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The Harare handshake: Soft power, Africa style
Alan Cowell, The International Herald Tribune
July 25, 2008

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/25/africa/letter.php

When Zimbabwe's political rivals posed for the cameras in a remarkable handshake in Harare a few days ago, the message resonated far beyond Africa.

After months of bloodletting in the deeply flawed Zimbabwean elections, after the killings, beatings and uprooting of opposition supporters, Robert Mugabe clasped the outstretched hand of Morgan Tsvangirai, the man who would replace him as president and whom he had reviled as a puppet of the West.

It was a moment that, only days before, would have seemed utterly improbable, but now the two politicians stood at the threshold of what Mugabe called a "new way of political interaction." Whether they will cross it is another matter altogether. But what exactly brought them this far?

Was it the culmination of Western and African pressures on Mugabe and threats of deeper sanctions in a land so beset with hyperinflation that a newly introduced 100 billion Zimbabwe dollar bill was not enough to buy a loaf of bread? Or was it, as some Africans and their supporters preferred to see it, a result of the cautious, painstaking backroom negotiations conducted for more than a year by Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa?

On a wider canvas, the handshake seemed to reinforce a lesson in diplomacy that bound a strife-bound nation in Africa to a onetime war zone in Europe.

On the same day that Mugabe and Tsvangirai shook hands, the Serbian secret police finally arrested Radovan Karadzic, the former leader of the Bosnian Serbs wanted on war crimes charges.

In both cases, proponents of what is called soft power claimed victory. While Western nations had threatened Mugabe, it was Mbeki who presided over the first face-to-face meeting in a decade between Harare's foes as they signed an agreement to open negotiations. And, in Serbia, the force that overcame the region's bloodstained nationalism was the lure of integration with the European Union, which had made clear that Belgrade's future relationship with Brussels hinged on the capture of suspected war criminals.

In a world where U.S. diplomacy is currently associated with "hard" power in Iraq and a threat of the same in Iran, "soft power" claimed an unusual twinning of victories. The carrot triumphed over the stick. Or so it seemed.

Of course, such iconic moments - a handshake, an arrest - are heavy with symbolism that does not always translate into substance. Few of those who have followed events in Zimbabwe would lay money that Mugabe and the military cabal around him are ready to cede real power in the creation of the unity government sought by South Africa.

But some conclusions seem worth underlining.

If Mugabe and Tsvangirai do indeed reach an agreement on power-sharing, Mbeki will almost certainly claim kudos, not only within Africa, but also on the broader stage where he stood firm against the United States and Britain, with China and Russia at his side, to resist the imposition of broader United Nations sanctions on Zimbabwe.

And if the Harare handshake is vindicated by political change, then Mbeki will be in a position to assert that African diplomacy succeeded where Western diplomacy failed. That would be no small achievement.

Many Africans feel that for centuries they have been demeaned, exploited and trivialized by outsiders from the earliest Portuguese and Arab slavers onwards. Generations of traders, missionaries and colonial administrators roamed Africa, eroding or denying the identities and manners they found there. In 1884-85, at the Conference of Berlin, the European powers carved up Africa for decades to come.

The underlying message was that Africa's own ways were inadequate - a notion reinforced in the post-colonial era by the aid agencies and global financial institutions whose representatives rode into town to rewrite the economic rule book according to the precepts of markets dominated by the West. Throughout the Cold War, sponsors in Moscow, Beijing and Washington offered rival prescriptions in return for guns or butter.

Only in 2001 did African governments come together to create what was ambitiously called the New Partnership for Africa's Development, or Nepad, which Mbeki embraced and sponsored enthusiastically as a means of regaining African self-respect and asserting its right to a place in a globalized world.

Most significantly, the arrangement included what was called a peer-review mechanism permitting African leaders to assess their lands' shortcomings in the pursuit of "democracy and good, political, economic and corporate governance."

But how could African governments claim any kind of collective standards in governance or renewal as long as they countenanced Zimbabwe's viral disarray? What purpose was there in "peer review" if the peer in question simply ignored it? In Mbeki's view, an "African solution" became imperative, not just for Zimbabwe, but for the continent's redemption. As the exclusive mediator appointed by Zimbabwe's neighbors, he was in a unique position.

But the cost of the diplomacy is clear. For months, Mbeki insisted that he could mediate only if he maintained his neutrality. But that neutrality effectively shielded Mugabe from reproach or pressure as his supporters rampaged bloodily against the opposition. While Mbeki maneuvered, Zimbabwe's economic ruin and political oppression sent ever more of its citizens fleeing into neighboring countries, his own in particular.

As so often in the continent's history, Africans themselves paid the price of their leaders' hubris. An African solution, it seemed, required African pain.

Of course, "soft power" rarely works without the threat of an alternative. The carrot requires at least the implicit threat of the stick. In Serbia's case, the alternative was continued exclusion from Europe's economic and political mainstream. In Zimbabwe, it was the threat of ever greater isolation and restrictions on its wealthy elite that laid the groundwork for the Harare handshake.

That is probably where the parallel ends.

Much of the history of both Zimbabwe and the Balkans has been written in blood - from the ethnic slaughter of Matabeleland in the early 1980s to the massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srbrenica in 1995. With his arrest, Karadzic now faces trial and accountability. But if negotiations in Zimbabwe lead to a unity government offering some protection for Mugabe, the survivors of his repression will have no prospect of commensurate justice.

Any hope of moral equivalence between the victims of Srbrenica and those of Matabeleland, in other words, will be lost. But then, Africa is no stranger to double standards - either from outsiders or from its own.

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