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Mugabe has no intention of sharing power
James Kirchick, Wall Street Journal
August 20, 2008

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121919081088055109.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

Negotiations held under the auspices of the Southern African Development Community have thus failed to achieve a "power-sharing" agreement between Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. According to some reports, the proposed accord, drafted by South African President Thabo Mbeki, would split executive powers between Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai, grant immunity to regime officials guilty of human-rights abuses, and give control over the military and Reserve Bank to Mugabe's ZANU-PF party.

Some in the West might welcome such an accord as a reprieve from months of turbulence, but history shows that sharing power just isn't something Mugabe does.

Following his March 29 defeat to Mr. Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Mugabe unleashed the full force of the state against his opponents, killing over 100 people and torturing and displacing untold more. In June he suspended outside humanitarian aid to his starving subjects.

Later that month, he held a sham "runoff election" in which Mr. Tsvangirai refused to compete. Fearful for his life, the opposition leader spent a week holed up in the Dutch Embassy. Abandoned by African heads of state and the West, he had little choice but to enter negotiations.

It should never have come to this. This sorry situation is the fruit of the international community's abandonment of Zimbabwe's beleaguered democrats.

The events of the past few months echo those of nearly 30 years ago, when Zimbabwe was a rebellious British colony called Rhodesia. In April 1979, three million blacks (64% of the native population) voted in the country's first multiracial election in hopes of putting an end to its brutal civil war between the white-led government and black liberation groups. After five days of balloting, the black Methodist bishop Abel Muzorewa was duly elected prime minister of the newfangled Zimbabwe-Rhodesia.

Under the plan agreed to by the white government and moderate black leaders, whites would get 28 out of 100 parliamentary seats and retain control over some government agencies for 10 years. This was hardly a perfect compromise, but Zimbabwe-Rhodesia's "internal settlement" offered the best opportunity to end white supremacy and establish multiracial democracy.

Mugabe, the Chinese-funded, Marxist-Leninist guerilla leader, threatened to kill anyone who participated in that election. Militias led by him and Joshua Nkomo of the Zimbabwe African People's Union killed 10 people. While he claimed that the "internal settlement" was a "bourgeois" swindle, Mugabe really wanted to rule the country by force.

In solidarity with Mugabe and Nkomo, the administration of President Jimmy Carter refused to send election observers. Two weeks after Mr. Muzorewa was elected, the Senate overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for the administration to lift sanctions on Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, which President Carter ignored.

Today, the world is once again allowing Mugabe to get away with murder. After Zimbabwe's most recent electoral sham, there was the requisite outcry from the "international community." But when Great Britain and the U.S. tried to push relatively tame sanctions through the U.N. Security Council last month, the measure was vetoed by Russia and China.

As for Mr. Mbeki's proposed "power-sharing" scheme, we've read this story before. Not long after taking power nearly 30 years ago, Mugabe jailed Mr. Muzorewa on trumped up charges of treason. In 1984, he deployed North Korean-trained troops to kill 20,000 members of his erstwhile comrade Nkomo's minority Ndebele tribe. Four years later he shut down Nkomo's ZAPU and transformed Zimbabwe into a one-party state.

We can't let this kind of thing happen again. The West must continue to make any future nonhumanitarian aid to Zimbabwe contingent upon the recognition of the March election, the end of Mugabe's control over the government and military, and the full restoration of the rule of law and human rights. The U.S. can bypass Mr. Mbeki and work with true allies of Zimbabwean democracy like Botswana and Zambia to help end Mugabe's rule. Mr. Bush should officially welcome Mr. Tsvanigirai in a Rose Garden ceremony as the duly elected president of Zimbabwe, and recognize his MDC as a government in exile.

Mugabe and his generals have no interest in "sharing" power, never mind giving it up. Any agreement that gives significant political control to Mugabe would betray all the Zimbabweans who risked their lives for democracy.

*Mr. Kirchick, who has reported from Zimbabwe, is an assistant editor of The New Republic.

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