Zimbabwe - No Case Yet For Armed Intervention

By Cernig

The situation in Zimbabwe is going from bad to worse, as the opposition leader takes refuge in the Dutch embassy and the despot in charge, Mugabe, continues to torture and oppress his own country. Now, the US and UK have upped the pressure at the UNSC by calling Mugabe's ruling party a "criminal and discredited cabal" and arguing that Mugabe "no longer remains the proper rightful leader of the country".

When you hear rhetoric like that, you know that the neoconservative dogs of war on the Right and the "humanitarian hawks" of the Left are probably close to joining together to call for another Western war of choice. But is that a good idea? Well, today in the Guardian Lester Holloway argues that it isn't.

With the election gone and no indication about when, or if, regime change will happen, the call for military action could develop from a low rumble into a roar. Such talk risks dividing Africa at the very time when its leaders, finally, appeared to be uniting against Mugabe.

...Now that Tsvangirai has abandoned the election, it is vital that the gathering momentum among African leaders continues. The leaders of Angola, Tanzania, Kenya, Botswana, Zambia, and South Africa's Jacob Zuma have all joined the chorus of international opinion declaring that the presidential elections would not be free and fair. After years of procrastination for a host of self-interested reasons, this development carries with it genuine hope that Mugabe will at last read the writing on the wall. The west can spend its time comparing Mugabe to Hitler, but the real answer is African solutions to African problems.

It's noteworthy that one person not calling for armed foreign intervention yet is Tsvangirai himself. He has said that he would be amenable to negotiations with a new leader for Mugabe's Zanu-PF party - and the South Africans have been pressuring Mugabe to step down by handing the reins of power to a new party leader. It's noteworthy too that the same folk who are most likley to call for armed intervention in Zimbabwe also recently called for intervention in Kenya - which turned out not to be needed after all, as diplomacy settled that country's political crisis and allowed the defusing of its humanitarian one.

My colleague BJ wrote a while back about the problems of humanitarian interventions with specific realtion to Burma's junta and that nations humanitarian crisis - another case where armed intervention was urged. Do you get the impression that some foreign policy thinkers see everything as a nail? His remarks apply equally well to Zimbabwe. We're a ways away from needing any kind of armed intervention right now, but if the man who has most claim to be the rightful leader of that nation, Tsvangirai, ever begins calling for such, then even so it wouldn't be a task accomplished best by the West. A UNSC-mandated force from the African Union would be a far better choice.

Comments

[Nell]

Agreed.

The intervention Tsvangirai and the MDC asked for and failed to get in time to make a difference was a united SADC and/or African Union observer force (armed for self-protection) that could realistically have afforded enough of a buffer to make the elections possible.

But thanks to the foot-dragging of the governments of Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, and South Africa, particularly Mbeki of South Africa, this never happened. The head of SADC said on the day the MDC withdrew that it was scandalous that SADC had not stepped in to provide a credible election protection force, and complained that Mbeki had withheld all information about his "negotiations" with Mugabe.

Only an African solution has any hope of turning this debacle around, and maybe it will happen -- but too late for the thousands of Zimbabweans who've been driven from their homes, beaten, tortured, and close to a hundred, at minimum, killed.

[Mark]

Agreed that any military intervention needs to be African (although it is probably inevitable that the US would be called upon to provide some logistical support in any such intervention), rather than Western. But with the manner in which Mugabe is cracking down, I fear the window for action of some sort is not particularly large, as I argued in more detail here:
http://publiusendures.blogspot.com/2008/06/zimbabwe-proposal.html

If Mugabe does not leave soon, then it will be decades before Zimbabwe can have any hope of being a reasonably stable country.