Zimbabwe is fast approaching a dangerous tipping point. Last month, its ailing octogenarian president, Robert Mugabe, angrily defied his critics, calling for early elections in 2012. If a political settlement with Zimbabwe’s security chiefs is not negotiated before the vote, Mr. Mugabe will no doubt rely on them to once again begin a campaign of intimidation and violence, leading to sham elections that could precipitate a regional crisis.

To prevent this, the international community — in concert with African regional organizations — must push for a deal that allows Mr. Mugabe’s coterie of security men to leave the political scene in a peaceful fashion.

Although it is difficult to swallow from a human rights perspective, any deal will have to grant the security chiefs immunity from prosecution and permit them to keep a sizable portion of their wealth.

The current power-sharing government between Mr. Mugabe and the opposition prime minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, has brought relative calm and economic stability to Zimbabwe since its formation in early 2009. However, the far from united “unity government” has failed to make any meaningful progress on the issue of how to deal with the so-called securocrats. Addressing this thorny question is the key to a peaceful democratic transition in Zimbabwe.

Over the past decade, the Joint Operations Command — Zimbabwe’s supreme security council — has orchestrated violent campaigns to guarantee Mr. Mugabe victory in successive elections, culminating in the 2008 crisis. After the opposition’s initial success in the 2008 elections, the J.O.C. began a brutal campaign of violence that left more than 200 people dead and forced Mr. Tsvangirai to withdraw from the poll. Little has changed since then.

Although the power-sharing agreement contained several opaque references to security reform, the only progress has been cosmetic because Mr. Mugabe, his ZANU-PF party, and the J.O.C. continue to unilaterally decide security matters and use security agencies for political purposes.

In anticipation of coming elections, the military has reportedly already deployed to rural areas to coerce people to vote for Mr. Mugabe.

But a careful balance of carrots and sticks could persuade Mr. Mugabe and the securocrats to accept a deal. Headed by the South African president, Jacob Zuma, the South African Development Community has been negotiating with Zimbabwe on a “road map” to free and fair elections.

The African Union, the United Nations, the United States and the European Union must pressure Mr. Zuma and the S.A.D.C. not to countenance elections without a deal that ensures the retirement of the securocrats.

The prospect of lifting existing targeted sanctions and promises of robust financial assistance would give Mr. Mugabe and his henchmen strong incentives to make a deal. If they remain obstinate, Zimbabwe’s neighbors should consider taking punitive measures, including economic sanctions.

As Mr. Mugabe’s health continues to falter and political pressure from neighboring countries increases, many of the security officials surrounding Mr. Mugabe are looking for a safe exit. They oppose a settlement mainly because they fear prosecution and losing access to political patronage networks through which they accrue their wealth.

A successful negotiated solution must therefore include two key “sunset clauses” for the securocrats: immunity from prosecution for political crimes and assurances that they could keep enough of their accumulated wealth to live comfortably for the rest of their lives.

With elections this year increasingly likely, the window of opportunity for the international community to prevent another round of bloody elections in Zimbabwe is rapidly closing.

Granting amnesty and affluence to egregious human rights abusers may seem like an unpalatable trade-off, but it is the only viable avenue to securing a full and peaceful democratic transition in Zimbabwe.

Barely was Laurent Gbagbo, wearing a sweat-damp white tank top and a startled expression, prodded at rebel gunpoint from the bombed ruins of his presidential bunker in Ivory Coast, than Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced this conclusion: His ejection, more than four months after he refused to accept electoral defeat, sent “a strong signal to dictators and tyrants throughout the region and around the world. They may not disregard the voice of their own people in free and fair elections, and there will be consequences for those who cling to power.”

Zimbabwe’s 87-year-old president, Robert Mugabe, who began his 32nd year in power this week, must have chortled when he heard that one.

The parallels between Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe are striking: both were once viewed as the singular successes in their respective regions, the envy of their neighbors. Both Mr. Gbagbo, a former history professor, and Mr. Mugabe, a serial graduate student, are highly educated men who helped liberate their countries from authoritarian regimes.

Both later clothed themselves in the racist vestments of extreme nativism. Mr. Gbagbo claimed that his rival Alassane Ouattara couldn’t stand for president because his mother wasn’t Ivorian; Mr. Mugabe disenfranchised black Zimbabweans who had blood ties to neighboring states (even though his own father is widely believed to have been Malawian).

The two countries have also been similarly plagued by north-south conflicts. And when they spiraled into failed statehood, both leaders blamed the West, in particular their former colonial powers — France and Britain — for interfering to promote regime change.

Finally, the international community imposed sanctions against both countries, including bans on foreign travel and the freezing of bank accounts, that have largely proved insufficient.

But here’s where the stories crucially diverge — why Laurent Gbagbo is no longer in power, while Robert Mugabe, who lost an election in 2008, continues to flout his people’s will.

The most important point of departure was the sharply contrasting behavior of regional powers. The dominant player in West Africa, Nigeria, immediately recognized the validity of Mr. Ouattara’s victory in United Nations-supervised elections, and worked within the regional alliance, the Economic Community of West African States, to unseat the reluctant loser. But Zimbabwe’s most powerful neighbor, South Africa, played a very different role. Instead of helping to enforce democracy, it has provided cover for Mr. Mugabe to stay on.

Partly this is due to what is called “liberation solidarity.” Most of the political parties still in power in southern Africa were originally anti-colonial liberation movements — like those in South Africa, Mozambique, Namibia and Angola — and they tend to abhor the aura-diminishing prospect of seeing any of their fellows jettisoned.

It is also because South Africa eyes the Zimbabwean opposition — which morphed out of a once-loyal trade union movement — through the suspicious lens of its own trade union movement’s contemplation of opposition politics.

As a result, instead of supporting the Zimbabwean opposition in 2008, Thabo Mbeki, then the South African president, bullied it into a power-sharing government of national unity headed by Mr. Mugabe. This democracy-defying model has threatened to metastasize into the mainstream of African politics; that same year it was also applied to Kenya, where a unity government was set up to end post-election bloodshed. When Mr. Mbeki was deputized by the African Union to broker a solution in Ivory Coast, that was the Band-Aid he reached for — but it was rightly rejected by Mr. Ouattara.

Of course, the other crucial difference is that in Ivory Coast, the dictator’s ejection came at the hands of men with guns. The northern rebels moved on Abidjan. The United Nations peacekeepers, trussed by restrictive mandates as always, nevertheless protected Mr. Ouattara until the French expanded an airport-securing operation into something altogether more ambitious. They basically prized Mr. Gbagbo from his bunker, though to avoid bad postcolonial optics, they brought the rebels in to make the final move.

In contrast, for refusing to plunge the country into a civil war, Zimbabwe’s democratic opposition has been rewarded by the international community by being largely ignored.

Next month, a group of southern African nations will discuss Mr. Mugabe’s continued resistance to agreed-upon reforms intended to pave the way to free elections. Either South Africa must get Mr. Mugabe to honor them, or it must withdraw its support for him. If it won’t, then the international community needs to push South Africa out of leading the negotiations, and engage more directly.

Zimbabweans need help if their voices are to be heard. If the United States wants to prove that Mrs. Clinton’s words were more than empty rhetoric, it should begin by pressuring South Africa. Otherwise Zimbabwe’s hopes for freedom will founder, even as Ivory Coast regains its stolen democracy.

Ten years ago large areas of Zimbabwe’s commercial farmland were invaded by land-hungry villagers, led by war veterans and backed by President Robert Mugabe. The Zimbabwe supreme court ruled the land reform programme illegal, and since then images of chaos, destruction and violence have dominated global coverage.

But as Zimbabwe moves forward with a new agrarian system, a more balanced appraisal is now needed for the process that overturned a century-old pattern of land use dominated by a small group of large-scale commercial farmers. This means listening to the results of solid, on-the-ground research.

In our 10-year study in Masvingo province, we examined what happened to people’s livelihoods. “We got good yields this year. I filled two granaries with sorghum. I hope to buy a grinding mill and locate it at my homestead.” These are the words of Samuel Mafongoya, a Masvingo farmer who was one of the many beneficiaries of the controversial land reform process. Not every story was as positive, of course. The hard evidence was complex and nuanced. But it also contradicted the overwhelmingly negative images of land reform presented in the media.

At independence in 1980, over 15m hectares were devoted to large-scale commercial farming by about 6,000 farmers, nearly all white. This fell to about 12m hectares by 1999, in part through a modest land reform and resettlement programme largely funded by the UK. Formal land reallocation since 2000 has resulted in the transfer of nearly 8m hectares to over 160,000 households, mostly are ordinary people from nearby areas. If the “informal” settlements outside the official programme are added, the totals are even larger.

This major restructuring has had knock-on consequences, and there have been heavy hits on certain commodities and markets: wheat, tobacco, coffee, tea and beef exports have all suffered. However, other crops and markets have weathered the storm, and some have boomed. Production of small grains and edible beans has increased dramatically compared with the 1990s, and cotton production too has gone up. True, there are major problems in certain areas, but agriculture has not collapsed.

In Masvingo, reform saw more than a quarter of the land taken over by around 32,500 households on smallholder sites, 1,200 households on slightly larger sites, and 8,500 households in informal resettlement sites. It has resulted in a new composition of people in the rural areas, with highly diverse livelihoods, based on mixed crop and livestock farming. Another resettlement farmer, Petros Chakavanda, told us: “We are not employed but we are getting higher incomes than those at work.”

In fact, our studies showed that over half of the 400 households sampled are accumulating and investing, often employing labour and increasing their farming operations. And their activity is having a positive impact on the wider economy, stimulating demand for services, consumer goods and labour.

Others were finding the going tough. Joining the land invasions and establishing new farms in what was often uncleared bush was not easy. It required commitment, courage and much hard work. It is true that some new farmers have made it due to political connections and patronage. Yet, despite their disproportionate influence on local politics, in Masvingo they make up less than 5% of households. Remember too that since 2000 these new settlers have received very little external support. The government was broke and often focused its efforts on a few of the elite. Meanwhile, aid organisations shied away from the resettlement areas for political reasons.

We do not want to underplay the abuses that took place or the challenges that transition brings. However, our research has dispelled the assumption that Zimbabwe’s controversial reform was “all bad”. Solid empirical evidence has challenged the myth that there is no investment, that agricultural production has collapsed and food insecurity is universal, that the rural economy is in precipitous decline, and that farm labour has been totally displaced. There are many challenges ahead, but we believe it is possible to define a positive, forward-looking agenda for the future.

• Some names have been changed. Zimbabwe’s Land Reform: Myths and Realities, by Ian Scoones, Nelson Marongwe, Blasio Mavedzenge, Felix Murimbarimba, Jacob Mahenehene and Chrispen Sukume.

Davos, the World Economic Forum, boasts that it is the place to meet important or influential people. That is one reason why I went to the meeting of the African chapter in Tanzania last week, but I didn’t expect to be embraced by Robert Mugabe.

He had not been invited, but happened to be in Dar es Salaam and got through the door. Klaus Schwab, who runs the organisation, pointed out that he was the first head of state to come to Davos. As his Prime Minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, and Deputy Prime Minister, Arthur Mutumbara, were there, Mr Schwab decided to have all three on the platform.

Avoiding his usual rant, Mr Mugabe was in mischievous mood. He opened by introducing “the threesome who are running the country at the moment — young, younger and youngest”. It got a huge laugh and from then on the old crocodile joked and teased, mocked and lectured until the audience — at least the African part — were almost on their feet with delight. He gave us a laid-back, more-in-sorrow-than-anger history lesson, heavy in irony (though light on reality) and all of it stuck in the “struggle” mentality of the 1970s. But alongside Mr Tsvangirai and Mr Mutumbara, it was like watching a top-class Premier League striker dancing round a third division defence.

During questions I asked him about the American and EU-targeted sanctions against Mr Mugabe and members of his family and regime. They seemed to worry Mr Mugabe a lot, but not the investors considering returning to Zimbabwe.

It was by no means the first time that I had met Mr Mugabe. I first interviewed him in 1976 and have met him four or five times since, but I was still astounded by what happened next. As he swept out with his entourage after the meeting, he spotted me and came over. He clasped my hand in both of his and held them tightly. “I am tired of this war with Britain,” he said with a simple smile. “How can we end it?”

Knowing how Mr Mugabe is regarded by most people in Britain, the image of a bottle of whisky and a revolver came to mind but, catching my breath, I asked what he thought the core of the problem was. Could it have been the much rumoured secret land deal believed to have been agreed at the Lancaster House conference of 1979 that led to an independent Zimbabwe?

“No,” he said. “It was Blair.”

He explained that British funding for land reform agreed at Lancaster House had ceased in the 1990s but that John Major had sent a team to work out a new plan, which had been agreed. Then Mr Major lost power and when Mr Mugabe met Tony Blair at the Edinburgh Commonwealth Summit in 1997 to follow it up, they fell out. “Blair repudiated us,” he said. “Labour never understood us.”

But Mr Mugabe’s fury with Britain and the unleashing of violence against white farmers in Zimbabwe is about far more than funding land reform or even politics. He had laws in place to take the land peacefully. All he needed was a legal instrument to effect the takeover. He could have given the farmers notice to quit. Instead he chose to take the farms by force. He wanted violent confrontation with Britain.

I believe the key lies in the small, lonely, bright child whose father left home when he was 10. Mr Mugabe was brought up by a fanatically Roman Catholic mother and practically adopted by a missionary priest and nuns at a Catholic mission. He owed his early education to them. They were the pull. Other whites — and the injustices of colonial rule — gave him the push. His relationship with Britain and white people reaches the extremes of love and hate.

No sooner had he told me of his rejection by Blair than he was telling me, as he tells everyone, how much he respects the Queen and the Royal Family. He also had an extraordinarily close relation with Lord Soames, the Governor-General who brought Zimbabwe to independence and whom Mugabe asked to stay on. He loves cricket and respects many other aspects of Britain.

What I hear is: “Mummy, the Queen, loves me. Daddy, the British Government, Blair rejects me. But I’ll show him. I’ll tear the house down.” And he did.

The explanation is psychological, not political but I do not see Mr Mugabe as mad or evil. To me he is a Macbeth-like figure, a warrior who fought for his country and started well, but then began to diminish into a ruthless killer obsessed with power.

How will it end? What if, seeing Burnham Wood coming towards Dunsinane Castle, instead of shouting: “Arm, arm and out,” Macbeth had said: “I’m tired of this war.”? I got the impression that, at the age of 86, he genuinely is.

If, like Colonel Gaddafi, Mr Mugabe had oil and threatened to go nuclear, there would, presumably, be swift negotiations. But Zimbabwe itself is of little importance to Britain and Mr Mugabe is a far greater hate figure than Colonel Gaddafi. So it is hard to see how his pro-British half could be rewarded with reconciliation until he announces the creation of a new constitution, allows a free and peaceful election and steps down if he loses it. But, whatever the British position, I think he is ready for the conversation.

In the midst of a wave of post-election political violence in Zimbabwe in 2008, Brian James, a white farmer who had been evicted from his property years earlier during President Robert Mugabe’s seizure of white-owned lands, found himself surrounded by a throng of black Zimbabweans in downtown Mutare, my hometown. The 50-strong crowd danced, sang and chanted political slogans for more than 20 minutes before Mr. James was finally able to raise his hand, thank them for their support and announce that he was honored to have been elected mayor of the country’s third-largest city.

This Sunday is the 30th anniversary of Zimbabwe’s independence from white rule and President Mugabe’s rise to power. Back then, Mr. Mugabe was hailed as a liberator and conciliator. “If yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend,” he told nervous whites at the time. For a long while he was true to his word. By the mid-1990s, Zimbabwe had become one of the most stable and prosperous countries in Africa.

But in 2000, within weeks of losing a constitutional referendum to entrench his power, Mr. Mugabe began the catastrophic land invasions that resulted in the eviction of almost all the country’s 4,500 white farmers and the ruin of what was once a model post-colonial African country. Ever since, the narrative of Zimbabwe has been one of race. Rare is the speech in which Mr. Mugabe does not rail against whites, colonialists, imperialists or the West. Members of his ZANU-PF party have spoken of a “Rwandan solution” for Zimbabwe’s whites.

Westerners have simply accepted this narrative of blacks and whites pitted against one another. But, in doing so, they have missed the inspiring story of what has actually been happening in Zimbabwe over the past decade. After years of mass unemployment, mutant inflation, chronic shortages and state violence, Zimbabweans simply don’t care about skin color. In fact, Mr. Mugabe has managed to achieve the exact opposite of what he set out to do in 2000: the forging of a postracial state.

Brian James’s story, taken in full, stands as proof of Mr. Mugabe’s unwitting accomplishment. Mr. James was barely interested in politics before losing his land in 2003 — “I just wanted to farm and play cricket on weekends” — but afterward he joined the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, quickly rose through the ranks and was elected mayor by a virtually all-black constituency.

And Mr. James is not a singular example. One of the most popular politicians in the country is Roy Bennett, another former farmer, known to his legion of black supporters as Pachedu, “one of us.” When Mr. Bennett was arrested on trumped-up treason charges last year, hundreds of black Zimbabweans surrounded the prison so that intelligence agents would not be able to smuggle him out to a more remote location where it was feared he might be tortured.

Then there is the inspiring sight of white farmers, who have been contesting the legality of the land expropriations in a regional human rights tribunal, marching into court arm in arm with their black lawyers, often dynamic women who know the laws and Constitution of the land better than those sitting in judgment. This belies Mr. Mugabe’s image of a country divided by race.

My parents, owners of a backpacker resort, are part of this new Zimbabwe. Like most whites, they once steered clear of politics. But in 2002, when their home came under siege, my father joined the M.D.C. By 2005, their lodge had become a meeting place for black political dissidents who would disguise themselves as priests to avoid detection by Mr. Mugabe’s militia.

In 2008, the lodge became a safe house for three black activists, Pishai Muchauraya, Prosper Mutseyami and Misheck Kagurabadza, who had won seats in Mugabe strongholds and were now on the run from government death squads. My mother, as tough-as-nails a white African as any, still gets emotional when she talks of the courage of her three “fugitives,” all of whom are now friends and in Parliament, part of the fractious national unity government set up between Mr. Mugabe and the M.D.C. in 2009.

Mr. Mugabe knows exactly what he is doing in constantly invoking race-based rhetoric. By framing the crisis in Zimbabwe as a struggle against the West — against the white world — he escapes censure from other postcolonial African leaders who understand their own countries’ histories in the same way. And when the West allows Mr. Mugabe’s narrative to go unchallenged, it plays right into his hands.

Overlooked in the racial invective are some basic and important facts. Mr. Mugabe has accused white farmers of being colonial-era “settlers,” but about 70 percent of them actually purchased their land after independence, with signed permission from Mr. Mugabe himself. And far from owning 70 percent of the land in the country, as was widely believed, those white farmers owned only half of our commercial land — just 14 percent of Zimbabwe’s total land. With that land, however, they used to produce more than 60 percent of all agricultural crops, and 50 percent of all foreign earnings. One only has to look at the decline in food production and collapse of the economy since 2000 to appreciate how vital white farmers were to the well-being of the nation.

All but ignored was the other major target of the land grabs: black farm workers. Some 300,000 blacks were employed on white farms up until 2000 — two million people, if one counts their dependents — and they overwhelmingly supported the M.D.C. By destroying white farms, Mr. Mugabe wiped out a major base of black opposition. It is hardly surprising, then, that black workers often stood with white employers to resist Mr. Mugabe’s violent invaders. When has that ever happened in post-colonial Africa?

I am often asked by friends in the United States if there is any hope for Zimbabwe, and I always answer yes. Then I tell them a story about a funeral.

Not long before he was elected mayor, Brian James lost his wife, Sheelagh, in a car crash in Mutare. Her funeral was held on the lawns of the local golf club and 300 mourners turned up, among them white farmers, black friends and an M.D.C. choir. The day before the funeral, my father was with Pishai Muchauraya, the former M.D.C. fugitive and soon-to-be member of Parliament, when he received a phone call from the leader of the choir. They had a problem, they told Mr. Muchauraya: they had never been to the funeral of a white woman before and did not know what to sing.

“What’s that got to do with it?” Mr. Muchauraya snapped. “Mrs. James was an African just like you. Sing what you normally sing.” When he turned to apologize for the interruption, he saw my father had tears in his eyes.

Lifting sanctions against President Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party “would give Zimbabwe an opportunity to move forward“, Jacob Zuma told reporters this week during his visit to Britain. South Africa’s president is right. The continued EU sanctions are seriously weakening the hand of Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, in his efforts to implement a power-sharing deal in Zimbabwe.

This is because Zanu-PF’s response to the EU sanctions has consisted of an unrelenting propaganda effort to cast Tsvangirai and the MDC as “sell outs” who campaigned for the imposition of unjustified sanctions that are “racist” and a violation of Zimbabwe’s sovereignty. Zanu-PF has circulated this message since sanctions were imposed in 2002. It depicts Tsvangirai’s MDC as being in cahoots with imperialist western states.

Tsvangirai’s party denies it campaigned for the imposition of sanctions. But it has nonetheless failed to counter Zanu-PF’s propaganda because its message has never been as coherent and consistent. The fact that Zimbabwe’s public media is controlled and dominated by Zanu-PF scarcely helps.

Since the MDC began sharing power it has come under pressure to advocate the removal of sanctions because it supposedly “instigated” them. Zanu-PF refuses to implement democratic reforms it consented to in the power-sharing agreement for as long as the sanctions remain in place.

The sanctions standoff is one of the main reasons why the government has made little headway in democratising Zimbabwean institutions in time for the next election in 2012. This stalemate is what prompted Zuma’s call – although it is consistent with the position taken by several southern African leaders since 2002. The then Tanzanian president, Benjamin Mkapa, was scathing about the EU move: “As you have heard about Zimbabwe and the EU’s decision to impose sanctions, it seems they want to divide Africa at Brussels in 2002 just as they did in Berlin in 1884. Africa must be prepared to say no,” he said.

When Zimbabwe’s power-sharing deal was signed in 2008, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) called on the EU and the United States to remove all forms of sanctions. They declined, arguing that sanctions should only be removed when Zanu-PF had fully implemented the power-sharing agreement. Today, the EU contends that if it brings Zimbabwe’s isolation to an end, it will have less leverage to persuade Zanu-PF to fully implement the agreement.

The EU’s condemnation of Mugabe and the Zanu-PF elite would command more authority if the same standards were applied elsewhere. After Afghanistan’s inconclusive presidential election in August last year, Afghans were expected to vote in a runoff between incumbent Hamid Karzai and challenger Abdullah Abdullah. Abdullah withdrew, citing vote rigging designed to ensure Karzai’s victory.

In Zimbabwe this drew comparisons with how Tsvangirai pulled out of the 2008 runoff against Mugabe because of its unfair nature. In spite of the evident electoral abnormalities in Afghanistan, the US and EU recognised Karzai as the duly elected president. Zuma and other SADC leaders who brokered power sharing in Zimbabwe deeply resent the EU’s refusal to lift sanctions when they applied no equivalent to Karzai.

Few, if any, African countries still look up to the EU, and the west generally, as champions of human rights and democracy. It is time to start listening and taking our cue from leaders like Zuma, who are far more engaged with the region and better placed to bring about free and fair elections in Zimbabwe.

Indications ahead of the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Trinidad are that Zimbabwe will be offered readmission to the Commonwealth in 2011. In return for readmission Zimbabwe will be required to implement democratic and economic reforms. Zimbabwe was suspended from the Commonwealth in 2002 on the grounds that Robert Mugabe had been fraudulently re-elected in the country’s presidential election. Zimbabwe quit the Commonwealth a year later, after the body refused to lift the country’s suspension. The lifting of Zimbabwe’s suspension had been supported by South Africa and some southern African countries, which favoured engagement over isolation of Zimbabwe. Mugabe’s Zanu-PF government labelled the Commonwealth’s decision racist. It accused Britain, which under Tony Blair had led the campaign to renew Zimbabwe’s suspension, and other predominately white member countries, such as Australia, of having hijacked the body.

The prime minister of Zimbabwe, Morgan Tsvangirai, backs readmission. But it is unlikely that President Mugabe and his party will welcome the offer of readmission because the conditions on which it is based are acutely sensitive to international double standards in human rights and democracy promotion. Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Uganda, among others, are no more democratic or respectful of human rights than Zimbabwe, but they are Commonwealth members. Zanu-PF will find the Commonwealth’s conditions objectionable for their hypocrisy.

Despite the Commonwealth’s high-sounding expectations on democracy and human rights, the body lacks the political will to promote and protect these ideals. The history of the Commonwealth’s relationship with Zimbabwe is unsurprisingly tainted. Certainly the 1979 Commonwealth summit in Lusaka in Zambia helped facilitate an end to white minority rule in Zimbabwe. But in the early 1980s Mugabe ordered a campaign of violence in order to destroy the Zapu party. Mugabe’s Zanu and Joshua Nkomo’s Zapu were the two main nationalist parties during Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle, which culminated in the independence of 1980. The historical rivalry and distrust between the parties endured into the independence era. Zapu’s existence was a challenge to Zanu dominance.

In the early 1980s, dissident activities in the Matabeleland province by army deserters allegedly linked to Nkomo were used as a pretext to crush Zapu. The Fifth Brigade, a North Korean-trained unit, was deployed to the Matabeleland and Midlands provinces, where it embarked on an operation of violence and intimidation called the Gukurahundi, which resulted in up to 20,000 deaths. The 1983 Commonwealth heads of government summit in India did not raise the matter of the Gukurahundi.

Even if Zanu-PF hails the Commonwealth readmission offer, it is improbable that the Zimbabwe power-sharing government will meet the mandatory political and economic reforms because the implementation of genuine democratic and economic reforms is political suicide for Zanu-PF. By virtue of its unpopularity, the party needs to maintain most of Zimbabwe’s undemocratic structures in order to stand a chance in the country’s next elections. Zanu-PF and its military backers are intransigent on reforms. They have obstructed and subverted reforms they agreed to as part of the power-sharing agreement. There has also been uninterrupted Zanu-PF violence against Tsvangirai’s MDC and civil society.

