Howard Barrell
Southern African states reined in Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s aggressive regional foreign policy under an undisclosed agreement between heads of state at their summit in Maputo last month.
Under pressure from other leaders of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), Mugabe agreed that he would not act in the name of the SADC’s Organ on Politics, Defence and Security without first consulting President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, President Joaquim Chissano of Mozambique and President Sam Nujoma of Namibia. The three presidents are, respectively, the past, present and future chairs of the SADC.
This agreement, which was kept out of the communiqu at the end of the Maputo summit, appears to have ended Mugabe’s use of the organ as an instrument of his own foreign policy. His manipulation of the organ had severely strained relations between Zimbabwe, on one hand, and particularly South Africa, Mozambique and Zambia, on the other, over the past three years.
The status of the organ has been the subject of a long-standing dispute. Although SADC states agreed in 1996 to set up an organ on politics, defence and security, they have never been able to agree its mandate or a legal framework for it. A draft protocol for the organ, drawn up in 1997, was never ratified by SADC member states.
But Mugabe, who was to be its initial chair, behaved as if the organ was operational. He retained its chair, and purported at various stages to speak and take decisions on behalf of the SADC on delicate matters such as the wars in Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Various attempts to get him to stop failed.
What the Maputo summit did was to indulge Mugabe by agreeing, in the words of the communiqu, that “the Organ on Defence, Politics and Security should continue to operate and be chaired by President Mugabe of Zimbabwe”.
But the other SADC heads of state put a six-month deadline on this and required Mugabe to consult Mbeki, Chissano and Nujoma before purporting to do anything in the organ’s name, according to well-placed sources. This requirement and the six-month deadline were, however, diplomatically left out of the script of the communiqu.
The summit also decided that “the Council of Ministers should review the operations of all SADC institutions, including the Organ on Defence, Politics and Security”, and report back within six months. Other SADC member states are determined that any political and security arm of the SADC which may arise out of these consultations should be clearly and firmly tied in to the economic bloc’s procedures in a way that makes it impossible for any single head of state to act alone in its name in future.
Observers see this as one motivation behind the increase in talk from South African Minister of Defence Mosioua Lekota about the need for a regional defence or security pact.
On his return to Zimbabwe after the Maputo summit, the Zimbabwe government presented Mugabe’s retention of the chair of the organ on politics, defence and security as a victory for him.