(1) Robert Mugabe
The principal beneficiaries of the media myths about Zimbabwe are President Robert Mugabe and President Thabo Mbeki. These myths should be dismantled before they rewrite history. First, there is Mugabe (whatever happens to him next). The myth is that he was quite a good guy until, regrettably, he went a little off the rails in 2000. This is poppycock.
In 1980, when Rhodesia became independent as Zimbabwe, Mugabe took over as its first president, and 28 years later he is still there. In 2000, after losing a referendum to amend the constitution, he began a reign of terror, now in its eight year. The debate has swung back and forth over what to do about him; but besides turning him and his ZANU-PF party into pariahs, a divided world has made no significant impact, unless it is to make "Comrade Bob" more frenzied. To the extent that Mugabe lives under moral siege, the main credit must go to Zimbabweans themselves, shattered though they have been by the terror.
Before independence, Mugabe's Zanu had been (and still is) supported by the Chinese government; the rival Soviet-backed Zapu, led by Joshua Nkomo, had bonded with South Africa's African National Congress (ANC). In his book The State of Africa (Free Press, 2005), Martin Meredith discusses the breakdown in relations between Zanu and Zapu. Following the 1980 elections the two parties governed Zimbabwe in coalition. "In secret," says Meredith, "Mugabe planned for a showdown. In October 1980, only six months after independence, he signed an agreement with North Korea, a brutal communist dictatorship, for assistance in training a new army brigade with the specific remit to deal with internal dissidents". It was the notorious 5th Brigade. In August 1981, after a team of 106 North Korean instructors had started work in Zimbabwe, Mugabe disclosed the Brigade's existence. By early 1982, Mugabe felt secure enough to stage a split with Nkomo, whom his rottweilers called a "cobra." "A major point of contention" Meredith writes, "was Mugabe's intention to make Zimbabwe a one-party state. Mugabe ousted Nkomo from the cabinet in February 1982 after the discovery of arms caches that were alleged to be part of a ZAPU-led coup attempt."
1983 saw the Brigade move against the Ndebele in an onslaught that did not peter out until 1987. Within six weeks, hundreds of homesteads had been destroyed. Meredith records: "Hundreds of thousands of ordinary civilians were quickly reduced to a desperate state...In Mugabe's drive for a one-party state at least 10,000 civilians were murdered, many thousands more were beaten and tortured and an entire people were victimised." Mugabe's army camps became notorious as "places of torture and brutality." (For an insider's view, see here). The 1980s violence was eventually brought to a close with the signing of the Unity Accord in December 1987, which effectively led to the absorption of ZAPU into ZANU and the de facto creation of a one-party state. In return for signing, ZAPU was guaranteed little other than that one of the Vice Presidents of Zimbabwe would henceforth be from ZAPU ranks. The Unity Accord of 1987 is seen by many in the region to represent the political emasculation of Matabeleland.
Despite this history the soggy Left rushed to Mugabe's defence as soon as he went - in the popular perception - from democrat to dictator in 2000. In March 2001 the deputy comment editor of The Guardian, for example, wrote soothingly under the headline, "Softly, softly": "Britain should stop hounding Mugabe and look for an African solution that lets him leave gracefully: To prepare a graceful exit for him, a very public focus on his past, as opposed to his present, would be necessary: his role in the liberation of Zimbabwe and his early, more successful, days in the presidency recalled and honoured. Perhaps a financial retirement package could be proffered. Mugabe must be coaxed out because he clearly cannot be hounded out."
It is historic practice to offer immunity to burnt-out tyrants for crimes against humanity, and then to maintain them in the style to which they had become accustomed. Undoubtedly, lives have been saved in this way. However, to elevate such agreements to "honourable" is grotesque. They invite revulsion.
Four years later, in July 2005, another Guardian commentator, John Vidal, was still singing from the same hymn book: "The vilification of Mugabe is now out of control. The UN Security Council and the G8 have been asked to debate the evictions, and Mugabe is being compared to Pol Pot in Cambodia. Meanwhile, the evictions are mentioned in the same breath as the genocide in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans - although perhaps only three people have so far accidentally died. Only at the very end of some reports is it said that the Harare city authority's stated reason for the evictions is to build better, legal houses for 150,000."
What explains the soggy Left's affinity to left-leaning tyrants? Name some of the world's worst dictators - starting with Stalin - and you will find that the soggy Left formed, at one point or another, an ideological praetorian guard around them.
