The UN is not the Holy See
The situation in Zimbabwe is intolerable: on that all decent people can agree. Robert Mugabe has turned the breadbasket of Africa into a wasteland. He has set his militia, his army and his police to beat, rape and kill his own people. He respects neither the results of any democratic ballot nor the norms of human decency. Neither pregnant women nor children are exempted from the brutality of his thugs.
The conclusion that something must be done is obvious. The question of what, precisely, is much trickier. The reports coming out of Zimbabwe have been so awful and the world’s response so feeble that there is an increasing clamour for Britain and America to intervene directly. We can sympathise with the sentiment behind this thinking — but a Britishor American-led action would play into Mugabe’s hands. It would, sadly, justify in the eyes of many Africans his assertion that what is at stake in this election is Zimbabwe’s independence, and that the country’s problems are the result of a colonial conspiracy. It is, in any case, hard to see how Britain and America could mount an invasion of a landlocked country without the support of some of Zimbabwe’s neighbours. And Britain and America are already overstretched militarily, immersed in two conflicts that will entangle both nations for some time to come.
Equally, though, sanctions alone are not the answer. Economic penalties have no effect on a regime that has already scandalously squandered its country’s wealth and despises its citizens. ‘Smart’ sanctions targeted at the individuals perpetuating this reign of terror are a morally appealing option. However, they are only effective if these people leave Zimbabwe: the impact upon the relatives of Mugabe’s henchmen living overseas is a minor calculation.
In an ideal world, the United Nations would raise a multinational force to go into Zimbabwe and ensure that free and fair elections were held. However, we do not live in an ideal world and the UN is — to put it mildly — far from an ideal institution. Its declaration on Monday that legitimate elections cannot be held in Zimbabwe at present was a feeble batsqueak of indignation, but also about the most we can expect from the UN at this point.
There is a huge misconception in this country and elsewhere that the UN is a Holy See for the modern era: the moral conscience of mankind, designed to guarantee basic freedoms for the peoples of the world. This is historically illiterate. The founding aim of the UN was to avoid great power conflict — which is why five nations have a veto over its actions, and the organisation has, to repeat the old joke, the engine of a lawnmower and the brakes of a Rolls-Royce.
Two of the Security Council’s permanent members — Russia and China — have no interest in setting a precedent whereby repression and the failure to hold free and fair elections are a trigger for other nations to intervene in the internal affairs of a country. In essence, they have no intention of drafting an international jurisprudence that could one day be used against them. It is no accident that the great humanitarian interventions of the post-Cold War era — Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo in 1999 and Sierra Leone in 2000 — had to be carried out outside the UN framework.
If the UN will not act, and Britain and America cannot, some other mechanism for intervention is clearly needed. There have been frequent calls for the Southern African Development Community or the African Union to step in. But just as a Britishor American-led initiative could be misrepresented as a colonial intervention, so an exclusively African-led military intervention is hard to envisage unless Africa is forced into doing something. The feelings of freedom-fighting solidarity that still exist between Mugabe and some African leaders are an obstruction to meaningful action. (It is worth noting that the South African populace seems to take a clearer-eyed view of the Zimbabwe situation than their leaders. For all Thabo Mbeki’s moral cowardice, it was South African dockers who refused to unload Chinese arms shipments to Mugabe.) So what is required is something that encourages African countries to see this issue through the prism of democracy and human rights. The best long-term hope of achieving this proposed thus far would be a League of Democracies, an idea currently championed by the Republican presidential nominee, John McCain. This idea has been predictably denounced as a neocon plot to undermine the UN and allow America to do what it wants, when it wants. But the idea can actually be traced back to the Clinton administration with Madeleine Albright and Václav Havel’s push for a Community of Democracies. A League of Democracies would also — by definition — be a check on American power. At the moment, the US can bypass the UN — as it did over Iraq — because it is clear that there are so many circumstances in which the UN simply will not act. But having invested large amounts of diplomatic capital in a new global organisation on the premise that the collective moral judgment of democracies is superior to that of autocracies, it would be embarrassing in the extreme for America simply to ignore it. This proposal would lay the basis for a new, realist multilateralism and deserves a more intelligent hearing than it has thus far been granted.
For now, the best that can be done for Zimbabwe is to make African nations face up to their responsibilities and the consequences of inaction. A private message should be delivered by all democratic donor nations to every sub-Saharan Africa nation that their attitude towards Zimbabwe will be taken as a test of their commitment to good governance. If they flunk it, then the donors would conclude that development aid, as opposed to humanitarian aid, is pointless as Africa is incapable of policing the necessary standards of good governance. Such an ultimatum might just force southern Africa — and South Africa in particular — to recognise that Zimbabwe deserves to be part of Africa’s future rather than the bloodied captive of its past.
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