There is a legitimate debate to be had about sanctions against Zimbabwe. My own view is that relaxing the sanctions is the only way to give Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and his faction of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) the space to operate and to ensure that the unity government has a chance to work (and eventually to give way to a legitimate democratically elected government). But Robert Mugabe continues to loom as an unchecked wild card. And Mugabe surely loomed large in the minds of the European Union visitors, Karel De Gucht, the EU’s development and humanitarian aid commissioner, and Gunilla Carlsson, the development co-operation minister of Sweden, which currently holds the rotating EU presidency, who spent the weekend in Zimbabwe to assess the state of Zimbabwe’s political and economic affairs for themselves.
De Gucht and Carlsson completed their visit and concluded that Mugabe is indeed a barrier to lifting sanctions. As a result, the EU’s sanctions remain in place, with “much work left to be done.” And no wonder. In the days leading up to the visit Mugabe denounced the “bloody whites” of the EU, the state media reported that Zimbabwe would demand an apology for the sanctions from the EU delegation, and a Mugabe ally declared that the sanctions were undermining the country’s government. The EU can be forgiven for not taking Mugabe’s welcome to them at face value.
Certainly not all organizations, bodies, or heads of state agree with the EU decision. South African President Jacob Zuma made clear his hope that the EU would end the sanctions. And the World Bank is going to provide grants to communal farmers, albeit by bypassing the government. But it is simply untenable to argue that the EU is baseless or unjustified in making its decision. A year into the experiment the unity government is racked by divisions. And only the blindest moral equivalizer or ZANU-PF partisan could honestly say that the biggest source of problems is anyone other than the same person who has been the source of the bulk of Zimbabwe’s misery for more than a decade, and that’s Mugabe. Morgan Tsvangirai, whose courage in confronting Mugabe seems to have no end, has tried to turn up the heat in the wake of the EU’s decision, warning Mugabe that “you misjudge me at your peril.” Mugabe has historically been impervious to such rising temperatures, however. Indeed he is usually the one cranking up the heat in the blast oven of Zimbabwean politics.