Although the Zimbabwe power-sharing government has managed to control what had become a record-breaking rate of inflation, the country’s economy remains in dire straits. Much-needed international economic aid has proved elusive. Zimbabwe will definitely be asking what it stands to gain economically by agreeing to rejoin the cash-strapped Commonwealth. It is a melancholy truth that the Commonwealth is an unattractive proposal economically. It is also pregnant with a lack of political will and double standards when it comes to upholding its stated norms and values. These are imperative subjects the Commonwealth must engage if it is to have a meaningful relevance.

At a summit last week, southern African leaders called on western states to “remove all forms of sanctions against Zimbabwe“. They contend that Zimbabwe’s power-sharing deal cannot be effectively implemented until sanctions are lifted. The EU and US say sanctions will not be lifted until the power-sharing agreement is appropriately observed.

Disagreement over the imposition of sanctions on Zimbabwe is not new. It goes back to 2002 when, at the request of Britain and some Zimbabwean civil society elements, the EU first imposed targeted sanctions on Robert Mugabe, Zanu-PF elites and companies associated with the Zanu-PF regime. African leaders’ reaction to sanctions at the time was typified by Tanzanian president Benjamin Mkapa’s remarks:

As you have heard about Zimbabwe and the EU’s decision to impose sanctions, it seems they want to divide Africa at Brussels in 2002 just as they did in Berlin in 1884. Africa must be prepared to say no!

Zanu-PF’s response was a determined propaganda effort to cast Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) as “sell-outs” who campaigned for the imposition of unjustified sanctions that were “racist” and an interference in the country’s internal affairs. Since 2002 Zanu-PF has religiously circulated this message, depicting Tsvangirai’s MDC in cahoots with imperialist western states.

Today Tsvangirai’s MDC is asked to advocate the removal of sanctions because it instigated them, as if Zanu-PF’s human rights violations were never and are not real.

The problem is not necessarily targeted sanctions themselves, because Zanu-PF’s well-documented systematic human rights violations validated them. The trouble is that the west’s condemnations and targeted sanctions against Mugabe and Zanu-PF elites would command more authority if the same human rights standards were applied to every country evenly. This is a reality the high-level EU delegation visiting Zimbabwe this weekend must grapple with.

Sanctions have become a convenient scapegoat for Zanu-PF. Some white Zimbabwean farmers evicted from commercial farms were instructed by invading war veterans to “speak to your George Bush and tell him to drop the sanctions – once this is done you may have your farms back”. The existence of sanctions allows Zanu-PF to argue that Zimbabwe’s breathtaking economic decline was not caused by Zanu-PF’s adoption of a disastrous Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (Esap) in the early 1990s, massive corruption by Zanu-PF elites, an ineptly implemented land reform programme and the country’s 1998 involvement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where, as the academic Norma Kriger writes, “in six months the government spent more money on the DRC military venture than it had spent on land purchases since 1980″. Western sanctions that the Tsvangirai MDC canvassed for are the origin of Zimbabwe’s economic debility instead.

While the MDC denies that it ever campaigned for sanctions, its message on the sanctions issue has never been as coherent and consistent as that of Zanu-PF. After the 2000 parliamentary election, MDC MP David Coltart advanced the following rationale as one of the factors behind the MDC’s choice not to enlist civil disobedience to dispute the results of the controversial election:

The international community pleaded with us to hold off on the use of mass action, promising at the same time that if we backed off, they would do all they could to increase pressure on Mugabe

Such statements allowed Zanu-PF to infer that by “pressure” the MDC meant sanctions. Zanu-PF’s propaganda machinery publicised this conjecture as evidence that the Tsvangirai MDC was pro-sanctions. It did not help the MDC’s cause that some of its MPs such as Trudy Stevenson publicly boasted that “we [Tsvangirai's MDC] have good contacts with the international community and Mugabe is going to have to negotiate with us”.

If the EU ends its isolation of Zimbabwe and lifts targeted sanctions, it is left with reduced leverage in influencing Zanu-PF to fully implement the power-sharing agreement. To date Zanu-PF has flouted the terms of the agreement at will, with no significant reform occurring. However, maintaining targeted sanctions provides a fillip for Zanu-PF propaganda, which the Tsvangirai MDC has thus far failed to counter.

Morgan Tsvangirai is due to arrive in London today as Prime Minister of Zimbabwe. He will be seeking UK government support and pitching for foreign investment. How should we respond to such an appeal from a Government that is led by Robert Mugabe, a man to whom we have got used to saying “no”?

We are clear that we must support the new inclusive Government, whatever our strong doubts about Mr Mugabe. Mr Tsvangirai has bravely chosen to join a government with his erstwhile rivals as the only way forward for Zimbabwe.

The reformers who have faced torture and death in pursuit of democracy have chosen to make this Government work. We must find ways to support them, not least because the humanitarian crisis is still unfolding: a direct consequence of mismanagement and corruption.

Agriculture and public health do not recover overnight. Up to seven million people received food aid at the height of the recent hungry season, and more than 4,000 have died out of almost 100,000 cholera cases. To tackle this, the UK recently pledged a further £15 million in humanitarian assistance. All our support has been transferred through the UN and NGOs, not the Zimbabwean Government. President Obama offered generous US assistance on the same terms when Mr Tsvangirai visited Washington a few days ago.

But we must also engage politically. Mr Tsvangirai and Mr Mugabe have overcome many of the early setbacks and declared their common commitment to the global political agreement (GPA) that they negotiated under South African leadership with the help of their southern African neighbours. It is not perfect, but it does provide a programme of steps to be taken before fresh elections under a new constitution, which the agreement specifies should be completed within 18 months. If those steps are taken, it is a basis for the international community to step up engagement and support in response. By engaging with those committed to reform, we can press for this timetable to be met.

This is why we have met Mr Tsvangirai, his Finance Minister, Tendai Biti, and his Foreign Minister, Simbarashe Mumbengegwi. We discussed how the UK can help Zimbabwe to implement its own commitments under the GPA, particularly on constitutional reform, human rights and the rule of law. When in London, Mr Tsvangirai will meet business leaders as well as the Prime Minister.

But the inclusive Government must understand the context of UK support. Our assistance depends on it meeting its commitments. This in turn depends on Mr Mugabe honouring the agreements he has made with Mr Tsvangirai and the Zimbabwean people. There is still much to do on this. The media are still not free, political activists are still harassed, farm seizures continue and promised personnel changes in key positions have not happened. The EU has also made clear that its support depends on real progress on human rights and related issues.

We have heard calls for the immediate removal of sanctions against Zimbabwe. Let’s be clear what those “sanctions” entail. They were never aimed at the Zimbabwean people. Restrictive measures were directed against individuals associated with the old regime’s corruption and violence, and against companies that bankrolled that regime. While we can show some flexibility, such as allowing some Zanu (PF) ministers who are covered by the EU travel ban to accompany Mr Tsvangirai to the UK, we will not lift the bulk of these measures until we are convinced that Zimbabwe’s transition to democracy has reached a point of no return.

Zimbabwe has begun the process of re-engagement with the IMF, World Bank and African Development Bank, and we are encouraging this. While misrepresented by some in Zimbabwe as sanctions, these assistance programmes always depended on the performance and credibility of the Government’s economic programme, which is now back on track. It was Zimbabwe’s unpaid debts to these institutions, not British opposition, that prevented them helping.

We welcome the efforts of President Zuma in South Africa, as well as other neighbours, such as President Khama in Botswana, to provide political and economic support to Zimbabwe’s transition. The Southern African Development Community (SADC) must stand up for the GPA agreement that it sponsored and insist that both sides keep their commitments. We remain happy to follow their political lead; we recognise that the UK can easily set back change inside Zimbabwe by appearing too intrusive.

By entering a government with Mr Mugabe, the Movement for Democratic Change has taken a leap of faith. It is beginning to make it work, although there are plenty of pitfalls. Mr Mugabe could easily try to go back on his word and grab absolute power again. Nevertheless, it is time to show a little faith and get behind the agreement to build a new Zimbabwe, while keeping all sides to their commitments on economic and political reform. As President Reagan once said in another context, “trust but verify”.

Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is attempting something rare and difficult — sharing power with the man who tried to murder him.

Every Monday morning, Tsvangirai conducts public business across the table from Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president, founder and oppressor. During a recent interview in Washington, Tsvangirai told me that the 85-year-old Mugabe “is someone who can be charming when he wants. I am on guard when he becomes charming. It is when I’m most suspicious of his intentions.”

Mugabe has a long history of co-opting his political opponents — or killing them. “He has not co-opted me,” says Tsvangirai. The killing part is not for want of trying. In 1997, regime thugs attempted to throw Tsvangirai out of a 10th-story window. In 2002, he was charged with treason and threatened with a death sentence. In 2007, he was beaten bloody during a protest. And the presidential election that Tsvangirai won last year was clearly stolen by Mugabe.

Yet Tsvangirai is now part of an unlikely power-sharing agreement with Mugabe, becoming prime minister in a unity government. It is, he admits, a “calculated risk.”

Tsvangirai describes two calculations. First, he was concerned that Zimbabweans were too weary to take to the streets to contest a stolen election. “You don’t want people to reach struggle fatigue. People wanted to try this cohabitation, to ease their economic plight.”

Second, Tsvangirai is making the extraordinary calculation that “Mugabe is part of the solution.” While most of the rest of the world insists that Mugabe must go, Tsvangirai believes his presence is necessary “to create stability and peace during the transition.” The alternative, he fears, could be a destructive militarization of the conflict. And he hopes that the aging Mugabe is considering his legacy — choosing to finish his career as the founder of his country, not as the villain of his country.

Given Mugabe’s history, this smacks of naiveté. But Tsvangirai believes he has a realistic political approach. “You don’t expect people who were violent yesterday to wake up one morning and become peaceful.” So his strategy is to “build institutions in the course of time” — particularly through the process of writing a new constitution, leading to new elections. Tsvangirai talks again and again of “institutions” and “mechanisms” and “political architecture” as the methods to make democracy irreversible. His intention is to fight arbitrary and personal rule with the weapons of process — a Madisonian response to a Neronian dictator.

Four months into the unity government, the results are mixed. The prime minister deserves credit for beginning to stabilize the economy, particularly controlling Zimbabwe’s legendary inflation. In August 2008, Zimbabwe’s central bank revalued its currency by removing 10 zeroes from its currency; five months later, it removed 12 more. Now the country has essentially scrapped its currency and moved to an economy based on the American dollar and the South African rand. While 70 percent of the population still depends on food aid, goods are back in the stores.

But Mugabe’s ruling party remains in charge of the secret police and key ministries. It continues to harass opponents and confiscate farmland. Tsvangirai optimistically calls these elements a “dwindling remnant” — but it’s hard to imagine that they will dwindle without a fight. And Mugabe has asserted his dominance with the appointment of political cronies in blatant violation of the power-sharing agreement — so far with little consequence.

It was this point that Tsvangirai emphasized during his recent U.S. visit, calling on Mugabe’s brutal attorney general and corrupt reserve bank governor to step down — and the world to insist upon these outcomes. This represents a test for South Africa’s new president, Jacob Zuma: Will he abandon the “quiet diplomacy” of his predecessor, which often amounted to permission for Mugabe’s abuses, and insist that the power-sharing agreement be enforced? It is a test for President Obama: Will he pressure Zuma to do the right thing? And it is a test for the power-sharing agreement itself. A stalemate on these appointments, Tsvangirai admits, would “undermine the credibility of the new dispensation.”

Tsvangirai’s strategy — using a power-sharing arrangement with a tyrant to gradually end a tyrant’s power — has little precedent of success. If Tsvangirai fails, he will be just another victim of Mugabe’s charming ruthlessness. But if the prime minister succeeds, he will be an exceptional statesman who set aside his own claims of justice for the peace and progress of his country. And he would become Zimbabwe’s true founder.

After years of rightly criticizing President Robert Mugabe’s authoritarian rule in Zimbabwe, Western countries now face a different, and difficult, set of decisions.

Since February, Zimbabwe has operated under a unity government led by Mr. Mugabe with the opposition’s leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, as prime minister. Had last year’s elections been free and fair, Mr. Tsvangirai would have been elected president, but instead of continuing to contest the results he eventually agreed to serve as prime minister. The transition has not been smooth; cabinet posts have been divided up awkwardly, while many people inside and outside the country have criticized Mr. Tsvangirai for seemingly being co-opted by Mr. Mugabe.

As a result, Western governments have been standoffish even though the unity government has taken important steps, notably lowering Zimbabwe’s 231 million percent inflation by abandoning the Zimbabwean dollar in favor of the American dollar and other foreign currencies. Last week, for example, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the United States wasn’t ready to resume aid to Zimbabwe and urged the ouster of Mr. Mugabe, while other Western donors have said they will not provide significant development assistance until there is firm evidence that the power-sharing agreement is working. Human Rights Watch has gone further by arguing that development aid should not be released until there are “irreversible changes on human rights, the rule of law and accountability.”

The reluctance of Western governments and human rights groups to embrace the current Zimbabwean government is understandable. There is, in particular, no real reason to believe that Mr. Mugabe, after decades of dictatorial rule and abuse, has suddenly embraced multiparty democracy. If he had, after all, he would not be president now.

But Zimbabwe may well be a case where the best is the enemy of the good. Mr. Tsvangirai’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change, went into the unity government with its eyes open. “We had won the election but we did not have the support of the military,” Mr. Tsvangirai told us this month in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital. “We did not want to be the authors of chaos. Instead we need to soft-land the crisis, stabilize the situation through peace and stability and democratic consolidation.” Accordingly, he views Mr. Mugabe as “both part of the problem and part of the solution: we cannot untangle the tentacles of the state without him.”

Mr. Tsvangirai has set himself the difficult task of trying to dislodge Mr. Mugabe’s ousted party from the state apparatus that it has controlled for more than a quarter-century. In many countries that process would require extensive violence against the regime. The “soft landing” that the Movement for Democratic Change has chosen is a difficult path but one which it has firm strategic reasons to opt for, reasons that deserve more careful consideration from international donors.

And Mr. Tsvangirai and Zimbabwe need help desperately. Per capita income is half what it was in 1997. Once the largest economy in the region after South Africa, Zimbabwe is now the smallest, after tiny Swaziland and Lesotho.

The United Nations calculates that just 6 percent of the work force is formally employed. More than 65 percent of the population urgently needs food assistance. Nearly 100,000 people have been struck by cholera in the last six months. While it used to be called the breadbasket of southern Africa, Zimbabwe now produces only about one-third of the grain it needs; tobacco, once its main export crop, has fallen to around one-sixth of the 2000 peak, the effect of the seizure of white-owned farms begun in earnest this decade.

Revealing as they are, these figures do not tell the full story. Take the University of Zimbabwe. Once a prestigious southern African institution, today it is without functioning sewers or running water. Many of its 12,000 students have left, its two teaching hospitals close intermittently, and departments like geology and surveying are shuttered. Lacking chemicals and equipment, the chemistry department stopped all experiments in 2007.

To consolidate progress, donors should end their ambivalence about the unity government and begin to support Mr. Tsvangirai’s aims. Development assistance can be allocated directly. Replenishing the hospitals and re-equipping schools are measurable and defined projects. More generally, Western governments and nongovernmental organizations should become more publicly enthusiastic about the unity government, especially because they haven’t been able to offer a better option.

The Movement for Democratic Change has also recognized that the only way to deal with the tsunami of advisers and aid agencies that will eventually come is to establish a single entry point into the government for donors, likely in the prime minister’s office, instead of allowing aid to go directly to ministries that may be run by Mugabe partisans. Donors should support this effort as a way to strengthen Mr. Tsvangirai.

There will be setbacks in Zimbabwe, but they can be overcome. As Mr. Tsvangirai told us, “Ask any Zimbabwean in the street — no one wants to reverse the process.” Instead of standing back and waiting, donors should do their part to help bring Zimbabwe back from the brink.

On February 11, 2009, I took an oath as Prime Minister of Zimbabwe to work relentlessly to create a society where values are stronger than the threat of violence, where the future happiness of children is more important than partisan political goals and where a person is free to express an opinion, loudly, openly and publicly, without fear of reprisal or repression.

To create a country where jobs are available for those who wish to work, food is available for those who are hungry and where we are united by our respect for the rights and dignity of our fellow citizens.

This is the country we are working to build and although Zimbabwe is not yet a democracy, it is on its way to becoming one. Our success on this journey will depend on this new, transitional Government, our people and the international partners who will work with us to realise this vision for our country.

The political agreement that lead to the formation of this new Government is not perfect. I have stated my concerns on many occasions, as has President Mugabe.

I have also stated that it is a workable agreement and by that I mean that it can help to alleviate the suffering of the Zimbabwean people and allow the country to move forward peacefully to a new constitution and fresh elections.

With regard to the former, the new Government has already made small but significant progress. We have started paying civil servants a monthly allowance to allow the public sector to begin working again and provide an essential stimulus to the economy. We have overseen the opening of hospitals and schools, the taming of hyperinflation, the lowering of prices of basic commodities and the rationalisation of utility tariffs. Most importantly, this new political dispensation has delivered hope to a country devoid of optimism or expectation.

These achievements are a fraction of what the country requires to start functioning normally again. It was, however, the knowledge that we could make an immediate and positive impact on the lives of all Zimbabweans that guided my party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), to enter the agreement brokered by the regional Southern African Development Community.

As I write this article, I know that we made the correct decision. The past six weeks have proved what we are able to do, not just as a party, but as part of an inclusive Government. For, in deciding to embrace the political pragmatism of our regional neighbours, we entered this administration in the spirit of the agreement, embracing its inclusivity and abiding by its letter with regard to the implementation of the transitional measures it contains.

Before entering this Government, we knew that most public servants, and Zimbabweans from all walks of life, were desperate for the positive commitments that the agreement contained. We also knew that elements of the old regime would resist these measures and attempt to obstruct any positive progress.

Happily, we underestimated the number of people who would embrace the opportunities that our country now has, but, sadly, we were correct in allowing for the residual resistance that we are now experiencing from a small faction of non-democratic hardliners.

However, those who try to stand in the way of progress will either realise that it is neither in their personal interests nor the nation’s to continue their obstructionist tendencies, or they will be swept aside by the overwhelming momentum being generated as we move forward as a nation.

This does not mean that the success of this new Government is guaranteed. Today Zimbabwe stands at a critical juncture that requires the MDC to stay true to the ideals upon which it was founded. It requires Zanu (PF) to embrace the commitments of this new agreement and it requires all of its citizens to stand up for their rights as enshrined in the new political agreement. This is also the time for the West to stand by the people of Zimbabwe as they move towards the goal of freedom and prosperity.

I can think of no contemporary example of a people who have stood by their belief in democracy more determinedly, peacefully or bravely than Zimbabweans. Despite a decade of persecution and violent provocation, Zimbabweans have refused to compromise their democratic ideals or their belief in a future of dignity, prosperity and hope by lashing out at their opponents in anger or despair. As Prime Minister and the leader of the largest political party in Zimbabwe, I am immensely proud of my nation and its peoples.

Zimbabweans should not have to pay a further price for their determination to stand by their democratic ideals because the new Government does not meet or match the “clean slate” or “total victory” standards expected by the West. As stated earlier, this new Government is not perfect, but it does represent all Zimbabweans – it is positive, it is peaceful, it is committed to a new constitution and free and fair elections and, with international support, it will succeed.

As Prime Minister, I am responsible for ensuring the formulation of policy by the Cabinet and its implementation by the entire Government. It is my responsibility to ensure that the commitments that this new Government has made to restoring the rule of law, instituting a democratising legislative agenda, ending persecution and freeing the media are implemented in the shortest possible time. In this, the new Government is only now beginning to realise the muscle that it has and to flex that muscle.

The West has been, and continues to be, the most generous provider of humanitarian support, of which all Zimbabweans are aware and grateful for. As a proud nation, we look forward to the day when we can develop our relationship with the West beyond merely being a beneficiary of emergency aid. We want to become a true economic partner and an investment opportunity for those who respect the true value of our natural resources and our sovereignty over them.

Indeed, as the leaders of the G20 meet in London to consider measures to deal with the economic challenges facing their countries, I encourage them to view Zimbabwe and other partners in Africa as investment opportunities with the potential to stimulate their own economic growth.

As Prime Minister, I ask you to work with me and the people of Zimbabwe and to engage with the efforts of our new transitional Government. I ask you to share our vision for our great country, to work with us to rebuild our nation and to walk with us on this promising phase of our journey to a true and lasting democracy for Zimbabwe.

Twenty-five years ago, people involved in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa would say wistfully: “Look at Zimbabwe. It’s come through a bitter war of liberation without wrecking its social cohesion, it’s developed a proper democratic culture and it’s feeding itself.”

Granted, this was, even then, a slightly too rosy picture, but it wasn’t nonsense. It represented a conviction that Zimbabwe was showing what was possible to its neighbours and indeed to the whole continent.

And this means that one of the worst of the countless casualties inflicted by Robert Mugabe on his wretched country is the destruction of many people’s hopes, both in Zimbabwe itself and throughout Africa. The continent can’t afford more failed states, mass hunger, contempt for the rule of law. And how much more painful it is when a country has been held up as a sign of promise.

We have been witnessing the slow death of a people. And slow death is only intermittently newsworthy; nothing to report except more of the same, so the temptation is to switch off. But this doesn’t mean that the need for hope is any less urgent on the ground.

In the past couple of years, the churches in Zimbabwe have shown signs of coming together in a cohesive way to challenge the tyranny of the Government and the apathy of neighbours. The Anglican Church has been through a quiet revolution, finally expelling discredited bishops and rallying around leaders of real stature such as the Bishop of Harare. And it has paid a heavy price. Anglican churches and congregations have been targeted by government-sponsored thugs while parishioners have been harassed, beaten and arrested.

But the important thing that the Anglican Church, along with others, has done is to remind a battered and violated population that their dignity still matters and that change is possible. The response to their witness has been remarkable: thousands gather to worship despite attacks and death threats.

The Church continues with its school feeding programmes (its schools working as food distribution points, so guaranteeing both nourishment and education for the young), with its work for the soaring numbers of orphans suffering from cholera and Aids, with its basic local health clinics and its trauma counselling for victims of torture. If the country is to be rebuilt – and a society can be destroyed pretty quickly but can be rebuilt only slowly, over generations – the Church will be central to the project.

With about 50 per cent of the population now estimated to be in danger of starvation, with cases of cholera rising to nearly 75,000 and a fatality rate of one in twenty, with Aids still a mass killer and no antiretroviral drugs available, with raw sewage pumping into streets, the humanitarian situation is as bad as it could be.

As for the infrastructure of society, we all know about the rate of inflation (the figure of 261 million per cent beggars the imagination) while, for all the high rhetoric about resisting colonialism, the country’s mineral rights have now been sold off to China and Zimbabwe is now wholly dependent on foreign currency.

Less well known is the fact that government schools have been closed because teachers could not afford to live on their salaries – the equivalent of ten US dollars a month. The state of the health services is appalling: medical professionals are simply being paid nothing and there is a huge exodus of doctors and nurses from the country.

These facts are worth rehearsing, if only because they are bound to slip out of view again and again as other stories claim the headlines. But they also reinforce the need for urgent humanitarian action.

Three weeks ago the primates of the Anglican Communion unanimously called for a concerted initiative of aid and support for the Church’s community work in Zimbabwe, and today we are launching our own Archbishops’ Appeal here in the UK.

The Church remains a trusted deliverer of aid at grassroots level, capable of getting food and medical supplies to those who need them, and we urge everyone, inside and outside the Christian Church, to give it their strong support. And for Christian believers, we want to repeat the primates’ call for prayer and fasting, especially today, Ash Wednesday – accepting our responsibility to stand alongside all who are suffering in Zimbabwe.

We know that there is no quick solution to this; and we know that there will be no serious solution as long as Robert Mugabe remains in power and refuses to accept the verdict of his people in last year’s election. Lives can still be saved and, more importantly, hope can be sustained if we continue to support the Church in Zimbabwe as a vehicle of promise and a guarantor of the human dignity so fearfully insulted by the current regime.

Physicians for Human Rights sent a team to Zimbabwe last month to investigate the cholera epidemic that has ravaged lives there since August. As part of that team, we found something much more disturbing even than cholera: a people facing an array of health threats in a country where the most basic functions of the state — clean water, sanitation and health-care delivery — have collapsed.

One could date the collapse to November, when the government closed the public hospitals in the capital, Harare. On Nov. 18, President Robert Mugabe‘s police, wielding batons, attacked doctors, nurses and medical students from the teaching hospital. But given that cholera has killed more than 1,600 people and sickened some 33,000 others, we might date the collapse to August, when the public hospitals lost running water. Imagine a hospital without running water for three months — with no functioning toilets, no soap, an empty pharmacy, and not enough food for patients or staff.

To be fair, not all hospitals are closed. Decent health care is available — for the few who can pay in American cash. Despite Mugabe’s vilification of the West, his policies have made this once-prosperous country dependent on the dollar. In Harare’s private clinics, a physician consultation costs $200; admission, $500; a Caesarean section, at least $3,200. Those without dollars make their way to stretched, but still open, mission hospitals, or they go to South Africa, as some 4 million Zimbabweans have already done, making this nation’s collapse a regional issue.

This tragedy has many terrible features, but chief among them is that this catastrophe is entirely man-made. The Mugabe regime has destroyed the health-care system, as it has devastated virtually every other sector of public life, with its ruinous mix of corruption, mismanagement, violence and human rights violations. Zimbabwe once was not only prosperous and a major agricultural exporter but also a leader in health care and in medical and nursing education. Sadly, in November, the medical school in Harare closed. It canceled exams, we were told, because it had no paper and ink to print them.

The cholera epidemic has its origins in politics, too. Mugabe’s ZANU-PF regime nationalized municipal water supplies in 2006 after the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), led by Morgan Tsvangirai, controlled some 80 percent of seats nationwide following successes in municipal elections. Mugabe’s government seized the water authorities to deny the MDC revenue and to control the lucrative contracts for repair of the broken system. The result was mayhem: Graft and corruption further undermined repairs, water went untreated and raw sewage was pumped into Harare’s main reservoir. Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city, was spared this fate. Mugabe’s regime had calculated that taking over the water authority there would drive residents to vote for the MDC. Tellingly, Bulawayo suffered no cholera deaths last week, while Harare’s case fatality rate for the same week was 19 percent, some 20 times higher than the 1 percent fatality rate the World Health Organization estimates for cholera when proper treatment is available.

