Published in the Washington Post by Michael Gerson
A nation is dying, its leader a tyrant, its neighbors indifferent
Thursday, June 14, 2007
WASHINGTON – When I talked earlier this week with David Coltart, a
Zimbabwean member of parliament and human rights lawyer, his office in
Bulawayo had been without power for five hours. The central business
district of Zimbabwe’s second-largest city, he said, was “a ghost town,”
with “hardly anyone on the streets” and “signs everywhere of total economic
collapse.”
Four days previously the price for a liter of gasoline had been 55,000
Zimbabwean dollars; that morning gas stations were advertising 85,000
dollars. Inflation, by conservative estimates, gallops at 3,700 percent.
Perhaps 31/2 million people — about one-fourth of the population — have
left the country, in a massive drain of youth and ambition. “Land reform”
has been a land grab for ruling party elites, who are proving that
intimidation and brutality are powerless to make the corn grow. Orphans,
many with the signs of childhood malnutrition, have begun coming to Mr.
Coltart’s parliamentary office for help.
Zimbabweans have discovered with horror that their founding father, Robert
Mugabe, is an abusive parent, as if George Washington had grown mad with
power, expropriated Monticello and given Jefferson a good, instructive
beating.
With elections for president and parliament set for next year, Mr. Mugabe
can hardly run on his record. So he has kicked off the campaign season by
attempting to destroy his opposition and rig the election in his favor. In
early March, his police crushed a protest rally and began arresting and
torturing political opponents. In response to international criticism, Mr.
Mugabe coolly replied, “We hope they have learned their lesson. If they have
not, then they will get similar treatment.” Constitutional changes are
moving forward that will allow Mr. Mugabe to handpick his successor. Next
week parliament will debate measures that permit the interception of e-mails
and the suppression of democratic groups, with the excuse of fighting
“foreign terrorism.”
Mr. Mugabe, having spent a lifetime consuming his country, now seems
determined to drink it to the dregs.
For years, nations in the region did nothing in response, and called their
silence “quiet diplomacy.” More recently, those efforts have progressed from
nonexistent to inadequate. After the recent round of beatings and arrests, a
summit of the Southern African Development Community — a 14-country
regional organization — appointed South African President Thabo Mbeki to
mediate the political conflict in Zimbabwe. Yet the summit refused to
clearly criticize the regime’s human rights violations. “We got full
backing,” boasted Mr. Mugabe, “not even one criticized our actions.”
South African diplomats tell American officials that there is no serious
alternative to the regime — that the opposition is weak and divided. But
perhaps that opposition is dispirited because in March and April of this
year, 600 of its leaders were arrested or abducted, 300 hospitalized and
three killed. Any hope of “mediation” in this atmosphere is a sham. How do
you sit down at the negotiating table when one side is using a truncheon on
the other?
The precondition for mediation is an end to beatings and torture on Mr.
Mugabe’s part — and the South Africans should insist on it. They should
also start considering more muscular options if Mr. Mugabe continues on his
current path. South Africa has tremendous leverage if it chooses to use it.
A cutoff of energy, fuel and trade could end Mr. Mugabe’s regime in a matter
of days.
The hesitance of many democracies to confidently promote democracy is one of
the great frustrations of recent years. The South Korean government does its
best to downplay massive human rights abuses in the North. India and Japan
do business with the brutal regime in Burma. It would be progress if South
African diplomats even raised the issue of human rights in Zimbabwe and
began showing the kind of moral clarity that once benefited their own cause.
In Zimbabwe, a collapsing economy, malnutrition, high rates of disease and a
failing health care system have produced some of the lowest life
expectancies in the world — 34 years for women and 37 years for men.
So Mr. Mugabe, at age 83, has achieved a rare distinction in the history of
tyranny — living twice as long as his citizens are expected to live.
According to Mr. Coltart, the most vivid image of Zimbabwe is found in the
cemeteries, which “are filled to overflowing.” “There are burials at any
time of the day,” he told me, “row after row of fresh dirt, with no
headstones, because the poor can’t afford them … It is the way,” he said,
“that I imagine the Battle of the Somme.”
That terrible battle during World War I lasted 142 days. Zimbabwe has
suffered for years — and the burials go on.