ZIMBABWE: Is the Commonwealth is Coming Back on to the Scene?

The horrendous mess in Zimbabwe is a product of decades of mistakes on all sides. In a few lines they include:

Many other mistakes can be added to a catalogue that goes right back to 1923 when Britain handed self-government (with strings) to a handful of tiny white settlers and to the creation in 1953 of the Central African Federation made up of Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now Malawi). But the literature on all this history is voluminous.

To move fast forward, what we have today is terrible suffering and violence in a land which was in the early Nineties in much better shape and more advanced than most countries in Africa. The quality of education was high and growing year by year. The country was a food exporter. It is often said now that independence began in 1980 with a seriously flawed election, but that is not the case.

As media adviser to the Commonwealth Observer Group I was in the country for several weeks. There was certainly considerable intimidation and the electoral system, hastily organised in extraordinary circumstances, was far from perfect. That was hardly surprising considering the turmoil and years of civil war that it followed. But there is not the slightest doubt that at that point Mugabe’s ZANU party had the overwhelming support of the people.

Mugabe will be the subject of a huge literature in the years to come. He is a fascinating figure, intellectually brilliant – a Roman Catholic and Marxist who it now seems clear was devious from the outset and with cruel intent. There are, for example, question marks about the deaths of potential leadership rivals such as Josiah Tongagara, the highly intelligent and liberal-minded army leader killed in a road accident a few days after he had played a notable mediatory role in the Lancaster House talks in 1979, and of lawyer Herbert Chitepo a popular rival in the ZANU power play, further back, in 1975.

In Judith Todd’s book Through the Darkness her father Garfield Todd, liberal prime minister before Ian Smith, is quoted as saying that what he detested most about Mugabe was his ability to corrupt just about anyone who ever came close to him.

From the outset of independence in 1980 Mugabe had an able team of ministers. Some are still in the government. The puzzle is how they have remained compliant over so many years and still hang in there with him. The only conclusion can be that they have stayed there as the result of a combination of threats and bribery. In cabinet he treated almost all of them roughly.

The question is what can be done now as the suffering grows. The country continues to function in a curious way, perhaps because it is now a black economy with a few people making a lot of money while the masses are left with nothing. The infrastructure remains and, almost surreally, a lot of it still works.

The Rhodesia Herald never steps beyond the party line but two other small papers which are highly critical remain, and 230,0000 copies of The Zimbabwean, published in South Africa and the UK, are weekly on sale in Zimbabwe. Only recently for the first time was a lorry load attacked and set on fire and the South African driver and his Zimbabwean distribution assistant beaten up.

The BBC is banned, but reporters go in clandestinely and filmed interviews are aired. To ensure their safety interviewees’ faces are obscured and voices distorted. One or two other resident journalists for British newspapers continue to report, outspokenly for the London Times, Daily Telegraph, Reuters and AP.

The biggest disappointment is that southern African countries have proved incapable of lancing this boil in their region. One reason is the African tradition of respect for the old and for those who led their struggle for independence. Mugabe is now, with the notable exception of Mandela, the only senior figure of that generation. He sees all the other leaders as juniors and treats them as such.

Even one or two presidents have come away from personal meetings with him stunned by the way he has dressed them down almost like children. Although president Thabo Mbeki of South Africa is rightly criticised for mishandling a situation which has landed his country with up to three million refugees and caused serious unrest in Johannesburg, there is little doubt that he has found Mugabe as difficult to handle as everyone else. He has also obviously been worried at the prospect of a military regime becoming entrenched in southern Africa just at a time when such governments have been all but eliminated in Africa – and, perhaps most importantly of all, of the real danger of land problems being stirred in South Africa itself. The indications are that the situation is running out of Mugabe’s control and that three army and air force chiefs, the director-general of the central intelligence organisation and the police commissioner-general are mostly in charge.

Hopefully, the Commonwealth is beginning to come back into the picture. When Zimbabwe, having been suspended in 2000, walked out of the Commonwealth at the end of the 2003 CHOGM in Abuja a view was wrongly taken in the Secretariat that Zimbabwe was now no longer the Commonwealth’s business. Little or no attempt was made to help the people of Zimbabwe, as had happened in the case of South Africa. Admittedly it was difficult because circumstances were quite different and most African members of the Commonwealth felt this was an African problem that required an African solution.

Zimbabwe was not mentioned in the communiqués of either the Malta or Kampala CHOGMs – even though opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was invited to Kampala by Commonwealth civil society organisations that included CHRI and addressed a packed meeting there. To be fair, over the years since Zimbabwe withdrew from the Commonwealth the Secretariat’s Political Affairs Division has continued to monitor the Zimbabwe situation and talked informally with other member governments, but now the attitude has markedly changed.

The new Commonwealth Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma became active on the issue almost from the time he took office on 1 April, aware that Zimbabwe must still be a matter of central concern for the Commonwealth.

When nine Heads of Government chaired by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown met in London on 10 June to talk about reform of the international institutions Zimbabwe was discussed bilaterally and informally discussed in the margins. Three African leaders were at the meeting - President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, currently chairperson of the Commonwealth, President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania, and Vice-President Alhaji Aliu Mahama of Ghana. Sharma had let it be known before the final press conference that he would be prepared to answer questions on Zimbabwe, but this was not conveyed to the journalists and in the event nobody asked about it. The issue was, of course, far removed from the subject of the meeting.

At the time of writing, just before the rerun of the presidential election, the situation is that no parliament is sitting in Harare. The House that was elected with a majority for the first time for the opposition Movement of Democratic Change (MDC) has still not been convened and no MPs have been sworn in. Zimbabwe is in fact a country without a legally installed president or parliament. In fact, a coup by stealth.