Since Mugabe’s defeat in the March general election, and his violent refusal to step down, economic and social collapse has been precipitous. Diseases of hunger such as pellagra have returned. Anthrax resurfaced as people resorted to eating carrion. Health worker salaries were worthless by the time cholera struck. The Harare morgue has lost power, so the dead rot. Nurses who have worked without pay for months told us of having no medication for pain, hypertension, epilepsy and infections. That many are still struggling to provide care is a testament to the Zimbabwean people. They deserve better.

What can the world do to help? Humanitarian assistance is flowing in, and groups and agencies such as Doctors Without Borders and UNICEF are saving many lives. But Zimbabwe’s agonies are not humanitarian in nature; they result from a political crime — the refusal of Mugabe and his cronies to accept electoral defeat. A September power-sharing agreement is all but dead, and there is little hope for the people of Zimbabwe as long as these criminals remain in charge.

Last month, Mugabe declared, “I will never, never, never surrender . . . Zimbabwe is mine,” and he has reportedly started to form a new government — without the MDC. This would amount to getting away with the murder of a country. Zimbabwe’s neighbors, led by South Africa, must do much more to push for change. At the United Nations, there is a key opportunity for China, long a Mugabe enabler, to show, by not hobbling the Security Council, that it is capable of mature diplomacy in Africa. And Uganda, which has just arrived as a rotating member of the council, must be pressured to reconsider its pledge to follow the “hands off” policy that has allowed Mugabe to stay in power.

Barack Obama will face many crises once he takes office, but the devastation of Zimbabwe by its own rulers cannot be ignored. If there is a “responsibility to protect,” as the United Nations has pledged, the world has that responsibility in Zimbabwe.

Long after you leave Zimbabwe images linger in the mind, harrowing and ineradicable. An emaciated old woman making “soup” from weeds for her orphaned grandchildren; desperate parents foraging in the bush for a handful of desiccated berries; young men defying crocodiles to catch a handful of tiny fish in the Zambezi; the corpses of cholera victims trussed up in black plastic sheeting; the ubiquitous and debilitated Aids victims; perfunctory funerals in Harare’s cemetery while, all around, fresh graves are dug.

The pathetic attempts to grow vegetables on scraps of common land; the queues desperate to withdraw a few pennies from banks before their money loses all its value; the listlessness and despair of a crushed and broken people, the anguish of priests, doctors and aid workers overwhelmed by this tsunami of suffering…

There are other images, too. Of once bountiful farms plundered then abandoned by Robert Mugabe’s cronies, fields vanishing beneath the encroaching bush; of Zanu (PF) fat cats and their playboy offspring speeding around Harare in sleek Mercedes, or stuffing themselves in restaurants; of opponents beaten, tortured and killed; of Mr Mugabe and his profligate wife holed up in their heavily guarded estate, oblivious to the misery of their people, while Western NGOs inadvertently prop up a pernicious regime by providing the rudimentary services – food, water, healthcare – the failed state can no longer deliver.

“Enough is enough,” Gordon Brown declared as the West worked itself up into one of its periodic lathers last month. But no one, it seems, is prepared to contemplate the one guaranteed means of removing Zimbabwe’s President: military intervention by a multinational force.

Nothing else has worked. Mr Mugabe has shown not the slightest intention of honouring his commitment to share power with Morgan Tsvangirai and the Movement for Democratic Change. South Africa has singularly failed, despite repeated international exhortations, to exert real pressure on Mr Mugabe to step down. Thabo Mbeki, its former President and the Southern African Development Community’s mediator, has been downright complicit in sustaining the regime.

There will be no popular uprising against Mr Mugabe – three million of Zimbabwe’s best citizens have fled the country and the rest are too weak, cowed and preoccupied with survival. A palace coup is improbable – the leaders of Zanu (PF)’s bitterly feuding factions appear to recognise that if Mr Mugabe falls, they all do. There have been no repeats of the riots by underpaid soldiers that briefly raised hopes last month. Some advocate a fuel blockade, but that would merely compound the suffering of ordinary people while the regime would undoubtedly find ways to circumvent it.

Which leaves military intervention – an idea from which, after Iraq, the world instinctively and understandably recoils. But is it really so unthinkable? You could equally well argue that if there were ever a case for regime change, for using military power to better the world, Zimbabwe is it.

First, it is eminently feasible. No great force would be required. The Mugabe regime, like a tree hollowed out by termites, is just waiting to be toppled. It is sustained by security forces whose middle and lower ranks are almost as penniless, starving and demoralised as the citizens they are meant to suppress. You see numerous soldiers and policemen hitchhiking on the highways, and in the privacy of a car they readily voice profound disgruntlement. It is inconceivable that they would fight to defend the regime, even if they had the weapons, fuel and transport. Most would melt away at the first sight of a foreign force. Any fighting would probably be over within hours, and the bloodshed would be minimal.

Second, there is a popular and legitimate government waiting to take over. Nobody seriously disputes that Mr Tsvangirai and the MDC comfortably won the presidential and parliamentary elections last March despite all Zanu (PF)’s violence, intimidation and vote rigging.

Third, it is immoral for the world to stand by, wringing its hands, in the face of such manifest evil. The 2005 UN World Summit agreed that the international community bore a responsibility to protect populations from genocide and other atrocities when their own governments failed to do so. What is happening in Zimbabwe is not far short of genocide.

More than half the population would starve were it not for Western food aid. Life expectancy has plunged to 39 years – the lowest in the world. Aids, cholera and other diseases sweep away the chronically malnourished. While the regime loots what is left of Zimbabwe’s wealth, a third of the population has been driven out, 90 per cent of those that remain are jobless, and the currency is rendered worthless by an inflation rate measured in quintillions of percentage points. Any opposition is ruthlessly crushed.

The arguments against military intervention are easy to predict. It would set a precedent. South Africa would object. If Zimbabwe, why not Sudan or North Korea? Intervention would smack of Western imperialism. To which the answers are, in turn: I hope so; tough; because Zimbabwe is doable; and that any intervention force would have to include African troops. Kenya, Botswana and Zambia have all denounced the regime. Even Ethiopia might be tempted by the prospect of capturing its former President, Mengistu Haile Mariam, who lives there as Mr Mugabe’s guest despite being convicted in absentia of genocide.

Once inconceivable, military intervention is still only a remote possibility. The political will does not exist. Already world attention has been diverted by Gaza, and Mr Mugabe – the “old crocodile” – has survived another crisis.

There is a perfect humanitarian storm in my country. The threats of AIDS, poverty, hyperinflation and malnutrition, and now cholera, combined with a regime that has given up on its people, add up to an all-but-untenable state of affairs. It is difficult to know where to turn, but it is clear that under such a barrage, a haven must be found. At the moment, that haven — perhaps the only port in this storm — is the transitional agreement inked in September by President Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai.

It is hard to see daylight at times and all too easy to be discouraged by worldviews on the September deal that left Mugabe in power. The Bush administration has withdrawn its support and is calling for alternatives. Others recognize that the agreement is flawed and full of political termites. But focusing on the negatives distracts from the positives.

In essence, the agreement was to establish a transitional government under the shared leadership of all three major parties. Mugabe has chosen to ignore the spirit of the agreement and to continue his utterly dysfunctional and brutal rule.

Moreover, the potential fault lines are many. The powers bestowed upon the prime minister — designated as Tsvangirai’s transitional position — are weak; transitional cabinet consensus looks dodgy at best and is probably impossible on touchy issues; the deal is not well supported internationally; and Mugabe’s thugs are slated to retain all the significant “coercive” ministries despite having lost the March elections.

Despite these issues, the situation in Zimbabwe suggests that this imperfect setup may be the only option. The population is decimated and exhausted and desperately needs leadership. This country is not like those where internal pressures have forced the removal of despots; it is not a tinder box as such. And the porous borders with Botswana and South Africa have enabled Zimbabwe’s best, brightest and most politicized young citizens to flee. Those who remain are hardly able to mobilize politically and shouldn’t be expected to.

Waiting and hoping that Mugabe’s own disingenuousness will bring down his regime is risky. Mugabe’s removal in such a scenario may embolden militants and cronies who, seeing their privileges challenged, could try to seize control in a post-Mugabe vacuum. It is hard to imagine a scenario worse than the present, but that could indeed be a more terrible outcome.

There is no viable option but for the international community to press for full implementation of the September agreement and for my party, the Movement for Democratic Change, to join it. In doing so, the MDC must view the upsides:

First, the prime minister would have significant de facto power. The international development assistance and investment that are massing at our borders in anticipation of Mugabe’s removal would flood into the country. The September arrangement envisages the MDC in control of the Finance Ministry.

Second, while Mugabe does hold the security departments, those that affect most Zimbabweans more directly will be controlled by the MDC (including the faction led by Arthur Mutambara). Education and health care, which account for two-thirds of the budget, would give the MDC a huge impact on the daily lives of Zimbabweans and a central role in the regrowth of the country’s social infrastructure.

Third, the transitional arrangement is a step toward a more liberal and democratic political culture. Written into the agreement is a process leading to a new constitution within 18 months. This is firmly backed by major regional bodies such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union.

Mugabe will turn 85 in February. As much as his rule is a daily threat to the people of Zimbabwe, it is also a threat to its own future viability. His patronage system survives because no alternatives exist. It will begin to crumble under the strains of dealing with the transitional government.

A transitional government in Zimbabwe could take advantage of the positives embedded in the September agreement. While the pro-democracy factions in our government must be committed to supporting the deal, so must the international community. Without the backing and moral favor of the world’s leading governments, government bodies and investors, the transitional government may well struggle.

Central to these supporters are the major African institutions, most important the SADC. It has pledged to underwrite the agreement and must be fully engaged with the process. A permanent SADC office and senior envoy should be established in Harare to ensure compliance with the letter and spirit of the agreement.

There is a way out of the crisis in Zimbabwe. Yes, the proposed transitional government has warts and blemishes, but this is not a beauty contest. It is time to move forward. This is the only viable, nonviolent option.

When I tell ordinary British people that I came to this country from Zimbabwe to seek asylum because of Robert Mugabe’s government, they are always sympathetic. They see the humanitarian crisis, the old people and children dying of cholera – the UN reported yesterday that there were more than a thousand dead and another 20,000 sufferers. They see on the news night after night what Mugabe is doing to my country. And they see the continuing human rights crisis and how he treats those who oppose him.

Hopes were raised when Mugabe agreed to a power-sharing government with the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, Morgan Tsvangirai. But it is evident that human rights are still not being respected. In the last two weeks prominent human rights defenders have been abducted by groups suspected of having government links. These include Jestina Mukoko, the director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, who has not been seen since she was taken from her home on 3 December.

British politicians have expressed great sympathy towards Zimbabweans. Just last week Gordon Brown said that “we must stand together to defend human rights and democracy, to say firmly to Mugabe that enough is enough”, and that it was “our duty” to support the aspirations of the Zimbabwean people. David Cameron has described Zimbabwe as the most important issue in the world today and has pressed for wider sanctions and a rescue package for the Zimbabwean people. And David Miliband has said that, “Zimbabwe’s crisis is one that the world has a responsibility to respond to.”

It is good to hear all this, but how does it translate into action? It is easy to condemn a government from afar. But if politicians really believe that Mugabe is illegitimate, that his repression of his own people is the most important issue in the world today, why do they behave as they do to his victims?

I got involved in supporting the opposition party when I was a student. Like many MDC supporters, I was beaten up by Mugabe’s Zanu-PF thugs when I went to meetings and rallies. When they wrote threats on the walls of my family’s house, my mother decided that I should leave the country.

I believed that I would be safe when I came here seven years ago, at the age of 18. When I stepped foot on English soil and claimed asylum, I did not realise that I was in for a long battle. I have been detained – imprisoned – for two and a half months, simply because I claimed asylum. I have been moved between three different detention centres, and taken without notice from Colnbrook at Heathrow, to Yarl’s Wood in Bedford to Dungavel in Scotland.

You feel extremely helpless in such places: it is almost impossible to stay in touch with friends or your lawyer, and you believe that anything could happen to you and nobody would know about it. Although suspected terrorists cannot be held without trial for more than 28 days, I was locked up for more than 60 days. In Dungavel at that time there were only half a dozen women and hundreds of foreign criminals awaiting deportation. It was terrifying just to walk around the centre.

It seems to me that political leaders are reluctant to do anything to help those who make their way here. Last week Jacqui Smith said that the government’s priority was to ensure that Zimbabwean refugees did not use false passports in order to get to this country. She did not say that refugees should find a fair system when they arrive.

I am still not safe. I have not been given refugee status. After my release from detention I was not allowed benefits nor allowed to work. This is the government’s policy of destitution; if you have failed in your asylum claim, then you are forced to live without support. I rely on handouts and gifts from churches and friends, even for the bed I sleep in and the soap I wash with. Most of the people who help me are asylum seekers or refugees themselves, because they understand what it’s like.

It is humiliating: not only can I not work, but I cannot study or learn. I am worried about the impact this is going to have on my future. I want to study and work, so that when Mugabe is toppled I and my fellow activists can be the backbone of the new country that will arise from the ashes. But all avenues are blocked to me to grow and give back to society. It is strange that this country, which expresses such sympathy for Zimbabwe’s people, condemns its refugees to this kind of life – which is no life at all.

The substance of Zimbabwe‘s horror stays the same. Only its miserable form keeps changing. Alongside hyperinflation, shanty-town evictions, mass unemployment, police-sponsored election violence and murder, badly-administered farm takeovers, rampant food shortages and the abduction of human rights activists, there now comes the latest manmade disaster – cholera. Close to 800 lives have already been lost. Thousands have fled to South Africa to try to avoid it or, if already afflicted, at least to get treatment.

As the horror mounts, calls for action grow. A few verge on the risible. “Bush steps up pressure on Mugabe”, says the headline on a wire service report of a White House statement calling on Zimbabwe’s leader to resign. Pressure? The worst US president in living memory is almost through the door himself, with what remains of his political authority draped round his ankles.

Statements from European leaders suffer from the repetitive predictability syndrome. Gordon Brown says “Enough is enough” and Nicolas Sarkozy declares “Mugabe must go”, while the EU adds 11 new names to the list of 168 Zimbabwean officials who are banned from entering.

The significant shift is a chorus of calls for the use of force against Mugabe, and most of them are African. Archbishop Desmond Tutu – a Nobel peace prize winner no less – says the time has come to overthrow Mugabe. So too does Kenya’s prime minister, Raila Odinga. Cheated out of victory in presidential elections earlier this year, he only got the prime ministership thanks to a power-sharing deal brokered by outsiders. What has angered him particularly is the way Mugabe seems to be wriggling out of a similar pact in Zimbabwe. Odinga wants the African Union to send “peacekeeping” troops, but without Mugabe’s consent they would actually be war fighters.

John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, and a refugee from Idi Amin’s reign of terror in Uganda in the late 1970s, takes a similar view. “Mugabe and his henchmen must now take their rightful place in The Hague and answer for their actions. The time to remove them from power has come,” he says. He does not spell out who should conduct the removal, but hints that Zimbabwe’s neighbours are the ones. He recalls Julius Nyerere’s “courage” in sending Tanzanian troops to topple Amin, and argues that the starvation and suffering in today’s Zimbabwe far exceed the horrors of the Ugandan dictator’s regime.

The most recent convert is Jimmy Carter, the former US president who is distinguished by a four-year term in which he only once ordered troops into battle (a bid to rescue US hostages in Tehran). After recent briefings on the country’s humanitarian disaster from Zimbabwean NGO activists and UN aid agencies, he says force may have to be used against Mugabe “as a last resort”.

The temptation to go to war for regime change is often beguiling, especially when intervention seems likely to meet minimal resistance. Most of Mugabe’s army would probably desert if foreign troops arrived. Tanzania’s invasion of Uganda in 1979 was quick and almost bloodless. The problem was that Amin’s ultimate successor Milton Obote was not much of an improvement, and civil war ensued. The Vietnamese invasion to topple the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia in 1979 is a better example. The new government in Phnom Penh was far less bloody than the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia could have been at peace if Reagan and Thatcher had not backed Pol Pot to mount armed resistance for several years.

The difference with Zimbabwe is that none of its neighbour governments favours the use of force. South Africa ruled it out this week, as did Jacob Zuma, the country’s probable next president. He has been more critical of Mugabe than Thabo Mbeki was, yet draws back from making war. The AU is against it too, leaving Kenya’s prime minister high and dry. Significantly the current AU chairman is Jakaya Kikwete, the Tanzanian president who knows his regional history as well as the Archbishop of York, and comes to a different conclusion. “Only dialogue between the Zimbabwean parties, supported by the AU and other regional actors, can restore peace and stability to that country,” his spokesman said this week. Even Botswana, which strongly opposes Mugabe, says no to force as well as to AU economic sanctions. Force, after all, has a habit of getting out of control.

What, then, can be done? Is the outside world impotent? Not entirely. The power-sharing deal that Mugabe and the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, struck in September after mediation by Mbeki and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) is still the best solution, precisely because it offers a transition through peace. Mugabe is haggling over the distribution of ministries between his party and Tsvangirai’s, refusing to abandon all control of the police. But he has not repudiated the pact. He would rather provoke Tsvangirai into doing so – a trap which the opposition leader must avoid at all costs.

Threatening Mugabe and his army and police commanders with criminal proceedings at The Hague, as Sentamu suggests, is only likely to entrench them further. This summer’s indictment of Sudan’s president has complicated the already difficult search for peace in Darfur. A similar move would have no better effect in Zimbabwe.

The opposite tactic would be to offer Mugabe and his friends a soft landing. Distasteful though it is, allowing Mugabe a quiet departure and judicial immunity is more likely to persuade him to go than a cascade of threats. SADC’s mediation proposals make no mention of prosecution, so the offer may be interpreted as being on the table by default. It would be better to write it in explicitly.

That is the lesson from the collapse of virtually every dictatorship over the past 30 years. Whether it was the Shah of Iran or Nicaragua’s strongman Anastasio Somoza or Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines or, as recently as this year, Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan, the lever which got these discredited men to relinquish their grip was not the threat of a jail cell, let alone invasion. It was a guarantee of retirement in safety.

Zimbabwe should follow this model. In the case of Mugabe’s cronies, offers of jobs in the new coalition government may also help to split them from their current boss. The power-sharing pact provides a mechanism, which is why it is still Zimbabwe’s best hope. Force is the wrong answer.

The horror story that is cholera-wracked Zimbabwe begins with a hand-pump in a Soho street and a British doctor who came up with a very simple, very brilliant idea one and a half centuries ago.

Cholera is more than just a dreadful disease: it thrives on ignorance and the most abject poverty; it breaks out when a state breaks down; and it is ultimately curable not by medicine alone but by organising society itself on rational, scientific principles. The only antidote to cholera, in the end, is political action.

Today, Robert Mugabe’s most powerful accuser is John Snow, the man who tracked down the cause of the bacterium Vibrio cholerae in Victorian Britain.

In September, 1854, cholera broke out in Soho, killing some 700 people, including entire families, in a matter of weeks. Conventional medical wisdom held that the disease was caused by some mysterious miasma in the air – “a wandering ferment” – a deathly smell lurking beneath the rank odours of the city.

Snow spotted that the brewery workers in Soho, who mostly drank ale, and the inhabitants of the workhouse, which was one of the smelliest places in the area but had its own water source, seemed to be immune. By plotting and mapping the spread of the disease, he traced the source to the water pump in Broad Street (now Broadwick Street): the water supply had been contaminated by an infected baby’s nappy which had been washed in a bucket, and the water then sluiced into a cesspool from which it had seeped into the water supply.

Using methods that now seem almost tragically obvious, Snow established a direct correlation between death from cholera and walking distance to the pump. People living below the sewage outlets on the Thames, he worked out, were 14 times more likely to contract cholera than those obtaining their water upstream.

The clincher came when a former resident of Soho who had moved to Hampstead asked her son to bring her some of the distinctive-tasting water from her old neighbourhood: she died a few days later.

The young doctor was still widely disbelieved. For many, the idea that they were dying from drinking their neighbours’ faeces was too disgusting to accept. But Snow was a brave man (he had, after all, administered anaesthetic chloroform to Queen Victoria during the birth of her eighth child, so he knew about taking risks). He removed the handle from the pump. The epidemic ceased.

Snow not only changed our understanding of cholera but helped to confirm the link between disease and living conditions, reinforcing the fledgeling concept of public health. Joseph Bazalgette’s great enclosed sewage system, begun in 1858, would henceforth ensure that sewage did not run into London’s drinking water.

A series of public health acts in the mid-19th century marked an acceptance of the State’s role in maintaining minimal standards of public health, forging a movement that would culminate in the foundation of the National Health Service in 1948.

Vibrio cholerae was defeated, but not dead. Cholera returns, with grim predictability, when the most basic structure of a society is broken.

Outbreaks of cholera followed the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. The disease killed hundreds in Basra, after the city’s sewage system was destroyed during the invasion of Iraq. One of the worst recent outbreaks afflicted Rwandan refugees fleeing the genocide.

The cholera bacterium – easily controlled, but horribly persistent – is the ultimate mark of a failing state. Snow’s discovery, and the public health movement that it helped to create, was proof that only political action can eradicate the scourge.

This is undoubtedly true of Zimbabwe, where the cause of the disease lives in his own palace, surrounded by security guards, drinking bottled mineral water. Mugabe’s spokesman has accused the West of using the cholera outbreak as a weapon to oust him; and so it should, for a state that allows its citizens to drink their own sewage has broken a basic compact and forfeited any residual legitimacy.

No one knows how many people have died from cholera in Zimbabwe because, like Victorian London, no one is accurately counting. The public health laboratory in Harare, where contaminated water could be tested, has closed down because of a lack of running water. The Zimbabwe National Water Authority is another front for corruption, pumping money into the pockets of Mugabe and his cronies, while the country’s water, the essence of life, becomes a conduit of death. The Health Minister of Zimbabwe has advised citizens not to shake hands to prevent spreading the disease, advice that seems oddly reminiscent of the Victorian health expert who insisted that the disease was caused by eating too many plums.

My most vivid memory of Harare, from long before the country began to disintegrate, is the smell of the blossoming jacaranda trees. Those same streets now reek of raw sewage, in a country slowly being poisoned by its own effluvia.

In 1858, just four years after Snow’s discovery, London suffered the “Great Stink”, when drains overflowed and bacteria thrived in the warm summer. The smell reached the House of Commons, and although the curtains were drenched in chloride of lime to try to keep out the appalling pong, the Honourable Members finally acted: the drains were fixed and cholera was eradicated.

The stink of corruption and death from Zimbabwe can no longer be ignored, but the cure, like that for cholera, may be surprisingly obvious: a matter of political willpower and concerted action.

One contemporary said of Snow: “The naked truth was what he sought and loved.” He simply removed the handle of the pump. The naked truth is that only way Zimbabwe can recover is to remove Robert Mugabe.

What I would like to do — not that you’ve asked — is have a Predator drone circle over Robert Mugabe‘s luxurious villa until this monster of a dictator who has brought such misery to Zimbabwe runs screaming from his home and into the arms of his own people. What happens after that is none of my business.

I do not mean to sound harsh or cruel, but when I say that what happens to Mugabe is none of my business, it is because it already appears to be almost no one’s business. The United States, along with much of the world, disapproves of him and has levied sanctions on his regime — but nothing more than that. None of this has stopped him from killing, beating and jailing his opponents, ruining this once-verdant country so that people starve, medicines are rare and a cholera epidemic rages.

Zimbabwe has almost literally come apart. Mugabe, the onetime freedom fighter, expropriated the white-owned farms that were his country’s breadbasket and awarded them to his cronies. He had something of an argument for doing so, since the farms themselves were the fruits of colonialism. Still, some time had passed, and appropriate compensation would have been nice.

It is Zimbabwe’s misfortune that Mugabe’s cronies are lousy farmers. Over the past eight years, agricultural production has fallen by four-fifths, and just about every economic catastrophe known to man has taken hold. Unemployment is so high (85 percent) that there is almost no such thing as employment, and the inflation rate, while a state secret, is estimated at beyond estimation — in the billions of percent. In case you’re not good with figures, that’s high.

These calamities are certainly the work of one man. If Mugabe were gone, chances are the situation would improve — although I am aware that removing Saddam Hussein initially made things worse in Iraq. I am aware, too, that deposing foreign leaders breaks all sorts of international understandings. Still, the man’s a thug, and thugs should be dealt with.

I went back to John F. Kennedy‘s inaugural address for inspiration. This is the speech that is so often emulated, the one with all those ringing phrases. One of them — the one that starts with the familiar “Let the word go forth” — ends with a pledge to not “permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.” In other words, we were not going to put up with the likes of a Mugabe.

Kennedy’s words were stirring, but they arguably led to our involvement in the Vietnam War and much else that was bad. The war in Iraq has taught the virtues of “realism” in foreign policy — a term that often conceals cold indifference, or the asinine belief that knowing better is a form of colonialism.

Mugabe is no fool. He knows the fight has gone out of us. He has killed his opponents in broad daylight. He has tortured children. Last June, he went to Rome to attend a conference on famine, of all things, staying at the five-star Ambasciatori Palace Hotel. It was obscene, a finger to the world. The world tsk-tsked, and South Africa, the one state in the region with any muscle, has been vigorously ineffective. It preaches noninterference, which, lucky for it, was not what apartheid’s international foes once preached.

In Zimbabwe, doctors and nurses protested the appalling conditions in the hospitals, and the police responded by beating some of them. The country is going backward at an astonishing rate. It has one of the world’s lowest life expectancies (44 for men and 43 for women), and the number of women dying in childbirth has doubled in recent years. Now comes cholera — preventable, curable but killing all the same. It is a disease, certainly, but also an indictment of a man who has led his country to ruin.

Condi Rice routinely condemns Mugabe. Much of the rest of the world does, too. Yet he persists, using his security forces and the wise dispersion of graft to remain in power. The example of Iraq forbids the United States to act. We are all realists now. Our grand cause is to have none at all. Still, a single Predator could do wonders. At the very least, it would lift the shame.

