Africa fails Zimbabwe: Another burden for Obama

Nov 16, 2008 Ronald Sanders

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A former Caribbean Head of Government, who should know, told me a few months ago that the only way Robert Mugabe is leaving Zimbabwe is “feet first”. In other words, Mugabe will die before relinquishing power in Zimbabwe.
As conditions in Zimbabwe rapidly deteriorate, I have been reminded of that former Caribbean leader’s words. Zimbabwe is already a fully failed state; life itself has become a daily lottery for the majority of its people who are being starved or brutalised. It is obvious to all that Mugabe should hand over power to Morgan Tsvangirai who, by all objective accounts, won the March 29th elections. Yet, Mugabe, with the help of the leaders of his military, holds on to power with a vice-like grip.
Mugabe’s regime has used the vilest tactics to punish people, particularly women, who have supported Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). AIDS-Free World, an advocacy group founded by Canada’s former United Nations Ambassador, Stephen Lewis, has collected testimony from women who survived organised gang rapes by members of Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party after he lost the March elections. The women give horrific accounts of multiple rapes and brutal beatings by gangs who openly identified themselves with the ZANU-PF. The group reports that “many of the women still have unhealed wounds five months later, since Zimbabwe’s medical system has entirely ceased to function, and all need HIV tests”.
It has to be recalled that Zimbabwe was once a flourishing country that not only fed itself but exported food to many neighbouring African states and other commodities to the world. Today, five million of the nine million people who remain there are dependent on food aid. Almost four million Zimbabweans have fled into neighbouring states, particularly South Africa where they eke out a living and where there have been incidents of beatings by South Africans who regard them as a threat to jobs.
Inflation in Zimbabwe is currently running at 230 million per cent. It is a figure that defies comprehension. A good indicator of what that means is that, if inflation in any Caribbean country rises over 10 percent, everyone would be mortified about the cost of living.
In the year running up to the March elections and since then, the former President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, has tried unsuccessfully to broker a power-sharing deal between Mugabe and Tsvangirai. His attempts have been a miserable failure.
Tsvangirai’s MDC party understood that a power-sharing deal, heralded in September with much fanfare, meant “striking a fair balance of power of all ministries in the unity government and sharing diplomatic appointments and assigning key government posts”. But, Mugabe kept control over both the military forces and the police, and when a meeting of key leaders in Southern Africa was called in October to try to resolve the issues, Tsvangirai could not attend because the Mugabe regime refused to issue him a passport.
As conditions worsened in Zimbabwe, the leaders of the Southern African Development Committee (SADC) held an emergency meeting on November 9th to address the issue. Again, it was a spectacular failure. Only five of the 15 Presidents turned-up. They listened to presentations by Mugabe, Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara, the leader of an MDC splinter group, and then asked them to recuse themselves from the meeting. Tsvangirai and Mutambara left, but Mugabe flatly refused to leave the room. He, therefore, participated in a decision that materially affected him.
The decision, when it came, was a complete nonsense. It insisted that a power-sharing government should start to function immediately and that the Ministry of Home Affairs should have two ministers, one appointed by Mugabe and the other by Tsvangirai.
So it seems the SADC mountain went forth and produced a mouse, and it wasn’t even a mouse that pretended to roar. No riot act was read to Mugabe, no threats of sanctions were made, no declaration was uttered that his regime would be isolated by SADC if he did not comply with a supervised power-sharing arrangement. All that SADC succeeded in doing is continuing Mugabe’s misrule and the further worsening of life for all Zimbabweans. Naturally, Tsvangirai has rejected the decision altogether.
So with an abdication of its responsibility to the people of Zimbabwe, SADC has left Zimbabwe to its own fate. It is a fate that can only bring more starvation, more refugees, a worsening of the economy and, sadly, more brutality against the Zimbabwean people and more bloodshed.
Thus far, the developed nations of the world have left intervention in Zimbabwe to the Southern African countries and particularly South Africa for fear that Mugabe would accuse them of racism. Mugabe has ranted and raved at the British government in particular, and at other governments including the United States, accusing them of punishing him over seizure of lands owned by white farmers. But, of course, Mugabe’s reign of terror is now directed at the black Zimbabwean people. What is happening there is naked abuse of power and the most awful brutalisation of native people.
SADC – and all of Africa – can not assail the world’s developed nations if their governments decide that intervention in Zimbabwe is now essential to stop a humanitarian crisis of major proportions. SADC leaders had a great chance to show that Africa could manage its own crises firmly and successfully. They blew it.
Fortunately, once Barack Obama assumes the Presidency of the United States of America, if the US Government decides to join with others, through the UN Security Council, to free Zimbabweans of Mugabe’s dictatorship, the accusation of racism would be a hollow cry.
The Caribbean should hope that Obama will give Zimbabwe early attention. For not only will his attention bring relief to millions of Africans, it will also help to ensure that a major portion of aid money, which the Caribbean would welcome, does not have to be diverted to rebuilding Zimbabwe after Mugabe’s spree of destruction.

(The writer is a business consultant and former Caribbean diplomat)
Responses to [email protected]

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