I imagine that if Zimbabwe had oil supplies or was somewhere in central and eastern Europe, Robert Mugabe might have been driven out of power by foreign action ages ago.
It is tempting to groan quietly at the quaint futility of the Queen of England stripping Mugabe of his knighthood, and the move to deprive Zimbabwe of being allowed to send its cricket team to the island.
The way that the world has dealt with the hooligan of Harare conjures up the vision of a cricket match in which Mugabe and his henchmen play by bludgeoning the opposing team with their bats. Towards the end of the match, there is a slowly rising murmur of booing from the spectators, who nonetheless remain off the field, doing nothing about what is going on.
It is easy to scoff at the ineffectual gestures by the UK, but the real foreign policy failures in regard to Zimbabwe have been those of the European Union, the African Union, South Africa and even the United States.
That Mugabe was able to sit in Rome a few weeks ago at the conference on the global food crisis is the latest evidence of the meaninglessness of the travel ban against him. The bitter irony of the man sitting at a conference on that topic, given the damage he has wrought to food supplies in his country, has been pointed out elsewhere.
The world has no consensus about how to get rid of tyrants. Sanctions do not always work, and there is no agreement about in what areas and just how rigidly they should be applied. A few random examples of sanctions include those against Saddam Hussein’s former regime, the US blockade of Castro’s Cuba and, for that matter, the boycotts and sanctions against the former racist regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa. It would be very difficult to summon up a substantial list of cause-and-effect scenarios where sanctions brought down odious regimes. Nor, for those who sit in armchairs and call for the troops, missiles and fighter aircraft, is military action a guarantee of success.
One has to bear this latter point in mind when hearing the calls from Archbishop Desmond Tutu for an international peacekeeping force (while giving credit to Tutu for his consistent moral stand of many years against Mugabe’s brutality) and also, while he has a vested interest, the calls from Morgan Tsvangirai for “armed peacekeepers”. Even then, given how late has been the reaction of African leaders in speaking out against Mugabe, it is impossible to imagine military intervention by other African states. Under its current president, Thabo Mbeki, South Africa will do nothing to strongarm Mugabe out of power and even then, given its own domestic problems including the recent violent incidents of xenophobic attacks, South Africa will have no interest in engaging in its own Vietnam that will compound South Africa’s domestic problems, not least the millions of Zimbabwean refugees.
Further, it is sad that the towering giant among all South Africans, Nelson Mandela, took so long to issue in public even the mild criticism that he did about Mugabe (a “failure of leadership” which, and I write this hesitantly given my profound respect for Mandela, was like describing Hitler as displaying a failure of tolerance).
The African Union, founded among high talk of Africa taking charge of its own destiny and exercising peer pressure on recalcitrant leaders, has proved completely impotent, as has the Southern African Development Community. Just the other day I had another look at the work of that genius among cartoonists, Zapiro of the Mail and Guardian, whose cartoon entitled “SADC leaders exercise pressure on Mugabe” showed said leaders gathered around Mugabe, giving him a full body massage.
Under George Bush, the US has bled away its moral authority and historically, long before the current failed administration, has a poor track record of interest in or successful action regarding Africa. Then-president Bill Clinton and his VP Al Gore came the closest to making positive steps, if only through a policy that virtually saw the US stepping back to being no more than the bankroller of projects including the plan at the time for an African Peacekeeping Force.
After Somalia, the US wanted to outsource any foreign policy and military interventions to Africa itself, and I know that Washington hoped that Pretoria would take a leading role. Instead, in the long term, we got a disengaged and ignorant US administration and, apart from the work done by AU military personnel in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, a set of multilateral African bodies that serves as little more than yet another platform for people like that other delirious thug, Muammar Gaddaffi.
If anyone hopes that there will be a highly satisfying if legally questionable abduction of Mugabe to face an international criminal court, a la Milosevic, this is a very, very faint hope indeed.
We may hope and pray that the “shameful humiliation”, in the words of Tsvangirai, of the June 27 so-called election may be followed by productive negotiations, especially allowing for the fact that Tsvangirai’s party has a majority in parliament, although just one factor is that Mugabe’s military and policy and other armed backers will ignore parliament in the way that they ignore the courts.
We may hope and pray that the worries of some African leaders that Zimbabwe will descend into a Rwandan-style genocide will not be realised. But by now, given the flaccid words of the outside world and the absence of any genuine intervention, it does not seem worthwhile hoping and praying that anyone in the world will help the people of Zimbabwe help themselves. And it will take a lot more than a cancelled game of cricket to do that.