All around, the effects of the Zimbabwean land programme are affecting our everyday life. How can people eat when those trying to produce food on the land are still being forcibly removed? How can a country go forward when there is no money being generated from production to allow it to do so?

I spoke to a friend of mine, Deon Theron, who is vice-president of the Commercial Farmers Union. A senior reserve-bank official wanted his farm and so Deon was prosecuted by the police this year. He was found to be a criminal for still farming and was given 30 days to move off.

Rather than go to jail he decided to move off; but he had nowhere to graze his cattle. The cattle are starving to death. He has lost more than 80 in the past couple of months. It is nearly half the herd.

In the drought years there was nothing more devastating to me than watching a crop slowly die. The leaves start to shrivel and curl up. Their colour is slowly bleached out until what was green and lush and pliable becomes white and brittle. It is then dead. Nothing can revive a crop after that.

To watch a whole cattle herd starve to death for no reason is something different, though. On Deon’s own farm, the one that he was moved off, the grass sings and bends as the breeze passes through it. There is something macabre about that when just a little way away cattle are dying because if their owner allows them to eat that grass he will be defying the law.

You can spend up to two years in prison for still being in your home in Zimbabwe if the Government has acquired it. Acquisition is simple. All it has to do is put a notice in the government gazette. You are not allowed to appeal against it in a court and after 90 days you are a criminal if you are still there.

Martha, Deon’s wife, couldn’t take it any longer. Seeing cattle dying every day preyed upon her mind. She had to go away. She wanted to shoot their cattle. You cannot allow animals to suffer like that. When there is no food to feed the cattle the choices become as starkly defined as the bones on the rib cages of the cows.

We were shot at and beaten up with rifle butts and sticks and sjamkoks on the day that Robert Mugabe was last “sworn in” for another term on June 29. We were taking to court this evil law that is creating the humanitarian crisis now unfolding – a law that allows land to be confiscated with no compensation. We were abducted from the farm and while my father-in-law and I were unconscious with severe head injuries, my mother-in-law, whose arm they had badly broken and who had had a stick from the fire thrust into her mouth for refusing to sing their pro-Mugabe songs, was made to sign a bit of paper with a gun to her head. The bit of paper said that we would withdraw from the court.

We didn’t withdraw. The court is no ordinary court. It is an international court with international jurisdiction. It is the first time that the SADC (Southern African Development Community) tribunal has heard a case. And on Friday we heard that the court in Windhoek had ruled in our favour. Even now, we accept it is unlikely that the Zimbabwean Government will pay any attention. But without farmers people don’t eat. It’s a simple equation. Britain recognised that in the Second World War. The North Atlantic convoys had to run the gauntlet to stop starvation.

In Zimbabwe starvation is already in the air. After we were beaten and put in hospital, we were away from the farm for some weeks and our entire sorghum crop was reaped for us and stolen. The entire sunflower crop went the same way. People are hungry and there are no jobs.

At a roadblock the other day, as I was bringing the children back from school, the police were looking thin. The women officer there said to me: “I am hungry. Have you got some food on the farm you can bring me?” An assistant inspector phoned another friend of mine the same day asking for food too. The voice of hunger echoes through the land.

Among the few of us still battling it out on the farms the talk is: “How can we make a plan to feed our workers?” Food crops just get stolen and the shops are empty. A few of us have clubbed together and are bringing in 30 tonnes of rice from South Africa; but it has been stuck at the border for almost two weeks now. The paperwork and permits required beggar belief. The ruling party has always wanted to achieve a total monopoly on food. When people are hungry they can be controlled with food. It’s like training dogs. Dog trainers use food to get their dogs to do what they want. Stalin and Mao used food as well.

I heard the other day of cattle dying on the other side of our local town of Chegutu. It was an outbreak of anthrax; but some of the people were so desperate that they ate the meat and have also died.

Cholera is rife now too. The sewers are open and there is no running water in most towns or at the hospitals any longer. There is no electricity most of the time to run the pumps. Many people are dying from cholera and it’s spreading all over the country. It is as though the whole place is now breaking up.

No one who is not close to the elite can get their money out of the banks now. No one will accept cheques. So every bank has had a queue snaking out of its door for months. People have been desperately trying to draw out their money, which is limited to the equivalent of less than the price of a loaf of bread a day. Before the end of the day if you are lucky enough to get your allocation of cash the prices have doubled and you can only get half of what you wanted to buy in the first place.

The inner circle can get foreign currency at the official rate, though. Someone worked out recently that for the price of a water melon they can buy a car. There is no shortage of new top-of-the-range cars belonging to the elite in Harare.

It is a malaise that appears unstoppable. While Rome burns the pig trough appears to know no limit. We had a literacy rate that was as high as any Western nation until recently. Most of the children from our area haven’t been taught at school for nearly a year now. Instead they are being taught to steal. The police don’t do anything when children are caught stealing, so their parents send them in to steal in gangs.

On the farm we are putting up razor wire around all the mango orchards. If we don’t, the entire crop will be stolen by gangs with a commercial network for transporting and marketing the stolen produce. In a country that used to be a land of plenty, that only a few years ago used to be a consistent net exporter of food, it is sad that everything has now degenerated into such chaos.

Zimbabwe has become like a good car that has suddenly had its engine taken out of it. In an instant the car called Zimbabwe is now unable to go forward any longer by itself. The international community, through the aid people, are trying to push the car along the road; but what the car really needs is a new engine.

On the farm, instead of us putting money into razor wire we should be putting money into planting more fruit trees and crops. Instead of the agencies putting most of their money into treating the symptoms by giving food aid, they should also be doing everything possible to treat the causes and ensure that property rights and the rule of law are respected. If that is done Zimbabweans will be able to feed themselves once again and generate the money in surpluses to deliver health and education and a proper justice system that the country so desperately needs.

The problem is that it might mean doing something bold. When dealing with tyrants who do not respect international agreements or international law, international peacekeeping forces and international prosecutors from the International Criminal Court are required to ensure that justice and democracy are delivered. Without such bold steps the people of Zimbabwe will continue to suffer at the hands of one man and his little circle of cronies.

Tema: La mezcla de esperanza y desesperación que siguió a las elecciones de marzo de 2008 en Zimbabue y la violencia que se desató tras éstas dieron paso posteriormente a las nuevas posibilidades ofrecidas por el acuerdo político firmado el 11 de septiembre de 2008 por la Unión Nacional Africana de Zimbabue-Frente Patriótico (ZANU-PF) y las dos facciones del Movimiento para el Cambio Democrático (MDC) lideradas por Tsvangirai y Mutambara, respectivamente.

Resumen: Los múltiples aspectos de la crisis en que se ha visto envuelta la política de Zimbabue en el último decenio han agotado a las fuerzas sociales a nivel nacional y han conducido a un acuerdo político que, aunque no ha conseguido sacar del poder al partido ZANU-PF, sí prevé un reparto de ese poder con las dos facciones del MDC.

Análisis: Las elecciones al Parlamento, el Senado, el gobierno local y la presidencia que tuvieron lugar el 29 de marzo de 2008 llevaron a la primera derrota electoral del partido en el poder, la Unión Nacional Africana de Zimbabue-Frente Patriótico (ZANU-PF), y de su presidente, Robert Mugabe. Las dos facciones del Movimiento para el Cambio Democrático (MDC), que se había dividido en octubre de 2005, obtuvieron una mayoría de 109 escaños en el Parlamento, frente a los 97 escaños obtenidos por el ZANU-PF; la primera ronda de la votación presidencial otorgó al líder del MDC el 47,9% de los votos, frente al 43,2% de Mugabe. El resto de los votos fueron a parar al disidente del ZANU-PF Simba Makoni. Sin embargo, el que ninguno de los candidatos presidenciales consiguiera obtener el 50% más uno de los votos hizo necesaria una segunda votación. Los actos de violencia promovidos por el Estado que precedieron a esa segunda votación a finales de junio fueron de tal intensidad que ni siquiera los defensores de Mugabe en el seno de la Comunidad del África Meridional para el Desarrollo (SADC) y la Unión Africana (UA) pudieron respaldar su “victoria” electoral.

Esta falta de apoyo en África, y las manifestaciones de condena que desde hace tiempo recibía de Occidente, aumentaron la presión a la que se vieron sometidos los mediadores de la SADC, encabezados por Thabo Mbeki, para encontrar una solución política a la crisis. El 21 de julio de 2008, el ZANU-PF y las dos facciones del MDC firmaron un memorando de entendimiento en el que se comprometían a “encontrar una solución verdadera, viable, permanente y sostenible a la situación de Zimbabue”. El acuerdo también tenía como objetivo: (a) el cese inmediato de la violencia y la retirada y disolución de las milicias, los campamentos paramilitares y los bloques ilegales; (b) la normalización del entorno político; (c) el restablecimiento del acceso de los organismos de ayuda humanitaria al pueblo de Zimbabue para facilitarle alimentos, servicios médicos y otros servicios críticos en todo el país; y (d) un compromiso de no tomar ninguna decisión que pudiera afectar a la agenda del diálogo, como convocar el Parlamento o formar nuevo Gobierno.

El 24 de julio de 2008, el ZANU-PF y las dos facciones del MDC reanudaron las negociaciones que se habían interrumpido justo antes de las elecciones de marzo, con la mediación del presidente de Sudáfrica Thabo Mbeki. Las negociaciones se abandonaron el 6 de agosto, con las siguientes cuestiones aún por determinar: (a) la duración del Gobierno de transición; (b) la forma y estructura de la Constitución provisional; (c) cuestiones marco relativas al nuevo Gobierno; (d) las atribuciones y obligaciones del presidente y primer ministro en el Gobierno de transición; y (e) el método y el nombramiento o la elección del primer ministro y el presidente. Aunque los mediadores sudafricanos habían elaborado una solución de compromiso que preveía un reparto (entre el presidente, el primer ministro y el Gabinete) de la autoridad ejecutiva de un Gobierno incluyente, el MDC de Morgan Tsvangirai consideró que esa solución seguía otorgando demasiado poder a Mugabe como jefe de Estado. Para Tsvangirai y su partido, cualquier acuerdo alcanzado en el marco del memorando de entendimiento debía reflejar los resultados de las elecciones presidenciales y parlamentarias de marzo, lo cual situaría a Tsvangirai como jefe de Estado interino hasta que pudieran celebrarse otras elecciones presidenciales en el marco de un proceso de reforma democrática avalado por un referéndum.

Según el ZANU-PF, Tsvangirai pedía demasiado de las elecciones de marzo, que habían dejado la presidencia sin decidir. El partido en el poder trataba, por tanto, de conservar la mayor cantidad posible de poder con un Gobierno de unidad nacional liderado por Mugabe en el que el Comando Conjunto de Operaciones integrado por los jefes del ejército, la policía y los servicios de seguridad siguieran desempeñando un papel fundamental. En palabras de uno de los negociadores del ZANU-PF, Patrick Chinamasa:

“No hay nada que justifique las exigencias de Tsvangirai. Quiere que el presidente Mugabe se convierta en (el antiguo presidente titular Canaan) Banana. Sin embargo, los resultados de las elecciones del 29 de marzo no permiten justificar esa exigencia. Lo que Tsvangirai pide es una transferencia de poder, no un reparto”.[1]

La facción minoritaria del MDC, liderada por Arthur Mutambara, respaldó la postura negociada por el SADC, por considerarla “básicamente un acuerdo de reparto del poder” que reflejaba “los hechos sobre el terreno”, y se mostró de acuerdo con los negociadores del SADC y de Mugabe en que “ningún partido puede exigir que se le transfiera a él el poder porque ningún partido ha conseguido una mayoría absoluta que le permita exigirlo”.[2] La cada vez mayor similitud entre la postura de la facción minoritaria del MDC, por un lado, y el ZANU-PF y la SADC, por el otro, fue resultado de diversos factores, entre ellos el aumento de las tensiones y la desconfianza entre las dos facciones del MDC desde que éste se dividiera en octubre de 2005, la reducción de la base de apoyo de la formación de Mutambara y la mayor dependencia del proceso de mediación por el grupo de Mutambara para afianzar su posición en un futuro arreglo político. Los 10 escaños obtenidos por la facción minoritaria del MDC en las elecciones de marzo también le otorgaron una importante influencia sobre los dos principales partidos políticos, puesto que tenía en su poder los votos que podrían decidir la mayoría en el Parlamento. Desde que comenzaron las negociaciones en el marco del memorando de entendimiento de julio, el MDC de Mutambara se fue sintiendo cada vez más molesto por lo que consideraba un intento por la facción de Tsvangirai de marginarlo en las negociaciones. Mugabe no tardó en aprovechar esas tensiones para tratar de entablar una relación más estrecha con el grupo de Mutambara, debilitando así la posición negociadora de la oposición.

El resultado de las tensiones entre las dos facciones del MDC quedó de manifiesto en la votación para elegir al presidente del Parlamento que se celebró el 25 de agosto de 2008. Ambas facciones presentaron candidatos rivales para el puesto. La mayoría de los diputados del ZANU-PF votaron al candidato de Mutambara, Paul Themba Nyathi. El candidato de Tsvangirai, Lovemore Moyo, terminó ganando con votos adicionales tanto del ZANU-PF como de la facción minoritaria del MDC, lo que supuso un duro golpe para dicha facción. En el proceso, Mugabe fue abucheado y recibió pitadas durante su discurso en el Parlamento, lo que le supuso una gran humillación y generó una breve sensación de victoria. Sin embargo, la triste ironía de ver cómo las dos facciones del MDC anteponían sus problemas al problema mayor, el régimen de Mugabe, puso de relieve las dificultades que siguen existiendo para crear una política de oposición sólida en Zimbabue.

Ante los continuos bloqueos del proceso de mediación, el MDC (Tsvangirai) adoptó una triple estrategia contra el régimen de Mugabe. En primer lugar, optó por rechazar las actuales condiciones del acuerdo elaborado con la ayuda de Mbeki y por presionar para que el proceso de mediación dejara de estar liderado por la SADC y la UA y pasara a estar liderado por la ONU. Esta postura concordaba con la conocida desconfianza que la “diplomacia discreta” de Mbeki suscitaba en el MDC y con las tensiones surgidas entre Mbeki y la UE y EEUU en relación con el problema de Zimbabue, ante la preferencia de éstos últimos por presionar para que el Consejo de Seguridad de la ONU adoptara una decisión sobre posibles sanciones al Gobierno de Mugabe. Tanto la UE como EEUU dejaron claro en reiteradas ocasiones que solo aceptarían un acuerdo para Zimbabue que supusiera una pérdida decisiva de poder para Mugabe. El MDC de Tsvangirai decidió adoptar esta misma postura en su intento de desvincular la iniciativa de negociación de la SADC. En segundo lugar, quizá algo menos importante, el MDC aprovechó su control de la asamblea legislativa para crear un centro alternativo de poder contra el ejecutivo, bloqueando cualquier intento de Mugabe de gobernar fuera de un acuerdo más amplio. Y en tercer lugar, el MDC adoptó la visión, algo fatalista, de que la economía en crisis terminaría minando la capacidad de Mugabe para gobernar.

El primer aspecto de esta triple estrategia tenía pocas posibilidades de prosperar, dado que la UA seguía el ejemplo de la SADC con respecto a la cuestión de Zimbabue, en particular porque el grupo de referencia ampliado adscrito a la mediación de la SADC había contado con representantes de la UA. Por tanto, sería muy difícil que el presidente de la UA, el presidente tanzano Kikwete, que se había mostrado crítico de Mugabe, desvinculara a la UA de la postura colectiva de la SADC. Por lo que respecta a la ONU, era muy poco probable que China o Rusia, especialmente en el contexto de la debacle de Georgia, fueran a apoyar otro intento de Occidente de conseguir una resolución del Consejo de Seguridad en que se sancionara a Zimbabue. En la escena parlamentaria, Mugabe ya había iniciado un proceso, tras las elecciones de marzo de 2008, destinado a debilitar la posición de mayoría del MDC mediante la detención de diputados del MDC sospechosos de haber participado en actos de violencia electoral.[3] Con toda probabilidad, semejante estrategia se intensificaría en caso de que la mediación se encallara en un prolongado punto muerto.

Por lo que respecta a la creencia de que la economía podría asestar el golpe definitivo al Gobierno de Mugabe, está claro que la mayor parte de la población de Zimbabue se enfrenta a la perspectiva de una devastación continua de sus formas de sustento como resultado de las desastrosas políticas del régimen en el poder. Más allá de las ganancias obtenidas por el capital extranjero en el sector extractivo y las actividades de rentismo parasitario (rent-seeking)de sectores de la elite gobernante, la mayoría de la población activa, tanto del medio rural como del urbano, se enfrenta a la probabilidad de una pobreza cada vez mayor, por no decir una inanición masiva. La devastación económica que se ha producido tiene tres características sobresalientes. En primer lugar, la hiperinflación de aproximadamente 10 millones por ciento ha acabado con los ahorros y los ingresos de los trabajadores, en un contexto de graves descensos de la producción y una importante escasez de alimentos, electricidad, combustible y bienes básicos. Como resultado de este proceso, la mayoría de las transacciones clave de la economía se han dolarizado, lo que ha generado rentismo parasitario, especulación, transacciones transfronterizas, dependencia de las remesas de dinero procedentes del exterior y delincuencia.

En segundo lugar, se ha registrado un enorme descenso del empleo en el sector estructurado, con el consiguiente crecimiento del empleo en el sector no estructurado. Entre los indicadores de este proceso figuran los siguientes: (a) el descenso del número de trabajadores con empleos en el sector estructurado, de 1,4 millones en 1998 a 998.000 en 2004 (los datos actuales, de los que no se dispone, probablemente mostrarían un descenso aún mayor); y (b) la reducción del porcentaje del PIB representado por los sueldos y los salarios, desde un promedio del 49% durante el período previo al ajuste estructural en 1985-1990 hasta un 29% en 1997-2003. Además, la crisis de la producción provocada por las ocupaciones de tierras también ha supuesto un problema para las formas de vida de los trabajadores, ya que la interrupción de la producción y los ingresos en los sectores agrícola y manufacturero han supuesto una enorme carga para la reproducción de los hogares de los trabajadores.

En tercer lugar, la economía ha experimentado un desplazamiento de mano de obra cada vez mayor. Durante el período de ajuste estructural, en la década de 1990, el volumen de desplazamientos desde las ciudades hacia el campo aumentó debido a las dificultades experimentadas por los trabajadores para encontrar formas de sustento sostenibles en las áreas urbanas. Esta tendencia se ha visto intensificada por el mayor desplazamiento de familias a partir de 2000 derivado de las ocupaciones de tierras, la violencia electoral, las cada vez mayores diásporas de mano de obra y los desahucios masivos que se llevaron a cabo en las ciudades durante la Operación Murambatsvina en 2005.[4] La Operación, destinada a acabar con el sector desestructurado en las zonas urbanas y reducir los principales distritos electorales de la oposición, hizo que unas 700.000 personas perdieran su forma de sustento y generó un movimiento migratorio de mano de obra que empujó a muchas personas a abandonar las ciudades o encontrar un nuevo lugar en los espacios urbanos.

Aunque este enorme deterioro de la economía redujo el apoyo del que disfrutaba el régimen de Mugabe, también supuso un desafío para la oposición. Un pilar fundamental del MDC desde su creación a finales de la década de 1990 ha sido el movimiento obrero. Sin embargo, esta base de oposición se ha visto negativamente afectada por la crisis anteriormente descrita, lo que a su vez ha generado unas condiciones sumamente difíciles para la movilización política, en varios aspectos. En primer lugar, la reducción del empleo en el sector estructurado ha provocado un descenso del nivel de sindicalización y cuotas, lo que ha minado la capacidad de los sindicatos para llevar a cabo actividades educativas y organizativas para sus miembros. En segundo lugar, como resultado de este descenso estructural y la mayor agresividad de los ataques del Estado contra los líderes sindicales, el movimiento obrero se ha vuelto más defensivo estratégicamente y ha disminuido su capacidad y voluntad de liderar amplias alianzas cívicas, como hizo en el período comprendido entre finales de la década de 1980 y 2000. En tercer lugar, las huelgas y paros, que en la década de 1990 habían sido un instrumento eficaz contra el Estado, cuando la economía era más boyante, dejaron de ser estrategias viables de movilización en el contexto existente de rápido descenso de la mano de obra. La desestructuración del mercado laboral ha hecho que los trabajadores pasen de prácticas laborales y acciones de protesta normalizadas en la esfera pública a estrategias más individualizadas y delictivas de supervivencia. La progresiva regulación de las relaciones laborales, que en su día fue uno de los primeros logros del Estado poscolonial, se ha visto reemplazada por una incertidumbre cada vez mayor en torno a la organización del trabajo y la estructuración de la mano de obra.

Este debilitamiento del movimiento obrero, y de la cultura de organización y movilización obrera que lo caracterizaba, llevó al Congreso de Sindicatos de Zimbabue (ZCTU, por sus siglas en inglés) a realizar llamamientos urgentes a la comunidad internacional para que interviniera en la crisis de Zimbabue. En un informe sobre una declaración formulada en 2008 por el presidente del ZCTU a este respecto se señalaba lo siguiente:

“El Sr Matombo dijo que muchos de sus miembros reciben demasiadas agresiones de las fuerzas de Zimbabue como para poder organizarse de forma efectiva. Ése es el motivo de que vaya a presionar a su grupo para que apoye una mayor intervención internacional, a pesar del daño a corto plazo que un bloqueo u otro tipo de acción podría ocasionar a los pobres del país”.[5]

Dado el grave debilitamiento de esta base fundamental de la organización del MDC, no es de extrañar que surgiera una compulsión casi desesperada por considerar la economía un aliado activo en la lucha contra el régimen de Mugabe. Lo que equivalió a una admisión de la menor capacidad de la oposición para movilizar políticamente a nivel nacional se fue traduciendo cada vez más en una categórica afirmación de la capacidad de una crisis económica para completar la tarea de una resistencia exhausta. En varios informes se señaló el carácter generalizado de esta idea. Se informó que Morgan Tsvangirai había dicho que la rápida espiral económica descendente de Zimbabue “terminaría por obligar a Mugabe a transigir”,[6] una opinión compartida por el importante líder cívico Lovemore Madhuku, que declaró:

“Mugabe tendrá muchas dificultades para gobernar sin una mayoría (en el Parlamento), pero ése no es su verdadero problema. Su principal e insalvable problema es el desmoronamiento de la economía. No tiene margen de maniobra”.[7]

El propio Mugabe era consciente de este argumento y no tardó en vincularlo a su opinión de que formaba parte de una estrategia de “cambio de régimen” auspiciada por Occidente. En su opinión:

“… los británicos han prometido al MCD que las sanciones serán más demoledoras y que nuestro Gobierno caerá en seis meses”.[8]

Sin duda, entre la opinión y la comunidad de donantes existía la opinión generalizada de que el lamentable estado de la economía de Zimbabue resultaba insostenible y de que su desastroso deterioro no tardaría en afectar a la capacidad de Mugabe para mantenerse en el poder. Sin embargo, también resultaba evidente que la crisis estaba beneficiando a determinados sectores clave de la elite gobernante, en especial a la principal base de apoyo de Mugabe, el ejército. Tampoco se disponía de información suficiente sobre los mecanismos de supervivencia de los pobres de Zimbabue y los distintos tipos de relaciones económicas resultantes de la crisis que permitirían subsistir a la economía, aunque a unos niveles deplorables de subsistencia. Por tanto, al predicar una estrategia de cambio basada en buena medida en el deterioro económico se corre el riesgo de infravalorar peligrosamente la constante capacidad de un régimen autoritario para mantenerse.

Acuerdo político

En vista del análisis anterior, no es de extrañar que la mediación de Mbeki llevara a la firma de un acuerdo político por los principales partidos el 11 de septiembre de 2008. En vista de las escasas opciones de que disponían los principales actores políticos de Zimbabue, Mbeki utilizó una combinación de esas limitaciones y de las presiones ejercidas por las fuerzas regionales e internacionales en favor de un cambio para presionar en favor de un acuerdo político. El acuerdo que se firmó finalmente reflejó las tensiones existentes entre un partido en su día dominante obligado a aceptar un reparto del poder y un partido opositor incapaz de reunir el poder de influencia necesario para arrebatar el poder de forma contundente al partido gobernante.

Entre los principales aspectos del acuerdo cabe destacar los siguientes:

• Mugabe seguirá siendo el presidente, con dos vicepresidentes del ZANU-PF.
• El nuevo cargo de primer ministro será ocupado por el líder de la oposición Morgan Tsvangirai, con dos viceprimeros ministros, uno de cada facción del MDC.
• Habrá 31 ministros, 15 nombrados por el ZANU-PF, 13 por el MDC de Tsvangirai y tres por el MDC de Mutambara, y 15 viceministros, ocho del ZANU-PF, seis del MDC de Tsvangirai y uno del MDC de Mutambara.
• El Gabinete estará presidido por Mugabe, con Tsvangirai como presidente adjunto, y será responsable de “evaluar y aprobar todas las políticas gubernamentales y los programas conexos”.
• El primer ministro presidirá un Consejo de Ministros que supervisará “la formulación de las políticas gubernamentales por parte del Gabinete” y “se asegurará de que las políticas formuladas sean aplicadas por la totalidad del Gobierno”.
• Se acordará una nueva Constitución en el plazo de 18 meses como culmen de un proceso que incluirá a la opinión pública de Zimbabue y que terminará en un referéndum.
• La aplicación del acuerdo estará supervisada por un Comité Mixto de Supervisión y Aplicación integrado por cuatro altos cargos del ZANU-PF y por otros cuatro de cada una de las facciones de MDC.

El acuerdo dejó muchas áreas sin definir, como la relación entre la autoridad y la capacidad de decisión del Gabinete y el Consejo de Ministros o qué ministerios concretos se asignarían a cada uno de los partidos. Este último problema sigue retrasando la aplicación del acuerdo, puesto que el régimen de Mugabe persiste en sus esfuerzos por conservar el control de los ministerios clave en materia económica y de seguridad. Sin embargo, el acuerdo debería entenderse en gran medida como un campo de batalla en que ambos partidos continuarán su lucha por hacerse con el poder estatal, en una situación en que el partido en el poder aún mantiene la ventaja de controlar los medios de coerción. El ZANU-PF es un partido político mucho más débil que tras las elecciones de 2005, pero el MDC sigue sin ser lo suficientemente fuerte como para ejercer su hegemonía sobre el Estado.

