Zimbabwe -- The Limits of Reform

And so it ends....

News 24 (South Africa) reports:

Harare - Zimbabwe's southern African neighbours on Sunday endorsed elections that handed a massive victory to President Robert Mugabe's ruling party, saying they reflected "the will of the people."

An 11-country observer mission from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) brushed aside opposition complaints of irregularities in a quarter of the constituencies, citing a lack of proof.

Read it here.

And:

The WaPo reports:

By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
MondayApril 4, 2005

HARARE, Zimbabwe, April 3 -- Zimbabwe's opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, ruled out organizing demonstrations against what he called the "fraudulent" results of last week's parliamentary elections, saying his party could not mount a protest large enough to force President Robert Mugabe from power.

Read it here.

Many in the blogosphere are enraged at this, but it was to be expected.

Mugabe, despite his many crimes and the incompetence of his regime, is still remembered in Zimbabwe as an anti-colonialist warrior hero. Moreover he has strong tribal support. His campaign of expropriating white land holdings, while economically disastrous, has been politically popular. And, he successfully played the race card throughout the election, arguing that the reformers would restore white supremacy. What is more, these charges resonated with a South African leadership that has strong memories of apartheid.

And, of course, he has shown himself in the past to be utterly ruthless in dealing with dissent. This seems to have intimidated his opponents to some extent.

This nut was just too hard to crack and the democratic reform imperative reached its limits in Zimbabwe, as it earlier did in Belorus and might be doing in Kyrgyzstan.

UPDATE:

Some people seem to be having trouble accepting that reform has limits. As in this site, linked by Instapundit.

Heather Hurlburt blames the media, including the blogosphere, for focusing insufficient attention on the suffering of the Zimbabwe people. As an example she cites Charlayne Hunter Galt on NPR. She concludes by blaming people in the media who credit President Bush with fostering democracy for ignoring the long struggles of people in Georgia, Zimbabwe and Lebanon.

She seems to feel that if only the western media could focus on the problems of the area the political will to solve them would emerge and all would be set right. This, I would argue, is naive.

1) She is contradicting herself -- first she implies that President Bush has not played a major role in promoting democracy throughout the world, preferring to credit the long struggles of the people themselves. But now, she argues that political will in the West, as exemplified by President Bush, is the crucial missing ingredient.

2) She romanticizes "the people" of Zimbabwe. Politics throughout the region is complex -- pitting tribe against tribe, race against race, and urban populations against those in rural areas. In this fractured climate there is no coherent, deeply felt, and widely accepted imperative for democratic change. The last such movement in the region was the campaign against apartheid in South Africa, the memory of which benefits Mugabe, not his opponents.

3) She recognizes that "Mugabe still enjoys almost-mythic status for leading guerrilla forces in Zimbabwe's war of liberation and sheltering South African ANC members during apartheid," but fails to appreciate the importance of that observation. Mugabe is a national hero who cannot be easily displaced. He may disgust us, and the white remnant in Zimbabwe, but his popularity, especially in rural areas, is undisputable. Throughout the campaign Mugabe ruthlessly, and sometimes ludicrously, played the race card. Because of the racial history of that region, the ploy, however ridiculous it seemed to western observers, worked. The rural constituencies turned out to vote for the man who fought white supremacy.

So it is not the fault of the western media, or even of the democratic leadership which suffered a failure of nerve, but the simple fact that a broad popular movement for real democracy just didn't materialize.

Another criticism, also linked by Instapundit, comes from Heather's colleague at Democracy Arsenal, Suzanne Nossel.

She calls for the Bush Administration to step up and demand new elections. Otherwise, she argues, the opportunity for democratic reform will have passed. Read it here.

I hate to tell you this, Suzanne. It had already passed by Sunday, if in fact it had ever existed. And there is little that the US can realistically do to change that.

What leverage the US can have in this situation I fail to see. Are we going to impose more sanctions on a people already suffering in extremis? Mugabe has regional support and that's all he needs and he can safely ignore demands for reform emanating from Washington and London.

AND THERE'S THIS:

The Christian Science Monitor explains:

Why Zimbabwe Is Not Ukraine

[A]part from the predetermined election and the yearnings of a suppressed people, the ingredients that allowed peaceful, democratic change in Ukraine are largely absent in Zimbabwe.

Viktor Yushchenko, who suffered near-fatal dioxin poisoning in his campaign to unseat Ukraine's corrupt and authoritarian president, had the support of masses of protesters. But those were healthy, well-fed masses. In Zimbabwe, half the country is on the verge of acute hunger, and the official HIV infection rate is 27 percent.

Mr. Yushchenko also had the backing of key institutions. The judiciary ruled in favor of a new election, and Ukraine's security forces refused to turn their guns on fellow citizens.

Zimbabwe's courts have yet to take up the opposition's legal challenges to the 2002 election, and its leader has been quite willing to allow violence against the opposition. Meanwhile, Zimbabwe has been given a whitewash by election monitors and neighbors.

Read it here.