I cannot imagine the tightrope that Morgan Tsvangirai walks on a daily basis.
Tsvangirai, the Movement of Democratic Change (MDC) Prime Minister of Zimbabwe who shares power with Robert Mugabe in little more than theory, knows that the thugs of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) are always just outside the door. The police and military and the so-called “veterans” of the liberation war of the 1970s are overwhelmingly in Mugabe’s corner. Or Mugabe is simply placating them — it’s hard to know which is tail and which is dog in that relationship. Either way, Tsvangirai knows that whatever power he holds in a coalition government with Mugabe is illusive.
And so it often seems as if Tsvangirai talks out of both sides of his mouth. The past week has been illustrative of Tsvangirai’s Janus face. At a conference in Johannesburg Tsvangirai spoke about Mugabe the hero, liberator and founding father of Zimbabwe. There was method to his seeming madness of course — Tsvangirai was really appealing to Mugabe’s considerable vanity but then pulled the bait and switch, using his flattery to assert that while things have gone badly awry it is not too late for Mugabe to play the hero again.This is Tsvangirai holding out the carrot of conciliation in hopes of achieving his goals.
This week, in the wake of violence and other abuses against Mugabe’s critics, Tsvangirai has warned that he will not participate in a presidential election in 2011 if the threat of politically-motivated violence continues.This is the stick that holds the carrot at a remove.
Tsvangirai did a similar thing before the runoff in 2008 guaranteeing his defeat, though given ZANU-PF’s control of the electoral mechanisms, Mugabe “victory” was probably an inevitability then as it might well be next year. One cannot question Tsvangirai’s courage in the face of ZANU-PF thuggery. But it seems to me that if the message is that violence will scare off MDC and thus forestall a serious campaign against Mugabe, then violence there will be. Violence is, after all, the coin of the realm in present-day Zimbabwean politics, and nearly all of it comes from Mugabe’s supporters (or from those with whom Mugabe has aligned his political fate — again, it is nearly impossible at this stage to know the difference.)
