While South Africans may be divided along race lines on the United States’s military intervention in Iraq (”Black and white take on the war”, April 25), Zimbabweans of all hues are mostly agreed that the US’s crusade to topple tyrants, wherever they are, is a good thing.
The reason is not difficult to fathom. Zimbabweans — rightly or wrongly — see parallels in the Iraqi situation. Oppressed by a brutal 23-year dictatorship — almost the same length as Saddam Hussein’s — they are conscious that their own efforts to remove President Robert Mugabe’s well-armed regime are not suficient.
While nobody has seriously suggested that the Americans should launch an ”Operation Zimbabwe Freedom” from aircraft carriers in the Mozambique Channel, the opposition Movement for Democractic Change (MDC) has called for action of the sort South Africans insisted on from the international community in the 1980s.
But just as the Arab League has opposed US intervention on grounds of ”sovereignty”, so African states have shielded Mugabe from Western sanctions with the same shibboleths. South Africa recently led a move to block criticism at the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva of Zimbabwe’s worsening record.
Nobody in Harare sees the UN or the African Union as their saviours. A visit by three African leaders to Harare this week, headed by President Thabo Mbeki, failed to shift Mugabe from entrenched positions, thus exposing the much-vaunted New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) as a toothless totem.
South African perspectives on the Iraq war, tinged by the country’s own resistance to Anglo-American pretensions, are not necessarily shared by others on the continent where memories of the anti-colonial struggle are less vivid.
Zimbabweans have seen their freedoms shredded under the guise of ”sovereignty”. Attempts by the regime to equate the fate of Iraqis with victims of imperialism everywhere strike no resonance because, unlike the African National Congress and its left allies south of the Limpopo, those calling for anti-imperialist solidarity long ago lost their claims to popular legitimacy. Instead, with their unambiguous denunciation of governance abuses, the ruling Zanu-PF’s enemies have very quickly become everybody else’s friends.
Harare is one of the few capitals that did not stage anti-war protests, even official ones, because Zimbabweans were more concerned with the war being fought against them in their own townships by Mugabe’s militias. A stayaway organised by trade unions and backed by the MDC to protest a 200% fuel price hike was widely supported by black and white Zimbabweans two weeks ago, despite warnings of dire retribution.
Letters to the press have proposed the hasty erection of statues to the Zimbabwean leader so they can be toppled and danced on when the day comes. An attempt by state television to provide a nightly programme opposing US intervention in Iraq was heaped with scorn by viewers, not least because of the arthritic ideologues it lined up to support the official line.
It has not been lost on Zimbabweans that South African Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad made noises of support for Saddam’s government during a visit to Baghdad shortly before the war began. They are curious why South African government spokesmen denouncing US aggression thousands of kilometres away have been less shrill about other forms of aggression on their doorstep.
Part of the explanation for these contrasting attitudes may indeed lie in Mbeki’s ability to exploit the ”two nations” legacy. The black middle class has yet to ditch the populist mantras of their rulers as they climb the political ladder of preferment. But elsewhere in Africa governments have done such a thorough job of sabotaging everybody’s prospects that a singularly damning view of post-liberation elites has emerged. In Zimbabwe’s case the ”two nations” turned out to be the rulers and the ruled!
US Assistant Secretary of State Walter Kansteiner was due to hold talks on Zimbabwe on Friday with Botswana’s President Festus Mogae in Gaborone after first visiting London. The US’s swaggering presence in the world is not something advocates of democracy anywhere should welcome.
Few would really want US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as their country’s godfather. But so long as Zimbabwe’s neighbours persist in disregarding democratic imperatives and gang up in support of Harare’s
Ba’athists, Zimbabweans are likely to reject the arguments of the anti-imperialist camp, whatever their merits, and embrace instead those who can deliver regime change soonest.
Iden Wetherell is editor of the Zimbabwe Independent