[DEBATE] : Mbeki, Mugabe and The Reign of Thuggery

[Sean Jacobs]

I thought of the role of Ian Khama (pro-MDC) very interesting.
This paragraph is surreal though:

"...  After two days of silence, announcers on state-run television  
began appearing on air every few hours to read off the winners of  
parliamentary seats, three or four constituencies at a time; then the  
station returned to a surreal mix of US sitcoms, Japanese calligraphy  
shows, Chinese kung fu movies, even a 1970s documentary about the  
science of monkey behavior. "



Volume 55, Number 11 · June 26, 2008
The Reign of Thuggery
By Joshua Hammer
1.

On a clear spring afternoon in Harare in mid-May, South Africa's  
president, Thabo Mbeki, paid a call on Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's  
beleaguered dictator, six weeks after Zimbabwe's tumultuous elections  
on March 29 in which opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai claimed a  
clear victory over Mugabe. Mbeki had been largely silent as Zimbabwe  
descended into chaos. In mid-April, while Mugabe's handpicked Zimbabwe  
Electoral Commission (ZEC) refused to release the final vote count,  
and Mugabe's War Veterans marched through the streets in an  
intimidating display of force, Mbeki had stood hand in hand with  
Mugabe outside the presidential residence in Harare and denied that  
the country was in "crisis."

In recent days, however, as evidence grew of widespread beatings and  
killings of supporters of Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change  
(MDC), Mbeki had found himself under attack in the press and at odds  
with members of his own party leadership. Jacob Zuma, the chairman of  
the African National Congress and Mbeki's likely successor to the  
presidency of South Africa, had criticized the delayed vote count and  
said that an April raid on MDC headquarters made the country look like  
"a police state." The Johannesburg newspaper Business Day revealed  
that Mbeki had several years earlier ignored a report by two South  
African judges describing widespread cheating by Mugabe's ruling  
party, the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU- PF),  
in the 2002 parliamentary election. Now, with the electoral  
commission's official results showing that Tsvangirai had defeated  
Mugabe by 47.9 percent to 42.3 percent—necessitating a runoff election— 
Mbeki faced mounting pressure to support a free and fair second round.
New York Review Books Children

And yet, when Mbeki stepped off the plane on May 9, it appeared to be  
business as usual—smiles, embraces, and hand-in-hand stroll across the  
tarmac. At their State House meeting, according to those close to the  
proceedings, Mbeki gently prodded Mugabe to declare an early date for  
the runoff. Then he suggested, diplomatically, that Mugabe should find  
a way to end the violence. It didn't matter who had instigated it,  
Mbeki said. Mugabe controlled the police and the army, and they could  
stop it.

Mugabe told Mbeki that the situation was under control, and that  
Zimbabwe's own laws would deal with it. The tone of the meeting was  
"chilly," I was told by one close observer; but Mbeki made no demands,  
and left without receiving any commitments. Since then, Mbeki has kept  
his distance from Mugabe. "It appears that he's washed his hands of  
the whole thing," the source said.

Mbeki's inaction is hardly surprising. Since Mugabe initiated his  
catastrophic "land grab" in January 2000, turning over four thousand  
white-owned farms to putative veterans of Zimbabwe's independence war  
and to cronies, the South African president has failed to address  
forthrightly both Zimbabwe's subsequent economic collapse and Mugabe's  
many human rights abuses. Clinging to an ineffectual policy of "quiet  
diplomacy," Mbeki stood by as Mugabe accelerated his violent land  
reform program. He then said and did little as the dictator unleashed  
thugs to intimidate voters and stuffed ballot boxes to guarantee  
electoral victories for Mugabe's ZANU-PF.

Mbeki has given the dictator and his inner circle political and  
diplomatic support in many forums, including the United Nations, even  
as the rest of Zimbabwe's population suffers the consequences of  
economic collapse. Over the past eight years, agricultural production  
in Zimbabwe has fallen by four fifths, unemployment has risen to 85  
percent, inflation has risen to an annual rate of more than one  
million percent, and three million Zimbabweans have fled the country.  
(The current population is estimated to be 12 million.) Most,  
ironically, have gone to South Africa, feeding the xenophobia that  
climaxed on May 19 in an explosion of violence. Since then dozens of  
people have been killed and more than 25,000 displaced.

