It really was highly unlikely that President Robert Mugabe, having conducted himself in the way that he has been doing for so long – before, during and after the last elections in the Republic – would suddenly have turned the face of generosity to Mr Morgan Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change (MDCs). The constant harassment of MDC supporters in the face of an election due shortly, now confirms the suspicions of the skeptics, and of those who were inclined to doubt that President Mbeki’s policy of softly, softly diplomacy would bear fruit.
So Zimbabwe’s dual, but interconnected crises continue. For to Mugabe’s harassment of the opposition, and his deliberate creation of conditions under which free and fair elections are virtually impossible, are linked the increasingly severe food crisis in the country and the now almost inconceivable level of inflation in the economy. Mugabe’s manipulation of the aid process, exacerbating the food crisis day by day, is meant to keep external agencies out of the country – in effect to close off the society and polity from external observation, much less influence.
It is now an open question as to whether the African Union, the regional institution, SADCC, and indeed the international community as represented by the United Nations should any longer tolerate the pretence that the situation in Zimbabwe is amenable to external persuasion, and that free and fair elections can now be held. President Mugabe has led the international community down the garden path for some time, and even more forcibly so since the results of the recent general elections were formally announced by the Government.
President Mbeki, with South Africa widely accepted as the point country in terms of seeking a peaceful, and non-interventionist diplomacy towards Zimbabwe, is really now seen to be carrying nothing in his velvet glove. He has sought to ensure, many observers believe, that no precedent is set in the course of the Zimbabwe crisis, for forceful intervention in the country’s affairs, and thus for infringement of the country’s sovereignty.
It is more or less the same approach as taken by countries like China and the Russia in respect of the Sudan and the Darfur issue.
The use of the concept of sovereignty in this way has come under pressure in recent times. The United Nations World Summit itself in 2005, in seeking to deal with difficult issues of the present kind as in Africa, accepted the principle of “the responsibility to protect” the human rights of citizens through some acceptable (to the general body of the UN) form of military intervention. The emphasis has been on the older notion of humanitarian intervention, supported, more recently in some instances by non-governmental organizations like “Doctors without Borders”. This institution was started by, among others, Dr Bernard Kouchner, now the Foreign Minister of France.
The former Foreign Minister of Australia, Gareth Evans, a protagonist of the responsibility to protect (now known as the R2P) principle and now President of the International Crisis Group has, recently described in an address in April at the University of Aberystwyth in the United Kingdom, the situation when in “an extraordinary moment” Heads of state meeting as the UN General Assembly, “unanimously accepted not only that sovereign states have a very explicit responsibility to protect their own people from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, but when they manifestly fail in that responsibility – as a result of either incapacity or ill-will – the responsibility falls upon the wider international community to take whatever action is appropriate, including in the last resort, and if the Security Council agrees, military action”. But at the same time, in surveying situations around the globe, he was forced to pose the question, as the title of his speech, “The Responsibility to Protect: An Idea Whose Time Has Come…and Gone?”
Experienced diplomatists like Evans are well aware of the difficulty of determining, and obtaining international consensus for, the point at which some form of forceful intervention is necessary. And it is, as South Africa and other Third World states indicate, an act which most of the states of the post-war ex-colonial world would hesitate deeply about before venturing, they being aware of the impositions on the autonomy of countries of the non-Western world in the past.
These states even during the course of the Zimbabwean events over these last few months, will have found solace in what can now be claimed as a successful diplomatic, rather than forceful, intervention in Kenya led by a combination of the African Union and the UN, through the leadership of former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
Last week, as well, the former Clinton Administration’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, in an article in the New York Times entitled “The End of Intervention” found herself contemplating the issue in this way. Having been in an administration generally deemed (in American terms) to have been “soft” on the use of military force, she observed: “The Burmese government’s criminally neglectful response to last month’s cyclone, and the world response to that response, illustrate three grim realities today: totalitarian governments are alive and well; their neighbours are reluctant to pressure them to change; and the notion of national sovereignty as sacred is gaining ground, helped in no small part by the disastrous results of the American invasion of Iraq”. And she further observes that “despite recent efforts to enshrine the doctrine of a ‘responsibility to protect’ in international law, the concept of humanitarian intervention has lost momentum”.
The question at issue is, of course, the nature of the “pressure” that is required to be used. Mrs Albright does not elaborate on the possible kinds of pressure, except for alluding to sanctions. Caribbean and Latin American states would, at this point in time, we suspect, be hesitant to go far in pursuing this discussion, given their sensitivity to, among other things, the present inflexible attitude of the United States to a Cuba in obvious political evolution.
But the Caribbean countries, on the other hand, should perhaps have a concern with the Zimbabwean issue that would drive governments to a more extensive concentration on this issue of options of pressure and intervention. Should we not now be pressing for a more active United Nations interest in this matter, to give more support, initially to the food aid efforts? Even at the risk of being told by Mugabe to mind our own business?
After all, it is one of our own Trinidadian calpysonians, who sang what became the very popular song “Stay Up, Zimbabwe” in recognition of the liberation of that country. And of course, though it will be said that this was an issue of dealing with the residuals of imperialism, it was Guyana and Barbados which provided stopover refueling points for the Soviet planes transporting Cuban soldiers to Angola in the mid-1970’s – the prelude to the liberation of South Africa.
