Zim: Anarchy as Leadership

Anarchy would seem to be the enemy of autocracy. After all, anarchy implies a lack of control where autocracy embodies control. Nonetheless, the most skilled tyrants know that there are times when unleashing the forces of chaos is a marvelous tool in their arsenal. Anarchy allows for police crackdowns, it allows for score settling, it allows for dirty deeds to go unnoticed, or to blur with other dirty deeds. Anarchy allows for plausible denial. In sum, anarchy, far from being anathema to dictatorship, can be an indispensable element in its perpetuation.

It appears that Zimbabwe represents a case study in unleashing the forces of anarchy, or at least in revealing that those forces are available to be summoned. If Zimbabwe has not yet devolved into what most in the media will facilely claim as Kenya-style chaos, there are hints that Mugabe's supporters are allowing a certain level of destabilization further to muddy the already murky waters. Their champion, after all, seems to be in political danger, but as they well know, while he may be down, he is not out.

Thus even though no national results have officially been released, Robert Mugabe demands a recount. That will serve to delay official results, further throwing Zimbabwe's stability into doubt, which itself serves Mugabe's purposes rather well. Time, the wily ZANU-PF paterfamilias clearly believes, is his ally. In the meantime, one of Mugabe's most stalwart cadres of support, the war veterans, have begun raiding and occupying many of the remaining white-owned farms. The land issue is one of Mugabe's favorite tools, as it allows him to fuel the race issue even if whites have virtually nothing to do with the current political conflict. Farms are symbolic. Mugabe knows this, but he will continue to draw from this well as needed.

One wonders, however, how it fits into his plans that the police seem intent on evicting at least the most brazen of the land-seizing opportunists. Or that judges on Zimbabwe's highest courts are intent on looking closely at the election and seem interested in hearing the official results from the first round of polling, which Morgan Tsvangirai and his supporters continue to claim to have won outright. And then one remembers: Violence. As long as Mugabe has the bulk of the police and military in his pockets, violence is the one lingua franca he knows how to speak so that his enemies may hear.

Tsvangirai, meanwhile, appears to be playing the game about as well as can be played under the circumstances. He has appealed to the outside world, and perhaps even more significantly, has stuck relatively close to home by embarking on a tour of South Africa in hopes of finally rousing Zimbabwe's neighbor from what has appeared to be a deep sleep with regard to issues across the Limpopo.

Mugabe has relied on the somnolence of his southern neighbors, on their being loyal to a fault to a long-dormant image of himself as a liberation hero and fellow opponent of racism and imperialism. Tsvangirai clearly hopes to change the narrative. He is, as Americans say, acting presidential. It remains to be seen whether such a rational approach will work in the face of encroaching Mugabe-supported anarchy.