The number one priority is to remove Mugabe from power. Dealing with his many crimes may have to come later.
The Guardian – Comment Is Free – 4 April 2008
President Robert Mugabe is on his way out. The Zimbabwean tyrant and his political party, ZANU-PF, have lost the election, clearly and conclusively. Even his three-card box of tricks – intimidating the media and opposition, bribing the electorate with land and food, and stuffing the ballot boxes – was not enough to secure him victory.
The people of Zimbabwe have spoken: there has been a mass rejection of Mugabe’s many years of fiddled elections, economic mismanagement and human rights abuses.
The election results were posted at many polling stations the day after the elections. Most showed substantial wins for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in both the presidential and parliamentary ballots. The delayed release of the ballot results by the Mugabe-controlled Election Commission has been a vain attempt to massage the results in favour of ZANU-PF.
For Mugabe’s men, removing large numbers of MDC votes and secretly disposing of them, and then substituting fake ballot papers in favour of ZANU-PF, was a task too big to complete in a short space of time for both the presidential and parliamentary elections. Moreover, the delays in declaring the results have fuelled suspicions of large-scale voting fraud and this has left Mugabe’s men in an embarrassing quandary: they don’t mind rigging elections but they don’t like to be seen as having done so. Even they care about issues of credibility.
Whatever the results that are finally announced by the Election Commission, we are now witnessing the end game of Mugabe’s 28-year rule. The delay in announcing the results and the failure of Mugabe to claim victory is a sign of defeat and weakness. It also signifies possible splits within ZANU-PF about how to respond to their party’s electoral meltdown.
Mugabe’s end may come quickly if the ZANU-PF leadership withdraw their support. Alternatively, the finale demise of the liberation hero turned despot could be long drawn out if Mugabe’s cronies decide to stand defiant and defend their man.
There are a number of possible scenarios:
First, the Election Commission could announce an election stalemate: that no presidential candidate has won more than 50% of the vote, and therefore order a run-off election between Mugabe and the MDC candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai. ZANU-PF’s hope is that next time, without the distraction of having to simultaneously rig the parliamentary election, they will have the people and resources to fix the second presidential vote.
The second scenario is that at Mugabe’s instigation, the Election Commission could declare the recent poll unfree and unfair (without specifying the culprits). It could then order a new poll, with a promise to clean up the electoral register and the vote counting process. Since this would take time to put in place, the Election Commission could set the new presidential poll date in three or more month’s time. In this scenario, a month or so later, Mugabe could retire on health grounds and be replaced by a less tainted ZANU-PF leader who might stand a better chance of winning (especially with more sophisticated and discrete ballot rigging); thereby retaining power for ZANU-PF and protecting Mugabe’s legacy.
A third possible scenario is that Mugabe might agree to stand down in exchange for immunity from prosecution for crimes against humanity. They fact that he is apparently
contemplating such a deal is a tacit admission of his guilt. He knows that he has committed crimes under Zimbabwean and international law. That’s why he wants a deal.
Mugabe has good reasons to fear prosecution. He could be arraigned on charges of war crimes, such as the massacres in Matabeleland in the 1980s when around 20,000 civilians were slaughtered on the suspicion that they supported Mugabe’s rival liberation hero, Joshua Nkomo. There are also torture and rape charges, arising from the mass torture and rape of political detainees. And there are charges of kidnapping, detaining without trial and murdering of oppositionists.
These abuses have been confirmed by a wide range of human rights organisations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
http://thereport.amnesty.org/eng/Regions/Africa/Zimbabwe
http://hrw.org/englishwr2k7/docs/2007/01/11/zimbab14720.htm
They say Mugabe’s regime is guilty of detention without trial, torture, rape, extra-judicial killings, media censorship, financial corruption, election fraud, mass starvation and the violent suppression of strikes and protests.
Mugabe is not the world’s only tyrant and not the worst. Nevertheless, he has killed more black Africans than even the murderous apartheid regime in South Africa. His slaughter of 20,000 civilians in Matabeleland was the equivalent of a Sharpeville massacre every day for over nine months. Once a freedom fighter, he became the moral equivalent of PW Botha, but with a black face – only many times worse, particularly over the last decade.
As well as Mugabe, at least 500 top ZANU-PF leaders, police and military officials are directly implicated in serious human rights abuses – plus several thousand lower level party activists, militia members and war veterans.
Should Mugabe and his accomplices get immunity from prosecution in exchange for stepping down and going quietly?
The number one priority right now is to remove Mugabe from power. This is the most likely way, although no absolute guarantee, of unravelling the ZANU-PF apparatus of fraud and repression. With Mugabe gone, the ruling party will lose its main authority. Lacking another giant Mugabe-like leader, ZANU-PF will be severely weakened. This will be good for democratic governance and accountability.
If giving Mugabe immunity from prosecution for crimes against humanity is the way to ensure that he goes quickly and quietly, and avoids the risk of Kenya-style blood-letting, then it might be the best option. But this is, of course, something that the people of Zimbabwe must decide.
What happens in the long-term is something else. Even if an MDC government grants him immunity, this deal is not binding on the international community. Under international human rights law, such as the UN Convention Against Torture, Mugabe would still be liable to arrest and trial if he set foot in any of the 130-plus countries that have signed the convention.
A different option would be a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where Mugabe and other ZANU-PF leaders would be granted exemption from prosecution if they confessed to their crimes and apologised to their victims. This model seems to have mostly worked well in post-apartheid South Africa – although it fell way short of giving justice to the victims of terrible, ruthless crimes, including torture and murder by the South African police and military.
Is this the model for Zimbabwe, in order to overcome the divisions caused by the terror of the Mugabe era and to rebuild a peaceful, democratic and prosperous nation? It is up to Zimbabweans to decide. But many will doubtless ask, if Slobodan Milosevic can be put on trial in The Hague, why not Robert Mugabe and his henchmen?
If major human rights abusers like Mugabe are allowed to escape prosecution, it signals to tyrants everywhere that they can get away with war crimes and crimes against humanity. It makes a mockery of international humanitarian law, which exists to prevent such crimes and, failing that, to punish the perpetrators.
On the other hand, if Mugabe and other human rights abusers (George Bush of the US, Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, General Than Shwe of Burma?) start facing justice in courts of law, it acts as a deterrent and warning that those who commit crimes against humanity will be caught and punished.
Human rights law is meant to be enforced. It will never be respected and observed, as long as violators like Mugabe know they can make deals to avoid prosecution.
What is now needed is a global people’s movement to demand the universal enforcement of humanitarian law, and this includes its enforcement against our own government when it commits illegal acts against the people of our country and against the people of other countries like Iraq. Mugabe isn’t the only leader who deserves to be in the dock – not by a long way.