After a week of silence on that issue, Mbeki on May 26 denounced the  
xenophobic attacks as an "absolute disgrace." By then, however, his  
stature inside South Africa had sunk to a new low: party elders  
sharply criticized him for being out of touch, and the Sunday Times, a  
leading Johannesburg newspaper, called for his resignation in a front  
page editorial. "Mbeki has demonstrated that he no longer has the  
heart to lead," the Times said.

Theories abound about what may bind Mbeki to Mugabe: a reverence for  
the Zimbabwean dictator as the last living founder of the African  
liberation movement; personal distaste for Tsvangirai; a reflexive  
suspicion of the MDC as an agent of Western governments; fear that an  
MDC victory could embolden the opposition in South Africa and  
undermine the ANC. ("Mbeki is a 'scion' of liberation movements. There  
is no way he can dump President Mugabe at this critical moment," said  
Campion Mereki in an opinion piece published in Zimbabwe's Herald  
newspaper, the ruling party's mouthpiece.) Whatever the case, Mbeki's  
seeming blindness toward widespread intimidation of MDC voters,  
displacements of thousands of people, and the terrorizing of teachers,  
election observers, and party activists has undoubtedly worsened an  
already desperate situation. It is now "next to impossible," according  
to one top-ranking MDC official I spoke to, that the second-round  
election can be carried out in a free and fair manner.

If Mugabe wins the election on June 27, his victory will represent, in  
part, the last, desperate gambit of a regime that long ago lost any  
shred of legitimacy. But it will also demonstrate how the possibility  
of genuine electoral change turned into a continuing nightmare—a  
nightmare of open, repressive brutality—thanks, in large part, to the  
refusal of Mbeki and other African leaders to intervene (with the  
exception of Ian Khama of Botswana, who has provided quiet support for  
Tsvangirai). This abdication of responsibility bears consequences not  
only for the future of Zimbabwe under the apparently unhindered  
violent rule of Mugabe, but also for the possibility of some minimal  
kind of multinational African concern for protecting democratic  
processes and human rights.
2.

The current crisis in Zimbabwe was set in motion last fall, when  
Mugabe, who commanded guerrilla forces in a six-year independence war  
against the white-minority regime of Ian Smith, and who has ruled the  
country since independence in 1980, announced that he would run again  
for his country's presidency. Until that time, it was widely assumed  
that Mugabe, who is eighty-four, would retire to a $15 million villa  
in the northern suburbs of Harare in mid-2008, and pass on power to  
one of several possible heirs in waiting, including Vice President  
Joyce Mujuru, a former independence war hero known as "Comrade  
Spillblood." His candidacy was ratified at an extraordinary party  
congress in December 2007, despite subdued protests by senior party  
officials who, according to news reports, called the vote a  
"fraudulent process" marred by "blatant intrigue and manipulation."

At the time, Mugabe's reelection seemed all but assured. It was widely  
assumed that the ZANU-PF would resort to the same tactics—voter  
intimidation, ballot-box stuffing, and falsified tabulations of the  
final vote count by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission—that it has used  
in three previous elections this decade against the Movement for  
Democratic Change, led by Tsvangirai, a former trade unionist.  
Tsvangirai said the MDC was a "liberal" party, committed to restoring  
civil rights and ending corruption.

As the election neared, Mugabe's prospects for victory began to dim.  
In February 2008, Simba Makoni, a British-educated economist and  
secretary for economic affairs of the ZANU-PF, announced that he was  
making an independent run for the presidency. He accused the ZANU-PF  
of failing to deal with the country's deepening poverty, and of  
fueling hyperinflation through the uncontrolled printing of Zimbabwean  
dollars. Makoni was then expelled from the ruling party and denounced  
as a traitor, but his breakaway candidacy was the first evidence of  
disaffection at the top of the ZANU-PF.

