We have a duty to protect Zimbabwe

Robert Mugabe is murdering, starving and brutalising his people in the run-up to the presidential elections next week, says Peter Oborne. We should act now to prevent civil war and ethnic cleansing Ten years ago the UN SecretaryGeneral Kofi Annan set out a new international doctrine. Annan declared that the world was looking forward to what he called ‘a new century of human rights’.

For the United Nations, declared Annan, this meant an entirely new way of doing things. ‘No government,’ he declared, ‘has the right to hide behind national sovereignty in order to violate the human rights or fundamental freedoms of its peoples.

‘Whether a person belongs to the minority or the majority, that person’s human rights and fundamental freedoms are sacred.’ This statement was revolutionary. International relations, since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, have been conducted on the basis of formal respect for national boundaries. Annan, responding to globalisation and prompted perhaps by Tony Blair, was asserting that these borders should no longer be immune and that intervention was always appropriate when governments waged warfare against their own citizens.

Kofi Annan expressed the spirit of the age, or so it seemed. Humanitarian intervention was the great fin de siècle theme. In Kosovo and East Timor this doctrine was used to justify cross-border excursions to confront brutal actions by repressive regimes. Even where more self-interested motives were at work, as in Iraq, it was still used as the overriding vindication for invasion.

But there are now overwhelming signs that the ‘responsibility to protect’, as Kofi Annan’s doctrine has come to be known within the United Nations, has ceased to apply. Within the past few months there have been two terrible cases which cry out for exactly the kind of action for which Annan called so eloquently.

The first of these is Burma, where the military junta has failed to come to the aid of its own people in the wake of natural catastrophe, and refused the help of outsiders as well. This murderous stance has been greeted with quite remarkable equanimity by the international community, including the once triggerhappy Bush administration. It is estimated that tens of thousands of Burmese have died as a result, victims of their own government.

The second case is Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe’s thugs have been permitted to act with total impunity ever since Morgan Tsvangirai’s election triumph in late March. Large parts of Eastern Zimbabwe, in particular Mashonaland (though the violence is now spreading), now recall Darfur when the genocide began five years ago. There are the same burning and empty villages, the same climate of fear, while the language of genocide is being explicitly used by ministers.

Large bands of state-sponsored militias, paid and protected by the Zanu-PF regime, move without hindrance from area to area, killing, burning and torturing as they go. As with the Janjaweed in Sudan, Mugabe’s socalled ‘green bombers’ are licensed to target all political opposition to the government, however tangential. In Darfur there was an ethnic or racial basis to the killing, whereas in Zimbabwe Mugabe (at this stage) is exclusively targeting members of the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change. Ministers refer to the MDC opposition as ‘vermin’ or ‘cockroaches’, and publicly contemplate their eradication.

Mugabe is not simply using violence as a method of control. International aid agencies have been cleaned out of Zimbabwe as well. This is partly so that there will be as few witnesses as possible to the carnage, and partly to prevent food and other forms of humanitarian assistance reaching MDC supporters. Zanu-PF cards are now required to acquire the national diet of mealie meal in many areas: those who do not possess this kind of identification now face starvation.

Mugabe has become the figurehead for a military junta, many of whom have blood on their hands from the genocide carried out in Matabeleland in the early 1980s, where 20,000 died. The election defeat last March posed Zanu-PF with by far the largest crisis since the Matabeleland killings, and they are responding in exactly the same way.

Thus far the death toll is hard to compute. Official records speak of 70 deaths, which is horrible enough, but the true figure is certainly far more than that. There are reports now of bodies being shoved down mineshafts, as they were in the early Eighties. Others are placed by the police in aluminium coffins and dropped into lakes and rivers.

Thousands of people have disappeared, no one knows where. Tens of thousands of Zimbabweans have been forced out of their homes, while hundreds of thousands have fled the country in search of jobs, food, or for their own protection. Mainly these exiles end up in South Africa, where their presence gives rise to resentment and has recently fanned into violence and is starting to threaten the stability and prosperity of the region.

Meanwhile Robert Mugabe has ignored the result of the elections last March. The victorious MDC MPs, who theoretically enjoy a majority in parliament, have not been sworn in. Indeed many of them are in hiding or detained facing trumped-up charges. There is no legal government. Robert Mugabe has explicitly rejected democracy, declaring at a funeral last Sunday he is not prepared to cede control on account of anything so insubstantial as a ballot paper.

This posture creates a problem for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Ever since its inception nearly ten years ago, the MDC has consistently stood for non-violence. It has refused to take to the bush or to resort to the guerrilla campaigns favoured by traditional African liberation movements. Like the monks in conflict with the Burmese junta, the MDC’s struggle has been moral, democratic, firmly based in civil society and based on Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings about non-violence.