Algunas figuras clave de la sociedad civil han expresado opiniones críticas sobre el acuerdo. El ZCTU advirtió:

“Un Gobierno de unidad nacional es una subversión de nuestra Constitución nacional. Sólo debería establecerse una Autoridad de transición encargada de conducir a Zimbabue hacia unas nuevas elecciones, libres y justas, que, esperemos, no sean impugnadas por los partidos”.[9]

Además, para el presidente de la Asamblea Constitucional Nacional el acuerdo suponía “una capitulación del MDC”. Sin embargo, está claro que ninguna de estas fuerzas sociales tiene la capacidad necesaria para oponerse a este proceso, y de hecho la alternativa propuesta por el presidente de la Asamblea Constitucional, “volver a las trincheras y ejercer presión”, es más una vuelta a lo que podría haber sido que una valoración realista de los problemas actuales.

Conclusión: En el momento de elaborarse este documento, sigue sin aplicarse el acuerdo firmado por las principales formaciones políticas el 11 de septiembre de 2008, parado por una disputa sobre la distribución de los cargos ministeriales. El hecho de que el acuerdo se vea envuelto en semejante disputa es otro reflejo de que, a menudo, este tipo de luchas por el Estado poscolonial se consideran juegos de suma cero en que el acceso al Estado es la condición sine qua non para el empleo, la influencia política y la acumulación futura. Para el partido en el poder, el peligro de perder el control de este recurso amenaza con deshacer las estructuras de rentismo parasitario y especulación que se han convertido en el rasgo dominante de las fortunas de la elite política. En el caso del MDC, el calor del poder del Estado ha incrementado la sensación de que no puede mantenerse un período prolongado de oposición en el actual contexto de deterioro económico.

Notas:

[1] Jason Moyo y Mandy Rossouw, “MDC: Brown’s Trojan Horse?”, Mail and Guardian, 22-28/VIII/2008.

[2] Entrevista a Welshman Ncube, secretario general del MDC (Mutambara)
www.newzimbabwe.com/pages/mdc253.18658.html, 22/VIII/2008.

[3] “Zanu (PF) ‘plots’ to seize parliament”, Business Day, 1/IX/2008.

[4] La palabra “Murambatsvina” significa en shona “sacar la basura”, que es como a menudo se refería el partido en el poder a la base de apoyo urbana del MDC.

[5] Margaret Coker, “Powerful South African labour group ponders how hard to press Mugabe”, Wall Street Journal, 9/VII/2008.

[6] Basildon Peta, “Mugabe advised to quit talks”, Cape Times, 22/VIII/2008. En las declaraciones de otros líderes de la oposición y comentaristas políticos pueden encontrarse otras afirmaciones de fe de este tipo.

[7] Dumisani Muleya, “Mugabe to call new cabinet, dealing new blow to talks”, Business Day, 28/VIII/2008. Piers Pigou también presenta este argumento en “Malice in Blunderland”, Molotov Cocktail 05, septiembre-octubre de 2008.
[8] Jason Moyo, “Mugabe prepares for next move”, Mail and Guardian, 29/VIII/-4/IX/2008.

[9] Declaración del ZCTU, Harare, 16/IX/2008.

Most crises blow over. A few blow up. But one or two live in our memories, scars on the conscience of a world that had knowledge of tragedy, the capacity to intervene, yet failed to act.

Zimbabwe is no Rwanda. Not yet. But after enduring years of Robert Mugabe’s thuggery, it has another cross to bear. The country is weeks away from what could become a catastrophe. Already more than two million people need food aid in what, say officials, is a “very, very serious” situation, after the collapse of commercial agriculture in the wake of Mr Mugabe’s confiscation of white-owned farms. By early next year famine could threaten the lives of some five million people – nearly half the population.

Yet Zimbabwe’s agony is all but buried under the international avalanche of bad financial tidings. But one suspects that the country is out of the headlines for another reason. The international community has turned away, well aware that horror may be imminent, but reduced to embarrassed silence by its failure to act decisively.

Every now and then, however, there comes a point in a crisis where the scale and duration of the suffering become too much to ignore. Conscience is pricked, and a hitherto bemused world wakes to demand action.

That point has surely been reached in Zimbabwe, where the testimony of a nurse in the front line (who of necessity must remain anonymous) suggests that her country has reached the end of its tether. She has spent 30 years serving its people, and now helps to run a city hospital. But never in all that time has she felt such painful frustration at the sheer scale of the agony unfolding. And it is coupled with anger at what she sees as the bureaucracy of a leading international aid agency in the face of pleas from the desperately needy.

Applicants for help from the UN World Food Programme (WFP), she writes in an e-mail, “are meant to declare how many are in their households, how many are disabled, how many are chronically ill”.

Food for the starving is available, she says, held in the local compounds of the WFP, ready for distribution. But first, insist officials, comes the paperwork: tick the right boxes on two vital forms, and you qualify for help. Give the “wrong” answers and you will almost certainly starve.

“Just how,” she asks, “does the head of a child-headed household [an all too common phenomenon in a country decimated by Aids] get into contact with people who have the questionnaires? We have had people in their hundreds coming to our doors and pleading for food.

“Please, whoever is responsible for all the bureaucracy, end this expensive time-wasting exercise. We plead with you to start getting the food out of the warehouses to the people who are hungry.”

One can sympathise with the WFP position: that in time of acute need scarce resources must be safely stored, and criteria for their release drawn up and observed. Nor should the delicate nature of a relief agency’s balancing act be underestimated: for how long should it abide by an agreement with a noxious regime, in which restrictions on relief operations have been reluctantly accepted, in the belief that the lifesaving role it plays outweighs all else?

The evidence of the nurse and others, however, suggests that whatever the terms, the deal is not working. In her city, youngsters beg for food at the hospital gates. In the country, many Zimbabweans are reduced to eating roots in the worst- hit areas, according to a BBC report last week.

This leads to an obvious conclusion: conventional means of supply and distribution are not enough. Zimbabwe urgently requires the unprecedented: a unilateral airdrop of food and medical supplies.

The means are within reach. Giant Hercules aircraft, of the sort used by the UN in Ethiopia and Sudan, could be based in neighbouring Botswana, where President Khama has shown he is willing to stand up to Robert Mugabe.

True, in the all too likely absence of government consent, the airlifted supplies would reach a fraction of those in need; and the dropping points would be arbitrary. But not a single life need be lost in the conduct of the operation, and many thousands would be saved.

Readers may recall a passage from Albert Camus’ The Plague. The Algerian town of Oran is isolated, cut off from the world by the dreadful pestilence it endures, and at night the local doctor reflects: “From the ends of the Earth, across thousands of miles of land and sea, kindly, well-meaning speakers tried to voice their fellow feeling, and indeed did do, but at the same time proved the utter incapacity of every man truly to share in suffering which he cannot see… ‘Oran, we are with you’, they called emotionally. But not, Dr Rieux told himself, to love or die together – and that’s the only way. They’re too remote.”

Zimbabwe is indeed a long way away. But it is not so remote that we cannot demonstrate our compassion, as well as our outrage, in a form that provides some relief to its people – even if we cannot truly share in their dreadful ordeal. If not an airdrop now, when? And if not an airdrop, what?

The events of this week mark a milestone in Zimbabwe’s history. The Harare agreement is a breakthrough that represents the country’s last, best chance of averting apocalypse. Sceptics insist that the deal cannot work; but for millions of suffering Zimbabweans, it is a sweet tea. And the risk is now that the international community might inadvertently undermine this source of hope.

It will not be easy to make this deal work; and MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe’s new prime minister, has no illusions about the size of the task facing him. In yesterday’s Guardian interview he spoke of the “inherent suspicion” between the reluctant partners. He also pointed out that not only would he have to handle Robert Mugabe and the Zanu-PF, but that he might also face opposition from MDC hardliners who want no truck with the Zanu-PF elite.

Tsvangirai will also have to gain the respect of the generals, without becoming one of them. Sooner or later, though he will have to make a decision on whether to persuade the military top brass to stand down, or order them to do so. A clash between Tsvangirai and the military is looming, and how he handles it will be essential to his political survival. His other immediate priorities will be to bring food, water, sanitation and medicine to the people; reforming the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe; and repealing repressive legislation.

The role of the international community is crucial to the survival of the new unity government, and there is an expectation that the MDC can deliver on foreign investment. But so far the European Union, the United States, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have given a tepid welcome to the deal, and have stated that the new government must “prove itself”.

What they really mean is that they are upset Mugabe is still in the picture, and they will not provide aid until Tsvangirai ousts him. Although this response is not unexpected given the decade of hostility between the west and Zanu-PF, it is wrong. The west has to abandon this orthodoxy of demonisation, which ignores the obvious. First, without aid, Zimbabwe will die. Second, the goalposts of Zimbabwe’s politics have irrevocably shifted. Although the agreement is notionally about power-sharing, in reality it sets the seal on the transition of power. The process will be lengthy, and fractious, but there can be no going back: Zimbabwe is entering a new era of leadership. Third, Tsvangirai and the MDC have already “proved” themselves – and they carry the scars of struggle to prove this.

Without donor aid, the Harare agreement will become merely a political armistice, a brief interlude in Zimbabwe’s civil war. If Tsvangirai is unable to persuade the donors to unlock their vaults, his usefulness – and shelf-life – will be brief. Failure by the international community to recognise the new government, and make at least a symbolic investment, would be to misinterpret Zimbabwean realpolitik and could only be destructive. Mugabe remains a major part of Zimbabwe’s political landscape. His time is passing, but he cannot be wished away – and Zanu-PF still holds the knife by the handle.

Tsvangirai, and in turn the Zimbabwean people, should not be punished for signing a deal with Mugabe. Western governments are right to worry about continued violence and corruption in Zimbabwe, and they cannot dispense aid willy-nilly, especially during this economic downturn. But the country needs aid, and it needs it now.

The west and Zanu-PF will also have to re-establish a relationship. Driving Mugabe underground will only encourage a lethal Zanu-PF unilateralism. Travel sanctions on the Zanu-PF elite will remain in force, but there is no reason why meetings cannot be held in Zimbabwe, or on neutral territory. Just as Zanu-PF and the MDC have formed a government of national unity, so too does the international community have to take an inclusive, not sectarian approach to Zimbabwe’s politics of reconstruction. Zanu-PF, in turn, must demonstrate that it is no longer addicted to violence.

Britain and Zimbabwe do have a “special relationship”: to pretend otherwise is facile. The relationship has often been acrimonious, and it is laden with a deep mistrust about the colonial past and recent history; but it can be salvaged and reformulated in ways that are mutually beneficial and not exploitative.

None of the signatories to this agreement got everything they wanted, but Zimbabweans got what we needed: hope. It is ordinary Zimbabweans of all races, not the political elite, who will have to empower the agreement for it to work. After years of blood, sweat and tears, Zimbabwe finally has a deal – but we will need the world’s help to give peace a chance.

We are but halfway through 2008 yet it has already born witness to a sizeable shift in global power. The default western mindset remains that the western writ rules. That is hardly surprising; it has been true for so long there has been little reason for anyone to question it, least of all the west. The assumption is that might and right are invariably on its side, that it always knows best and that if necessary it will enforce its political wisdom and moral rectitude on others. There is, however, a hitch: the authority of the self-appointed global sheriff is remorselessly eroding.

There have been two outstanding examples so far this year. The first was Burma (or Myanmar as it should be known). We can all agree that the regime is odious. The question facing the rest of the world in the aftermath of the cyclone, however, was how to assist the millions of victims of a humanitarian disaster. True to form, it was not long before the west, including our own foreign secretary, was talking up the idea of military intervention; warships were deployed off Burma’s coast, talk was rife of helicopter landings and amphibious craft making their way up the Irrawaddy delta.

The idea, of course, was patently absurd. Burma’s closest ally is China, with whom it shares a long border, while it is also a member of Asean (the Association of South East Asian Nations). China, India and Asean – who largely make up the region – were irrevocably opposed to the use of military force. Western leaders were living in a time warp: the kneejerk responses of old, freshened up by the short-lived era of liberal interventionism, have become a stock response. It was not long before the bellicose talk subsided and the west was obliged to channel its aid via Asean – which, from the outset, was the obvious and desirable course of action.

The fact that the west could not understand the geopolitical realities of east Asia – now the largest economic region in the world – and adapt its policies accordingly, revealed that old assumptions and attitudes run very deep indeed. Even when the very thought is ridiculous and utterly impractical, the call for military intervention, on the part of political leaders and media commentators alike, is seemingly the invariable reflex action. In fact, what Burma demonstrated were the limits of western power, the need for the west to understand those limits, and to respect and work with a region rather than seeking to intervene over its head like some kind of imperial overlord.The second example is Zimbabwe. This hurts the British psyche. Because we suffer from an acute case of colonial amnesia, we seem to think that we have some unalienable right to lecture Zimbabwe on its iniquities. Yet Britain’s culpability for the country’s plight – from tolerating Ian Smith’s declaration of independence to the disgraceful land deal that guaranteed the privileged position of white settlers – is second to none. Notwithstanding all of this, the British feel they enjoy incomparable moral virtue on Zimbabwe.

Yet this episode too has revealed British – and western – impotence in its starkest form. After much grandstanding at the G8 summit, the Anglo-American attempt to toughen up sanctions foundered in the UN security council, where it was vetoed by Russia and China and opposed by South Africa and two others. Meanwhile, President Thabo Mbeki, whose efforts to broker some kind of deal have been widely and patronisingly scorned, has scored a major diplomatic triumph. The Southern Africa Development Community’s appointed mediator for Zimbabwe, Mbeki managed to bring both Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF and Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC to the negotiating table. All the western bluster and invective now look just that: the route to a possible solution has been the work of South Africa, the SADC and the African Union alone. This is yet a further illustration of a shift in global authority.

Western power can no longer deliver in the face of the growing power, competence and self-confidence of developing countries. Instead of universal western power, we are witnessing the rise of regionalisation and regional solutions. This reflects broader changes in the global economy. Economic power is fast ebbing away from the old G7 countries towards the so-called Bric economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China), or, rather more accurately, a growing number of developing economies. The G7 now account for less than half of global GDP and that share is steadily falling. Such economic shifts are the irresistible prelude to parallel changes in political power. The two examples discussed are classic instances of this process: Burma involved China and India, together with the Asean countries, while Zimbabwe featured South Africa, with Russia and especially China, emboldened in this instance to play a more assertive role on the global stage. They illustrate what might be described as the growing “Bricisation” of global politics.

They also underline the comprehensive failure of Anglo-American foreign policy. At the time of the invasion of Iraq, no thought was given to the idea that western economic power was on the wane; on the contrary, the likes of Bush and Blair seemed to believe that we were seeing the dawning of an era of new and overwhelming western power.

Never underestimate the ability of political leaders to misread history on a monumental scale. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have both served to hasten western decline: they have both failed to achieve their objectives and in the process demonstrated an underlying western impotence. In contrast, those other “rogue” states, namely North Korea, Zimbabwe, and perhaps even Iran, show strong signs of responding in a positive manner to a very different kind of treatment. Liberal interventionism has failed. But as yet the west shows no sign of either understanding the new world or being able to live according to its terms.

It remains in denial, refusing to recognise the diminution in its own authority and, as a result, seemingly incapable of adapting to the new circumstances and coming up with an innovative response. This is certainly true of Britain. The foreign secretary only seems able to utter the platitudes and cliches of the discredited Blairite era: he has yet to come up with a single idea, suggestion or insight that indicates he understands the nature of this new world. British foreign policy is mired in its own past and in its relationship with the United States. In such circumstances we will find ourselves dragged kicking and screaming into the new era, constantly shunned and disappointed, a spectator rather than an architect, cast in the role of Mr Grumpy.

It is clear what Robert Mugabe wants to see from the talks with the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) that began in South Africa on Thursday. On December 27 1987 he sat down with Joshua Nkomo, the leader of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu) and signed a unity accord. It followed seven years of sustained violence against Nkomo’s party in which some 18,000 people died. The creation of a government of national unity made Nkomo vice-president. Three Zapu leaders were given cabinet posts. They might as well have been hamsters in a cage on Mugabe’s desk.

This is what Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the MDC, must remember as he sits down at the talks. Like Nkomo, his party has been battered, with many of his MPs dead, in hiding or facing charges, and more than 1,500 officials in prison. The mediator, Thabo Mbeki, and other African presidents would be happy with a deal similar to the 1987 accord. But will the MDC be able to arm-wrestle a deal that leads to Mugabe stepping down or to free and fair elections – or even a joint Mugabe/Tsvangirai control of the state and its security apparatus? The question, as Humpty Dumpty said, is: who is to be master?

Much is being made of the Kenyan model forged earlier this year when the country exploded after a stolen election. Raila Odinga, who most neutral observers considered to have won, accepted the post of prime minister under Mwai Kibaki’s presidency. But Kenya is different. The security apparatus remained largely unengaged, if not neutral, in Kenya’s violent January. Kibaki is no Mugabe, and Kenya’s politicians are more cynical. In return for a slice of the power pie, they traded in their loyalty to principles and voters.

In Zimbabwe everyone in the power structure has been appointed by Mugabe, all are loyal members of Zanu-PF. Several of the military and security bosses have pledged their refusal to allow Tsvangirai to come to power. Their “right to rule” comes not solely from their “conquest” of the country by war against white rule, it is also because many Zimbabweans voted for them. In the March parliamentary elections, Zanu-PF gained more votes than Tsvangirai’s MDC. Even discounting rigging and bullying, the unpalatable fact is that there is still popular support for Mugabe and those around him.

Is it conceivable that some time in the near future – two weeks to complete the talks is an unlikely deadline – prime minister Tsvangirai will say to Emerson Mnangagwa, the man who organised the reign of terror since the March election, that it is time to retire? Could he tell General Philip Sibanda that he is no longer head of the army? Miracles of reconciliation, peace and power-sharing have happened before in Africa but this is not credible. Mugabe and his cronies have allowed the country to be destroyed in order to hold on to power. Talks, for Mugabe, are not about reaching a compromise, they are a time-wasting ploy while he prepares for more war, or a tool for retaining – even extending – power.

What strengths does Tsvangirai have? The support of millions of Zimbabweans and a stubbornness that the flaky Nkomo lacked. Support from western countries is a double-edged sword. They provide financial, technical and diplomatic support but they also give Mugabe a cause – anti-imperialism – to unite his allies. And their power is waning. The Chinese and Russian veto of the American UN security council resolution calling for sanctions against Mugabe last week marked the full stop at the end of the west’s exclusive post cold war domination of Africa. They cannot rescue Zimbabwe.

Much weight was put on the rest of Africa in sorting out Zimbabwe but the African Union ducked its responsibilities at its summit in Egypt last month and passed the buck back to Mbeki. His power as president of South Africa is ebbing daily. The African National Congress, now dominated by allies of Jacob Zuma, is removing Mbeki’s allies from positions of power and is setting up a parallel ANC negotiation. In the next few months we may see South Africa begin to take the Zimbabwe crisis seriously.

But can Zimbabwe’s economy wait? It is sliding quickly into subsistence and starvation with guns and mobiles. There are no buffers, just endless decline. Tsvangirai knows that confidence and financial support will not return without his say-so. But the ruling elite are not troubled. Some make good money out of Zimbabwe’s ruin. They are shifting their money overseas; sending the Zimbabwe dollar on down. They can always bring a little foreign exchange back and buy a few trillion dollars to pay servants and purchase food and black-market fuel. The only question is how long the government can produce money to pay its troops, police and thugs?

For different reasons, both sides may play for time. At present whatever moral and political strength Tsvangirai has, Mugabe is in power. Unless something inside Zanu-PF happens to unseat him, the battle for democratic change in Zimbabwe is far from over.

It is a matter of principle, surely. Here’s an ageing dictator using every means to hang on in power. His people are starving. Hundreds of thousands flee to a safe haven in the democratic country to the south. Elections are a malign joke. And what does the west do about it? Why, pile in with food aid, trade deals and sweet promises. Prop up the dictatorship for all its worth. Because for the moment we’re talking North Korea, not Zimbabwe: and Pyongyang has (or perhaps had) a little bomb that turned idealism on its head.

Of course it was galling to see Robert Mugabe’s spokesmen hailing a “great victory” this weekend. Of course there’s reason for Gordon Brown to grind his teeth as his Anglo-American package of mini-sanctions comes unstuck at the security council, blocked by China and Russia (among others), and to talk of unleashing “Plan B”. Of course it would be deeply cheery to see Mugabe dumped. But let’s not get carried away by too much froth about “impotence against tyranny”. Diplomatic life, alas, includes more than a Sunday Telegraph leader column.

The sanctions themselves, mild pursuit and hindrance of Zimbabwe’s president and immediate chums, were never likely to achieve very much – except, perhaps, to make those chums feel more beleaguered. An arms embargo makes no effective difference: Mugabe’s army has quite enough guns for oppressive purposes. And as for shoving Thabo Mbeki from the mediation stage and putting in some UN representative, how brilliant was that? South Africa’s president hasn’t had much success at the conciliation business, to be sure: but the (lost) UN resolution specifically sidelined him, and thus automatically the most influential player in the region. No wonder South Africa itself took the Chinese and Russian side.

We may scoff and rail as much as we like over Beijing’s cynicism or Moscow’s duplicity, yet their arguments are more than mere self-interested manoeuvring. Is Zimbabwe a “threat to international peace and security”? It has produced a refugee crisis causing grave internal strains in South Africa. But such strains, again, didn’t influence Mbeki’s vote, or change his mind on what can be done. And nor, significantly, did it change other African minds, either.

Take Jakaya Kikwete, president of Tanzania and the African Union, laying out the regional line. “No party can govern alone in Zimbabwe … therefore the parties have to work together.” Therefore there has to be a negotiated settlement. Is that just one more excuse for more inaction? Not in an Africa where the fault lines of tribalism still run deep. Remember how, and why, Kenya fell to its knees a few months ago. Look carefully as Mbeki strives to keep the Zulus sweet. Never forget that Zimbabwe has tribes as well as parties.

It suits us, in full preaching mode, to believe that democracy comes easy. It doesn’t in many parts of the globe where tribal and religious loyalties tear up the textbooks. Yet our own grim lesson in Afghanistan and Iraq never seems to stretch our thinking. We learn painfully that freedom can’t arrive with a visiting army, yet we don’t transfer that wisdom to others (partly because, as pat assumption, Africa should just do what we say).

Mugabe is a wrecker and an affront. But meaningless gestures won’t bring him down. There will be an African solution here, or there will be no solution at all. London and Washington aren’t central to the outcome.

Rather than get cast as a kind of transition figure between Bush and John McCain’s touted alliance of democracies, Brown would be far better sticking closer to the reality of UN charter (and practical) life. Pyongyang has its own lectures to deliver on principle. Needs must when the nuclear devil drives. The sad truth of the matter, in Harare and beyond, is that often there is no Plan B.

Robert Mugabe, el octogenario presidente y principal artífice de la independencia de Zimbabue, se ha vuelto un déspota. Consiguió lo que quería: la presidencia vitalicia. Con la oposición en el exilio, en las cárceles o muerta, puede seguir “hasta que Dios le eche”, según dice. Pero, aunque hace décadas que sus compatriotas padecen su tiranía, los occidentales sólo descubrieron el verdadero rostro de Mugabe en 2001, cuando, para camuflar su incapacidad de resolver los agudos problemas del país, azuzó a sus “veteranos” de la guerrilla a ocupar las tierras de los granjeros blancos. Aquello fue un modelo de cómo no se debe realizar una reforma agraria en el África actual: evidenciando el racismo subyacente en su política, Mugabe abocó a Zimbabue a un rápido y profundo deterioro económico y social. Zimbabue era antes un exportador de alimentos; ahora, sus famélicos 12 millones de habitantes subsisten gracias a la ayuda internacional.

Como otras figuras del África poscolonial, Mugabe vive en la irrealidad. Pretende que su aureola de líder “nacionalista” le coloca por encima del bien y del mal. Aún sueña con sus pasadas hazañas bélicas en la lucha por la liberación, y cree que ese pasado justifica el presente. Es incapaz de reconocer su gran fracaso: el no haber sabido revalidar su competencia como guerrillero en su labor como estadista.

Apenas instalado en el poder en 1980, Mugabe deshizo la alianza con Joshua Nkomo, compañero de lucha y principal adversario, que creó el Frente Patriótico para acelerar el final del régimen segregacionista instalado por Ian Smith a mediados de los años sesenta del pasado siglo, según el modelo surafricano. Nkomo era ministro y destacado miembro de la etnia ndebele, cuyo feudo es la región de Bulawayo. Con el sempiterno pretexto de que intentó dar un golpe de Estado -los dictadores africanos carecen de imaginación y se repiten unos a otros-, Mugabe echó a Nkomo del Gobierno y desencadenó la llamada Operación Gukurahundi, en la cual asesinaron al menos a 20.000 miembros de dicha etnia en los seis años que duró esa etapa de terror, que no ha terminado: algunos cálculos sitúan en un millón los ndebeles huidos del país en los últimos 10 años. El dirigente material de la purga, el general Perence Shiri, se hace llamar El Jesús Negro, y continúa al frente de la terrible V Brigada del Ejército. Y uno de los factores que pudieran explicar la recalcitrante y patética resistencia de Mugabe a dejar el poder es la promesa del principal líder opositor, Morgan Tsvangirai, de encausar a los responsables del genocidio si llega al poder; Mugabe y los suyos prefieren morir en sus palacios y no en la cárcel.

El actual episodio del drama de Zimbabue, como toda su trayectoria en 28 años de absolutismo, demuestra que Mugabe no es demócrata: no le importan los métodos con tal de seguir en el poder. Mientras tanto, la comunidad internacional sólo hace declaraciones y publica comunicados. Protestas y condenas que son sólo eso, palabrería y papel mojado para un viejo león acostumbrado a resistir, a la espera de que amaine la tormenta.

¿Y ahora, qué? ¿Qué solución podemos esperar cuando, desoyendo el clamor del mundo, Mugabe volvió a colocarse la banda presidencial tras su “aplastante” victoria en una parodia de “elecciones”, sin oposición?

