Mixed Messages from Zim — Most Not Good

As most Zimbabweans still struggle to survive and to access the basics — bread, toilet paper, and the like, the prospect of chaos hovers around them. The story remains largely the same — lots of news, little actual information.

The Southern African Development Community plans to meet to address the Zimbabwe situation. Zambia's Levy Mwanawasa, who chairs SADC, has called for the emergency conference. Perhaps emblematic of SADC's relative fecklessness with regard to Zim, however, Robert Mugabe, who has proclaimed that he still is in charge in Zimbabwe, seems to feel no pressure and welcomes the SADC gathering. Hopefully recent events have served to provide a moment of clarity for the heads of state of the SADC member nations and will impel them finally to follow the lead of the European Commission and Jacob Zuma, among many others, and take a clear stand against Mugabe's reckless rule.

Meanwhile the MDC and their candidate, widely presumed to have won the election handily, has taken what I fear will be its first serious misstep. the party has announced that it will boycott any runoff election. Emotionally this perhaps makes sense. And from the vantage point of righteousness it probably resonates as well — the MDC has every reason to feel that Tsvangirai won the election with a clear majority of the votes and to fear bloodshed. But it is precisely this sort of misstep that Mugabe and his underlings have been anticipating. Mugabe will not go quietly, and the MDC expected all sorts of shenanigans. But they have to play the game now. The champion, however invalid his title, does not go down on a decision, he goes down by knockout. Boycotting a runoff might feel right, but it won't be the right thing to do.

(This is as good a time as any to acknowledge some fairly bad commentary on Zimbabwe in recent days as well. The New Republic has had two pieces proving that good intentions are a necessary but not sufficient condition for writing effectively about the Zimbabwe crisis. Alvaro Vargas Llosa presents “four lessons learned from Mugabe's horrific regime,” almost all of which are debatable, especially those that seem to have been written in some sort of Cold War time warp where proving anticommunist bona fides is more important than assessing the realities on the ground. Jamie Kirchick's article is more right than wrong, but it brings little new to the table and as with so much of his writing tends to mistake shrill outrage for insight. Finally, writing in The New York Times Heidi Holland seems a bit too enamored of having gotten the chance to sit down with Mugabe and argues for more engagement with Zim’a Big Man. I tend to fall on Barack Obama's side of the debate over whether to open doors for discussion with dictators, and would welcome American talks with Mugabe if they would be fruitful. But it seems that Holland is asking for more than that, which strikes me as hopelessly blind to who Robert Mugabe is, what he is done, and how willing he is to relent.)