Anyone who has followed the vicissitudes of democracy in the developing world will find the chaos surrounding Zimbabwe’s latest elections all too familiar. Having outlasted its foreign critics for so long, the Mugabe government simply cannot accept a straightforward electoral defeat. Instead it has staked its political future on the hope that another round of mob violence and murder will produce a face-saving result in the upcoming run-off elections. Mr Tsvangirai’s decision to pull out of this deadly charade has evoked the proper outrage in Britain, the United States and at the UN, but without further international pressure the endgame in Zimbabwe is unlikely to look much different from the low dishonest decade that has preceded it.
Lord Ashdown recently told the London Times, that the situation in Zimbabwe “could deteriorate to a point where genocide could be a possible outcome – something that looks like [another] Rwanda.” That prospect should unsettle anyone who can remember the death-by-committee visited on the international community’s efforts to prevent the horrors in that country fourteen years ago. Even after the early killings which followed president Habyarimana’s death, General Dallaire, commander of the United Nations’ Assistance Mission to Rwanda (UNAMIR) remained hopeful that a modest number of peacekeepers would be enough to frustrate the Hutu genocidaires’ carefully laid plans for a countrywide campaign. Dallaire never got the chance to find out. Several months earlier the UN had scotched his plans to seize Hutu arms caches (a credible informer had also warned Dallaire that lists of Tutsis were being drawn up to facilitate extermination) because the diplomats feared this would cause more instability. Faced with something infinitely worse in the first week of April 1994, they responded with unconscionable handwringing while the interahamwe engaged in the unhurried slaughter of several thousand victims per day – for nearly three months.
Could anything like this happen in Zimbabwe? “Mugabe has declared war,” said Mr Tsvangirai as he pulled the MDC out of the run-off elections, “and we will not be part of that war.” A noble sentiment, but peace may require a stronger guarantee. For more than a decade Mugabe has shown a willingness to use violence and murder for political ends. Every failed policy has been blamed on traitors and imperialists, every credible political challenge met with censorship, trumped-up prosecutions, physical intimidation or worse. Unsurprisingly, the shock of electoral defeat does not seem to have unravelled the illusion within the Zanu (PF) party that Mr Mugable still is, and will likely remain, Zimbabwe’s rightful leader.
Surrounded by kleptocrats with a vested interest in further violence, it is diplomatic wish-thinking to hope that the latest wave of violence – 85 MDC supporters killed, 2,000 detained and hundreds of thousands displaced – can somehow be turned into the prologue for a reasonable political settlement. And yet, Mr Tsvangirai’s boycott effectively means that internal change is no longer practical unless Zimbabwe’s international critics are prepared to move beyond the usual rhetoric of “strong condemnation” of the government’s “grave abuses.” Australia and the European Union have said that they will pursue Mr Mugabe’s cronies by seizing foreign assets, or refusing to allow their children to continue attending expensive boarding schools abroad. These imaginative sanctions will certainly strengthen doubts within Zanu (PF) about the president’s future, but Mugabe is likely to weather this problem unless much more is done. He has managed to survive the locust years of an economic collapse caused by his own government’s corruption and incompetence, and he has brazenly ignored repeated calls for his resignation, within Africa and beyond. Vague threats of further sanctions, and the usual name-calling, is unlikely to make a serious difference.
Recent history has not been kind to the idea of humanitarian intervention in the affairs of sovereign states. Kosovo, Mogadishu, Darfur and Baghdad are bywords for everything that can go wrong with over-hasty or ambivalent intervention in far-off countries. But the prospect of allowing hostile security forces a free rein against their opponents is also intolerable after the horrors of East Timor, Chechnya and Bosnia – to name but a few. Either way Zimbabwe desperately needs something more than the long list of political compromises that has underwritten so much of Mugabe’s 28-year misrule.
A few months ago, in an article in The Guardian, Mr Tsvangirai asked: “How can global leaders espouse the values of democracy, yet when they are being challenged fail to open their mouths? Why is it that a supposed ‘war on terror’ ignores the very real terror of broken minds and mangled bodies that lie along the trail left by Mugabe?” The latter question has never needed a more urgent response than it does today, on the eve of another sham election in the kingdom of Mugabe. Much of Zimbabwe’s immediate future depends on the willingness of the international community to provide a decisive answer.