¿Estamos condenados los africanos a sufrir en silencio a nuestros sátrapas, sin que se haga nada efectivo para poner coto a la miseria y al terror que provocan? Cuando, década tras década, los mandatarios utilizan con impunidad todo tipo de trucos y trampas, incluido el asesinato, para seguir donde están pese a quien pese, parecería lógico pensar que la gente tiene derecho a defender su vida y su libertad. Cuando esos mismos tiranos se atrincheran y pretenden eternizarse a través de sus hijos -como en la República Democrática de Congo, como en Togo, y puede que en Gabón y Guinea Ecuatorial-, los simples ciudadanos pierden toda esperanza. A generaciones de africanos nos han robado el futuro, nos han desprovisto de toda ilusión. Y esta impotencia, convertida en desesperación, es un caldo de cultivo para ambiciosos y aventureros.

La Unión Africana, creada en 2001 en sustitución de la ineficaz Organización para la Unidad Africana, consagró el no reconocimiento de los gobiernos que llegasen al poder por medio de la violencia. Dicho así, parece una medida para impulsar la democracia. Pero si tenemos en cuenta que buena parte de los signatarios de estos acuerdos de Syrta (Libia) ocuparon sus puestos mediante sangrientos golpes militares, en algunos casos ahogando regímenes democráticos conseguidos con mucho esfuerzo, se concluye que es sólo una medida para blindar a las dictaduras. En África, existen gobernantes que pronto celebrarán su cincuentenario en el poder, sin que nadie se escandalice. Todos ellos, como Mugabe, se distinguen por su crueldad y corrupción, pues los jefes y allegados acaparan las inmensas riquezas de un África nada pobre, sólo empobrecida por la depredación y los abusos.

La percepción del africano es que esas tiranías cleptómanas no existirían sin la aquiescencia o complicidad de los países occidentales, principales beneficiarios de la situación. Porque, al tiempo que explotan nuestras ingentes materias primas a precios irrisorios, se benefician de la fuga de cerebros y de la barata mano de obra inmigrante; y cuando llegan los tiempos de crisis, sacan de la rebotica todos los rancios mecanismos que limiten la libre circulación de las personas, pero no de los bienes.

Africanos y occidentales coincidimos en que mucho debe cambiar en África. Las discrepancias son metodológicas. El modelo español es ideal, y ha dado resultado en algún país latinoamericano, pero no siempre es exportable. La Transición fue la obra de un Rey deseoso de transformar la dictadura heredada en democracia plena. Ese impulso desde la jefatura del Estado estaba en consonancia con los anhelos de la inmensa mayoría de los ciudadanos, y los políticos de todas las tendencias asumieron la necesaria transformación. ¿Por qué hacer cuando es la propia cabeza del régimen la que no tiene voluntad de ceder ni un ápice de su dominio omnímodo? Los dictadores africanos tomaron nota de los avatares de Augusto Pinochet y resisten para no terminar como él, humillados y ofendidos.

¿Estamos obligados los africanos a soportar eternamente miserias y tiranías? ¿En nombre de qué maldición bíblica o determinismo genético? África debe dejar de ser un problema, en primer lugar, para los propios africanos. Pero no habrá solución mientras no se comprenda que la libertad y el progreso sólo llegarán de la mano de los demócratas africanos. Y para ello es necesario obligar a salir a los tiranos. Y se puede lograr sin derramar ni una gota de sangre, sin guerras ni invasiones. Uno de los temores recurrentes entre los dirigentes occidentales de todas las tendencias es el de la desestabilización; se piensa que cualquier cambio pondrá en peligro las fuentes de materias primas y las inversiones. Esta doctrina perversa lleva a legislar sobre la protección de los simios, mientras las personas son vejadas. Pero no se han valorado los beneficios que se derivarían para el mundo, incluido el de los negocios, si africanos con otra mentalidad asumieran los destinos de sus países: la estabilidad sería verdaderamente sólida si los africanos pudiéramos vivir tranquilos en nuestro suelo, y nuestras riquezas nos sirvieran para alcanzar el desarrollo.

Si se produjese una complicidad entre africanos y occidentales, si los demócratas europeos y americanos se aunaran contra las dictaduras inhumanas de África, las cosas empezarían a cambiar. Nuestras independencias deben ser plenas, no nominales; pero, a tenor de lo vivido en el último medio siglo de relaciones entre Occidente y África, sería preferible que la injerencia extranjera en nuestros asuntos se produjera a favor de los pueblos y no de los tiranosaurios.

Hace unas semanas, el Tribunal Supremo de EE. UU. dictaminó que los detenidos en Bahía de Guantánamo tienen derecho a un hábeas corpus – el derecho a recusar la base fáctica y legal de su detención en un tribunal de justicia-. La decisión me regocijó, después de cuatro años de haber trabajado para asegurar el régimen de derecho en la política de detención e interrogatorio de Estados Unidos, incluida la supervisión de los juicios de comisiones militares en Bahía de Guantánamo. Pero mi felicidad se ve oscurecida donde estoy, cerca de la frontera con Zimbabue – un país donde el mandato judicial de hábeas corpus y el régimen de derecho se han vuelto obsoletos-.

El hábeas corpus, término que en latín corresponde a “que tengas tu cuerpo”, es un antiguo principio del derecho común inglés incorporado a la Constitución de Estados Unidos para asegurar la libertad frente a una detención ilegal por parte del Estado. Fue y sigue siendo un control fundamental frente a la encarcelación de individuos sin omisión por parte de las cortes independientes. En Zimbabue, este derecho – como tantos otros equilibrios de poderes- ha sido socavado por un Estado represivo.

Apenas horas antes del dictamen del Supremo de EE. UU., Tendai Biti, secretario general del opositor Movimiento para el Cambio Democrático (MCD), fue arrestado tras su regreso a Zimbabue. A pesar de los intentos inmediatos por parte de sus abogados para dar con él, durante días se siguió desconociendo su paradero. La policía descartó una orden judicial inicial que exigía que se trasladara a Biti ante un tribunal.

Una vez que Biti fue llevado finalmente ante la corte, días después, el Gobierno anunció que sería acusado de traición – lo que conlleva la pena de muerte- por anunciar extraoficialmente los resultados de las elecciones del 29 de marzo del 2008.

Antes de su detención, Biti había respondido a esas acusaciones declarando que su único delito había sido pelear por la democracia en Zimbabue. Es poco probable que pueda recusar la causa de su detención en un tribunal independiente.

Desde 1999, el MCD ha funcionado como una alternativa democrática para el régimen del presidente Robert Mugabe. En las elecciones de marzo, los zimbabuos hicieron saber su elección, a pesar de los serios obstáculos y la represión generalizada, con el candidato presidencial del MCD, Morgan Tsvangirai, que obtuvo más votos que Mugabe. Pero, según los recuentos de votos dados a conocer por el Gobierno después de una sospechosa demora de un mes, el margen de victoria del MCD- 48% a 43%- no alcanzó el 50% necesario para evitar una segunda vuelta.

Biti no es el único miembro del MCD en estar “desaparecido” por un tiempo por el Gobierno de Mugabe. En los dos últimos años, la policía y paramilitares respaldados por el Gobierno encarcelaron, golpearon y hasta asesinaron regularmente a funcionarios del MCD y miembros sospechados de pertenecer a este movimiento. El año pasado, Biti fue detenido y golpeado junto con Tsvangirai y decenas de otros funcionarios del MCD. Las fotos del cuerpo golpeado de Tsvangirai generaron una protesta internacional.

La violencia patrocinada por el Estado contra el MCDy sus seguidores ha escalado a medida que se acercaba la segunda vuelta electoral el pasado 27 de junio. Hace apenas semanas, Biti describió el descubrimiento del cuerpo mutilado de Tonderai Ndira, un joven líder del MCD. Ndira había sido sacado de su casa por la policía. Estuvo desaparecido durante siete días; cuando encontraron su cuerpo, sólo pudieron reconocerlo por un brazalete que llevaba.

En nuestras oficinas en Johannesburgo, tenemos dos abogados zimbabuos que huyeron de su país después de recibir amenazas de muerte por su trabajo en la defensa de los derechos humanos. Al menos cinco de sus clientes han sido asesinados en las últimas semanas. Más recientemente, la policía zimbabua suspendió el trabajo de numerosas organizaciones de derechos humanos que estaban documentando la reciente violencia.

Cuesta imaginar que se pudiera llevar a cabo una elección libre y justa con el telón de fondo de una violencia tan intensa y sistémica. De hecho, hasta el presidente de Sudáfrica, Thabo Mbeki, quien a pesar de una protesta clamorosa de muchos de sus ciudadanos respaldó a Mubage, se sintió obligado a calificarla como una “causa de seria preocupación”.

En el caso Boumediene contra Bush, el juez Anthony Kennedy escribió que “la libertad y la seguridad se pueden reconciliar; y en nuestro sistema están reconciliadas dentro del marco de la ley”. Pero ya no queda ningún régimen de derecho en Zimbabue – ni hábeas corpus ni control de las acciones arbitrarias del Estado-. Es hora de que intervenga la comunidad internacional, de que haga un llamamiento a poner fin a la detención y desaparición de funcionarios y seguidores del MCD y de que presione para una transición democrática en Zimbabue. Sólo entonces los principios que subyacen a la decisión de la Corte Suprema estarán al alcance de los ciudadanos comunes de ese país.

Now that President Robert Mugabe has been sworn into a sixth term after an election widely viewed as illegitimate, what is the rest of the world going to do about it?

So far, the response has been slow or ineffective; the United Nations Security Council has managed to pass only watered-down condemnations of Mr. Mugabe’s electoral terror because of resistance from South Africa, China and Russia. And Tuesday, the African Union urged Mr. Mugabe to join in a power-sharing agreement — a government of national unity.

But a better idea may be for Zimbabwe’s elected officials to cut the 84-year-old Mr. Mugabe out altogether — by getting rid of the office of president.

At first glance that may appear difficult: the Zimbabwean regime is marked by an extremely powerful executive presidency coupled with a largely neutered Parliament. Nearly all state power now rests with Mr. Mugabe, who has run the country since independence in 1980, and now presides over a nation with severe fuel and food shortages and an inflation rate of more than a million percent a year.

Yet it is possible for the Parliament to jettison the presidency. Recall that Zimbabwe’s parliamentary elections in March gave the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change led by Morgan Tsvangirai, 109 seats in the House of Assembly to 97 for Mr. Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF. Though by no means flawless, these elections were not marred by the same degree of violence and intimidation as the recent presidential election, in which the winner of the first round, Mr. Tsvangirai, withdrew from the race in fear for his life and those of his supporters.

The Movement for Democratic Change’s slight majority is a relatively accurate depiction of the country’s political landscape, giving both sides significant representation in Parliament, with the M.D.C. controlling the 210-seat lower house, and the parties effectively tied in the Senate. That would allow a Prime Minister Tsvangirai to govern while still requiring his party to compromise with ZANU-PF to gain the two-thirds majority needed to pass constitutional amendments — like getting rid of the presidency for good. That would also help protect ZANU-PF supporters, including military officers, from state-sponsored revenge.

More immediately, a newly empowered Parliament would give reformist elements in ZANU-PF a forum in which to conduct politics and make deals. The party is no longer a monolith: former Finance Minister Simba Makoni ran for president against Mr. Mugabe in the first round, and there are leaders within ZANU-PF who are more than willing to abandon the “old man” given the opportunity to do so. These leaders — including Gen. Solomon Mujuru and former Home Affairs Minister Dumiso Dabengwa — are the natural negotiating partners of the Movement for Democratic Change, not the indefatigable Mr. Mugabe and his coterie of hard-liners.

The newly elected parliamentarians haven’t been sworn in yet, and some seats remain contested. But once they find a way to meet, they could rather quickly declare the Parliament sovereign and terminate Mr. Mugabe’s reign. In the last few decades, African countries like Benin and Mali made transitions from authoritarian rule by taking similar actions at so-called national conferences.

What’s more, a sovereign parliament with significant ZANU-PF backing could credibly offer amnesty deals to the generals who had sustained Mr. Mugabe’s tyranny. Although distasteful, such amnesty deals would be critical to any lasting settlement and would be far easier to achieve without Mr. Mugabe in the picture — particularly if the Parliament’s sovereignty were recognized by the African Union and the United Nations.

A parliamentary government would have the virtue of not only dislodging Mr. Mugabe, but assuring a more democratic Zimbabwe in the future. Indeed, Zimbabwe began as a parliamentary democracy, but Mr. Mugabe found that form of government too restrictive and abolished the office of prime minister in 1987, concentrating power in an executive presidency.

Political scientists have demonstrated that parliamentary regimes are more likely to remain democratic than their presidential counterparts. Power and legitimacy in the new regime would be vested in a representative body, not a single person or office. Moreover, parliaments are institutionally appropriate for politically and ethnically divided societies like Zimbabwe: they ensure representation for political minorities and generally require compromise in order to form governments.

With other geriatric presidents clinging to power throughout Africa — Omar Bongo in Gabon and Paul Biya in Cameroon are but two examples — more Zimbabwe-like crises may be on the horizon. The international community would be well served to support institutional alternatives to the continent’s over-empowered executives, beginning with a parliamentary (and free) Zimbabwe.

Robert Mugabe’s disregard for democracy and human rights is shared to varying degrees by many of the leaders who have been urged to condemn him today at the African Union summit in Egypt. Publicly defenestrating Zimbabwe’s self-declared president might create an uncomfortable precedent for them – and for this reason among others, is thus unlikely to happen.

Hosni Mubarak, veteran host of the meeting of the 53 AU countries, may be said to have set the standard to which others have fallen. He has been repeatedly returned as president with over 90% of the vote in effectively uncontested elections. Egypt’s biggest political party, the Muslim Brotherhood, is banned.

South Africa’s leader, Thabo Mbeki, is widely seen as chief enabler and perpetuator of Mugabe’s misrule through his misjudged pursuit of a supine “quiet diplomacy”. One direct consequence was the recent outburst of xenophobic violence against Zimbabwean refugees in South Africa. Under Mbeki, the “rainbow nation” has moved inexorably towards one-party rule.

Other aspiring African regional powers, such as Nigeria, exhibit similar leadership failings. International and domestic observers reported massive fraud, including vote-rigging and political violence, during presidential, parliamentary and state polls apparently won hands down last year by the People’s Democratic party.

The US state department’s 2007 country report on Nigeria said: “The government’s human rights record remained poor and government officials at all levels continued to commit serious abuses”. Extrajudicial killings and torture by the security forces and “the abridgement of citizens’ rights to change their government” were among problems cited.

Notorious human rights abuses in Sudan, Congo and Somalia tend to deflect attention away from the unpleasant excesses of more obscure regimes such as those in Chad and Eritrea. A former role model, President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, has meanwhile proved disappointingly incapable of embracing democratic transition. More than 1,500 dead in the wake of Kenya’s rigged polls last winter testify to a more general fragility affecting democratic institutions across Africa.

It would be foolish to write off a whole continent’s political leaders because of the venality and corruption of a few. Though by no means problem-free, many countries are making headway. Botswana and Zambia, outspoken on the Mugabe issue, are among them; so, too, is Senegal. In Ghana, Amnesty International approvingly reports the continued payment of reparations to victims of human rights violations committed under previous governments.

Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries on earth, has made considerable progress in lifting itself up, politically and economically. Its prime minister, Meles Zenawi, argues it is in any case irrational and unfair to expect the instant attainment of Westminster-style standards of governance from struggling developing nations emerging, in many cases, from decades of colonial exploitation, dictatorship, war and famine.

Organisations such as Human Rights Watch respond that the AU should uphold its own 2007 Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance that proscribes, for example, “illegal means of maintaining power” akin to those employed by Zanu-PF.

All the same, and whatever they may think in private, few African leaders, progressive or otherwise, appear ready to publicly back western efforts, led by Britain and the US, to turn Mugabe into an international pariah. Support for withdrawal of official recognition, tougher sanctions, and suspension of Zimbabwe from the AU or even the UN appears very limited.

Some leaders profess residual respect for Mugabe as an erstwhile liberation hero. Most are reluctant to be seen to be following behind George Bush and former European colonial masters. And a few may have been influenced by Mugabe’s crude threat to turn the tables on them if there is any summit finger-pointing.

Mugabe “was prepared to face any of his AU counterparts disparaging Zimbabwe’s electoral conduct because some of their countries had a worse record,” the state-controlled Herald newspaper in Harare reported today.

The unprecedented criticism levelled at the regime by its southern African neighbours is thus unlikely to translate into harsh punishment or intervention, as demanded by the likes of Desmond Tutu. Mugabe’s unhindered admission to the Sharm el-Sheikh summit and the conciliatory comments of Jean Ping, AU commission chairman, among others, suggest a loose agreement that Zanu-PF enter into talks with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change is all that will be required of Mugabe at the summit.

Zimbabwe’s friends and neighbours should “do everything in (their) power to help the Zimbabwe parties to work together in the supreme interests of their country,” Ping said. That vague formula leaves recently floated ideas of a government of national unity, other power-sharing arrangements, or a transitional government (as belatedly proposed by South Africa) wholly up in the air.

This latest crisis, the worst since he took power in 1980, has undoubtedly weakened Mugabe. He is more reliant now on key political cronies and security chiefs. His reputation among his African peers is much damaged. The country is economically on its knees.

It may well be that Zimbabwe has finally reached the beginning of the end of the “old Bob” era. But the wait for his final departure, once the global fuss dies down, could still be a long one.

How Bill Clinton brightens a room. Last week he dropped into town to celebrate Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday. One minute he was hobnobbing with Elton John and Robert De Niro at a charity dinner – corporate tables a snip at £100,000 – the next he was seen leaving No 10 in what the fashion writer of The Times gushingly described as “a dazzling pistachio shirt, an eye-popping striped tie and a raffish summer jacket in dove grey, the season’s most fashionable shade”.

The only raincloud on our man of mode’s sunny horizon was Mandela’s pronouncement that Zimbabwe was suffering because of “a tragic failure of leadership”. I hope such talk didn’t bring back unhappy memories, as Clinton is quite the expert on African genocide and failures of leadership.

Back in 1994, when he was president, the Hutu government of Rwanda murdered 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu within the space of 100 days. The weapons were primitive – machetes, spades and garden tools – but the results were highly efficient, the fastest killing spree in history. Clinton later apologised for failing to “appreciate the gravity” of the situation.

Actually Bill’s administration did appreciate it. Washington had helped remove UN peacekeepers from Rwanda, blocked the sending of UN reinforcements when 8,000 a day were being murdered, and refused even to jam radio broadcasts used by the government to coordinate the killings.

A year later Clinton was at it again, or rather not at it again, during the mass murder of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995. This time he refused even to change the flight path of an American spy satellite to find out what was going on: it would have been too embarrassing.

Clinton is, of course, loved by good liberals everywhere, while his successor George Bush and Tony Blair are reviled for the invasion of Iraq; they were or are deluded pawns of sinister neoconservatives and starry-eyed neo-liberals who want to prop up democracies on the back of western bayonets.

Now I don’t want to be too hard on dear Bill. He eventually came round to tipping the balance against evil in Bos-nia. And when the Serbian leader Slo-bodan Milosevic threatened the ethnic cleansing of the Albanian population of Kosovo his friend Tony Blair persuaded him, after a series of screaming matches on the phone, to commit American ground troops.

Today humanitarian intervention has, in any case, been widely discredited after the disaster that followed the toppling of the genocidal dictator Saddam Hussein, hasn’t it? The antiAmerican left and the little England right unite in scorn for the Texan cowboy and his British poodle.

But what’s that I hear? Massacres of Muslims by Muslims have approached genocidal proportions in Darfur, Sudan. “Something must be done,” cry the do-gooders of the left. In Burma, the generals let their people die in the wake of devastating floods rather than accept contaminating western aid. “Send in the US air force,” bellow the critics of American bombers.

The little Englanders have changed their tune, too. Fire-eaters are now calling for Britain and America to oust Mugabe, even though they have condemned all other allied interventions.

There is only one thing worse than humanitarian intervention by the West, it seems, and that’s no intervention.

The calls for action grow stronger as Zimbabwe’s pulse grows fainter. Our government has failed to persuade the South Africans to turn Mugabe out, as they can at any time, though as Peter Hain hinted in these pages last week, we haven’t tried very hard.

Forty years ago Britain didn’t act to remove the illegal white minority government of Ian Smith in Rhodesia when it was propped up by apartheid South Africa. Today Britain doesn’t want to topple Smith’s nemesis, Mugabe, against the wishes of the white regime’s enemy and successor, the ANC government of Thabo Mbeki. We gave Mugabe a knighthood after he massacred his enemies in Matabele-land. But he was “a good chap” then. Conservative and Labour policy alike on Zimbabwe has been crippled by postcolonial guilt or inverted racism.

In any case, an overstretched, second-rank power like Britain would find it difficult to force its will on a landlocked opponent without the cooperation of the neighbourhood – though Zimbabwe’s army is no obstacle.

Mugabe jeers: “How can the ball-point fight with the gun?” Alas, he is right. Perhaps the disapproval of Man-dela and, more important, that of Mugabe’s African neighbours heralds an end to his illegitimate rule. I have my doubts. For the moment we can tighten the sanctions screw. But if the horrors threaten to mount to Rwandan proportions, shouldn’t we act?

Back in 1999, at the height of the Kosovo crisis, Tony Blair gave a celebrated speech in Chicago drafted by my old war studies tutor, Professor Lawrence Freedman, setting out principles for humanitarian intervention. Somehow it evaded the Foreign Office censors. It deserves reading in full, but here are his key tests for action.

“First, are we sure of our case? War is an imperfect instrument for righting humanitarian distress; but armed force is sometimes the only means of dealing with dictators. Second, have we exhausted all diplomatic options? We should always give peace every chance. Third, on the basis of a practical assessment of the situation, are there military operations we can sensibly and prudently undertake? Fourth, are we prepared for the long term? In the past we talked too much of exit strategies. But having made a commitment, we cannot simply walk away once the fight is over; better to stay with moderate numbers of troops than return for repeat performances with large numbers. And finally, do we have national interests involved?”

The Chicago speech was not a charter for American gunslingers to go riding out in an outlaw world. Blair knew that idealism had to be tempered by realism. He understood that democracies are rightly reluctant to sacrifice the lives of their servicemen. He set limits to western ambitions: no, we are not going to get rid of dictatorships where the balance of risk is all wrong.

Blair’s critics have a point, too, that the first and second tests were not applied in Iraq, though even Saddam’s allies thought he had chemical weapons. In Afghanistan and Iraq, President Bush and his defence secretary, Don-ald Rumsfeld, failed the fourth test by pig-headedly refusing to plan for the postinvasion settlement. In our magazine today you can read how the remarkable US general David Petraeus, exponent of “the surge”, is trying to make up for that deficit in Iraq, though even he acknowledges that military victory will be insufficient without “moral legitimacy”.

Blair concluded his speech like this: “I say to you: never fall again for the doctrine of isolationism. The world cannot afford it. Stay a country outward-looking, with the vision and imagination that is in your nature. And realise that in Britain you have a friend and an ally that will stand with you, work with you, fashion with you the design of a future built on peace and prosperity for all, which is the only dream that makes humanity worth preserving.”

Windy talk of “dreams” and “humanity” usually gives me indigestion, but I believe, in essence, Blair was right. British engagement with an outward-looking America is always better than the alternative. I see no reason in theory why an Anglo-American planB could not be devised to topple Mugabe’s tinpot government if thousands more are starved and axed to death. Most of the Chicago tests are easily passed in Zimbabwe’s case. The second, that of exhausting all diplomatic means, alas, could soon be met. Only the last, that of cold national interest, is debatable – although we should be able to look our children in the eye when they ask us what we did.

When he was chancellor Gordon Brown won a reputation for his concern for debt-laden African countries. Now the prime minister and his idealistic Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, may have to face a hard choice. To watch as more die or to push for intervention. I’m sure they won’t want to go down with Bill Clinton as leaders who couldn’t “appreciate the gravity” of an African tragedy.

While Zimbabwe’s obscene charade of a runoff election played itself out yesterday, foreign reaction still seemed stuck in two grooves: either Mugabe-bashing or hand-wringing. The former is well justified, after everything the Zimbabwean president has done over the past few months. But, however muscular the rhetoric, it will be no more effective in producing regime change than passive despair.

There is a third way. It goes beyond denunciation and punishment, though it involves bitter medicine. The only route that will avoid yet more bloodshed is a negotiated transition of power in which legal immunity and guarantees of safety are given to the very men who have been responsible for the violence of the past few months. I am not referring primarily to Mugabe. It is the security and police chiefs around him who hold the key.

Zimbabwe is not a failed state awash with guns, or under the sway of roaming gangs of rebels and warlords who ignore the government, on the pattern of parts of west Africa or Afghanistan. Zanu-PF, the ruling party, remains an efficient hierarchy. Its top men can call off the so-called liberation war veterans and other jobless youth who have been terrorising the opposition Movement for Democratic Change since the first round of elections in March – and may be unleashed again when the runoff is over. The trick is to get them to want to.

The MDC’s wiser heads have long recognised this. They have held intermittent talks with Zanu-PF’s leaders with the aim of forming a government of national unity that will maintain jobs for some Zanu-PF figures while allowing others to retire with dignity. The key issues concern the role of outside mediators, what pressures should be applied to get Zanu-PF to accept that power must be shared, and who should lead the new government.

Thabo Mbeki’s quiet diplomacy has run its course. The South African president’s mediation was too quiet and not diplomatic enough. He gave excessive credence to Mugabe’s vague offers of talks, and with his refusal to condemn the violence he became hopelessly one-sided. Now African leaders in the Southern African Development Community are preparing a new negotiating team to work with the two sides in Harare.

There is much talk of finding an African solution. Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, has offered himself as a mediator. But the agreement he brokered in Kenya after that country’s flawed election is not the right precedent. Zimbabwe’s constitution does not provide for a prime minister so there is no obvious way of splitting power at the top, as in Kenya. Moreover, the Annan deal left President Mwai Kibaki in power while offering the post of prime minister to the opposition, in spite of strong evidence that it had won the election. The opposition reluctantly agreed. Kibaki might have got his officials to cheat, but he had not launched murder on Mugabe’s scale. In Zimbabwe, anger is higher. The Zimbabwean president has forfeited all claim to legitimacy and must leave.

