this article is not arguing for either an invasion of, or a thoughtless severing of ties with, the Zimbabwe controlled by Mugabe. What it aims to demonstrate is the ignorance and hypocrisy of those who now would casually dismiss all alternatives to the current failed engagement -- and let us be clear, it has failed.

They refuse even to see the nightmare that has been visited upon the Zimbabwean people, and so are blind to the real possibilities -- however distorted -- for a future.

Muller is a masters student in applied economics and Public Policy Partnership Fellow at the University of Cape Town. He writes in his personal capacity.

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