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Dictator Mugabe makes a comeback
Joshua
Hammer, New York Review of Books
October 22, 2009
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23182
The arrivals
lounge at Harare International Airport in Zimbabwe once provided
a sinister foretaste of life under the Robert Mugabe dictatorship.
In every corner lurked agents of Mugabe's Central Intelligence Organization,
his domestic spying agency, on the lookout for Western journalists,
human rights workers, democracy activists, and other perceived enemies
of the regime. It was here that Tendai Biti, the outspoken secretary-general
of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the country's main
opposition party, was arrested by security agents in June 2008 upon
his return from a trip to South Africa and charged with treason,
which carries a death sentence. (After international protests, he
was released on bail two weeks later.)
Correspondents trying
to slip into the country on tourist visas could expect to find themselves
interrogated here by CIO operatives; then they would either be detained
or put back on planes for Johannesburg. Most elected to enter the
country through the backwater airport of Bulawayo, an opposition
stronghold, or overland from Victoria Falls. "If you come through
Harare," one Zimbabwean colleague told me last year, "chances
are good you'll be sent back - or go to jail."
Thus I was pleasantly
surprised when I arrived in Harare on a South African Airways flight
from Johannesburg in late August, six months after Mugabe had been
forced to cede partial power to Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC leader.
The CIO seemed to have disappeared: the atmosphere was as laid back
as that of a small-town airport in the United States. A friendly
immigration official issued me a tourist visa on the spot for the
usual $30, no questions asked, then winked as I gathered my documents
and headed toward baggage claim. "Welcome to the new Zimbabwe,"
he told me.
Last year at
this time Zimbabwe looked very different. In March 2008, Morgan
Tsvangirai defeated the deeply unpopular Mugabe by a majority vote
in the presidential election, promising - it seemed - an
end to a brutal, twenty-eight-year dictatorship that had brought
the country economic ruin and international isolation. Mugabe refused
to recognize the result and forced Tsvangirai into a runoff, then
unleashed his security forces and pro-government militias on a campaign
of torture and murder. At least seventy MDC activists were killed,
several hundred disappeared, and 25,000 people fled their homes.
Then South African president Thabo Mbeki and other regional leaders
stood by, refusing to intervene or even to condemn Mugabe's tactics.
Tsvangirai withdrew from the runoff on June 22, 2008, calling it
a "violent sham." Five days later, Mugabe, running unopposed,
declared himself the winner.
Mugabe's victory, however,
was not absolute. The continued implosion of Zimbabwe's currency,
combined with a spreading cholera epidemic, global revulsion at
the ruling party's violence, and growing impatience from the Southern
African Development Community (SADC) - the regional group of
nations led at the time by Mbeki - forced the dictator to enter
talks with the opposition leaders last fall. After tortuous negotiations
and several walkouts by the MDC, the two sides in September signed
the Global Political Agreement, preparing the way for a "unity
government": Tsvangirai became Zimbabwe's prime minister; Mugabe
retained the presidency. The MDC received sixteen of thirty-one
ministries - including the Ministry of Finance, giving the party
some power over the country's wrecked economy.
In the months
since then, top officials in Mugabe's ZANU-PF (Zimbabwe African
National Union-Popular Front), who once enjoyed absolute power,
have been forced into awkward proximity with their former enemies
- talking with them at cabinet meetings, having meals with them,
even sharing suites in cabinet retreats in the Zim-babwean bush.
Still, as Human Rights Watch recently reported, Mugabe retains much
control, even if ministries are officially under the authority of
the MDC.
MDC officials, including
Tsvangirai, argue that such grudging and partial cooperation is
evidence that Zimbabwe is slowly building democratic institutions,
establishing the rule of law, and laying the groundwork for a new
constitution and free and fair elections next time around. "I
see it as a process, and I believe the process is on track,"
I was told by David Coltart, a constitutional lawyer, MDC member
of Zimbabwe's Senate, and the newly appointed minister of education.
Coltart has reopened thousands of schools that had been abandoned
during the Mugabe dictatorship because their teachers went unpaid.
Coltart concedes, however, that the current $155 monthly teacher's
salary is barely enough for basic essentials, and members of the
Zimbabwe Teachers Association, the largest of three unions, went
on strike in early September to protest living in "abject poverty
and perpetual debt."
