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Some questions
Gerald Cubitt
June 25, 2007

http://www.zimbabwesituation.com/jun25_2007.html#Z7

One seriously has to question where President Mbeki, or anyone else who believes it is remotely possible to hold a free and fair election in Zimbabwe within a year, or even two, is coming from.

That Mbeki, and the other leaders of the SADC countries would back such an initiative is no surprise.

By now it has become clear their support for Mugabe and his land grab has turned around to bite them. It is also quite obvious that they cannot pull the plug on him without a massive loss of face. The upshot is they will support any initiative that buys time in the hope that his own party will scrape together the courage to show him the door, or that time itself will do the job for them.

What is more difficult to grasp is how the MDC, after the 2000, 2002 and 2005 elections can be so naive as to believe that they can take on and defeat Mugabe at the ballot box. A couple of months of ostensibly free and fair electioneering hardly constitutes a level political playing field and ignores a number of core issues which are fundamental to the exercise of democracy.

Democracy consists of a matrix of interlocking freedoms: speech, the written word, movement, association, organisation and the right to recruit support for political causes and ideals and, above all else, the absolute right to exercise these freedoms without fear. None of these freedoms are currency in Zimbabwe under the Mugabe government.

To believe that by suddenly paying lip service to these values a few months before an election constitutes a return to democracy is blatant dishonesty. Mugabe with the connivance of the SADC pulled a similar stunt in 2005 after Mugabe signed the Mauritius protocols. It was announced, amid great fanfare, that adherence to the protocols would ensure a free and fair election. Mbeki was one of those who advanced this myth.

When push came to shove, the protocols were honoured more in the breach than in practice.

The real problem was that by then the SADC governments had succeeded in their goal of getting the MDC to commit itself to the election. Participation was a done deal and the many complaints about breaches of the protocols were simply swept under the rug.

The power struggle in Zimbabwe cannot be defined in terms of a normal democratic contest.

Mugabe, who has boasted openly of having degrees in violence, has a power lust which borders on the psychotic. As far back as the mid-1970s, when he was released from prison in Zimbabwe, he showed his ruthlessness by turning against his colleagues whom he perceived to be competitors for control ZANU.

In the ensuing struggle he instigated the murder of Herbert Chitepo, a founder member ZANU and the nominal head of the organisation. While Chitepo's murder was high profile, it was by no means a singular act. Mugabe dealt ruthlessly and murderously with those he perceived to be political foes in the camps in Zambia and Mozambique. Scores of people were beaten, horrifically tortured, incarcerated and executed.

Even when the war in Zimbabwe ended he did not turn his back on violence. In the run-up to the 1980 election, Mugabe's cadres instituted a reign of terror in Zimbabwe in which villages and communities that did not support his canditure were subjected to violent reprisal. The situation became so bad that Nkomo requested Lord Soames, the British governor, to postpone the election until the political intimidation could be brought under control.

It is worth noting that at that time Mugabe and Nkomo were ostensibly political allies.

After the 1980 election Mugabe turned on Nkomo savagely when he unleashed the Fifth Brigade in Matabeleland. Between 10,000 and 20,000 villagers were brutally murdered during the ensuing three years.

Anyone who believes that Mugabe has changed these spots is seriously naïve. In fact, as soon as his political popularity started to decline during the latter half of the 1990s, he reverted to type doing what he does best: ratcheting up violence.

The election campaigns in 2000, 2002 and 2005 were characterised by massive institutional brutality and fraud when Mugabe openly and blatantly used the state machinery (and even the distribution of international food aid) to bolster his waning political fortunes.

The opposition, including its press and other supporting organisations, were hounded mercilessly, shut down, terrorised, brutalised and in cases people were murdered by state agents, the military, the war veterans association and the green bombers (ZANU-PF youth brigades).

After the 2002 election, it should have been clear to all, even the most gullible optimists that the election results had been distorted by gross political violence and even the threat of military intervention in the event of the MDC winning the election.

At the time, the Southern African states, most notably South Africa, did not have the stomach to become embroiled in a dispute over the election result. Probably they believed or hoped that in victory Mugabe would be magnanimous and reign in his goons and that in time the political situation would return to normality. In this they were mistaken. If anything, Mugabe sensed their weakness. He viewed it as a license to freely subvert the rule of law and due process, thereby tightening his hold on power.