The best model for Zimbabwe happens to be European. October 2000 in Belgrade is the pattern that Zimbabwe, with luck, will follow. The scenario is uncannily similar. A ruthless strongman loses the first round but gets his election commission to say the opposition did not reach 50% and therefore a runoff is needed. The opposition refuses to take part for fear the ruling party will organise its cheating better the second time; and street protests are held. Those of us who stood outside the Yugoslavian parliament and watched the police fade away before a bulldozer at the head of an angry crowd smashed into it were not entirely surprised. The police had not gone over to the people, however romantic that might have been. Some sympathised with the protesters, but the switch of loyalties mainly flowed from orders after behind-the-scenes negotiations that Vojislav Kostunica, the opposition candidate, led with Slobodan Milosevic’s security chiefs. They were assured of safety if they changed sides. Milosevic met Kostunica next day and threw in the towel.

Some western leaders claim Milosevic was brought down by years of sanctions. Tony Blair often says Nato’s bombing in 1999 removed him from power. But Milosevic’s downfall came more than a year later, when the hard men realised it was better to sacrifice their boss than themselves. Their Zimbabwean counterparts are probably making similar calculations.

So if the EU puts sanctions on these men, they need to be conditional. Make it clear they will be lifted as soon as Zanu-PF’s hardliners accept an MDC-led government and tell Mugabe to go into retirement, elsewhere in Africa or preferably to a villa in China. Better still, hold the sanctions with the understanding they start only if the MDC negotiations, backed by SADC mediators, fail.

It will be painful to let killers go free, but this is a case where justice should give way to pragmatism. The liberty of a few dozen thugs is the necessary price for millions of Zimbabweans to have a chance of life.

In politics as in our personal lives, just six words comprise one of the commonest falsehoods around. Those six words are: “It can’t go on like this.” But it can. I’ve come to the melancholy conclusion that in Zimbabwe it must.

This weekend there will be voices in our Prime Minister’s ear suggesting how in one bound he might cast off his dithering reputation. To help to broker the toppling of Robert Mugabe (they will whisper) might be just the sort of history-making that rescued Margaret Thatcher from doldrums at home, before Galtieri invaded the Falklands. In The Times this week Lord (Paddy) Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon suggested that intervention may become necessary. Mr Brown will think hard about this; list the pros; list the cons; dither; and finally decide it’s all too difficult.

Well let’s hear it for dithering. Beware the widely held opinion that all we need is Robert Mugabe’s head on a stick. In Iraq we called this the decapitation strategy, and duly secured the required head – Saddam’s – on the right stick. Then it all went wrong. The ingredients necessary for a liberal democracy were not, it turned out, there. Why should things be different in Africa?

Not even the most hot-headed interventionist (I assume) is seriously proposing a unilateral British invasion; and not many propose invasion by a coalition of Western powers. It should anyway be doubted whether this would be militarily possible. Zimbabwe is a landlocked country and the active co-operation of her neighbours should be key to any kind of occupation, however temporary. That being so, it would make more political sense for the intervention to be African-led, or at least appear to be so, by one or more of her neighbours.

The idea probably being canvassed would be for an African ultimatum to Harare, stiffened by the threat of a Western-backed but African-led invasion, with or without the use of European or American service personnel, but perhaps with a measure of Western military support and reconstruction money behind the scenes. It is possible that a mix of determined international moral exhortation, and private cajolery, development-aid bribery and threats, could secure such an apparently African initiative.

Not only would this invasion be doable, it would probably never prove necessary: the threat alone should be sufficient to trigger a coup within Mugabe’s Zanu (PF) party, whereupon the old man would be dispatched, imprisoned or exported, and a leading group of Zanu (PF)-backed politicans and generals would take temporary power, promising to talk to the MDC, and hold elections as soon as practicable.

So far – it might seem – so good. And if there were televised scenes of crowd jubilation as a statue of Mugabe was torn from its plinth in a municipal square somewhere in Harare (or more likely Bulawayo), so much the better.

But after that, what? Stop for a minute and ask yourself this: who has really been running Zimbabwe for the past five years? Do you honestly think it’s just an old, deluded man, a King Lear minus the humanity, who has been organising the hit squads, arm-twisting the judiciary and turning the police into a private militia? Is it really only Robert Mugabe who has been diverting Zimbabwe’s resources into private pockets?

Of course not. This is the whole culture of the governing party, Zanu (PF). You’ve seen the TV pictures of Zanu (PF) “thugs” rampaging across the bush with iron bars, in pursuit of Morgan Tsvangirai’s supporters. That word “thug” is handy for the Western media because it throws a linguistic cordon round what we want to distinguish as an horrific minority, virtually unconnected with what we assume to be the great majority of peace-loving Zimbabweans… er, Zanu (PF) supporters. Or so they were and continued to be, through all Mugabe’s early atrocities, his massacres in Matabeleland and confiscations of white farmers’ lands, until the economy hit the rocks so hard that they could no longer be sure of their next meal. Only then did they start to desert, and we may suppose that to this day, millions in the rural areas have still not deserted.

Mugabe is not unpopular in Zimbabwe today because his Government has been autocratic and brutal. He is not unpopular because the minority (but substantial) Matabele tribe have been persecuted, killed and dispossessed by a governing party whose power base is among the Mashona majority. He is not unpopular because he and his wife are greedy and flaunt their wealth, or because corruption in his Government is widespread. He is unpopular because his administration is broken and there is nothing for ordinary people to eat.

Many Zimbabweans hunger not for liberal democracy, but for food. By corollary, much of Morgan Tsvangirai’s power base is either an urban minority or among the minority tribes who have received a raw deal from the distribution of resources by Zanu (PF). They too, many of them, hunger not for liberal democracy but a turning of the tables. Unless we are careful, today’s TV pictures may tomorrow be thrown into reverse, and we may watch those who were once in flight, now in pursuit; and those who were once in pursuit, now in flight; the iron bars having changed hands. The Matabele in history were always a more warlike people than the Mashona pastoralists. Bulawayo (their capital) means “place of slaughter”. Jacob Zuma, the next South African President, comes from the same (Zulu) family of tribes.

And into this richly complicated picture we Westerners suppose we can charge and, by precipitating the removal of one old madman, conjure into existence a transformed national political consciousness. Do you think that when Mugabe asked last week “how can a pen fight a gun?” he was simply issuing a threat? He was not. It was a populist remark. He was making an observation about the business of politics across much of his continent: an observation that will not have outraged, but amused, his intended audience.

Plenty of people in Zimbabwe, including plenty of white business people and farmers, will have done deals with Zanu (PF). There will be an intricate network of client- relationships, of patronage and of diffused and shared power. It will probably prove possible to shift and replace one or two figures at the top. It may even be possible to seat a couple of opposition figures at the government high table. The West certainly can, and does, run puppet autocracies in Africa. But if anyone thinks this will be the beginning of genuine multiparty politics, the toleration of opposition and the rule of law, such hopes will be disappointed.

For that, an outside power or league of powers would need to occupy Zimbabwe and begin the process of re-creating government, the executive and judiciary; purging the military and police, redistributing land and resources that have been stolen, identifying and prosecuting the culprits… and paying for it. I doubt we have the stomach for this.

“Thanks for that,” you may say, “but what alternative do you propose?”

I have none. To rescue Zimbabwe is beyond not our capacity, but our will. We can only wail and wring our hands.

Robert Mugabe está dejando en ridículo el intervencionismo de corte progresista. Se ha convertido en un regalo de los dioses para caricaturistas, políticos y comentaristas. Las elecciones de hoy en Zimbabue son un buen ejemplo de ello. En occidente lo retratan blandiendo palos chorreantes de sangre. Lo sacan de pie, en actitud de triunfo, sobre un montón de calaveras. Es un Bokassa copiado de un Idi Amin copiado de un Charles Taylor. Es uno de esos tipos que ya tenemos vistos de toda la vida, el epicentro africano de las tinieblas, monstruoso, bufonesco, grotesco y malvado. Si Gran Bretaña, por emplear la frase burlona de Kipling, fuera capaz en algún momento de «matar a Kruger con la boca», hace mucho tiempo que Mugabe estaría muerto.

Hay un cierto sentido en el que es correcto el histérico análisis antibritánico que Mugabe hace de los aprietos por los que está pasando. Su Zimbabue es una criatura del imperialismo y el postimperialismo británicos. El último gobernador del país, Lord Soames, lo consideraba cariñosamente a Mugabe la mascota del regimiento, «un chico estupendo», tal y como me confesó en una entrevista poco antes de que le hiciera entrega del poder en 1980.

Gran Bretaña toleró, como era de esperar, la eliminación del rival de Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo, y la transformación de Zimbabue en un Estado de partido único. Hizo la vista gorda ante la matanza de Ndebele, perpetrada en 1983 por la Quinta Brigada shona [etnia mayoritaria de Zimbabue] de Mugabe al mando de su caudillo militar, Perence Shiri, quien, según dicen algunos, es el que en estos momentos tiene a Mugabe en sus manos. El Whitehall [el Gobierno británico] de Margaret Thatcher concedió a Harare ayuda a manos llenas y le dio unos consejos disparatados, y colaboró en transformar una economía viable en un caso perdido de cleptomanía pseudosocialista, magníficamente reflejado por Andrew Meldrum en sus memorias tituladas Where we have hope [Mientras nos queden esperanzas].

En estos momentos, se considera que Zimbabue se encuentra en un estado de escándalo monstruoso. Aunque posiblemente Mugabe no sea el peor dictador del mundo, está considerado «nuestro» dictador y, por tanto, nuestra responsabilidad. La opinión pública pregunta qué es lo que se va a hacer con él. Harta de «haber hecho algo», supuestamente glorioso, en lugares como Bosnia, Sierra Leona, Kosovo, Afganistán e Irak, la opinión pública ya se ha acostumbrado, sin ningún género de dudas, a esta clase de preguntas. Así pues, ¿qué se va a hacer?

La respuesta del Gobierno británico es pura farfulla. Sobre la cabeza de Mugabe ha caído toda una cascada ministerial de improperios como cruel, sanguinario, ilegítimo y repugnante. Yo ya he perdido la cuenta de las veces que, desde el ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores de Gran Bretaña, se han referido a él despreciativamente, con una palabra tan grandilocuente y tan reveladora de impotencia como «inaceptable». En cuanto a las sanciones, hemos tenido que escuchar el penoso conjuro de prohibición de intercambios comerciales y limitaciones a viajes en primera clase, a cuentas en [los grandes almacenes] Harrods, a guarderías en Londres y a giras de cricket, toda esa palabrería incesante de sanciones elegantes.

Esas medidas son las armas de los cobardes y los hipócritas. Nunca sirven para nada en ningún sentido que tenga alguna trascendencia y equivalen, más o menos, a lo mismo que no comer naranjas de Sudáfrica o no comprar café de Brasil. Se supone que, si incomodan un poquito a los poderosos y hunden en la miseria más absoluta a los pobres, van a hacer que nos sintamos bien. En países como Cuba e Irak, las sanciones han condenado a la pobreza y el aislamiento a generaciones enteras.

La historia más que repetida de las sanciones comerciales demuestra que las restricciones a largo plazo, sean las que sean, lo único que producen es un reajuste económico interno. El control del dinero y de los productos pasa de los comerciantes a los gobernantes, lo que empuja a los primeros al exilio y aumenta el patrimonio de los segundos. De la misma manera que las sanciones hicieron ricos a Sadam Husein y a su familia, las sanciones han hecho ricos a Mugabe y a sus compinches.

La única sanción que sirve para algo es la que funciona de la noche a la mañana. Es de imaginar que, si Sudáfrica y los restantes vecinos de Zimbabue fueran capaces de cortar los suministros de petróleo y electricidad, podrían poner en marcha un golpe de algún tipo. Ahora bien, ¿quién lo daría? Cualquiera que se apoderara del poder en estos momentos habría de ser alguien con petróleo, y ése es el ejército, que precisamente ya tiene el poder.

En su lugar, nos encontramos en Londres con una señal inequívoca de pánico, un murmullo todavía tímido en torno a esa palabra que empieza por M, militares. Desde aquel dirigente liberal, «bombardero Thorpe», que insinuó que se pusiera fin por la fuerza a la sublevación de Ian Smith en Rodesia en 1967, Zimbabue ha despertado el machismo de la izquierda. En esta misma semana, Lord Paddy Ashdown ha seguido ese mismo camino, repleto de alusiones. Si se produjera un genocidio en Zimbabue, ha dicho el viejo aventurero, y si las Naciones Unidas lo aprobaran, y si fueran los africanos los que se encargaran de pelear, y no nosotros, entonces deberíamos ofrecer nuestro «apoyo moral».

¡Bravo por Douglas Fairbanks descolgándose desde la gran lámpara de la Cámara de los Comunes! Ni Sudáfrica ni ninguno de los estados vecinos pertenecientes a la Unión Africana han mostrado la más mínima inclinación a forzar un cambio de régimen en Harare, por mucho que puedan condenar a Mugabe. Los gobernantes africanos consideran muy poco atractivo el precedente intervencionista. Tampoco hay ninguna gana en Gran Bretaña de montar un ataque aerotransportado, desde dondequiera que pudiera lanzarse (¿Diego Garcia?). Nadie se imagina que a los aviones se les diera permiso para sobrevolar o repostar en el sur de Africa. Así de hundida está la autoridad moral de Gran Bretaña después de Irak.

Derrocar a Mugabe exigiría una fuerza lo suficientemente potente como para decapitar su ejército, como mínimo, y es de imaginar que para instalar en el poder al jefe de la oposición, Morgan Tsvangirai. ¿Qué clase de poder sería éste, conseguido gracias a las armas extranjeras? Probablemente no iría más allá de ser el prólogo de una guerra civil, que debe ser precisamente lo último que Zimbabue necesita en estos momentos.

La verdad es que Gran Bretaña y occidente han llegado a cansarse de este tipo de operaciones. No han sido capaces siquiera de reunir la fortaleza suficiente para hacer llegar su ayuda al delta del Irrawaddy, en Birmania, que no es, ni de lejos, la más drástica de las intervenciones. Las bravatas altisonantes del laborismo sobre Bagdad y Kabul se han quedado reducidas en la actualidad a advertencias plagadas de matices. La consigna del cruzado, aquélla de que «no se puede abandonar a su suerte a los pobres albaneses» (o chiíes, o pastunes), ha degenerado en una monotonía diplomática de trámites y resoluciones.

A Gran Bretaña no le queda más alternativa que asistir a la tragedia de Zimbabue sin intervenir, impotente y al margen. Si Africa quiere ayudarse a sí misma, ya lo hará. Si no, allá ellos. No podemos rendir a Mugabe por hambre, porque ésa es precisamente la estrategia que aplica a su pueblo. Nos conformamos con declarar una y otra vez que su país está «al borde del colapso», pero eso es economía para tontos. Las economías de subsistencia y giros desde el extranjero no se hunden.

Podemos pintar a Mugabe en la prensa como un gorila sanguinario e imponer las denominadas sanciones inteligentes, para que Gordon Brown y otros tantos gobernantes europeos puedan sentirse un poco mejor, pero nuestros buenos sentimientos difícilmente van a resultar claves de cara a las penalidades de Africa.

El denominado intervencionismo progresista es un fuego fatuo, una reformulación insípida y bienintencionada de la política exterior en respuesta a unos hechos que aparecen en los titulares de la prensa, motivada por nuestro propio interés o por un arranque pasajero. Deberíamos enviar comida para paliar el hambre en Zimbabue, porque eso es lo que está en nuestra mano hacer, por mucho que Mugabe manipule esos envíos. En cuanto a los sueños de derrocarle, se nos ha pasado el momento. Gran Bretaña ya ha infligido suficiente daño a Zimbabue a lo largo de años y años. La prudencia aconseja que nos quedemos calladitos.

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Robert Mugabe is making a mockery of liberal interventionism. He has become God’s gift to cartoonists, politicians and commentators. He is depicted wielding clubs dripping in blood. He stands triumphant over a pile of skulls. He is Bokassa out of Idi Amin out of Charles Taylor. He is that old familiar, the African heart of darkness, monstrous, buffoonish, grotesque and evil. If Britain, as Kipling jeered, were ever capable of “killing Kruger with your mouth”, Mugabe would long be dead.

There is a sense in which Mugabe’s hysterical anti-British analysis of his predicament is correct. His Zimbabwe is a creature of British imperialism and post-imperialism. The last governor, Lord Soames, regarded him as an affectionate regimental mascot, a “splendid chap”, as he told me in an interview shortly before handing power to him in 1980.

Britain duly tolerated the suppression of Mugabe’s enemy, Joshua Nkomo, and Zimbabwe’s conversion into a one-party state. It turned a blind eye to the 1983 Ndebele massacre by Mugabe’s Shona Fifth Brigade under its warlord, Perence Shiri, who some say is Mugabe’s present master. Margaret Thatcher’s Whitehall gave Harare lavish aid and barmy advice, helping turn a viable economy into a basket case of pseudo-socialist kleptomania – well charted by the Guardian’s Andrew Meldrum in his memoir, Where We Have Hope.

Now Zimbabwe is declared outrageous. Though Mugabe is hardly the worst dictator in the world, he is regarded as “our” dictator and therefore our business. The public asks: “What is to be done about him?” Sated on having “done something”, presumably glorious, about Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, public opinion is hard-wired to such a question. So what is to be done?

The government’s answer is splutter. Abuse is heaped on Mugabe’s head in a ministerial cascade of brutals, bloodthirsties, illegitimates and revoltings. I have lost count how often the Foreign Office has excoriated him with that lofty, impotent putdown, “unacceptable”. As for sanctions, we must listen to the sad incantation of trade bans, VIP travel restrictions, Harrods accounts, London kindergartens and cricket tours – the ceaseless chatter of sanctions chic.

Such sanctions are the weapons of cowards and hypocrites. They never work in any meaningful sense, and are on a par with not eating South African oranges or not buying Brazilian coffee. By mildly inconveniencing the powerful and destituting the poor, they supposedly make us feel good. In countries such as Cuba and Iraq, they have condemned whole generations to poverty and isolation.

The much-abused history of commercial sanctions shows that any protracted squeeze leads only to internal economic adjustment. Control of money and goods shifts from merchants to rulers, driving the former to exile and increasing the wealth of the latter. As sanctions made Saddam Hussein and his family rich, so they have made Mugabe and his cronies rich.

The only sanction that works is one that works overnight. It is conceivable that if South Africa and Zimbabwe’s other neighbours were able to cut petrol and electricity supplies they might precipitate some sort of coup. But by whom? Anyone seizing power at present would be anyone with petrol – and that is the army, which has power already.

Instead we have that sure sign of panic in London, the tentative murmur of the M-word, military. Ever since the Liberal leader, “Bomber Thorpe”, suggested that Ian Smith’s Rhodesian revolt be ended by force in 1967, Zimbabwe has excited leftwing machismo. This week Lord “Paddy” Ashdown followed in typically allusive fashion. If there were genocide in Zimbabwe, said the old swashbuckler, and if the UN approved, and if the Africans did the fighting for us, then we should offer “moral support”. So much for Douglas Fairbanks swinging from a House of Lords chandelier.

Neither South Africa nor neighbouring states of the African Union have shown the slightest inclination to force regime change on Harare, however much they may condemn Mugabe. African rulers regard the interventionist precedent as unappealing. Nor is there any British stomach for an airborne assault, from wherever it might be launched (Diego Garcia?). It is inconceivable that planes would be allowed refuelling or overflying rights in southern Africa. Such is the collapse of Britain’s moral authority after Iraq.

Toppling Mugabe would require a force strong enough at least to decapitate his army and, presumably, install the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, in power. What kind of power would that be, achieved with foreign guns? It would probably be a prelude only to civil war, which must be the last thing Zimbabwe needs just now.

The truth is that Britain and the west have grown tired of this sort of thing. They could not summon up the muscle even to land aid in Burma’s Irrawaddy delta, hardly the most drastic of interventions. The Labour bombast of Baghdad and Kabul is now reduced to nuanced caution. The crusader cry, “You can’t just leave the poor Albanians (or Shias or Pashtuns) to their fate,” has degenerated into a diplomatic monotone of demarches and resolutions.

There is no alternative for Britain to sitting out the Zimbabwean tragedy, impotent on the sidelines. If Africa wants to help its own, it will. If not, so be it. We cannot starve Mugabe into submission, since that is his own strategy towards his people. We take comfort by endlessly declaring his country “close to collapse”, but that is idiot economics. Subsistence and remittance economies do not collapse.

We can portray Mugabe in the press as a bloodthirsty gorilla and impose so-called smart sanctions, in order that Gordon Brown, David Miliband and the rest can feel a little better, but our fine feelings are hardly central to Africa’s predicament.

So-called liberal interventionism is a will-o’-the-wisp, a vapid, feel-good refashioning of foreign policy in response to a headline event, motivated by self-interest or passing mood. We should send food to the starving of Zimbabwe because that is something we can do, however much Mugabe distorts the supply. But as for dreaming of toppling him, those days are over. Britain has done enough damage to Zimbabwe over the years. Prudence tells us please to shut up.

Whether you believe in him or not, it’s time to give God a helping hand. Robert Mugabe, the Catholic mission school boy turned tyrant, says “only God” can remove him from power in Zimbabwe. In that case, I’m rooting for God. Go for it, Lord. (Silence on high. Damn.)

What we see in Zimbabwe today is naked political terror, orchestrated solely to extend the reign of a once legitimate but now illegitimate ruler who has led his people to a hell on earth. Destitution, murder, rape and mass beatings are the order of the day, and a so-called election this Friday which is now the barest sham. Let Mugabe himself be my witness. “We are not going to give up our country because of a mere X,” he warned earlier this month, according to a report by Chris McGreal in Tuesday’s Guardian. “How can a ballpoint pen fight with a gun?” Mugabe asked.

If “only God” can remove him, Mugabe also says, “the British and Americans want to play God. They have given themselves a role which is not their own, of installing and deposing governments. They want to do the same here but we say to them they are not God.”

Especially in the post-colonial south, and especially after Iraq, that argument has traction. When South Africa’s ANC – which could make the difference in Zimbabwe in a way that London and Washington cannot – finally came out this week to condemn the Zimbabwean government for “riding roughshod over the hard-won democratic rights” of its people, it made a point of recalling how Africa’s former colonial rulers trampled on the principles of freedom and human rights. “No colonial power in Africa, least of all Britain in its colony of ‘Rhodesia’,” it argued, “ever demonstrated any respect for these principles.”

Then there is the appeal to absolute, unlimited state sovereignty. At an election rally on Tuesday, Mugabe cried: “The elections are ours; we’re a sovereign state, and that is it.” By contrast, the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, has called for an African-led and UN-backed team to facilitate a transition in the country. Senior people in his own party, which won more seats than Mugabe’s Zanu-PF in the parliamentary elections in March, will privately go further. They do not believe that rulers should be allowed to get away with murder – literally, not metaphorically – behind an iron curtain of absolute sovereignty. They are asking for more help from outside. They want the UN to go further than it has in its recent security council resolution, and above all they want South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, to get off his fence. To accuse them of being western neo-colonialists is as absurd as it would be to accuse a murder victim of being a murderer.

So Zimbabwe brings us back to this great argument of our time, about the rights and wrongs of intervention. And the first thing to say is that this debate is crippled by reducing “intervention” to the single dimension of military action. There are hundreds of ways in which states and peoples intervene in the affairs of other states and peoples without resorting to the use of military force.

War, if it is to be just, must always be the last resort. In a column last month I went through some classic “just war” criteria to argue that an international military intervention in Burma was not justified. I would do the same for Zimbabwe today. For good reasons of maintaining international order, the “just cause” bar for such interventions has to be set very high – roughly speaking, at the level of actual or imminent genocide.

You would be most unlikely to get “right authority” for such action from the UN. Crucial among the objections, in the case of Zimbabwe as of Burma, is the lack of a “reasonable prospect” of success. What would these troops do and how would they make things better? The theoretical argument about legitimacy can’t be divorced from the practical one about efficacy.

But the choice is not either to invade or to sit on your hands and do nothing. Either reach for the gun or leave it to the sadly silent Almighty. “Gun or God” is the Mugabe fallacy. When he asks “how can a ballpoint pen fight with a gun?” our job is to provide the answer.

Here, in no particular order, are seven things that people outside Zimbabwe can do to help the majority inside Zimbabwe have its democratic will recognised. We – through our elected governments – can work for a second UN resolution, stronger than the last. We can encourage our governments – as many as possible, especially those outside the traditional west – not to recognise as Zimbabwe’s legitimate leader the president who emerges from this Friday’s terror sham election (assuming it goes ahead, despite yesterday’s appeal for postponement from the leaders of Tanzania, Angola and Swaziland).

We can shame the mining giant Anglo-American into not pushing ahead, under Mugabe, with its £200m investment in a platinum mine at Unki. We can spread the word that the Queen – the royal “we” – has at long last stripped Mugabe of his honorary knighthood. We can sign the petition to Thabo Mbeki and other leaders of Southern Africa on avaaz.org, to be published in newspapers across the region. (The number of signatories has risen from 90,000 to over 111,000 while I’ve been writing this article.)

Then anyone in London can join a planned small demonstration at Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday party in Hyde Park this Friday, respectfully asking the old hero to urge Mugabe to leave the stage. Mandela’s discretion and loyalty to his successor Thabo Mbeki have, in this regard, outlived their useful term. Few contrasts are more painful than that between these two veteran anti-colonial leaders and long-term political prisoners, Mandela and Mugabe, the one ennobled and the other embittered by long struggle and imprisonment. Few voices would carry more weight in the world than that of Mandela calling for Mugabe to go.

Last but not least, we should listen to what the legitimate representatives of the majority in Zimbabwe say about stepping up sanctions. An obvious objection is: “But broader sanctions would hurt the people, who are already suffering enough.” Sometimes, though, the people themselves are prepared to take the pain for long-term gain. Or at least, that’s what their legitimate representatives tell us – and how else can we know? That was the message from the ANC under the apartheid regime in South Africa and from Solidarity in Poland. In both those cases, the historical record suggests that sanctions did contribute to the eventual good result. In other places, sanctions made things worse. To say simply that sanctions don’t work is a useless, lazy generalisation.