In The Times recently Daniel Finkelstein reviewed In Sickness and in Power, "a riveting new book on the health of statesmen" by Lord David Owen (a former Labour Foreign Secretary and doctor). The book discusses political leaders who were "drugged to the eyeballs" [the Times's words] when they were taking decisions that could change the course of history. But it is not only drugs that warp politicians; it is also their psychological make-up. How often haven't we seen photographs of Comrade Bob, animated and beaming after another ‘successful' day of terror, holding Mbeki's hand in that curiously effeminate way of his - the same Mugabe who says gays and lesbians are "worse than dogs and pigs."
The question remains: why do so many African governments repeatedly end up with corrupt, deranged leaders? What is it about the "African tradition" that makes the African tragedy re-enact itself so remorsely?
(2) Thabo Mbeki
The other leading player in Zimbabwe's horror story is Mbeki. The myth attached to him is that he went into "denial" over what was happening across his northern border. The New Oxford Dictionary defines denialism as "Refusal to acknowledge an unacceptable truth or emotion or to admit it into consciousness, used as a defence mechanism." In other words, Mbeki has a mental blockage which prevents him from acknowledging the truth.
This, like the myth about Mugabe's "successful early days," is poppycock. Mbeki knew exactly what was happening in Zimbabwe, and why it was happening, and he defended Mugabe from start to the present day. At meetings of the 53-member African Union and the 14-member Southern African Development Community, more than any other African leader he protected Comrade Bob: orchestrating African solidarity and ovations.
At tricky moments, over the past eight years, Mbeki must have asked that Mugabe at least make a few minor tactical moves in a pretence of conciliation; but Mugabe ignored such counsel. In the May 8 issue of the London Review of Books, RW Johnson writes: "In Mbeki's and Mugabe's minds Western imperialism is engaged in a struggle to overthrow the NLMs and restore, if it can, the preceding regimes - apartheid, colonialism or white settler rule."
At AU and SADC conferences, much Mbeki-engineered applause for Mugabe was extracted under duress. Solidarity of this kind is one of Africa 's killer traditions. It helps to explains why African countries, one by one, have become basket cases, as leaders from the same old tyrants' stable are monotonously returned to office. In 1980, the Washington Post reported that President Samora Machel "had warned Mugabe on several occasions not to follow Mozambique's post-independence economic policies,' which resulted in all but 15,000 of the approximately 250,000 Portuguese settlers in the country quitting, abandoning farms and taking valuable equipment with them. Mugabe took this advice for twenty years, before overturning it completely from 2000 onwards. Neither Mbeki nor Mugabe could have been under any illusions about what the economic consequences of the land seizures were going to be - yet the one pressed ahead with them with the approval of the other.
It was only last week that Zambia's president Levy Mwanawasa broke ranks, assembling SADC to try to curb Mugabe. However, not only did Mugabe fail to appear, but Mbeki turned up and talked SADC out of its intentions. Mwanawasa says he will persist: he has had enough of Mbeki and "silent diplomacy." Perhaps what is changing here is not just the usual grovelling support for Mugabe, but the beginnings of a breakthrough in a new moral standard for African leaders.
Mbeki is a complex man; some would say damaged goods. Next to his English upbringing is anti-whiteism, and next to his Africaness is low tolerance of his own people. The address he wrote for the ANC's Mafikeng conference in 1997 was read for him by President Mandela doggedly, painfully and obediently - revealing where real power lay. In the address, Mbeki gave ANC members a tongue-lashing for being too consumed with ambition and greed. Seeing that Mbeki presided over the country's huge arms procurement programme (the poisoned fount of the corruption pandemic in the country), it did not take him long to walk away from an African "renaissance".
Since Jacob Zuma ousted him as ANC president in mid-December last year, Mbeki seems to be almost in a trance, as if nothing much matters any more. His reaction to China's shipment of arms for Zimbabwe - documented in the media, but dismissed by him - was mind-boggling. How did Mbeki acquire his reputation as an "intellectual" when his presidential record is so littered with novice mistakes? Now, since Zuma, Mbeki and his presidency are like a procession of the walking dead.
When Mugabe finally quits, Mbeki will look over a charred Zimbabwe - demolished homesteads, barren farms, a beaten and bloody population, four million refugees gathered across the Limpopo River in South Africa - and no doubt exclaim, "There, I told you. Silent diplomacy works".
