So what do I wake up to this morning, just a few hours after yesterday's cynical post about Zimbabwe? A report in the Mail & Guardian that Robert Mugabe is nearing a deal that will “end a political crisis in his country.”Naturally, if an agreement, which will largely involve the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and Mugabe's ZANU-PF, is pending that is a good thing. And if it is true, as the M&G story indicates, that the potential truce is the result of Thabo Mbeki's work as SADC's chosen broker, all the better.
But let's not get carried away. Mugabe has spoken of conciliation in the past only to continue on his chosen path whenever he felt it necessary to do so. Mugabe can afford to display largesse. By and large he has won. Giving some concessions to an opposition he has effectively broken is a far cry from Zimbabwe's crisis being over.
After all, also in this morning's papers came news that Mugabe's government is threatening to arrest white farmers resisting evictions from new land targeted for black farmers. Land reform in the former settler colonies of Africa is a vexatious issue. Africans have every right to look for reform policies that will allow blacks, and especially farmers, to secure land on which to work and live. But those policies need to be coherent and, as much as possible, fair and without the threat of violence and coercion. Mugabe's land reform policies were so long a chimera that only appeared periodically as a threat against white farmers whenever Mugabe felt the need to mobilize his base that when he finally began to enact slapdash policies, they proved to be capricious and chaotic. Whatever the necessity of land reform in Zimbabwe, Mugabe's policies have proven disastrous and have fueled the economic collapse that has characterized most of the last decade.
Furthermore, whatever the good news coming from Thabo Mbeki's political mediation, most Zimbabweans are little concerned with politics-qua-politics right now. And so while the M&G carried that good news forward, it also reminds us that fundamentally, Zimbabwe is an authoritarian state. A new report from the Human Rights Forum argues that torture, assault, unlawful detention and other violations of human rights are increasing apace.
The HRF report indicates that much of the source for this human rights crisis stems from the political instability, and so perhaps the deal that Mbeki hath wrought will help to stabilize the political situation and in so doing alleviate the human suffering across the country. Any positive progress is a cause for at least tempered optimism. And if Mbeki's work really is bearing fruit, it will once again prove the essential role that South Africa must play in the region. But success in Zimbabwe is more than likely going to come in small, incremental, and sometimes barely discernible steps. And even as the country takes those steps, there will be steps backward as well. Indeed, as long as Mugabe is in charge, the question as to whether the shifts in momentum take the country forward or in reverse might be impossible to differentiate.
