A rchive Date
[ 07-05-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Zimbabwe ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/stanway.html
Zimbabwe descends into total chaos
By PAUL STANWAY -- Edmonton Sun
May 7, 2003
The odious Robert Mugabe, the aging president of Zimbabwe, appears to be yet another despot hoping to benefit from the all-consuming attention paid by media and diplomats to the war in Iraq.
Like his pal Fidel Castro, Mugabe used the world's preoccupation with Iraq to launch a blatant attack on political opposition. While media and governments were looking elsewhere, Mugabe's army, police and youth militia went after everyone they could identify as a pro-democracy activist. More than 500 people have been arrested, including 11 opposition MPs, and the sparse media reports from Zimbabwe suggest hundreds have been hospitalized after beatings, torture and rape.
Two weeks ago Mugabe was so confident that he agreed to hold talks with his leading opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai - if the opposition leader recognised the legitimacy of Mugabe's victory in last year's disputed elections. He wouldn't, and Mugabe, 79, announced that he would lead his country until at least 2008.
The problem is that Zimbabwe can't stand another five months of Mugabe, let alone five years. The economy has ground to a halt, there is little food to buy and almost none being produced across a fertile country that used to export a surplus of food. The collapse of Zimbabwe's agriculture is a direct result of Mugabe's policy of seizing productive farms from mostly white owners and handing them out as political rewards, mainly to politicians, generals and civil servants who don't bother to do any farming.
Meanwhile, Zimbabwe's Commonwealth partners sit useless and impotent on the sidelines. The Commonwealth labelled the 2002 elections "suspect," but if Mugabe was OK with the likes of South Africa and Nigeria, Canada and the other democracies could, as usual, find reasons to look the other way. Some observers have been confidently predicting violent civil strife before the end of the year.
Recently, two documents have been published that suggest the fixing of the 2002 elections results from a "national command centre" in the capital, Harare, run by Mugabe's military. Control of the centre put the collation and publication of results from around the country in the hands of Zimbabwe's army and air force. The centre was off-limits to the opposition and journalists from the independent or foreign press.
You have to wonder about the international "observers" who monitored the elections and reported a huge number of irregularities, but apparently didn't think the replacement of the civilian electoral process by a military one under control of Mugabe's cronies was sufficient reason to void the result? Not that it would have mattered: President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria endorsed Mugabe within hours.
The only thing keeping Mugabe's government limping from one week to the next is Mbeki's largesse. Almost all of Zimbabwe's fuel supplies and 90% of its electricity come from South Africa. But Mugabe may finally be becoming too much of an embarrassment even for his supporters in the region. Apparently in Africa there is a difference between an election that is mostly fixed and one which now seems to have been entirely fixed. Mugabe's fig leaf of legitimacy is slipping.
Mbeki and Obasanjo visited Harare this week, reportedly to work out a face-saving deal that would allow Mugabe to fade into comfortable retirement with immunity from prosecution. There would be new elections and the inevitable international relief effort to bring Zimbabwe back from the brink of starvation.
The talks appeared to have collapsed within hours. No surprise since success depended on Mugabe, who has proved he couldn't care less if his people starve, putting the fate of his country before his own. Africans solving an African problem would be a positive, almost unique outcome, but, failing that, some commentators in South Africa have even suggested that the U.S. might be called upon to threaten to remove Mugabe, a-la-Saddam. And it just happens that Walter Kansteiner, the American assistant secretary of state for African affairs, will be visiting the region next week for talks with Mbeki and Co.
If Mugabe's prepared to go (it's a big if), the real carrot would be a promise that he can keep all or most of the estimated $1 billion he has managed to steal from his impoverished country and stash in the U.S. and Europe. It would be a sordid but plausible end to a sordid story.
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 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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