Nor does everybody share
Coltart's optimism. In a huge series of concessions by the MDC that
many within Tsvangirai's own circle opposed, the ZANU-PF still has
control over the army, the police, the courts, the jails, and the
Ministry of Information, which regulates the press. Thus Mugabe's
henchmen have kept their hands on levers of coercive power, including
the ability to harass and detain their enemies. "Mugabe was
beaten in an election, he came back through violence, and...I think
he is having the last laugh," I was told by Farai Maguwu, a
human rights activist in Mutare, in eastern Zimbabwe. Indeed, there
is ample evidence that the MDC has been outmaneuvered by Mugabe
and his cronies, and that the former dictator, rather than being
diminished, has walked away from the deal with his power and his
privileges largely intact, and his legitimacy - to some degree - restored.
Tendai Biti, the MDC
leader and new finance minister, exemplifies the cautious optimism - or,
critics would say, naiveté - of the MDC today. Biti works
out of a corner office on the fifth floor of a dilapidated high-rise
on Samora Machel Avenue, the main thoroughfare in Harare. A tall,
burly figure with a booming voice, Biti was once one of Mugabe's
fiercest opponents; he called Zimbabwe under the dictator "a
predator state characterized by tolerance for violence." Last
fall, Biti urged his MDC colleagues not to enter into a power-sharing
deal, arguing that Tsvangirai, as the clear winner of the March
2008 election, should form a new government without Mugabe. He was
ignored. "I cried when the national council of the MDC took
the decision to participate [in the unity government]," he
told me. "I wanted to resign. And Morgan spoke to me, and I
decided to stay." Since then, Biti has become a supporter of
the alliance.
Biti has rolled back
some of Mugabe's most pernicious economic policies. His biggest
target has been the national reserve bank, run by Gideon Gono, a
Mugabe protégé. During his heyday, according to human
rights workers, journalists, and MDC politicians, Gono ran the bank
as a personal slush fund. He printed up trillions of Zimbabwean
dollars, which he used to pay the security forces, purchase agricultural
equipment for rural communities to bolster support for the ZANU-PF,
distribute loans to party insiders, allegedly buy diamonds in newly
discovered fields in southeast Zimbabwe (which he then smuggled
out of the country for hefty personal enrichment), and trade for
hard currency at official government rates, which diverged wildly
from black market rates. Gono's money policy fueled a hyperinflationary
spiral: in March 2008, the Zimbabwean dollar was valued at 25 million
to the US dollar; two months later, it had fallen to one billion
to the dollar. Factories stopped producing goods. Long lines of
people stretched around city blocks in front of ATM machines, waiting
hours to withdraw the equivalent of US $3 - the maximum allowed
by law.
In April, Biti abolished
the Zimbabwean dollar and made the US dollar legal tender. (The
US dollar was already widely used in Zimbabwe, though unofficially.)
The move brought the inflation rate to near zero, revived the stock
market, put goods back on supermarket shelves and gasoline in the
pumps, and allowed commercial enterprises to establish budgets and
return to business. Last spring ministries began to pay their employees
in US dollars, which has drawn thousands of teachers, doctors, and
other civil servants back to work - though many on the new government
salaries are still scraping by.
Biti couldn't help the
millions of Zimbabwean citizens whose pension funds and savings
accounts had been wiped out by hyperinflation. One sixty-year-old
Zimbabwean colleague told me that he had recently cashed out his
75-trillion-Zimbwabwean-dollar pension fund - and received three
US cents. And the shortage of US bills in circulation has forced
some people in rural areas to barter for goods - paying in grams
of gold, crops, or even animals. (The Associated Press carried a
story about a woman in a rural area who boarded a bus to Harare
and offered the driver a trussed, live chicken in lieu of bus fare.)
But overall, he argues, dollarization has restored a measure of
normality to Zimbabwean society.