At about the same time, the MDC, which had been weakened by a split  
along tribal lines in October 2005, began showing renewed vitality. On  
March 11, 2007, Tsvangirai had been grabbed by police and savagely  
beaten with truncheons and iron bars; he suffered a concussion and  
several fractures. "His left arm was shattered, he had seven stitches  
across his skull, his entire body was black and blue," one of his  
advisers, a former British army officer, told me. "The combination of  
the beating, and the physical and moral courage he showed, won him the  
sympathy of the nation."

Thus there was a sense of possibility in the air when I arrived in  
Zimbabwe three days before the March 29 election. As on three prior  
visits, I came in on a tourist visa: the government had banned almost  
all Western journalists from entering Zimbabwe to cover the elections.  
On the way to downtown Harare, I passed a mile-long row of campaign  
posters for Mugabe: unsmiling visage, eyes hard behind thick frames,  
fist raised, the slogan proclaiming "Our Nation. Our Sovereignty"—a  
reference to the ruling party's now- shopworn argument that the  
Movement for Democratic Change was a puppet of Great Britain and the  
United States, and sought to roll back Zimbabwe to the days of white- 
minority rule. Every one of these posters, I saw, had been defaced by  
a splatter of black paint. (The Herald that week announced a citywide  
manhunt for those who did it.) I checked into the York Lodge, a  
colonial-style guest house tucked into the outskirts of town, which  
was filled with both Western correspondents and staff members of the  
National Democratic Institute, a US pro-democracy organization that  
was quietly training independent election monitors ahead of the vote.

I attended Tsvangirai's last rally, in Chitungwiza, a dozen miles  
south of Harare, before 15,000 MDC supporters at the city's football  
stadium. Stylishly attired in a tan panama hat and a white Cuban  
guayabera covered with a green palm tree motif, Tsvangirai, who is  
fifty-six, addressed the excited throng in Shona, the main tribal  
language of Zimbabwe, punctuating his speech with riffs in English. He  
led the crowd in Shona victory chants and traditional Zimbabwean  
songs; at the end of his thirty-minute talk, he danced a celebratory  
two-step across the podium, bobbing, weaving, and spinning as the  
crowd roared. Tsvangirai is a charismatic campaigner and the mood of  
the crowd was jubilant.

One man I interviewed, Patrick Nyengera, had just returned from his  
birthplace, Gokwe, in rural Midlands province, and had been astonished  
by the disenchantment shown for the dictator there. Rural areas in the  
north, central, and eastern regions of Zimbabwe had long voted  
overwhelmingly for Mugabe's ZANU-PF, which controlled the distribution  
of food as well as information, and terrorized opposition supporters  
during past electoral campaigns. But "now it's gone over to the MDC,"  
he told me. "Mugabe made so many promises and none of those were kept— 
there is no dip for the cattle, no food, the shops are empty, they are  
closed. There's nothing to buy. Support for him is just dropping away.  
There are some Mugabe supporters out there, but just a few."

Early on the morning of election day, March 29, I met Tsvangirai at  
his house in Avondale, a leafy suburb a few miles north of Harare's  
city center. Tsvangirai, dressed now in a peach-colored guayabera, led  
me to a picnic table beside the swimming pool in his rear garden, and  
we sat beneath the shade of a gum tree. He was calm and confident,  
pledging to create "a government of national unity" as soon as he was  
elected, assuring me that top ZANU-PF officials and military  
commanders would be pensioned off and would not be prosecuted for  
crimes committed during the Mugabe era. "That reassurance is very  
important, because there are people in the military and in the ZANU- 
PF, with all their ill-gotten wealth, who feel very insecure."  
Tsvangirai told me that he would extend forgiveness even to Mugabe,  
who would be allowed to retire to his Harare villa, there to finish  
out his days as "a failed founding father of Zimbabwe."

