South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki is a man on a mission. He believes he can secure what he calls leadership renewal in Zimbabwe by June. That is the deadline he has set himself. And following his recent humiliating rebuff in Abuja, Nigeria, where Commonwealth leaders rejected his bid to re-admit President Robert Mugabe to the fold, he is under intense international pressure to show that his quiet diplomacy is capable of delivering change.
But how effective will he be when, according to some soul-baring on the ANC Today website, he sees Mugabe as more sinned against than sinning — a victim of the very forces Mbeki blames for having thwarted his own diplomacy at Abuja?
Mbeki’s apologists have been busy arguing that his public declarations on Zimbabwe shouldn’t be taken too literally. There was a need to propitiate that country’s notoriously prickly ruler, they suggest. But the president’s Internet intervention reflects all too obviously his own deeply held convictions to be dismissed as diplomatic footwork.
He slams Australian Prime Minister John Howard, chair of the troika of leaders tasked at the previous Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (Chogm) in Coolum, Australia, with deciding what steps to take on the Zimbabwe issue, for calling an ”unscheduled” meeting in September 2002 to impose new sanctions on Harare halfway through its one-year suspension.
The troika, comprising Howard, Mbeki and Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo, had imposed the suspension in March 2002 following the verdict of a Commonwealth observer team that Mugabe’s re-election had been seriously flawed
Howard had no mandate to call such a meeting, Mbeki indignantly declares. He also castigates Commonwealth Secretary General Don McKinnon for misleading member states when he said it was the ”broadly held view” of government heads that Zimbabwe’s suspension should be extended beyond March 2003 until the Abuja Chogm in December. Some were not consulted, he said.
Mbeki claims the Zimbabwe government was not given a chance to respond to the report of the observer team. He expresses a clear preference for the views of South Africa’s own observer mission, which declared that the poll outcome represented ”the legitimate voice of the people of Zimbabwe”.
Mbeki is disingenuous on all these points. The troika was mandated at Coolum to adopt whatever measures it saw fit based on the report of the Commonwealth observer group. It was entirely within the remit of Howard as both Commonwealth and troika chair to schedule meetings and propose fresh measures if it was felt Zimbabwe was refusing to comply with the Marlborough House terms set out by the three leaders in March 2002.
These included electoral reform, repeal of repressive laws, inter-party dialogue and engagement with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on land reform. McKinnon was authorised to liaise with the Zimbabwean government in ensuring the terms were met.
After a year of frustration, McKinnon spent most of February 2003 discussing Zimbabwe’s suspension with Commonwealth leaders. He saw most in person. That is how he arrived at the ”broadly held view” that Zimbabwe’s suspension be continued until the Abuja Chogm.
This was hardly surprising. In the 12 months since Zimbabwe’s suspension there had been no repeal of repressive laws and no attempt to set up an independent electoral commission or to disband ruling party militias. Army officers continued to supervise polls.
Howard and McKinnon’s stance in maintaining Zimbabwe’s suspension was vindicated by the decision of the committee of six, appointed at Abuja, and subsequently endorsed by all government heads in their final communique that Zimbabwe’s suspension should be maintained until Mugabe met the terms laid down in 2002.
In other words, the ”broadly held view” that Mbeki questions is the majority view that prevailed. McKinnon had misled nobody and Mbeki, lashing out at procedures that ”undermined democratic principles”, ended up in a minority of one.
Reference to Pretoria’s own observer mission does little to bolster Mbeki’s case as it was widely seen as susceptible to manipulation by South African ministers who made their views known ahead of its findings. When the team’s chair Sam Motsuenyane was asked why there had been insufficient polling stations in Harare, an opposition stronghold, he replied that it was an ”administrative oversight”.
Mbeki ignores the report of the regional parliamentary observer group, which concurred with the Commonwealth mission’s conclusions.
Contrary to Mbeki’s claim, the Zimbabwe government was given every opportunity to respond to the Commonwealth’s report and to engage with McKinnon on matters of concern but, as Mbeki conspicuously omits to mention, McKinnon and his envoys were refused visas to visit Harare.
On the vexed subject of land reform Mbeki claims the large sums of money promised by the British government at the Lancaster House conference on Zimbabwe’s independence never materialised.
In fact, Britain provided more than £47-million in the period 1980 to 1985 for land reform. But few of the farms acquired found their way to the deserving poor. Most ended up in the hands of Mugabe’s cronies.
And when the UNDP decided after the 1998 Harare donors’ conference that land redistribution was chaotic, donors felt they could no longer justify funding a programme that lacked transparency, failed to address poverty alleviation, and undermined self-sufficiency in food production.
When Mbeki visited London in 2000 he was told Britain had set aside a further £36-million for land reform if the UNDP was prepared to approve a workable plan. He omits that detail from his account.
While Mbeki makes repeated reference to Britain’s ”kith and kin” in Zimbabwe, he seems studiously indifferent to the fate of trade unionists, women’s groups, lawyers, and students. While lamenting Zanu-PF’s treatment by the international media, he has no words of compassion for the victims of Mugabe’s unrelenting violence.
If ”those who fought for a democratic Zimbabwe” have been ”turned into repugnant enemies of democracy” by a hostile media, as he claims, that could be because they have indeed become repugnant enemies of democracy!
Mbeki denies lobbying at Abuja for the lifting of Zimbabwe’s suspension. In fact, his officials lobbied hard ahead of Abuja, according to senior diplomats. That included support for former Sri Lankan foreign minister Lakshman Kadirgamar’s candidacy for McKinnon’s job and, according to one account, an attempt to get the Commonwealth observer team’s report rewritten to bring it into line with South Africa’s.
But what is most revealing in Mbeki’s ANC Today commentary is his resentment of any foreign policy that is driven by concern for human rights. He appears shocked that United States administrations should want to ”foster the infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities and allow people to choose their own way…”
Nowhere in his article does Mbeki say what happened to South Africa’s human rights-based foreign policy unveiled with much fanfare seven years ago. Nor does he say why he thinks it is ”meaningless” for the Commonwealth to have upheld its core principles in its policy towards Zimbabwe.
He laments that the land issue has ”disappeared from the global discourse about Zimbabwe” but fails to understand that most leaders have now seen through Mugabe’s spurious nationalist smokescreen. In any case, Mugabe’s land grievance can hardly continue to resonate as a global issue when nearly every white farmer has been expropriated!
Mbeki was in Zimbabwe in December to promote a government of national unity. But any such plan — the one-size-fits-all being hawked from Burundi to the Comores — that forces the Movement for Democratic Change into bed with Zanu-PF is bound to fail. Zimbabwe’s problems derive from repression and misrule, not a lack of national unity. Zimbabweans are united in wanting free and fair elections.
If Mbeki sees his mission as indulging Mugabe by doctoring the diplomatic record and forcing an accommodation with an increasingly brutal regime, he had better get used to further setbacks of the sort he experienced in Abuja.
Iden Wetherell is editor of the Zimbabwe Independent