No democracy, no change

To the surprise of practically no one, Robert Mugabe was declared the winner of Zimbabwe’s presidential election on March 13. Election officials said he had taken 57% of the votes, compared with 42% for his opponent, former union organizer Morgan Tsvangirai.

While there may have been no surprise, there was definite disbelief. Virtually all observers of the election agreed the figures were pure fiction. For years, Mugabe’s government and his party, the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front, have been manipulating the election and sponsoring violence against political, economic, and ethnic targets.

Repression during the campaign, unfairness during the polling, and last year’s wholesale seizure of commercial farms in the name of “land reform” have overshadowed a longer-term campaign on the part of ZANU-PF to establish itself as a government-for-eternity. In the 1980s, ZANU, with a largely Shona power base, supervised violence against the Ndebele minority, which had supported ZANU’s then-rival, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union. More recently, the government has attacked the independent judiciary and driven judges from office, to be replaced by more compliant ones.

ZANU-PF’s thugs, with the connivance and sometimes open support of the police and armed forces — which see themselves not as the servants of the state but as the servants of ZANU-PF — were abroad in Assembly elections in mid-2000 to harass and intimidate the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. The violence has been stepped up since that time, taking in the farm invasions last year and the presidential elections last weekend.

Observer groups from outside the country were generally agreed that the election had been contrived to produce a win by ZANU-PF, that the MDC’s leadership had been systematically interfered with and that the MDC’s supporters had been intimidated.

African observer teams were less critical, evidently out of a sense of political loyalty to Mugabe, the “Young Old Man” and southern Africa’s living icon of anti-colonialism. Samuel Motsuenyane, leader of the South African Observer Mission, was able to muster only a thin endorsement of the result, saying the opposition had “actively participated in the campaign and in the elections.” He said he hoped “the world will respect [Zimbabweans’] verdict.”

Motsuenyane is not some African National Congress bagman sent to paper over the flaws in the Zimbabwe election: he was head of a commission of inquiry that exposed torture in ANC camps during the apartheid years, when the party was running a terrorist war from the old “front line.”

Still, his call for the world to accept a result that is widely believed to have been manufactured by menace and dishonesty points up how sensitive African governments are about First World criticism. Some of that is the fear of stones felt by occupants of glass houses: African governments whose own electoral legitimacy might not bear the closest scrutiny don’t like to be reminded of the fact. But some comes out of the sense that the developed world, and particularly the old colonial powers of Europe, are still treating Africans like children who can’t manage their own affairs. That perception is undeserved — European diplomacy for years has bent itself into the oddest shapes to avoid criticizing African dictatorships — but it is so deeply ingrained among African leaders that it is nearly impossible to dislodge.

It must not stop the world from taking action against the ZANU-PF government now. The one-party Zimbabwean state is unlikely to stop at stealing the election, taking over farms, and repressing the opposition. The year before last, Mugabe openly stated his intention to take over mining assets in the same way farms were invaded.

The result will matter to the mining industry, but much more will it matter to Zimbabweans, who have seen their economy nearly destroyed by ZANU-PF’S economic mismanagement, its foreign adventurism in the Congo, and its sponsorship of farm invasion. Zimbabwe’s one other major export sector needs to be preserved if the country is to survive.

Meanwhile, in the developed world’s last strongholds of romanticism about the Liberation Struggle, two cries go up. First, criticizing the recent election is a neo-colonialist attempt specific to Zimbabwe, that the country be pressured to conform to 21st-century exploitation economics; to take one example, nobody has criticized Zambia’s badly managed election of last December. In this, the Old Left’s continuing vanity — that only they actually mean what they say — is on indiscreet display. What is material is that criticisms of ZANU-PF’s theft of the election and the government’s human rights abuses are valid, full stop.

The second cry is that the developed world is aghast not at human rights violations in Zimbabwe but at the black takeover of white-owned farms, and human-rights issues are just a veneer over the desire to maintain white economic power. Nonsense: the butt of violence during both the election campaign and the land invasions has been, overwhelmingly, black Zimbabweans identified with either the MDC, the Ndebele, or the agricultural and urban working class.

The world is right to criticize the Zimbabwean elections, the continuing violence, and the orchestrated destruction of lawful institutions. We must hope ears on every continent will be opened to the truth: that a decent and honest Zimbabwean people deserves better.