Sunday Telegraph
15 February 2009
By Graham Boynton
The new Zimbabwe was born last Wednesday with a whimper rather than with whoops of delight, and then turned to dark farce as the week progressed.
The Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai was sworn in by the old despot, Robert Mugabe, in a joyless ceremony in a tent. Mugabe’s wife, the ghastly couture-clad Grace, refused to shake hands with Tsvangirai.
Then on Friday, before he was to be sworn in as deputy agriculture minister, the MDC’s Roy Bennett was arrested and has now been charged with treason. And at the latest count at least 14 of Tsvangirai’s party activists remained in police detention – amid accusations of torture – in spite of the fact that their release was supposed to be a precondition for the country’s new era of coalition government.
Sceptical observers – and anyone who has followed the rape of Zimbabwe over the past decade can be forgiven for being sceptical – take these signals as evidence that neither Mugabe nor his hardline Zanu-PF inner circle are going to honour the content or the spirit of the coalition agreement.
Even if the 85-year-old ruler is wilting slightly after almost 30 years of running this once prosperous country into the ground, the Zanu-PF hawks who surround him are desperate to hang onto power. For although this power-sharing deal, forced on him by fellow African leaders, may have saved Mugabe from a trial in the Hague, his generals may not escape prosecution for crimes against humanity.
Tsvangirai and close advisers have taken a great risk. One member of the new unity cabinet, who spoke on condition of anonymity, has said that the success or failure of the coalition government would be clear within two weeks.
David Coltart, the Bulawayo MDC Senator who is part of the smaller MDC faction led by the new Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara, is more circumspect. He says that while he recognises huge problems “that even the finest government in the world would find enormously difficult to deal with” there has been a significant step forward. He says it represents a substantial reduction in Zanu-PF’s power base and will hopefully begin to isolate the hardliners.
It is now widely believed that Mugabe and the hardliners did not really think Tsvangirai would sign the coalition agreement, and that the point of their rolling campaign of arrests, torture and murders of MDC officials and supporters was to dissuade him from doing so.
However, with the support of African Union countries such as Botswana, Zambia and Tanzania, he has outflanked Zanu-PF, and with half Mugabe’s ministers having lost their posts to the MDC the first signs of cracks in the ruling elite are now expected to emerge.
Now it is time for the international community to share Tsvangirai’s risk. It is too easy for Gordon Brown and David Miliband to utter cautionary remarks, as they both did last week, and play the roles of cool Western politicians, but what the people of Zimbabwe need right now is for Tsvangirai’s bold move to be seen to be having an impact on this broken country.
To that end, in his first speech he implored the civil servants, the teachers and the hospital workers to return to work and promised to pay them foreign currency rather than the now valueless Zimbabwe dollar. The assumption here is that he has received promises of financial support from African Union allies, but to maintain the momentum the support of the EU countries and Obama’s born-again America is required.
Unfortunately, our recent history of helping Zimbabwe has been uniformly dreadful. For the past eight years – since the first farm invasions – the international community has vacillated, fidgeted and fulminated and achieved nothing. Thus Mugabe, his shopping wife and his larcenous inner circle have roamed the world seemingly free to spend their Treasury’s money and to have their children educated at our most expensive schools and universities.
Now we can make up for these years of inactivity, during which this lovely country has plunged from prosperity to bankruptcy, disease and famine, by getting behind its rehabilitation.
In Africa everything is possible. One only has to look back to apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, when the idea of Nelson Mandela being freed, never mind actually leading the country, seemed as fanciful as a modern-day banker handing back his bonus out of guilt.
Post-Mandela South Africa is a world apart from the country run by the granite apartheidists and it is to that miraculous transition beleaguered Zimbabweans look in hope. Indeed, at his first rally as Prime Minister last week Morgan Tsvangirai reminded his supporters that it was 19 years ago to the day that Mandela was freed from prison and warned them that this did not signify the end of his people’s struggle for democracy.
So, too, with Zimbabwe. This ungainly attempt to form a coalition government with the architects of the country’s downfall is fraught with difficulties but it is a first step. This is Tsvangirai’s interim government before the next election, and if he holds it together in the face of Zanu-PF’s determination to wreck it then Zimbabwe has a glimmer of hope. That is why the West must now support him unequivocally.