These principles — never controversial within the ranks of the MDC — have been breaking down here and there over the past few weeks, though only in the face of the most grotesque provocation. Reports are beginning to trickle through of pockets of MDC resistance to the Zanu-PF militias, and reprisals too. Mugabe’s statement that he will not accept any election result bar victory effectively gives the opposition the choice of mute surrender or armed resistance. My feeling is that Robert Mugabe, and some of his allies, would welcome the latter path. It would give them the excuse they need for launching a fullscale campaign of bloodshed, completing the unfinished business of the early 1980s, and establishing a one-party state. That is why many observers now fear that Zimbabwe will soon start to move towards the horror of civil war and ethnic cleansing.

And yet the United Nations has reacted with insouciance, taking Mugabe’s side rather than the terrorised opposition’s. Amazing to report, when the Security Council met last Thursday the word ‘Zimbabwe’ did not even appear on the formal agenda. The problem was discussed, at the request of the United Kingdom, but only under the general rubric ‘other matters’. This omission was very important: Zimbabwe standing alone on the agenda would have opened up the issue to formal discussion and — who knows? — action!

But even this very limited acknowledgement that some kind of problem existed was severely constrained. The United Nations will not accept that there is a political problem. This means that all discussion within the Security Council last Thursday, say diplomatic sources, was limited to a brief and abstract survey of ‘humanitarian’ issues.

These exceptionally narrow parameters render discussion meaningless. The humanitarian problem faced by Zimbabwe has been deliberately brought about by the Mugabe regime, above all through the use of food deprivation as a weapon to punish political opponents. The Security Council was unable to acknowledge this, however, let alone contemplate the reign of terror which has now extended into the towns. Meanwhile the United Nations continues to fete Robert Mugabe as head of state, most recently when he and his large entourage visited the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation summit in Rome. With the United Nations washing its hands of the situation, a great deal of responsibility falls on regional groups. But these are all but useless. The Southern African Development Community, for example, is supposed to be ensuring free and fair elections in Zimbabwe. In practice, its so-called independent election observers have in most cases taken no interest in recording Mugabe’s reign of terror.

This should be regarded as no surprise at all, since the election observers were chosen by Mugabe and include representatives from sympathetic and equally repressive regimes like Libya and Sudan. Head of the observer mission for the elections on 29 March was the foreign minister of Angola, a oneparty state where elections have not been held for more than 15 years. The Economic Community of West African States is no better. It has appointed General Gowon who seized power in Nigeria from a coalition government to head its mission monitoring the Zimbabwean election.

So Robert Mugabe has international sanction for his barbarism. The Chinese government — shortly to bask in the warm glow of the 2008 Olympics — is at liberty to supply AK-47s and rocket launchers and munitions to Zimbabwe. The Munich-based company Giesecke & Devrient continues to supply, unhindered, truckloads of large denomination banknotes. This enables Mugabe to bribe his army, police force and irregular militias but only accelerates the total collapse of the economy. Charles Davy, potential father-in-law to Prince Harry, continues to maintain a close business relationship with very serious members of the Zanu-PF regime without censure.

Some individuals have been prepared to speak out. Levy Patrick Mwanawasa, president of Zambia, has bravely broken with the cult of omerta which has overcome so many African and international rulers. Botswana received Morgan Tsvangirai with the full military honours appropriate to a national leader when he fled across the border in the early hours of the morning in fear for his life just after the March election. No praise is too high for the US ambassador in Harare, James McGee, who has made a series of provocative visits to rural Mashonaland, witnessing for himself the atrocity sites, and braving dangerous confrontations with Zanu thugs. Gordon Brown and the foreign secretary David Miliband have both been assiduous.

Zimbabwe is a perfect test case for the new United Nations doctrine of ‘responsibility to protect’. There should be peacekeepers, international monitors, a roar of urgent condemnation. The United Nations, led by its feeble Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, has made its choice. It has gone down the path of collaboration with Robert Mugabe’s illegal government as it launches war on its own people. It is important to try and understand why it has decided to hide behind national sovereignty. It has become conventional to single out the legacy of the Iraq invasion as the main reason for the failure of the international community to engage in the dark places of the world like Darfur, Burma and Zimbabwe. There is some truth in this. But other factors are at work.

Mugabe has allies who need him to succeed. Russia and South Africa are on his side. So is China, and scores of other states which fear the ballot box. That Chinese gun shipment, say Mugabe’s spokesman, has arrived, and its effects are already being felt. The latest reports from Mashonaland state the rampaging militias are no longer equipped only with iron bars. They have brand new AK-47s, and are ready to use them. These well-armed militias, and their commanders, are fully protected from the consequences of their actions by the United Nations Security Council. The case of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe may come to be seen as a terrible portent of the looming new world order, and Kofi Annan’s prediction of ‘a new century of human rights’ possess a grotesque meaning he could hardly have dreamt of at the time.