We finally have a result in the Zimbabwe election. Over the weekend, the man who won it, Morgan Tsvangirai, withdrew from the run-off, thus clinching the presidential poll for the incumbent and loser, Robert Mugabe, after nearly three months of murder and mayhem. An official letter from the challenger’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change (which also won the Parliamentary elections), confirmed yesterday that the run-off would not be contested, to save the lives of as many party supporters as possible.
Mr. Tsvangirai himself immediately sought refuge in the Dutch embassy at Harare, trusting not in his opponent’s magnanimity. He had already been arrested and beaten five times during the election campaign—in one instance “to a pulp” according to persons who saw him just after his release. Tendai Biti, the MDC’s secretary-general, is in police custody, charged with treason and facing death for the crime of having uttered “premature” election results—i.e. the aggregate results from polling stations, before the ballot boxes had been locked down, and Mugabe’s Zanu-PF had had a chance to tamper with them.
So bad have things now become in Zimbabwe, that the ruling African National Congress in neighbouring South Africa has announced it is officially “dismayed”; and South Africa President Thabo Mbeki, who for years has been running cover and interference for the Mugabe regime, is understood to be a little embarrassed.
Nelson Mandela—former South African president, hero and saint of the anti-apartheid struggle, who has so much to say when a democratic polity such as Israel slips into defending itself against armed terrorists—remains silent about atrocities committed against the black people of Zimbabwe on a scale far beyond any the apartheid regime dreamed of committing against its own black people. Mandela, the picture of discretion in retirement, is able to withhold comment even though he has been verbally snubbed by Mugabe, and even though he alone carries the prestige to mobilize opposition to Mugabe through Africa.
The West, and in particular, former Rhodesia’s departed imperial master, Britain, can take no satisfaction in the turn of events. In the Lancaster House Agreement, of almost thirty years ago, Lord Carrington and the panjandrums of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office delivered the future Zimbabwe into the hands of its most revolutionary faction, in the fairly complete knowledge of what they were doing, in order to wash their hands of the place. They knew then that Mugabe was violent and depraved.
This is a long and cumbersome diplomatic history to which the moral, in retrospect, needs to be affixed. We must eventually abandon the cynical diplomatists’ belief that by cutting the legs out under the most moderate, reasonable, and even popular faction, and delivering a country into the hands of murderous revolutionaries, “progress” will be most efficiently served. In Zimbabwe today, upwards of three million starve, in payment for post-colonial “realpolitik.”
It is worth mentioning that the situation in Zimbabwe might not be much improved, might even, God forbid, be worsened, should Mugabe suddenly be removed from the scene. For the man has created a government in his own image: armed, ignorant, paranoid thugs. All stand to come to a bad end (at least in their own imaginations) should they release for a moment their grip on power. There were credible reports coming out of Zimbabwe, just after the mock-election took place, to the effect that Mugabe’s control had already been seriously relaxed, and a junta was emerging for which he was mere figurehead. Out of a junta, a new strongman generally emerges, as one scorpion out of several in a bottle.
While the possibility exists, that Mugabe’s vicious regime may perpetuate itself, and is in fact using the present chaos to adapt itself to conditions after Mugabe’s final departure, I doubt things would in fact get worse. Nature tends to reassert herself, and in a country so well-endowed with magnificent farmland, a people do not stay hungry forever. Moreover, the self-confidence of the regime has depended, since its inception, on its “figurehead.” One thinks of Cambodia after Pol Pot: for even among us sordid humans, there are few monsters with the sheer stamina of a Pol Pot, an Idi Amin, a Saddam Hussein, a Fidel Castro, or a Robert Mugabe. Two in a row in the same small country would be, after all, a statistical fluke.
President-for-life Mugabe has declared on several occasions that, “Only God can remove me from power.” Well, Lord: the ball is in Your court.
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