Zimbabwe: without real hope

HARARE, April 12, 2007 (AFP) - Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan
Tsvangirai expressed optimism Thursday about planned talks between
his party and President Robert Mugabe's government to end the crisis
in the country.
"This crisis is going to be resolved through negotiations,"
Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Tsvangirai told a news
conference in the capital Harare.
"And ZANU-PF and MDC will sit down and negotiate under the
tutelage and under the facilitation of (South African) President
(Thabo) Mbeki."
Zimbabwe's political crisis deteriorated even further last month
when state security agents assaulted Tsvangirai and scores of
supporters and shot dead an opposition activist as they broke up an
anti-government rally.
Tsvangirai said of the planned talks: "Things are moving. We
want to see how President Mbeki is going to successfully resolve
this crisis and we wish him well."

A large part of the reason why Zimbabwe still has its kleptocratic, pseudo-marxist dumb-ass government is revealed in Morgan Tsvangarai's words. This is emphatically not Winston Churchill speaking. Its a terrible shame that rather than having leaders, Zimbabwe has blowhards with lots of sad excuses for inaction. Real national leaders in waiting do not shuffle off the dirty work to their neighbors the instant it becomes possible. My mind wanders to Charles De Gaulle, who acted like the President of France even when he was only in charge of twelve aide-de-camps. Taking responsibility is a hard thing to do, but huge amounts of good flow from doing it. Will Zimbabweans grow some decisiveness and testicular fortitude before their country crumbles into stone-age squalor?

"This crisis is going to be resolved through negotiations". Really? Nothing from the last 27 years events would lead me to that conclusion. Only the most oafish and stubborn self-deluder would still think that to be the case at this point in Zimbabwe's history. To paraphrase the NRA bumper-sticker, Mugabe will give up the reins of power when they are taken from his cold dead fingers. What used to seem Ghandiesque and laudably statesmanlike in the commitment of the MDC to peaceful resolution of Zimbabwe's crises of government and society now seems pusillanimous and bankrupt. Imagine if in 1939 instead of declaring war on Nazi Germany for invading Poland, Chamberlain sent a strongly worded note protesting the blah blah blah- lets face it, there has to be a line which once crossed means the end of 'resolved through negotiations' and the start of 'hold on to your hat, here come the cavalry'.

Mugabe's legitimacy as a ruler disappeared in the early 1980's, when his special forces murdered twenty thousand people simply because they were ZAPU not ZANU. It is only by the dispensation given to black murderers in charge of black nations that he didn't immediately become a world pariah- had it been Francois Mitterand murdering tens of thousands of his political opponents, I don't think there would have been such a reverential hush. Even when Mugabe started his 'land redistribution' (read large-scale theft) program, most of Europe looked on benignly. After all, the victims were racist white farmers and the recipients landless black people- weren't they? But then once it became obvious to even the most retarded Guardian reader that the bottom had fallen out of the whole Zimbabwean economy as a consequence, and that Mugabe didn't seem to notice, even the politically-correctophiles became slightly anxious. Mugabe seemed disturbingly blase about the entire situation, especially the onset of famine on a biblical scale. If finally began to dawn on people that behind the tired platitudes of the 'liberation struggle', 'defeating colonialism' and 'redistributive justice' lay cynical corruption and a sociopathic lack of concern for actual Zimbaweans.

We now have the bizarre situation where suddenly the whole world seems to have decided Mugabe is a REALLY BAD DICTATOR. Bizarre because although his recent behaviour has been stupid, self-defeating and cack-handed, its evilness is on a misdemeanor level. His felonies are decades old, back when nobody gave a crap. If I was Mugabe, I would be raging at the illogical nature of human affairs. Murdering tens of thousands of people in cold blood gets you a couple of paragraphs on the bottom of page 41, whereas having a handful of political activists beaten up gets block headlines across the globe. Go figure!