I asked Tsvangirai if, should Mugabe steal the election, he would  
consider it a personal failure. He shook his head emphatically. "I  
feel proud that we've managed to build a movement that has confronted  
this dictatorship relentlessly in spite of the resources they have  
poured against us," he told me. But he did not want to dwell on the  
possibility of failure. "You see people in a [police or military]  
uniform now, and it's just a uniform," Tsvangirai told me. "All of a  
sudden people are so confident, so happy about this victory. In  
people's hearts, they know that this regime has to go."

As it turned out, the MDC had one powerful, and often overlooked,  
weapon in its effort to unseat the dictator. Before the 2005  
parliamentary elections, the Southern African Development Community  
(SADC), the fourteen-member group of countries in the region, had  
wrested from the state-controlled Zimbabwe Electoral Commission a key  
concession: vote counts would be posted outside every polling station  
in the country, guaranteeing an unprecedented transparency in the  
electoral process. During the voting in 2005, however, the government  
had reneged on that agreement, often locking opposition polling agents  
and monitors inside the polling stations to prevent them from  
reporting the results.

But in the runup to this year's elections, renewed pressure by SADC  
leaders, including Mbeki, forced the government to promise to comply  
with the guidelines. (The ZANU-PF was confident that it maintained  
enough control over rural Zimbabwe to win even in a transparent vote.)  
This was, in fact, one of a handful of instances in which Mbeki has  
tried to check some of the dictator's worst abuses. He also urged  
Mugabe—without any visible effect—to modify both the 2002 Public Order  
and Security Act and the 2002 Access to Information and Protection of  
Privacy Act, draconian pieces of legislation that stifled almost all  
public criticism of Mugabe. In the weeks before the election, the  
Zimbabwe Electoral Support Network (ZESN), an independent monitoring  
group, mobilized eight thousand poll observers at nearly every polling  
station in Zimbabwe, and the MDC deployed thousands of its own  
loyalists, most armed with Kodak disposable cameras and cell phones.

The first signs of an electoral calamity for the ruling party came  
just hours after the polls closed. Late that evening, I drove past the  
headquarters of the ZANU-PF, a twelve-story tower on the edge of  
downtown Harare. There were a few lights on in the windows, but no  
other sign of life: "If the regime had won, you'd see celebrations  
going on here," a local Zimbabwean journalist I was riding with told  
me. The following morning, MDC poll observers reported that half a  
dozen members of Mugabe's Politburo, including the widely despised  
justice minister, Patrick Chinamasa, had lost their parliamentary  
seats; the ruling party remained silent. Hours later, the ZESN was  
privately telling Western diplomats that Tsvangirai had won a decisive  
victory, possibly with as much as 55 percent of the total. (MDC  
leaders forecast a 58 percent victory early on, but those projections  
were based on a largely urban sampling, and thus proved to be  
inaccurate.)

The ZANU-PF, meanwhile, appeared to be stalling for time, desperately  
trying to avoid revealing the extent of the debacle in the making.  
(According to one report, the ZEC's first, secret prediction to the  
ZANU-PF Politburo mirrored that of the MDC: Mugabe would win 27  
percent to Tsvangirai's 58 percent, with Makoni getting 15 percent.)  
After two days of silence, announcers on state-run television began  
appearing on air every few hours to read off the winners of  
parliamentary seats, three or four constituencies at a time; then the  
station returned to a surreal mix of US sitcoms, Japanese calligraphy  
shows, Chinese kung fu movies, even a 1970s documentary about the  
science of monkey behavior. The staff at my hotel sensed the regime's  
panic and were quietly ecstatic: "We're finally going to be rid of the  
old man," one of them exulted. "At last we'll have salt, sugar, milk  
back on the shelves."