Other Zimbabweans I spoke
to supported this view. In Mutare, a town near the border with Mozambique,
I met Ched Nyamanhindi, a young researcher for the Center for Research
and Development, a human rights advocacy group. Nyamanhindi used
to have to travel across the border to Mozambique two or three times
a week to buy essentials like food and gas, because shops in Zimbabwe
had been stripped bare. But now, he told me, "You have money,
you can budget, you can plan, you can walk into a supermarket and
buy food for your family. There's no more running across the border
to buy goods. Zimbabwe food products, like cooking oil, rice, sugar,
salt, mealy meal, are coming back to the markets."
Some people, however,
seem determined to turn back the clock. Gono, who was appointed - and
can only be fired - by Mugabe, recently announced plans to bring
the Zimbabwean dollar back into circulation. Biti says it will never
happen: "I don't have the authority to get rid of him,"
he told me. "But he can't do anything without our consent."
In July, a package arrived at Biti's home in Harare containing a
nine-millimeter bullet and a message to "sort out your will."
Biti was shaken, though he vowed to continue his reforms.
Mugabe's security forces
continue to carry out acts of brutality. The worst such case took
place in Chiadzwa, a vast field of alluvial diamonds that was discovered
in 2006. Immediately after the discovery, diamond panners from across
Zimbabwe - and other parts of Africa - descended on the
area, some of them becoming rich overnight. Following the 2008 elections,
Mugabe and the generals decided to crack down. In Operation Hakudzokwi,
or "you won't come back," two helicopter gunships and
hundreds of ground troops attacked the panners and, over a two-month
period, killed several hundred of them, according to human rights
groups, then cordoned off the fields with military checkpoints.
"They shot the miners and left their bodies to rot in the field
for days," the human rights activist Farai Maguwu said, as
we stood in front of what he said was a mass grave at a Mutare cemetery.
It contained the bodies, Maguwu told me, of eighty poor diamond
panners, shot down by an army brigade last November.
Today, the troops augment
their paltry incomes by smuggling the diamonds across the border
to Mozambique and selling them to Lebanese buyers. The MDC has demanded
that Mugabe withdraw the army and turn the fields over to a reputable
mining company, in order to bring transparency to the hunt for diamonds.
But nothing has yet happened, and the smuggling goes on. Biti admitted
that the fields - under the authority of the army and the ZANU-PF-controlled
Ministry of Mines - were beyond the reach of his authority and
that the government is now losing any profit from the diamonds.
"We are getting zero," he said.
In other areas as well,
the MDC remains powerless. Mugabe's police have arrested more than
a dozen MDC parliamentarians - including ten seized in late
August in a mass arrest during a meeting at the Ministry of Finance - on
a variety of charges ranging from disturbing the peace to abducting
a twelve-year-old girl. In July, the police jailed an MDC deputy
minister on charges of stealing a Nokia cell phone allegedly owned
by Joseph Chinotimba, leader of the Zimbabwe war veterans - who
have seized thousands of white-owned farms, often at gunpoint, in
a radical land-reform program initiated by Mugabe in 2000.
Meanwhile, the land reform
falls under the authority of provincial governors, all of them Mugabe
appointees, and of the ZANU-PF-controlled Ministry of Home Affairs.
Seizures of white-owned farms continue, though by now there are
only a few hundred left. (Biti told me that he wanted to stop the
seizures, but that the government would not return land that had
already been confiscated. "You can't reverse the land-reform
policies. You cannot have minority ownership of any resources in
the country.")
The Central Intelligence
Organization - despite having been withdrawn from Harare's airport
for cosmetic reasons - is still a near-ubiquitous presence in
the rest of the country. The Ministry of Information is still denying
newspapers licenses, arresting journalists, and refusing to accredit
others. Angus Shaw, the Associated Press bureau chief in Harare
and a Zimbabwean citizen, has been working without accreditation
for a decade, which can make him subject to detention at any time.
Last month, he told me, he attempted to attend a press conference
held by Morgan Tsvangirai - and was ordered to leave by a CIO
agent lurking around the entrance. "He said, 'if you don't
go now, your next destination will be the police station,'"
said Shaw, who has been writing about the country for nearly forty
years.
