Telegraph
By Graham Boynton
28 November 2009
Today in Trinidad the Commonwealth leaders will for the first time in some years discuss whether or not they should allow their delinquent outcast – Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe – back into the 53-member club.
That this debate is actually taking place while the 85-year-old Mugabe is still president of the country he has ruined so dramatically is testimony both to the Commonwealth’s ability to forgive and forget and equally to the wily dictator’s instinct for survival. (Mugabe withdrew Zimbabwe’s membership in December 2003, in protest at its continued suspension for rigging the country’s elections.)
Despite setting new standards of tyrannical rule, socio-economic destruction and spectacular accumulation of personal wealth on a continent whose political leaders have cornered the market in such political malfeasance, Mugabe has managed not only to hang onto power but now appears to be a candidate for rehabilitation.
The Commonwealth caveat is that readmission will be linked to the reforms that Mugabe promised when he signed the so-called Global Political Agreement more than a year ago. The GPA was intended to be a power-sharing agreement that would lead to the completion of a new constitution by August 2010, followed by free and fair elections. Human rights abuses, state control of the media, illegal farm invasions and other undemocratic behaviour that has become the norm under Mugabe’s ZANU-PF regime for the past ten years was also to be abandoned with the forming of a new coalition government.
Although Mugabe reluctantly swore in his old enemy Morgan Tsvangirai as prime minister in February, there have been problems in the coalition government from the outset, and Mugabe’s ongoing autocratic behaviour offered sceptics evidence that he was using Tsvangirai and the illusion of power-sharing as a way of re-establishing himself on the world stage as an elder statesman rather than his current status of power-mad pariah. Insiders say that the travel sanctions imposed by the EU on Mugabe and many of his inner circle are a key factor in his show of democratisation. “Mugabe and his wife want to go shopping in Bond Street and the Rue Faubourg again. It’s as simple as that,” said one insider this week.
Kate Hoey, the Labour MP an outspoken anti-Mugabe campaigner who made a number of clandestine trips to Zimbabwe before travelling there this year for the first time at the invitation of Tsvangirai’s MDC, says Mugabe “will be thrilled and delighted that the Commonwealth is talking about Zimbabwe coming back. But even though on the surface things appear a bit better inside Zimbabwe, the underlying problems are all still there -and Mugabe ignores international opinion anyway. Gordon Brown should use this Commonwealth conference to put pressure on the other African leaders.”
A vivid example of the dysfunctional nature of the coalition government occurred last month when Manfred Nowak, the UN special rapporteur on torture, arrived in Harare with his team at the invitation of Tsvangirai and was denied entry on the orders of Mugabe. Nowak and his team spent the night at Harare airport’s VIP lounge while mediators attempted to negotiate his entry into the country but at dawn Mugabe’s will prevailed and they were put on the first flight out of the country.
An angry Mr Nowak said he had never been treated more rudely by any government and that “it is for me an alarming signal in relation to the non working of the unity government. If the prime minister can invite a UN representative and is not able to get clearance from his ZANU PF colleagues, this sheds light on where the power lies at the moment.”
However, this week Morgan Tsvangirai said that he welcomed the move by the Commonwealth leaders as “a sign of confidence in the new coalition government despite the problems we are facing with the rule of law and the restoration of basic freedoms. Although the process is slow, it is an experiment in peaceful transition in Africa and Zimbabweans should be proud of what we have achieved so far.”
The South African political commentator Allister Sparks agrees that Tsvangirai faces “a daily uphill battle as Mugabe and his people are systematically violating all the GPA agreements.” However, Sparks says, there has been “some progress, most notably, in the sense that Tsvangirai and his finance minister Tendai Biti, by abandoning the country’s worthless currency and dollarizing the economy, have been able to bypass the Reserve Bank, which has until now served as the piggy bank of the Mugabe regime. The economy seems to be slowly starting up again and there are now goods back on the shelves.”
This week I spoke to a Bulawayo businessman who agreed that “the economy is just starting to wake up again.” However, this was from a very low base, he said, as businesses in the country’s second city had all but closed down for more than a year. “In this place the only activity has been from NGOs who are here sorting out cholera, dealing with water filtration and all the other social problems caused by a collapsed economy.”
It was then that the businessman, who asked not to be identified, revealed that two weeks earlier an intruder had broken into his house and stabbed him 20 times, leaving him for dead on his living room floor. A typically phlegmatic white Zimbabwean, he said it was sad that things had come to this in Bulawayo, once a sleepy town that was a model of law and order, “but these guys are driven to crime because there have been no jobs, no food on their families’ tables and no prospects. But we are just, in the last few months, getting the sense that there is a change.”
Many Zimbabweans now believe there is a change, a sense of momentum that, despite the obduracy of Mugabe and the ZANU PF old guard, suggests the corner has been turned. It is for this reason that Senator David Coltart, the education minister in the new coalition government, says that a return to the Commonwealth is vital for the long-term rehabilitation of the country. “While I understand the Commonwealth’s concerns about issues of governance, I have no doubt that being inside the Commonwealth will help us solve our problems. We always knew that the ZANU-PF hardliners would do everything to undermine and destroy the (GPA) agreement. People who don’t want us back in the Commonwealth are playing into the hands of those hardliners.”
Meanwhile, inside Zimbabwe Mugabe is, as always, planning for the future. Earlier this month he was photographed inspecting a passing out parade of the latest graduates of his “Green Bombers” youth league, an indoctrination programme that costs an estimated $6 million a year. The Green Bombers are the enforcers of ZANU PF’s hardline policies, deployed in opposition strongholds and in the rural areas far beyond of the reach of the international media, terrorising ordinary citizens and suppressing by force any dissent.
If Mugabe does live long enough to contest another election – the one that, according to the GPA, will be free and fair – Zimbabweans fear it will be preceded by another campaign of killing, kidnapping and torture at the hands of the Green Bombers.
Zimbabwe has a long way to go to regain its liberation.