Some speakable reactions to the unspeakable

Thursday, June 26, 2008

I’VE BEEN TAUGHT not to take things personally. But like a lot of human beings - including even objectivity-cherishing journalists - I can sometimes find it hard.

I find it hardest with two Southern Africans in particular (pictured far left). I mean of course Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe (still, by force of arms and brutality) and Thabo Mbeki, President of South Africa (still, until his term ends constitutionally next year).

 

Tomorrow Mugabe will go through with a public farce interwoven with horror and tragedy – a “run-off” round of presidential elections in which he is the only candidate, since his opponent Morgan Tsvangirai has justifiably withdrawn. Tsvangirai told the world’s media, as he broke briefly from safe cover in a friendly nation’s - Holland’s - embassy and held a bold press conference (pictured right) at his house in Harare's leafy Avondale suburb, that “the people of my country … have borne more than any people should bear”. That can hardly be contested, in view of  Mugabe’s ruthless campaign of killing, beating and intimidating voters.

 

And tomorrow as Mugabe conducts this vicious travesty of leadership, Mbeki will in effect be supporting him. I find this unspeakable.

 

I’ve had periods of great admiration, even liking, for both these tarnished leaders.

 

For Mugabe, I once campaigned as a journalist to have him freed from detention by the country's former white-supremacist regime, closely planning the campaign details with his then wife Sally Hayfron. Sally was a valiant freedom-fighter in her own right whom Mugabe later abandoned when she was dying of kidney disease, taking up instead with his much younger personal assistant Grace Marufu. She in her turn is now the stereotypically lavish-spending First “Lady” of the nation so abjectly impoverished by her husband.

 

And Mbeki? Well, he was the liberation leader-in-waiting who took me carousing around his then city of exile, Lusaka in Zambia, extolling between our jovial drinks the importance of staying “in touch with the people”.

 

While Mbeki has thankfully not degenerated into mass murder, both these men now have in common the devastating defect of character, all too frequent when people attain their pinnacles of power, of listening to nobody except the yes-men with whom they surround themselves.

    

 

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THAT 9th OF MAY ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTO OF THE PAIR, grinning and garlanded with flowers at Harare airport, emblemizes the feckless inadequacy of Mbeki’s much-promoted “quiet diplomacy” as a way to change Mugabe’s ruination of his country.

 

During that meeting, press leaks had it that the atmosphere behind closed doors was “chilly”, and Mbeki won no concessions from Mugabe. But Mbeki seems not even to have tried, and one observer there said “It appears he’s washed his hands of the whole thing.”

 

He’s in a sense done worse, actually, blurring the truth with a smokescreen. This week at the United Nations, his ambassador Dumisani Kumalo claimed to the accredited correspondents’ gaggle that his country was still attempting negotiations in Zimbabwe, and that Security Council members, meaning especially the US and the UK, risked fouling them up, since “we are in a very sensitive stage”.

 

Tsvangirai himself knows the truth of it (that it's a complete lie, in fact). And yesterday he evoked authentically, if calculatedly, an apt historical echo from Africa’s long freedom struggle when he chose Britain’s The Guardian as the venue for his anguished appeal for countries beyond Zimbabwe's borders to come to its aid. The Guardian long championed the anti-colonial cause, as did its sister-paper The Observer for even longer, and the two still function today as a kind of combined house-magazine for many of the continent’s current ruling elites.

 

And how will those rulers now react? Bluntly, it’s highly unlikely that the United Nations can be dragooned into responding to Tsvangirai’s plea for “the moral rectitude of military force” - and actually send in peacekeeping troops to “cast the protective shield around the democratic process for which Zimbabwe yearns”.

   

 

BUT SOME AT LEAST OF ZIMBABWE’s nearest neighbors – though hardly South Africa and certainly not its lame-duck president, who only yesterday again was shamed by his morally gigantic predecessor Nelson Mandela, who made a powerful anti-Mugabe declaration, on his 90th birthday, no less –  deserve close media scrutiny as these countries seriously review their options.

 

Botswana’s President Ian Khama has already been quietly providing Tsvangirai with logistical aid from within his armed forces, including planes to fly him and other Movement for Democratic Change operatives back and forth across the region. Khama is also known to be prepared – though only in combination with other countries, given the little-doubted power of Mugabe’s army – to support some kind of tightly targeted military action.

 

Yesterday Swaziland’s capital Mbabane - until now rarely visited by globetrotting reporters - hosted talks with officials from Angola and Tanzania, who along with the Swazis themselves make up the Defense and Security committee of the Southern African Development Community, the regional union of nations.

 

And western editors seem not to have paid much attention to the Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete when earlier this week – before the UN meetings - he became the first African head of government to raise the issue of military intervention in Zimbabwe: “We will certainly consider it if asked. If we get there, to a point where military action is needed, if it’s a multilateral project, then we’ll do it”.

 

Kikwete happens this year to be chair of the African Union – a continent-wide grouping not noted for its unified strength or decisiveness (witness their troubled efforts to help in Darfur).

 

But on the other hand, there is one intriguing precedent that analysts and commentators have largely overlooked.

 

American readers and viewers may have missed it, but in March this year 1500 African Union troops staged a dramatic invasion. Forces drawn from Kikwete’s own Tanzania and from Senegal, along with logistical support from Libya, made amphibious landings on the island of Anjouan, part of the Comoros Islands republic that lies in the ocean between Mozambique and Madagascar. There they forcibly ousted President Mohamed Bacar, who had ruled the island tyrannically since 2001.

 

And the trigger for this AU operation? A plundering, corrupt dictator who tried to cling to power through a set of illegitimate elections.

 

Tomorrow’s "elections" in Zimbabwe will be called many things - none of them positive, I am sure.

 

We might even hear someone else besides me (taking it personally) who will label them decidedly Comorian  ... and arguably requiring a Comoros-style response.