Such harassment and continuing
lawlessness have made a mockery of the MDC's participation in the
unity government - and of Tsvangirai's conciliatory statements
toward Mugabe. (Tsvangirai recently told The Guardian that he had
developed "some chemistry" with the man who had once put
him on trial for treason and threatened to kill him.) "The
MDC has sanitized and legitimized ZANU-PF, and they continue to
do so," said Derek Matyszak, a director of the Research and
Advocacy Unit, a human rights organization in Harare. Mugabe loyalists,
Matyszak says, are biding their time, "building up a war chest,
and waiting for the next election." Unless the government comes
together, ratifies a new constitution, and establishes a new date
for general elections, the next parliamentary and presidential vote
will take place in 2013. At that point, he believes, the country
could experience a new wave of violence and terror.
By 2013, there is also
a good chance that Mugabe, who is eighty-five, will have faded from
the scene. The succession battle continues to play out inside the
ruling party, with attention focusing on two candidates, Joyce Mujuru,
who is vice-president and also the wife of former armed forces commander
Solomon Mujuru; and Emmerson Mnangagwa, currently the minister of
defense. Both are members of Mugabe's Shona tribe - the country's
dominant ethnic group - and both are considered to be hard-liners
who stood firmly behind the campaign of intimidation and violence
against MDC supporters and activists in the spring of 2008.
Neither of them, however,
is believed to be a favorite of South African President Jacob Zuma,
who has taken a more critical position toward Mugabe and his henchmen
than his notoriously passive predecessor, Thabo Mbeki. Zuma is believed
to be taking a close interest in the struggle within the ruling
party to succeed Mugabe as president, though it remains unclear
just how strongly he will throw his weight behind Morgan Tsvangirai.
(On the other hand, Mugabe and his party, the ZANU-PF, are so widely
unpopular in Zimbabwe now that Zuma would badly damage his credibility
if he is seen to be meddling in internal ZANU-PF rivalries.)
This spring both Morgan
Tsvangirai and Tendai Biti traveled across Western Europe and to
Washington, seeking financial support for the unity government.
Their efforts were largely unsuccessful. President Obama met with
Tsvangirai at the White House in June and pledged $73 million to
Zimbabwe, a relative pittance. He also refused to place the money
directly into the hands of the government, channeling it instead
through aid organizations and United Nations agencies. The funds
will go to specific ministries, such as health and education, that
are run by the MDC. Other Western leaders have refused to support
the new government, despite cautious approval of Tsvangirai personally.
In September, a European Union delegation traveled to Harare for
its first talks with Mugabe in seven years, but refused to lift
sanctions, citing continued lack of progress in human rights. "The
default position among the donors is 'sit back and do nothing,'"
I was told in Harare by a Michigan State professor and native Zimbabwean
who arrived in the country in August to conduct a research study
for the World Bank. "Nobody wants to contribute funds that
might end up propping up the old guard." Western donors have
established a set of benchmarks that the unity government must meet - including
establishing the rule of law, respect for democracy and human rights,
and commitment to free and fair elections - before the money
begins flowing. A US diplomat told me that "the government
hasn't come close" to meeting them.
For their part, regional
leaders, including Zuma, who pushed hard for the formation of a
unity government last year, have eased off Mugabe in the last few
months, glad that the sense of crisis has faded and apparently eager
to return to business as usual. At a gathering of southern African
heads of state in Kinshasa in early September, the leaders repeated
a call for lifting sanctions against Mugabe and his cronies, citing
improvements in human rights and the economy.
Biti and Tsvangirai were
hoping to emerge from their trips with pledges that would allow
Zimbabwe to pay off its loans from the World Bank and International
Monetary Fund. "I think the donors are being selfish,"
Biti told me. "They are sulking. They are unhappy that Mugabe
is a part of this inclusive government. They wanted proper and pure
regime change. But when you are fighting a dictatorship, using nonviolent
means, whatever you do is gradual." Already, he said, "People
can put on MDC T-shirts right now without violence, people can get
on with their lives without any reprisals." I asked Biti about
Mugabe cronies who had benefited from ZANU-PF hegemony, and who
were desperate to avoid the possibility of judgment in The Hague
or some other court. "They are not powerful enough to derail
this process," he insisted. Like the Western donors, he said,
"They can sulk and sulk, but we are going to do what we have
to do to give our people a chance." The trouble with such statements
is that they are made under the still heavy shadow of Mugabe and
his goons.
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