PoliGazette

‘What we see in Zimbabwe today is naked political terror, orchestrated solely to extend the reign of a once legitimate but now illegitimate ruler who has led his people to a hell on earth. Destitution, murder, rape and mass beatings are the order of the day, and a so-called election this Friday which is now the barest sham,’ Timothy Garton Ash writes.

If “only God” can remove him, Mugabe also says, “the British and Americans want to play God. They have given themselves a role which is not their own, of installing and deposing governments. They want to do the same here but we say to them they are not God.”

Especially in the post-colonial south, and especially after Iraq, that argument has traction. When South Africa’s ANC - which could make the difference in Zimbabwe in a way that London and Washington cannot - finally came out this week to condemn the Zimbabwean government for “riding roughshod over the hard-won democratic rights” of its people, it made a point of recalling how Africa’s former colonial rulers trampled on the principles of freedom and human rights. “No colonial power in Africa, least of all Britain in its colony of ‘Rhodesia’,” it argued, “ever demonstrated any respect for these principles.”

Then there is the appeal to absolute, unlimited state sovereignty. At an election rally on Tuesday, Mugabe cried: “The elections are ours; we’re a sovereign state, and that is it.” By contrast, the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, has called for an African-led and UN-backed team to facilitate a transition in the country. Senior people in his own party, which won more seats than Mugabe’s Zanu-PF in the parliamentary elections in March, will privately go further. They do not believe that rulers should be allowed to get away with murder - literally, not metaphorically - behind an iron curtain of absolute sovereignty. They are asking for more help from outside…

So Zimbabwe brings us back to this great argument of our time, about the rights and wrongs of intervention. And the first thing to say is that this debate is crippled by reducing “intervention” to the single dimension of military action. There are hundreds of ways in which states and peoples intervene in the affairs of other states and peoples without resorting to the use of military force.

War, if it is to be just, must always be the last resort. In a column last month I went through some classic “just war” criteria to argue that an international military intervention in Burma was not justified. I would do the same for Zimbabwe today. For good reasons of maintaining international order, the “just cause” bar for such interventions has to be set very high - roughly speaking, at the level of actual or imminent genocide.

You would be most unlikely to get “right authority” for such action from the UN. Crucial among the objections, in the case of Zimbabwe as of Burma, is the lack of a “reasonable prospect” of success.

What, then, can we do?

Here, in no particular order, are seven things that people outside Zimbabwe can do to help the majority inside Zimbabwe have its democratic will recognised. We - through our elected governments - can work for a second UN resolution, stronger than the last. We can encourage our governments - as many as possible, especially those outside the traditional west - not to recognise as Zimbabwe’s legitimate leader the president who emerges from this Friday’s terror sham election (assuming it goes ahead, despite yesterday’s appeal for postponement from the leaders of Tanzania, Angola and Swaziland).

We can shame the mining giant Anglo-American into not pushing ahead, under Mugabe, with its £200m investment in a platinum mine at Unki. We can spread the word that the Queen - the royal “we” - has at long last stripped Mugabe of his honorary knighthood. We can sign the petition to Thabo Mbeki and other leaders of Southern Africa on avaaz.org , to be published in newspapers across the region. (The number of signatories has risen from 90,000 to over 111,000 while I’ve been writing this article.)

Then anyone in London can join a planned small demonstration at Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday party in Hyde Park this Friday, respectfully asking the old hero to urge Mugabe to leave the stage. Mandela’s discretion and loyalty to his successor Thabo Mbeki have, in this regard, outlived their useful term.

Mandela; can he be the answer?

Meanwhile, the Zimbabwe opposition continues to call on the UN to send peacekeepers. From their perspective, this makes a lot of sense. After all, they’re being killed. Ash, however, seems to believe that it does not make a whole lot of sense for us , for the West.

I think that Ash underestimates Africa’s importance. As usual, Westerners seem to believe that what happens in Africa isn’t really a concern of us. I think that this is a major mistake; if we allow chaos and war to rule in Africa, even though we could stop it ASAP, I think that it will come to haunt us in the coming years and decades. African misery will create terrorism, and hatred for the West.

As we have seen in the Middle in recent years, this can create tremendous problems.