Robert Mugabe and the Downfall of Liberal Interventionism

Robert Mugabe is making a mockery of liberal interventionism. He has become God's gift to cartoonists, politicians and commentators. He is depicted wielding clubs dripping in blood. He stands triumphant over a pile of skulls. He is Bokassa out of Idi Amin out of Charles Taylor. He is that old familiar, the African heart of darkness, monstrous, buffoonish, grotesque and evil.

There is a sense in which Mugabe's hysterical anti-western analysis of his predicament is correct. His Zimbabwe is a creature of British imperialism and post-imperialism. The last governor, Lord Soames, regarded him as an affectionate regimental mascot, a "splendid chap," as he told me in an interview shortly before handing power to him in 1980.

Britain duly tolerated the suppression of Mugabe's enemy, Joshua Nkomo, and Zimbabwe's conversion into a one-party state. It turned a blind eye to the 1983 Ndebele massacre by Mugabe's Shona Fifth Brigade under its warlord, Perence Shiri, some say his present master. Margaret Thatcher's Whitehall gave Harare lavish aid and barmy advice, helping turn a viable economy into a basket case of pseudo-socialist kleptomania.

Now Zimbabwe is declared outrageous. Though Mugabe is hardly the worst dictator in the world, he is regarded as "our" dictator and therefore our business. The public asks "what is to be done about him?" Sated on having "done something", presumably glorious, about Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, public opinion is hard-wired to such a question. So what is to be done?

The answer is splutter. Abuse is heaped on Mugabe's head in a ministerial cascade of brutals, blood-thirsties, illegitimates and revoltings. I have lost count how often the Foreign Office has excoriated him with that lofty, impotent put-down, "unacceptable". As for sanctions, we must listen to the ludicrous incantation of VIP travel restrictions, Harrods accounts, French hotels, London kindergartens and reclaimed knighthoods - the ceaseless chatter of sanctions chic.

Such sanctions are the weapons of cowards and hypocrites. They never work in any meaningful sense and are on a par with not eating South African oranges or not buying Brazilian coffee. By mildly inconveniencing the powerful and starving the poor, they supposedly make us feel good. In countries such as Cuba and Iraq they have condemned whole generations to misery and early death.

The much-abused history of commercial sanctions shows that any protracted squeeze leads only to internal economic adjustment. Control over money and goods shifts from merchants to rulers, driving the former to exile and increasing the wealth of the latter. As sanctions made Saddam Hussein and his family rich, so they have made Mugabe and his cronies rich.

The only sanction that works is one that works overnight. It is conceivable that if South Africa and Zimbabwe's other neighbours were able to cut supplies of petrol and electricity they might precipitate some sort of coup in Harare. But by whom? Anyone seizing power at present would be anyone with petrol, and that is the army, which has power already.

Neither South Africa nor neighbouring states of the African Union has shown the slightest inclination to force regime change on Harare, however much they may condemn Mugabe. African rulers regard the interventionist precedent as unappealing. Nor is there any British stomach for an airborne assault, from wherever it might be launched (Diego Garcia?). It is inconceivable that planes would be allowed refuelling or over-flying rights in southern Africa. Such is the collapse of Britain's moral authority after Iraq.

Toppling Mugabe would require a force strong enough at least to decapitate his army and, presumably, install the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, in power. What kind of power would that be, achieved with foreign guns? It would probably be a prelude only to civil war, which must be the last thing Zimbabwe needs just now.

The truth is that Britain and the west have grown tired of this sort of thing. They could not summon up the muscle even to land aid in Burma's Irrawaddy delta, hardly the most drastic of interventions. The Labour bombast of Baghdad and Kabul is now reduced to nuanced caution. The crusader cry, "You can't just leave the poor Albanians (or Shias or Pashtuns) to their fate," has degenerated into a diplomatic monotone of demarches and resolutions.

There is no realistic alternative but to sit out the Zimbabwean tragedy, impotent on the sidelines. If Africa wants to help its own, it will. If not, so be it. We cannot starve Mugabe into submission, since that is his own strategy towards his people. We take comfort by endlessly declaring his country "close to collapse" but that is idiot economics. Subsistence and remittance economies do not collapse.

We can portray Mugabe in the press as a blood-thirsty gorilla and impose so-called smart sanctions, in order that we can feel a little better, but our fine feelings are hardly central to Africa's predicament.

So-called liberal interventionism is a will 'o the wisp, a vapid, feel-good refashioning of foreign policy in response to a headline event, motivated by self-interest or passing mood. We should send food to the starving of Zimbabwe because that is something we can do, however much Mugabe distorts the supply. But as for dreaming of toppling him, those days are over. Britain has done enough damage to Zimbabwe over the years. Prudence tells us please to shut up.

Comments

[outnow]

The British are determined to maintain their empire in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Let's not forget how they have invaded and occupied both Afghanistan and Iraq. And this is not the first times.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were the worst things to happen to the middle class. The bitter arguments being made by Mr. Jenkins would seem to support this view of economic liberalism which others call neocolonialism or economic imperialism. I could mention the problems of the East India Company, the problems in Indo-China after WW II. The problems in India with Pakistan. Indonesia. These countries got a conditional freedom but the British have managed to keep a stranglehold. Nehru said so of India after the devaluation of the rupee. That's the condition of South Africa after British colonialism.

The policies are forged by a syndicate of financiers, individual and groups. Mr. Jenkins is patriotic, nationalistic, and well-intentioned, no doubt. But colonial and neoliberal policies are more often destructive of the very values he promotes. The interventions keep wars going all over the planet. Call them humanitarian or economic but it is still colonialism and in derogation of the right of self-determination.

[Lemeritus]

11:05 PST - FISA being debated on C-SPAN 2.

[Krikkit]

Notwithstanding your rant against sanctions, a simple Google search on peacebuilding in Zimbabwe returns 159,000 hits. Many of these are about regional efforts that are aimed precisely at undoing the damage that has erupted in the wake of decolonization. Many more are about groups dedicated to building organizations of civil society. Most of them are either funded or staffed by people from all over the world, and most are organizations created in the United States or Europe.

Although I agree with you that sanctions produce evil results, let's not get overly simplistic. It takes working from the top down and from the bottom up both to bring peace to a region. Leaders don't simply give up power because it is the right thing to do or is in the interest of their own people.
Dictators can and do crush civil societies that spring up in their midst. International pressure must often be brought to bear to inform them that those actions will have consequences that undermine their power.

[S1m0n]

The 'responsibility to protect' doctrine on western interventionism, which had been slowly taking form in the decade after the collapse of Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda died that day that George Bush reminded us all that if a loophole is created in the international law doctrine of the soveriegnty of nations (first annunciated in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648) it will be exploited to excuse wars of aggression far sooner than for humanitarian purposes.

It's a wonderful idea in theory, but in practice will create more suffering than it alleviates.