Perhaps the most telling indication that Mugabe's grip was loosening,  
that the ruling party was in disarray, was the scene at the Meikles  
Hotel, one of the last bastions of luxury in the dilapidated capital.  
During my previous clandestine visits to Zimbabwe, the Meikles was a  
no-go zone, a favored haunt of the Central Intelligence Organization  
(CIO), Mugabe's ubiquitous domestic spying agency. But now dozens of  
unaccredited Western journalists flocked here to attend daily MDC  
press conferences: despite initial anxieties about a roundup of  
reporters, it soon became clear that the CIO had little interest in  
such matters, at least for the moment. "The fear factor has eroded," I  
was told by John Makumbe, a respected University of Zimbabwe political  
analyst and an MDC supporter. He was, for the first time, meeting  
openly at the hotel with pro-democracy activists, human rights  
workers, and foreign correspondents. "The CIO are still around, of  
course, but they are discouraged, disenchanted. They have lost the  
will to fight."

There were reports that members of Mugabe's Joint Operations Command  
were urging the dictator to give up the fight, and that MDC leaders  
were involved in final negotiations with army leaders to guarantee  
them immunity from prosecution. On the evening of April 2, as I sat at  
the Meikles cappuccino bar with dozens of other reporters and  
activists, waiting for an MDC press conference to begin, CNN reported  
that Mugabe would step down that night: the Times of London  
correspondent displayed a text message from her desk in London: ZANU- 
PF SOURCES SAY MUGABE WILL GIVE UP POWER. Tendai Biti, the MDC  
secretary-general, told me that reports of an imminent deal were  
erroneous, but "there are people in Mugabe's court who have young  
children, debts, school fees, who are saying, 'Chef, you must go.'"

Mugabe himself, Biti believed, was losing the ferocious will that had  
sustained him through thirty years in power. "The courtiers are  
propping him up, but he is tired." A few minutes later, in the  
ballroom, Morgan Tsvangirai appeared in public for the first time  
since election day to call the result "a vote for change and a new  
beginning...a vote for decency, tolerance, equality. We have no doubt  
we've won this election."

But it is one of the hallmarks of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe that  
periods of relative calm and normality can be suddenly, even viciously  
upended. For days, the opposition—and the press—had been lulled into a  
sense of security. Mugabe's secret police were still on the payroll,  
but it was as if they had received orders not to intervene in the  
democratic process, but had been ordered, perhaps, simply to observe.  
Then, as has happened so often in the past, the atmosphere palpably  
changed. I flew out of Zimbabwe, via the southern city of Bulawayo, on  
April 3, after it became clear that the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission,  
clearly under pressure from the ZANU-PF, was determined to drag out  
the vote counting for weeks. As I waited at Bulawayo's tiny terminal  
for a flight to Johannesburg, I was approached by an old friend, David  
Coltart, an opposition leader and one of two white members of  
Zimbabwe's Parliament, who whispered a warning that it was premature  
to drop my guard. "This place is crawling with CIO agents," he said.  
Coltart, who was on his way to deliver a lecture at Oxford University,  
added: "You can't feel entirely safe until you're on the plane—in the  
air."

That same afternoon, Mugabe reasserted control and the crackdown on  
the opposition began. Police raided Haven House, the MDC's dilapidated  
headquarters in downtown Harare, as well as MDC suites at the Meikles,  
seizing documents, and arresting and beating up opposition members. At  
the same time, dozens of riot police and CIO agents surrounded the  
York Lodge, which I had checked out of only the day before. Two  
correspondents, The New York Times's Barry Bearak and the Sunday  
Telegraph contributor Stephen Bevan, with whom I had shared a car for  
the past week, were arrested on charges of "committing journalism,"  
interrogated, and imprisoned for four days. Tsvangirai, who had  
emerged from his safe house on April 2 to all but proclaim an MDC  
victory, was gone again. And hundreds of so-called War Veterans were  
mobilized by Mugabe and came out in full force in the streets of  
several cities.

Since then, the ruling party's tactics have taken an increasingly  
vicious turn. According to the Movement for Democratic Change, forty- 
three supporters have been murdered and hundreds injured in the past  
six weeks. Thousands have been forced to flee their homes in a drive  
reminiscent of Operation Murambatsvina, Mugabe's 2005 "slum clearance"  
campaign that destroyed the homes and livelihoods of 700,000 people,  
almost all of them MDC supporters. A report by the US State Department  
Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor stated:

     Soldiers, police, war veterans and youth militia loyal to the  
ruling party have been deployed in rural areas throughout Zimbabwe to  
systematically intimidate voters through killings, beatings, looting  
of property, burning of homes and public humiliation.

