Softly, softly oust Mugabe
As the horror mounts, calls for action grow. A few verge on the risible. “Bush steps up pressure on Mugabe”, says the headline on a wire service report of a White House statement calling on Zimbabwe’s leader to resign. Pressure? The worst US president in living memory is almost through the door himself, with what remains of his political authority draped round his ankles.
Statements from European leaders suffer from the repetitive predictability syndrome. Gordon Brown says “Enough is enough” and Nicolas Sarkozy declares “Mugabe must go”, while the EU adds 11 new names to the list of 168 Zimbabwean officials who are banned from entering.
The significant shift is a chorus of calls for the use of force against Mugabe, and most of them are African. Archbishop Desmond Tutu – a Nobel peace prize winner no less – says the time has come to overthrow Mugabe. So too does Kenya’s prime minister, Raila Odinga. Cheated out of victory in presidential elections earlier this year, he only got the prime ministership, thanks to a power-sharing deal brokered by outsiders. What has angered him particularly is the way Mugabe seems to be wriggling out of a similar pact in Zimbabwe. Odinga wants the African Union to send “peacekeeping” troops, but without Mugabe’s consent they would actually be war fighters.
John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, and a refugee from Idi Amin’s reign of terror in Uganda in the late 1970s, takes a similar view. “Mugabe and his henchmen must now take their rightful place in The Hague and answer for their actions. The time to remove them from power has come,” he says. He does not spell out who should conduct the removal, but hints that Zimbabwe’s neighbours are the ones. He recalls Julius Nyerere’s “courage” in sending Tanzanian troops to topple Amin, and argues that the starvation and suffering in today’s Zimbabwe far exceed the horrors of the Ugandan dictator’s regime.
The most recent convert is Jimmy Carter, the former US president who is distinguished by a four-year term in which he only once ordered troops into battle (a bid to rescue US hostages in Tehran). After recent briefings on the country’s humanitarian disaster from Zimbabwean NGO activists and UN aid agencies, he says force may have to be used against Mugabe “as a last resort”.
The temptation to go to war for regime change is often beguiling, especially when intervention seems likely to meet minimal resistance. Most of Mugabe’s army would probably desert if foreign troops arrived. Tanzania’s invasion of Uganda in 1979 was quick and almost bloodless. The problem was that Amin’s ultimate successor Milton Obote was not much of an improvement, and civil war ensued. The Vietnamese invasion to topple the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia in 1979 is a better example. The new government in Phnom Penh was far less bloody than the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia could have been at peace if Reagan and Thatcher had not backed Pol Pot to mount armed resistance for several years.
The difference with Zimbabwe is that none of its neighbour governments favours the use of force. South Africa ruled it out this week, as did Jacob Zuma, the country’s probable next president. He has been more critical of Mugabe than Thabo Mbeki was, yet draws back from making war. The AU is against it too, leaving Kenya’s prime minister high and dry. Significantly the current AU chairman is Jakaya Kikwete, the Tanzanian president who knows his regional history as well as the Archbishop of York, and comes to a different conclusion. “Only dialogue between the Zimbabwean parties, supported by the AU and other regional actors, can restore peace and stability to that country,” his spokesman said this week. Even Botswana, which strongly opposes Mugabe, says no to force as well as to AU economic sanctions. Force, after all, has a habit of getting out of control.
What, then, can be done? Is the outside world impotent? Not entirely. The power-sharing deal that Mugabe and the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, struck in September after mediation by Mbeki and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) is still the best solution, precisely because it offers a transition through peace. Mugabe is haggling over the distribution of ministries between his party and Tsvangirai’s, refusing to abandon all control of the police. But he has not repudiated the pact. He would rather provoke Tsvangirai into doing so – a trap which the opposition leader must avoid at all costs.
Threatening Mugabe and his army and police commanders with criminal proceedings at The Hague, as Sentamu suggests, is only likely to entrench them further. This summer’s indictment of Sudan’s president has complicated the already difficult search for peace in Darfur. A similar move would have no better effect in Zimbabwe.
The opposite tactic would be to offer Mugabe and his friends a soft landing. Distasteful though it is, allowing Mugabe a quiet departure and judicial immunity is more likely to persuade him to go than a cascade of threats. SADC’s mediation proposals make no mention of prosecution, so the offer may be interpreted as being on the table by default. It would be better to write it in explicitly.
That is the lesson from the collapse of virtually every dictatorship over the past 30 years. Whether it was the Shah of Iran or Nicaragua’s strongman Anastasio Somoza or Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines or, as recently as this year, Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan, the lever which got these discredited men to relinquish their grip was not the threat of a jail cell, let alone invasion. It was a guarantee of retirement in safety.
Zimbabwe should follow this model. In the case of Mugabe’s cronies, offers of jobs in the new coalition government may also help to split them from their current boss. The power-sharing pact provides a mechanism, which is why it is still Zimbabwe’s best hope. Force is the wrong answer.—Dawn/Guardian News Service