At that point, after the 2002 election, the MDC would have been well advised to have withdrawn from the parliamentary political process. Such a step, as drastic as it may sound, would clearly have undermined the legitimacy of the election and also Mugabe's government both, nationally and internationally. It would have forced South Africa and the SADC countries to take a closer look at what was happening in Zimbabwe and to realign their policies towards Zimbabwe with the realities of the situation.

What has been amazing post 2002 are the efforts the SADC countries, and most notably South Africa, have made to convince the MDC to remain part of the political process.

Their efforts can be likened to, and are as morally bankrupt, as the argument that a battered woman should stay with her husband for appearance's sake. The argument is pure sleaze. That it should emanate from the ANC in South Africa which boasts about its highly principled morality, more especially where human rights are concerned, is nothing short of disgraceful.

Having said that, what is just as worrying is that elements in the MDC actually believe that there is sufficient time to level the political playing field in Zimbabwe between now and May next year. Also that Mugabe and his henchmen will somehow undergo a change of heart between now and then and actually participate in an open and honest manner in an election which could cost Mugabe the presidency.

That members of the MDC are prepared to subscribe to such a belief is to an extent understandable. They have been bullied, beaten and battered to a point where as human beings they have to be psychologically scarred. Once again, this brings us to the analogy of the battered wife, where she knows that nothing will change buts clings with pathetic desperation to the hope that it will.

This is clearly demonstrated by the befuddled thinking of those in the MDC who believe that Mugabe should be given a free pass in the event he loses next year's election.

The questions they have not answered is what would happen to Mugabe's henchmen in such a scenario. Would they be allowed to walk away with him taking with them their ill-gotten loot?

What about the military, the police and other agents of the state who have been involved in crimes against humanity - episodes such as the Matabeleland massacres, operation Murambatsvina [drive out the filth] which saw some
700,000 having their homes bulldozed, and the manipulation of food aid so that those people who supported Mugabe received preferential treatment while others starved?

They are a great many other examples of viciousness and torture and if the MDC leadership, in the unlikely event of an election victory, would allow them to walk, it would be tantamount to a betrayal of the thousands who have been murdered and died as a result of Mugabe's brutality and misrule.

Speculating about what will become of Mugabe in the event of his losing an election next year is nothing more than an exercise in wishful thinking.

The election is not only about the presidency. It is also about who is going to exercise power. The people who have run the country into the ground and who currently hold the reins of power are not going to give up their places at the trough, surrender their privileges and stolen wealth if they can humanly help it. While they are the perpetrators of the corruption, misrule and brutality that has brought the state to the verge of collapse, they are also the recipients of its evil fruits.

As for the SADC efforts to resolve the Zimbabwean problem, one cannot help wondering why they have taken so long to get involved and why they have left it so late in the day.

To introduce basic democratic freedoms a few months before a critical election is a hollow gesture. There is simply not enough time for any opposition to fully mobilise its resources to make use of these new-found opportunities and for the effects of such freedoms to work their way through to grassroots level where it has become essential to re-establish tolerance and trust in the democratic process.

Arguing that by granting the opposition access to the existing state media in effect translates into press freedom is simply so much straw.

The editorial staff of the state media is the product of a decade of blind subservience to the ruling party and they have been well rewarded for venomously denigrating the opposition. To expect balanced, honest journalism from them bespeaks a belief in the tooth fairy.

There are many other equally challenging changes that will have to be made in the country before it can hold a legitimate election.

One thinks of things such as a return to the rule of law, and due process, equal access to the services and functions of government fair and honest registration of voters and auditing of voters rolls, etc. In a normal democratic state these may not sound like testing conditions. However, in a country where the edifices of power have been built on patronage and where corruption and misrule are the norm this becomes a monumental task.

It is against this backdrop that members of the MDC are talking to ZANU-PF on an agenda for next year's election. What is dismaying is that even while they are talking in the safety and comfort afforded by South Africa, their supporters in Zimbabwe are being hounded by the security forces. Many are languishing in jail or being beaten and tortured without recourse to even nominal justice. There are also reports of members of the MDC who have been murdered recently and while there is no actual proof that the murders were committed by agents of the state, one cannot help suspecting strongly that this was the case.

Finally, the big question the MDC leadership has to ask itself at the end of the day, is how much more suffering is it prepared to forgive?

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