Gideon Rachman on the Tragedy in Zimbabwe:
Tragedy is traditionally meant to provoke pity and fear. But the world is in danger of reacting to the Zimbabwean tragedy with different emotions: resignation and relativism.
The resignation stems from the idea that nothing short of invasion is going to dislodge a brutal and ruthless dictator such as Robert Mugabe. Nobody wants to invade Zimbabwe, goes the argument, so there is nothing to be done. The relativists chip in by pointing out that there are plenty of other tragedies in Africa: Congo, Somalia, Darfur. Why make a particular fuss about Zimbabwe?
But the resignation is not justified – and so neither is the relativism. Zimbabwe can still be saved from economic and political destruction. It is not just another African tragedy. But it is urgent that action is taken now – while the political situation is still in flux.
[…] Britain, the US and the European Union need to cut off the access to hard currency and international banks that allows Mr Mugabe and his cronies to float above Zimbabwean hyper-inflation. Some of the big names in western business also need to re-examine their ties with Zimbabwe. Barclays Bank, which was forced to quit apartheid South Africa, still operates happily in Zimbabwe.
David Aaronovitch in the Times of London makes the case for intervening in Zimbabwe to get rid of Mugabe:
For most of my adult life we have witnessed the incremental and inevitable destruction of a nation, almost in slow motion. After initially ignoring the repression and violence, we have for two decades applied the same strategies of pressure, minor sanction, condemnation, talks, aid and buck-passing, only to enjoy the same flickering hopes, to bemoan their subsequent betrayal and to start anew.
[…] And what do we imagine now? That Zambia's crossness, Angola's criticism (only a few weeks after that country passed on Chinese weapons to the armed forces of Zimbabwe) and Botswana's rather valiant anger will persuade the Harare murderers that the game is up, especially now we are investigating freezing their European assets? Again, one asks, do the diplomats know something we don't, and that the historical record fails to suggest? Is there some Zimbabwean Admiral Dönitz or Juan Carlos, waiting to arrange the transition? Why aren't we just as likely to get Mugabe's Heydrich, Emerson Mnangagwa, the Joint Operations Command strongman?
“Military intervention,” said one BBC person yesterday, expressing the views of the consensus, “is not a realistic option.” It might be better if it was. How many South African or British soldiers would it take to unseat the junta and disperse the Zanu (PF) “veterans”, who are now veterans only of whipping and gouging defenceless people, or raping women without the slightest chance of resistance?
What is happening in Zimbabwe is happening in part because the “international community” and powerful countries haven’t yet figured out a way out of the false dichotomy which makes it seem that the choice is between military intervention and using tools such embargoes and boycotts to avoid dealing with the urgency and danerousness of the situation while maintaining the illusion that it isn’t doing nothing and grandstanding. The time to solve the Zimbabwe crisis was years ago when it became clear that Mugabe was willing to starve his people and to destroy his country to remain in power. I agree therefore with Chris Dillow when he argues that the answer to this mess was for the international community to have never enabled Mugabe to become Mugabe in the first place. Unfortunately, international leaders are prisoners of a mindset that makes them accept the unacceptable in certain parts of the world when their immediate national interests are threatened and when they are unwilling to lose blood, sweat, and tears.
What is happening now was predictable five years ago and could have been avoided if the “deciders” had been willing to take more risks and to be willing to be humiliated by Mugabe in order to make him go. The truth is that Mugabe is an old fox who knows very well the rules of the game for he has been playing longer that most of the other players. He knows that neither the Brits nor anyone else will dare to intervene militarily in Zimbabwe, and that he will remain in power as long as he sends violently and barbarically the message that he is unwilling to die for power without making trouble for any other country that his own. Dictators are like cancerous tumors, which are malignant when they develop in areas which the rest of the world believe they will not spread or which are expendable. The longer dictators are allowed to remain in power, the more difficult it becomes to get rid of them for after all they all know that the status of ex-dictator is not an enviable one and that they might as well as do everything to hold on to it or even die on the throne when they don’t have much time on this earth left. Powerful nations always imagine that they can solve political cancers with military intervention and I believe that it is in part the reason why they believe that they can take their time in front of trouble because at the end, they will always be able to use force. However, we know that the longer a cancerous tumor is allowed to spread, the less likely it is that surgery will be able to repair the damage done.
Intervening now might get rid of Mugabe, but it won’t solve the Zimbabwe crisis for after all, Mugabe is a product of a system and just a symptom of a graver Zimbabwean illness. At the same time, putting more pressure on Zimbabwe won’t put an end to the crisis because Mugabe knows all that he has to do is to hold on and that South Africa will remain neutral or timidly outraged as long as he makes it too expensive for Mbeki to intervene and accepts to be their bastard by promising that with him at least Zimbabwe may be Burma, but will not become Congo and thus destabilize the region.