On the evening of May 5, ruling-party thugs descended on three  
villages in Mashonaland Central province, a former Mugabe stronghold  
that had turned decisively against the dictator on March 29. Repeating  
a pattern that has been seen throughout rural Zimbabwe, villagers were  
summoned to a "reeducation meeting," where they were forced to  
denounce the MDC and pledge their allegiance to the ZANU-PF. Then  
names were called, and those singled out were hustled into the  
darkness. "Next we heard the whips and screams," a witness named  
Bernard Pungwe said, describing a night-long rampage that left six MDC  
supporters dead and dozens injured. "Every time someone screamed hard  
the chairman of the meeting would stop his lecture and say: 'Listen to  
the traitors, they are dying.'"

Particularly distressing to Zimbabweans have been reports that 2,700  
teachers have fled or were evicted, while dozens of schools have been  
closed down and 121 are being used as bases for the ruling party's  
youth militias. One of Mugabe's achievements was opening up schools to  
poor blacks. Literacy rates rose from 2 percent in 1990 to 70 percent  
in recent years. Now Mugabe has been destroying the country's  
education system.

Throughout this period, the Southern African Development Community has  
remained largely disengaged. This pattern was established in the days  
leading up to the election, when the SADC's chief of mission—the only  
monitors whom Mugabe had allowed into the country—blandly praised the  
regime for preparing the way for a "free and fair" election, despite  
ample evidence to the contrary. (MDC campaigners, for example, were  
denied access to state-owned television and radio and to the official  
electoral register, which was packed with dead and fictitious voters.)  
SADC leaders met in Lusaka, Zambia, in April to discuss the deepening  
crisis, but broke up without making a public comment.

The most glaring silence came from Mbeki, who, as the leader of the  
region's primary economic and military power, rejected requests from  
the MDC to intervene on behalf of a free election. "There's a lot that  
Mbeki could have done that was not done, and [as a result he] caused a  
lot of damage," I was told by George Sibotshiwe, Tsvangirai's  
spokesperson and close aide. "All we have seen publicly is Mbeki  
holding hands with Mugabe, and making trips to Harare to meet with  
ZANU-PF."

Not every SADC leader has followed Mbeki's lead: Botswana's president,  
Ian Khama, has been quietly providing Tsvangirai with government  
planes and other logistical support as the MDC leader travels around  
Africa, attempting to increase pressure on Mugabe. (The Herald  
commented that Tsvangirai's MDC was criss-crossing southern African  
capitals, "all in a bid to slough off its white western skin for an  
African one.") And Zambian president Levy Mwanawasa, the current  
chairman of the SADC, has been vilified as a neocolonialist by ZANU-PF  
officials for his outspoken criticism of Mugabe.

Indeed, as Zimbabwe's drama has played out, there has been a growing  
split among the southern African nations between the majority, made up  
of anticolonial national liberation leaders such as Mbeki, and a  
handful of heads of state who are more pro-Western. Besides Mbeki,  
other leaders who have refused to condemn Mugabe include Angolan  
President Eduardo dos Santos, Namibian president Hifikepunye Pohamba,  
and Mozambican President Armando Guebuza.

This split within the SADC was perhaps most glaring during the  
notorious "Ship of Shame" incident that unfolded while I was traveling  
through the region in April. During my stay in Namibia, local  
newspapers published extensive reports on the odyssey of the An Yue  
Jiang, a Chinese merchant vessel that was carrying thousands of tons  
of arms and ammunition to the Zimbabwean government—some of it,  
presumably, to be used by the army and police to put down opposition  
protests. After dockworkers in the South African port of Durban  
refused to unload the vessel, the An Yue Jiang attempted to drop its  
cargo at the Namibian port of Walvis Bay. But Namibian civil leaders  
and union pressure obliged the government—normally friendly to Mugabe— 
to deny the ship landing rights, and it was forced back out to sea.

