Prominent British blogger Norm Geras has looked at the Zimbabwe power-sharing negotiations, and especially SADC's recent attempts to intervene, and has come away unimpressed:
The power-sharing deal in Zimbabwe, for everything that was wrong with it in requiring a compromise between those who had won the recent elections and the architects of the country's decline who had lost them, did at least envisage some power-sharing, opening hopes thereby of the start of a genuine transition: Mugabe was to retain his hold on the army, but Morgan Tsvangirai and the MDC would have control of the police. Mugabe subsequently modified the deal in a clever way by deciding to keep the police as well as the army for Zanu-PF. This weekend the Southern African Development Community met to consider the matter. They didn't insist upon Mugabe backing down. No, they insisted only on a government of national unity in Zimbabwe being formed immediately, with ‘control of the disputed home affairs ministry, which oversees the police’ to be… shared between Mugabe and the MDC. A grand regional solution.
This, of course, is the problem with toothless intervention. Without will and without enforcement mechanisms and without even a viable stick, international organizations, such as SADC, that ought to have at least regional leverage, can exacerbate existing situations when tyrants like Mugabe realize that there is no cost to violating agreements. For such organizations, there needs to be something of a Hippocratic Oath: Do No Harm.
We might be reminded again of the need for SADC and other groups to remember that they must always keep in mind that they are engaged in determining what is possible rather than what is desirable, and in expanding what fits into that former category. SADC is now talking about augmenting United Nations peacekeeping forces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For IRIN reports that while SADC may be willing, their military forces are also weak, and that such intervention might thus prove worthless, again undermining a regional body that cannot afford to be made to look any weaker. And shody intervention could well fall into the category of doing harm in the long run.
