Robert Mugabe was received as a hero this week by fellow African leaders following his blunt-force victory in a no-contest poll in Zimbabwe, where he remains dictator. The venue was the African summit, where the heads of the continent's 53 nations gathered just after Zimbabwe's phony elections. Many of the African "presidents" share Mugabe's methods, so I guess they do really understand him:
President Omar Bongo of Gabon, who has held power for 41 years and won a series of widely criticised elections, gave his public backing for Mr Mugabe as leaders met in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
"He was elected, he took an oath, and he is here with us, so he is President and we cannot ask him more," said Mr Bongo. "He conducted elections and I think he won."
Mr Bongo added that African leaders would not allow Western governments to dictate their view of Zimbabwe. "We have even received Mugabe as a hero," he said. "We understand the attacks but this is not the way they should react. What they've done is, in our opinion, a little clumsy, and we think they could have consulted us first."
But the real shame is that the few real democrats (small d) in Africa, like South Africa's Thabo Mbeke, couldn't find the strength to do much more than complain:
Mr Mugabe has faced fierce criticism from his fellow Africans. The AU's election observers ruled that Zimbabwe's presidential contest did not meet democratic "standards", the first time they have ever denounced an African poll.
Raila Odinga, Kenya's prime minister, urged the AU to respond by taking punitive steps against Mr Mugabe. "They should suspend him and send peace forces to Zimbabwe to ensure free and fair elections," he said.
While many are deeply unhappy about Zimbabwe's crisis, African leaders are unlikely to snub Mr Mugabe or pass judgement on his country's crisis at this summit. Instead, they will probably confine themselves to urging Mr Mugabe and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change to negotiate.
South Africa's foreign ministry said that talks on the creation of a "transitional government" to cope with Zimbabwe's "challenges" were needed.
The private frustrations that President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa has felt towards Zimbabwe's regime have now emerged. In 2001, he wrote a 37-page "discussion document" for Mr Mugabe's Zanu-PF party setting out a series of stark warnings and recommendations.
"Of critical importance is the obvious necessity to ensure that Zimbabwe does not end up in a situation of isolation, confronted by an array of international forces she cannot defeat, condemned to sink into an ever-deepening social and economic crisis," wrote Mr Mbeki.
... a lame-duck President, required to step down next year, and he has lost control of the A.N.C. party apparatus to his chief rival, Jacob Zuma. But his coddling of Mugabe has made him complicit in Zimbabwe’s devastation. So perhaps there is some justice in the fact that the Zimbabwean crisis he denies threatens to become the defining crisis of his Presidency. After all, the recent mayhem in South Africa only serves Mugabe, creating a distraction as he bleeds Zimbabwe in the final stretch of the election, with forebodings of greater slaughter hanging over the outcome. ...
... though to be fair, the Brits don't do much themselves beyond complain, for fear of looking like the colonial power trying to butt back in. Nor has the United Nations been much help (surprise, surprise...) And the Bush administration? Put it this way: like the late Saddam Hussein, Mugabe is a thug, who holds pretend elections and terrifies his own people into knuckling under (his militias burned a political opponent's wife alive this election cycle.) Unlike Saddam, he has no oil that Bush and Cheney's friends in the Industry want to exploit for their own gain...
Earlier, Odinga broke ranks with other Africa leaders following Mugabe's widely discredited re-election as the Zimbabwean president.
Speaking from Nairobi, he said: "The African Union should not accept or entertain Mugabe.
"He should be suspended until he allows the African Union to facilitate free and fair elections between him and his opponent."
Yesterday, Odinga called for AU peacekeepers to be sent to Zimbabwe and the UN urged the union to negotiate a political settlement.
But Odinga is largely alone, and few other African nations have the strength or stability to challenge the status quo. And with South Africa being the strongest country, economically and politically, in sub-Saharan Africa, it will continue to bear the brunt of criticism for Africa's collective inaction. That same New Yorker article, written by Philip Gourevich, concluded:
To watch the intertwined agonies of South Africa and Zimbabwe today is to see what Frantz Fanon meant when he wrote, in “The Wretched of the Earth,” that “the last battle of the colonized against the colonizer will often be the fight of the colonized against each other.” Mbeki and Mugabe belong to a generation of liberation fighters who seem incapable of seeing the world through any lens beyond that of anti-colonial struggle, and who invoke their revolutionary bona fides as immunity against all political criticism and all challengers. Their time has passed.
Pity no one has told the dictators.
Meanwhile, back at the AU summit, Mugabe tells his critics to "go hang."
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"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