After a several-week odyssey, however, ZANU-PF officials boasted that  
they had finally taken delivery of the cargo. The An Yue Jang  
reportedly unloaded the weapons in May in the Angolan port of Lobito.  
 From there, the cargo traveled by train to the Democratic Republic of  
Congo, where it was loaded onto regular military supply flights and  
flown to Harare. It was yet another example of how a lack of SADC  
solidarity in the face of Mugabe's abuses had emboldened and  
strengthened one of the world's most abusive regimes.

At this writing, there seems little question that, without coordinated  
action by African leaders in neighboring countries, the chances of a  
fair second-round election are virtually nil. The Zimbabwe Electoral  
Support Network has been crippled by police raids and intimidation of  
its volunteers, and won't be able to deploy many observers at  
Zimbabwe's nine thousand polling stations. The New York Times reported  
that the regime has terrorized thousands of teachers, many of whom  
served as poll monitors and sided with the opposition during the first  
round. "The teachers are terrified," I was told by one Zimbabwean  
journalist. "They helped to run these polling stations, and many had  
their houses burned down as a result." The army and police are  
expected to be deployed in far greater numbers than in March. And  
despite expressions of defiance, the huge displacements of population  
will make it difficult for the MDC to get out the vote. "People we've  
met in the hospitals have told us, 'we're not going to vote for people  
who beat us,'" I was told by a Zimbabwean journalist. "But the rural  
communities have been disrupted, and people may not be able to get to  
their polling stations."

George Sibotshiwe, Tsvangirai's spokesperson, told me that the MDC was  
engaged in talks with the SADC, asking for the deployment of thousands  
of "unarmed peacekeepers" throughout the country. The African Union  
has also been consulted. "SADC has said that this election must be  
held under the security of the law," Sibotshiwe told me. The question,  
he added, was whether they will back up their words with active  
election monitors. The performance of the SADC up to this point  
suggests that they will not.

On May 16 I caught up with Tsvangirai again at the Hotel Europa in  
Belfast, Northern Ireland, where he was to speak at an international  
conference of liberal party leaders, his final public appearance  
before flying back to Zimbabwe to carry on his campaign. During the  
1970s and 1980s, the Hotel Europa had been called "the most bombed  
hotel in Europe"—a favorite target of the Irish Republican Army.  
Today, refurbished and frequently filled to capacity, it's become one  
of the most potent symbols of Northern Ireland's postwar renewal. In  
his talk Tsvangirai drew parallels between Northern Ireland's recovery  
and Zimbabwe's eventual "new era." But Zimbabwe, he admitted, still  
had far to go to reach that point. Tsvangirai spoke of "a wave of  
brutality reminiscent of the worst days of evil during the Ian Smith  
Regime." "No Zimbabwean," he said, "is safe from the wrath of this  
vicious dictator." Leaders in the region—particularly Mbeki—had an  
obligation "to speak out against Mugabe and his henchmen."

When I talked to Tsvangirai at the end of his speech, I reminded him  
of our election-day meeting at his home in Harare. I asked him if he  
thought his life would be in danger if he went back to Zimbabwe. The  
regime was capable of anything, he replied, and "I'm as vulnerable as  
everyone else." His words, as it turned out, were prescient. The next  
day, Tsvangirai was forced to postpone his homecoming after MDC  
secretary-general Tendai Biti said the MDC had uncovered a Zimbabwean  
army plot to kill Tsvangirai using a team of snipers.

As I write this, Tsvangirai has just returned to Harare, and the  
violence in Zimbabwe continues. In May, in another example of the  
widening split among southern African political figures over the  
Zimbabwe crisis, Pallo Jordan, an outspoken member of Thabo Mbeki's  
cabinet, told the ZANU-PF to "surrender power to the party that has  
won." Mbeki maintains his silence.

—May 28, 2008
------------------------------------------------------
Sean Jacobs
tintinyana at gmail.com

“Only intellectuals love poverty. Poor people love luxury” (from a  
Brazilian samba).

http://theleoafricanus.com/