On their own, none of these steps will have the desired effect. Some, taken individually, are open to easy ridicule. (“Fall, Sir Robert …” I could write the squib myself.) And taken altogether, they won’t get rid of the monster: that depends on the Zimbabweans and their southern African neighbours. But these suggestions do nail the fatalist idea that there’s nothing we can do. And I’ll bet you this: sooner or later, even in Zimbabwe, the ballpoint will defeat the gun.

In the course of the last few tumultuous months, I have often had cause to consider what it is that makes a country. I believe a country is the sum of its many parts, and that this is embodied in one thing: its people. The people of my country, Zimbabwe, have borne more than any people should bear. They have been burdened by the world’s highest inflation rates, denied the basics of democracy, and are now suffering the worst form of intimidation and violence at the hand of a government purporting to be of and for the people. Zimbabwe will break if the world does not come to our aid.

Africa has seen this all before, of course. The scenario in Zimbabwe is numbingly familiar. A power-crazed despot holding his people hostage to his delusions, crushing the spirit of his country and casting the international community as fools. As we enter the final days of what has been a taxing period for all Zimbabweans, it is likely that Robert Mugabe will claim the presidency of our country and will seek to further deny its people a space to breath and feel the breeze of freedom.

I can no longer allow Zimbabwe’s people to suffer this torture, for I believe they can bear no more crushing force. This is why I decided not to run in the presidential run-off. This is not a political decision. The vote need not occur at all of course, as the Movement for Democratic Change won a majority in the previous election, held in March. This is undisputed even by the pro-Mugabe Zimbabwe electoral commission.

Our call now for intervention seeks to challenge standard procedure in international diplomacy. The quiet diplomacy of South African President Thabo Mbeki has been characteristic of this worn approach, as it sought to massage a defeated dictator rather than show him the door and prod him towards it.

We envision a more energetic and, indeed, activist strategy. Our proposal is one that aims to remove the often debilitating barriers of state sovereignty, which rests on a centuries-old foundation of the sanctity of governments, even those which have proven themselves illegitimate and decrepit. We ask for the UN to go further than its recent resolution, condemning the violence in Zimbabwe, to encompass an active isolation of the dictator Mugabe.

For this we need a force to protect the people. We do not want armed conflict, but the people of Zimbabwe need the words of indignation from global leaders to be backed by the moral rectitude of military force. Such a force would be in the role of peacekeepers, not trouble-makers. They would separate the people from their oppressors and cast the protective shield around the democratic process for which Zimbabwe yearns.

The next stage should be a new presidential election. This does indeed burden Zimbabwe and create an atmosphere of limbo. Yet there is hardly a scenario that does not carry an element of pain. The reality is that a new election, devoid of violence and intimidation, is the only way to put Zimbabwe right.

Part of this process would be the introduction of election monitors, from the African Union and the UN. This would also require a recognition of myself as a legitimate candidate. It would be the best chance the people of Zimbabwe would get to see their views recorded fairly and justly.

Intervention is a loaded concept in today’s world, of course. Yet, despite the difficulties inherent in certain high-profile interventions, decisions not to intervene have created similarly dire consequences. The battle in Zimbabwe today is a battle between democracy and dictatorship, justice and injustice, right and wrong. It is one in which the international community must become more than a moral participant. It must become mobilised.

In these last few weeks, the full nature of Robert Mugabe’s repressive regime in Zimbabwe has been cruelly exposed. With his increasingly brazen resort to torture and hit squads to terrorize his own people, Mr. Mugabe has crossed a moral line. Some United Nations lawyers now say there is enough evidence to charge him with crimes against humanity.

Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change and Mr. Mugabe’s opponent in Friday’s runoff presidential election, had little choice but to pull out of the race. (Mr. Tsvangirai has taken refuge in the Dutch embassy in Harare.) Proceeding with elections would have ensured the murder of even more of his supporters. Any middle ground in this conflict has disappeared.

Standing amid the ruins of Zimbabwe looms the vacillating, dithering, morally compromised figure of Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa — hitherto the point man in the region — who was supposed to help ensure a free and fair outcome in the Zimbabwean election. Even at this late stage, with death squads on the move, Mr. Mbeki is still trying to persuade the Movement for Democratic Change to participate as a junior partner in some sort of Kenya-style unity government.

Mr. Tsvangirai and his followers — who have remained nonviolent, participated in three rigged elections and tried to inhabit “democratic space” as it diminished to a sliver — are understandably loath to join in an administration with the very people who have been attacking them. What’s more, joining would only reward Mr. Mugabe for his violent repression. The solution for Zimbabwe is simple: a free and fair election.

The international community has no choice but to delegitimize Mr. Mugabe’s regime. For a start, the “results” of Friday’s election should not be recognized. In effect, the world should no longer acknowledge Mr. Mugabe as Zimbabwe’s president. And should the opposition set up a government in exile, the West should move to deal with that government instead, based on the results of the March election, in which Mr. Tsvangirai drew more votes than Mr. Mugabe.

Of course, South Africa could use its economic power to draw Mr. Mugabe’s rule to an end in weeks rather than months. Yet Mr. Mbeki has steadfastly refused to act, providing a protective cloak for Mr. Mugabe’s repression. And just a few weeks ago, even as opposition members were being tortured, Mr. Mbeki visited Zimbabwe, allowing himself to be garlanded at the airport and displayed on state-run TV with a broadly grinning Mr. Mugabe. In the United Nations Security Council, where South Africa currently has a seat, Mr. Mbeki has opposed attempts to put the political situation in Zimbabwe on the agenda.

If Mr. Mbeki’s cost-benefit calculus has been such that he hasn’t seen it necessary to take tougher action, perhaps it’s time to change that calculus. Perhaps, for example, now is not the time for you to book a safari to South Africa. Or for you, or any institution that manages your funds, to make new investments in the country.

Most important, there is the FIFA soccer World Cup, for which South Africa is to act as host in 2010. That may seem like a long way off, but South Africa is already investing huge amounts both financially and politically, for what is supposed to be its triumphal coming-out party. Maybe Zimbabwe should become to the South Africa-hosted World Cup what Tibet has been to the Beijing Olympics — the pungent albatross that spoils every press conference and mars every presentation with its insistent odor.

Perhaps it’s time to share the Zimbabweans’ pain, to help persuade Mr. Mbeki to bear down on its source by threatening to grab the world’s soccer ball and take our games elsewhere.

Morgan Tsvangirai’s decision to pull out of Friday’s presidential run-off is disappointing, but not entirely unexpected. Ever since the March 29 election and its bitterly contested results, opinion in Zimbabwe had been divided over whether or not the Movement for Democratic Change should be part of this second-round vote. Tsvangirai will be criticised for withdrawing, but his MDC was damned if it did, damned if it didn’t.

The MDC’s participation in the run-off would have made it harder to condemn the outcome, and Zanu-PF believed that MDC participation would effectively legitimise Mugabe.

But Tsvangirai’s exit is a propaganda coup for Zanu-PF, which will portray Tsvangirai as weak and vacillating. Zanu-PF’s strategy of violence was aimed at ensuring a victory for Mugabe rather than forcing the MDC’s withdrawal. But the state will make the most of the situation and claim Mugabe as an elected leader. The likely first step after the election will be for Zanu-PF to start dismantling the MDC’s narrow parliamentary majority through legal challenges and harassment of its MPs. Zanu-PF will undermine Tsvangirai’s credentials as leader of the MDC and as a future president.

The MDC has stated its reasons for withdrawing – state-sponsored violence; inability to campaign, with the state preventing access to its supporters; the destruction of its party structures; Mugabe’s announcement that he would never relinquish power; evidence of electoral manipulation; and the politicisation of the Zimbabwe electoral commission.

Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people have been killed since March, and tens of thousands have been forced out of their homes. There is little doubt that Tsvangirai would have “lost” the presidential run-off, since the state controlled every aspect of the process. But it is clear that Tsvangirai’s political survival depends upon convincing MDC supporters and outside observers that his withdrawal was necessary and politically astute. If Tsvangirai fails to convince them that he made the right decision, he will sow the seeds of division within the MDC. He will also have to map out a post run-off plan – centring on whether the MDC intends to continue as a formal opposition, or pursue a coalition with the government. Both options are fraught with pitfalls.

The wider strategy is the struggle for international hearts and minds, and African hearts and minds in particular. Tsvangirai is hoping that the growing criticism of Mugabe by some of the Southern African Development Community and African Union member states will coalesce into a global “coalition of the concerned” that will pressure Mugabe to step down or negotiate a transition to a handover of power. The problem is that, while there is international condemnation of the Mugabe regime, there is no consensus on what should be done. Britain, the EU and the US insist on tougher punitive measures against Zimbabwe’s leaders; but the SADC, the AU and South Africa are not committed to this course.

What kind of intervention should take place? Humanitarian intervention to feed starving Zimbabweans? One based on the right to protection for civilians? Should pressure be put on both sides to negotiate a settlement? The MDC is desperate to ensure it has the backing of the international community; Zanu-PF is keen to combat its growing isolation, and its strategy is to re-inaugurate Mugabe as soon as possible, thus compelling the African community to recognise him as president. A divided opposition would immeasurably assist this process.

Maybe this time,” sang Lord Malloch-Brown on the Today programme yesterday. “Something’s bound to begin. It’s got to happen, happen sometime. Maybe this time I’ll win.”

Well, all right, I am – like postmodernist scholars – decoding the metatext. What the Minister of State for Africa, Asia and the UN actually said was that the mood around the world had so turned against Robert Mugabe and his various cronies that their combined diplomatic effort would bring him down.

Till now, Lord Malloch-Brown allowed, there had only been a “fairly limited set of measures” taken against the Zimbabwean President. This was changing. The Australians were kicking out the kids of Zanu (PF) officials being educated in Oz. The EU would be freezing bank accounts. The African Union and the Southern African Development Community would not be recognising Mr Mugabe’s imminent second-round election theft thus delegitimising him, and the UN would “force in” election observers to monitor that second-round (from which Morgan Tsvangirai had already withdrawn) or – in a manner unspecified – “force some change of government”. These were “powerful steps – as long as you accept that there are pressures short of military action”.

Perhaps, I thought, his lordship simply knows something we don’t about back-channels and internal divisions in Mugabe’s apparat. Because, unless you regard the recent burnings, rapes, beatings, murders, threats, arrests, starvings and raids as some kind of exotic preamble to negotiation, then what seems clear is that the Zanu (PF) military-security group has no intention of allowing any transfer of power to an elected opposition, no matter what a whingeing world says about it.

Or am I missing a clue, cleverly hidden in the present repression? If so, it seems that Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change missed it too when he took refuge in the Dutch Embassy in Harare on Sunday night. Recalling Bosnia, one can only hope that the Dutch keep their embassies safer than they did their UN safe havens.

This obduracy on the part of the Zimbabwean junta is not so incomprehensible. The regime represents that astonishing phenomenon, the ideo-kleptocracy, which believes that its enrichment and corruption is a historically necessary reversal of colonialism. “The people of Zimbabwe,” one senior Zanu (PF) minister said yesterday, “have declared war against any force that would recolonise Zimbabwe”; and that would take away his money, power, foreign assets, yachts and mistresses and – at best – slap him in chokey for the rest of his days.

What might embolden him is the record. He might reflect that, over nearly 30 years, he and his comrades have repeated the same essential pattern of behaviour, each time taking Zimbabwe’s people on another downwards journey, and have got away with it over and over and over again. For most of my adult life we have witnessed the incremental and inevitable destruction of a nation, almost in slow motion. After initially ignoring the repression and violence, we have for two decades applied the same strategies of pressure, minor sanction, condemnation, talks, aid and buck-passing, only to enjoy the same flickering hopes, to bemoan their subsequent betrayal and to start anew.

Right from the beginning it was all there, in Mugabe’s 1980 revelation that he believed in a one-party state. It was evident in his 1982-83 suppression of the Ndebele-based opposition of Joshua Nkomo using the notorious 5th Brigade trained by North Koreans; in the 20,000 resulting deaths and the use of starvation as a political weapon; in the intimidation of the opposition by Zanu (PF) “youth brigades” during the 1985 elections; in the 1987 absorption of Nkomo’s Zapu and Mugabe’s extolling of “one single, monolithic and gigantic political party”. But we didn’t take too much notice, because there were no whites involved.

And then the farm grab started, ostensibly redistributing white land to the poor, and in fact giving it to the ideo-kleptocrats, in whose hands it became barren. It was all there, this time for the whites: the roving groups of thugs, the murders and the round-ups. The same with the stolen election of 2000. The same with the stolen election of 2002. The same with the stolen election of 2004. Each time there were hopes that maybe the ageing Mugabe would mellow, or that his party would bring down the curtain and begin to compromise and each time it all got worse. We chucked him out of the Commonwealth, he macheted a few more opponents, we refused to shake his hand, he killed another opposition election worker.

We believed – understandably – in the crucial role of South Africa. South Africa, led by Thabo Mbeki, in turn believed in quiet diplomacy, in secret talks, in dignified exits that might be delayed by incautious condemnations, in governments of national unity between the raped Opposition and their rapers. Several times President Mbeki, who dislikes Mugabe intensely, would manage to get the Zimbabwean leader into talks about this or that aspect of an imaginary future – land settlement, development, whatever – only to have Mugabe renege the instant the two men were back in their own capitals.

And what do we imagine now? That Zambia’s crossness, Angola’s criticism (only a few weeks after that country passed on Chinese weapons to the armed forces of Zimbabwe) and Botswana’s rather valiant anger will persuade the Harare murderers that the game is up, especially now we are investigating freezing their European assets? Again, one asks, do the diplomats know something we don’t, and that the historical record fails to suggest? Is there some Zimbabwean Admiral Dönitz or Juan Carlos, waiting to arrange the transition? Why aren’t we just as likely to get Mugabe’s Heydrich, Emerson Mnangagwa, the Joint Operations Command strongman?

“Military intervention,” said one BBC person yesterday, expressing the views of the consensus, “is not a realistic option.” It might be better if it was. How many South African or British soldiers would it take to unseat the junta and disperse the Zanu (PF) “veterans”, who are now veterans only of whipping and gouging defenceless people, or raping women without the slightest chance of resistance?

Instead, the suffering people of Zimbabwe (life expectancy, 37) get what the Foreign Secretary called yesterday “the worst rigged election in African history”.

Robert Mugabe patted me on the knee as we sat in his favourite London hotel, his wife Grace recently in from one of her infamous shopping trips that put even Imelda Marcos to shame.

“I know you are not one of them, Peter; you are one of us,” he said, acknowledging me as a son of Africa with an antiapartheid record, including campaigning against Ian Smith’s racist white-minority regime, which had imprisoned him in the old Rhodesia.

My Foreign Office officials were delighted. So were his. After a period of bad relations, at last we have a basis for future dialogue, they said after our meeting in 1999, when I was Britain’s Africa minister.

But the very next day everything turned on its head. The radical gay-rights activist Peter Tatchell confronted the notoriously homophobic Mugabe outside the hotel and attempted a citizen’s arrest for infringement of human rights.

Outraged, Mugabe flipped. He got his foreign minister to blame me for orchestrating the protest. Preposterous though that was, Mugabe convinced himself he was again the victim of a fiendish British plot. Later, on the BBC, he told an incredulous David Dimbleby that I was Tatchell’s “wife”. News to my real wife.

And to Tatchell.

He subsequently denounced me as a “racist” – a poignant moment indeed. With many other antiapartheid activists I had been thrilled at Mugabe’s 1980 landslide win in the country’s first democratic election, after generations of oppressive white-minority rule.

Yet, over the past 10 years especially, Mugabe has savagely prostituted the freedom struggle he once led so ably. With murder, torture, maiming and violent intimidation, he has copied the very techniques of terror used against him and his comrades in that struggle. Once imprisoned, now he imprisons his opponents.

Zimbabwe was once the jewel in Africa’s crown, a beautiful and hospitable land to visit, with the highest standards of education in Africa, good infrastructure and a strong and growing economy.

Yet, these past 10 years, Mugabe has all but destroyed it, turning a booming agricultural sector – a breadbasket for not just his people but surrounding nations too – into a wasteland, with starvation widespread.

Deploying the convenient rhetoric of anticolonialism to force white farmers off their land, he deprived in each case an average of 100 black workers of their jobs and homes, handing over farms to incompetent cronies. With corruption institutionalised and the economy in freefall, inflation has surged and the currency has collapsed.

In this election campaign he has ordered his thugs to murder, to beat, to rape and to starve his opponents. Independent monitors have been abducted and “disappeared”. Last week Mugabe declared “war” on anyone daring to vote against him. African governments have, for the first time, denounced the process, declaring that the elections cannot be free or fair.

Though embarrassed by Mugabe, neighbouring leaders have until now deferred to him as a heroic liberation leader.

Eight years ago I tried to disabuse some of my Foreign Office officials of the notion that Mugabe was susceptible to diplomacy when it was clear to me he wasn’t. I also disagreed with friends in southern African governments, especially my former antiapartheid colleague Thabo Mbeki, whose foreign minister denounced me in a leaked letter to the foreign secretary Robin Cook.

For me the arguments deployed by Mugabe’s South African apologists evoked bittersweet memories from the 1960s to 1980s: Zimbabwe’s “problems” are an “internal matter” and there should be no “outside interference”. European criticism of Mugabe is tantamount to “colonialism” or even “racism”.

Similar specious points were thrown at us in the antiapartheid movement. The millions of black Zimbabweans living or dying under tyranny are crying out for the support that black South Africans got in their grim decades of oppression.

After a colossal failure of diplomacy – by southern Africa, Europe, the United Nations, the Commonwealth – the international community must now act at last, decisively.

This is no time for a pusillanimous pretence that the re-run election amid such carnage and mayhem can be a solution. Friday’s election can only proceed with more deaths and maimings of Mugabe’s opponents. Having lost the unusually free and fair first round in March, Mugabe and his ruling clique were never going to risk a second defeat. They are determined to steal it.

A united international community must insist it is cancelled. Anything else will be a complete travesty covered in blood. The results of the first round should be respected, with the clear winner, the MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, installed as the president of a government of national unity. It could include Mugabe’s former finance minister and breakaway presidential candidate Simba Makoni, as well as Zanu-PF elements.

Mugabe and his elite should either be given international guarantees of immunity as they exit office, or be offered a safe passage if they wish. Since the state and security apparatus is indistinguishable from Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party, that is the only way to ensure a violence-free transfer of power. Even then, African peacekeepers may have to police the transition, as the army chiefs may mount a coup.

South Africa should threaten to pull the plug on his energy supply, and his African neighbours refuse to recognise him any more. The West should offer an emergency aid and reconstruction programme to a new government, including for land reform.

Mugabe now needs to be presented with the only language he has ever understood: an uncompromising insistence that he has no alternative but to obey the democratic will of his people and go.

In Johannesburg, Robert Mugabe was given a rousing welcome by Africans from across the continent. As he addressed the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, we ululated and sang his praises, and after his brief speech we gave him a standing ovation. He spoke of the wonderful work he had achieved in Zimbabwe with his “agrarian reforms” in a country where 70% of prime land had been owned by just 4,000 white farmers.

Here was an African leader who was prepared to redress the injustices of the past by giving land back to its rightful indigenous owners. Here was a government doing what our own was afraid to: dealing with the problems of inequitable distribution through one short, swift surgical action. Here was a black man giving the former colonial masters the finger. We went into frenzied applause when he thundered: “So, Blair, keep your England and let me keep my Zimbabwe!”

It did not matter to us that the process was not done in a way that respected the rule of law, or that the so-called agrarian reforms were an election ploy to win votes from a peasantry that had been marginalised since 1980. We condemned our South African newspapers as lackeys of the west when they reported in the previous two years that the “war veterans” (most of whom had never fought any war) murdered black workers as well as white farmers when they occupied white-owned farms in the Mugabe-sponsored violence and mayhem. We dismissed as mere western propaganda reports that began to filter into the country that the farms – confiscated not only from whites but from those black farmers who were deemed to be supporters of the opposition – were in fact redistributed to leaders of the ruling Zanu-PF party.

In any case, most of us did not read newspapers, which had exposed Mugabe from the beginning, but got our news from the South African Broadcasting Corporation, which did not dare be critical of Zimbabwe and even banned independent commentators who were deemed to be anti-Zanu-PF – including the South African president’s brother, Moeletsi Mbeki.

Our unwavering support for Mugabe continued over the years, despite outrageous acts of violence against his own people, such as Operation Murambatsvina (Sweep Away the Filth) when he destroyed more than 700,000 homes in urban areas deemed to be opposition strongholds. We were encouraged by the line our government was taking. Our president, Thabo Mbeki, was the official mediator between Zanu-PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, and he was engaged in what was euphemistically called “quiet diplomacy”.

We understood that Mbeki could not be neutral because Zanu-PF was a fraternal organisation. It had been our ally during the struggle, and as South Africans we were well known for being loyal to those who took our side – hence our continued close friendship with Fidel Castro and Muammar Gadafy, despite protestations from America. We were proud of our independent foreign policy. Despite the “mediator” title, we never expected Mbeki to be an honest broker. We were not about to desert Mugabe in his time of need; “quiet diplomacy” was another name for “complicity”.

But last December a new leadership took over the ANC. The new party leader, Jacob Zuma, attained his position through the support of the trade union movement and the South African Communist Party, both of which had been vocal in condemning Mugabe’s actions as soon as the “war veterans” began their farm invasions. And for the first time we heard the ANC publicly condemning Mugabe for trying to hijack the electoral process, even as a lame-duck Mbeki continued to defend Mugabe in international forums and to declare that there was no crisis.

Two weeks ago I was in Johannesburg talking to reporters who have been covering the xenophobic anti-Zimbabwean attacks of the past few months. It became clear to me that the support that Mugabe used to enjoy among black South Africans is beginning to wane. For the first time our people are beginning to talk openly about the South African government’s complicity in the total collapse of Zimbabwe. They are beginning to say South Africa should bear some of the blame for the millions of Zimbabweans who have had to flee state violence only to compete for scarce resources in the poor townships of South Africa.

Yes, the jokes about “those millionaire Zimbos” – an allusion to the fact that a million in Zimbabwe adds up to less than one US dollar – still abound. But there is growing recognition that the chickens are coming home to roost, as thousands more continue to cross the border in search of a better life and are welcomed with hate attacks.

In less than two weeks the fate of the people of Zimbabwe will be determined by the result of a run-off presidential election. If Robert Mugabe is allowed to steal that election the tragedy will be complete. The scale of the catastrophe that Mugabe has precipitated in his country is almost unimaginable. In just ten years, life expectancy has plummeted from 61 years to less than 36 – the lowest in the world. The economy has disintegrated – inflation by the official measure stood at 164,900 per cent in April, unemployment is more than 80 per cent; the shops are empty, the health service has collapsed, the school system no longer functions and millions of Zimbabweans have fled.

Amid the chaos and misery for ordinary Zimbabweans there exists a grotesque contrast. It is to be found in the ostentatious houses, newly built in the suburbs of Harare by Mugabe’s party cronies and the military top brass; in the expensive cars that chauffeur the Zanu (PF) elite around the capital and the luxury foods available to those with access to foreign currency. But this grotesque contrast is most sinisterly apparent in the foreign currency miraculously found to arm and equip the forces that brutalise Mugabe’s opponents, while public services and infrastructure crumble.

In view of the extreme circumstances facing Zimbabwe, I urged Gordon Brown two weeks ago to warn Mugabe that unless his Government met the basic minimum standards for a free and fair election on June 27 we would work with our allies in the region and the wider world to do the thing that his regime fears: cut off access to the foreign currency that keeps them in power. This step could be taken straight away by Britain using the powers of the Exchange Control Act 1947.

Since everything hinges on what happens in the coming days, a sharp and aggressive strategy with immediate consequences is justified and this is the only tool with sufficient force to secure the guarantees that we need now to ensure there is a fair election. We propose that its application should be reviewed weekly and be lifted immediately should the regime meet basic requirements for fair elections.

Blocking Zimbabwe’s access to foreign currency would be a serious step and I do not propose it lightly. I know that many ordinary Zimbabweans rely on remittances from friends and relatives abroad. But access to foreign currency is what sustains Mugabe’s brutal rule; blocking it is the only step that will have an impact on his regime because it would threaten its ability to function.

Since I raised this matter with the Prime Minister, the political situation in Zimbabwe has deteriorated even farther. Aid agencies have been banned from distributing desperately needed food, Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, has been detained five times and prohibited from holding rallies; more than 60 opposition supporters have been killed, and thousands have been beaten, intimidated and driven from their homes. Mugabe at the weekend said that he was willing “to go to war” if he lost. The Joint Operations Command, made up of the heads of the military and state security organisations, is already directing a violent campaign to “decompose” the Movement for Democratic Change.

Mr Brown said that he was willing to consider any measure that might secure a free and fair election, but I fear that in the end we will settle for nothing more than the usual hand-wringing and ritual condemnation.

The British Government has faced a difficult dilemma in tackling the Zimbabwe crisis. The Foreign Office has been understandably fearful that robust action against Mugabe’s regime would play into his hands by discomforting our allies in southern Africa and by allowing him to characterise the MDC Opposition as stooges of Zimbabwe’s “colonial oppressors”.

The Government’s reticence may have been understandable while hope remained that Thabo Mbeki, the President of South Africa, would act decisively, but that hope faded long ago. In any event, anyone who has recently read the pages of the Zimbabwe Herald recently, or heard the broadcasts of the state radio or television channels, will know that the virulence of Mugabe’s anti-British/anti-MDC rhetoric is already so extreme that he could not increase the level of vitriol even if he wished to.

Critics of the measures I have proposed argue that blocking foreign currency from entering the country would precipitate greater suffering. I do not underestimate the severe consequences.

The alternative, however, is to do nothing. That may spare us our moral qualms but it would not spare us the responsibility for the far greater disaster that will engulf Zimbabwe if Robert Mugabe is allowed to steal the election. The consequences for Zimbabwe’s people of that outcome would be catastrophic beyond any imagining.

The next three weeks in Zimbabwe will be the most traumatic in its history. Robert Mugabe has declared war on the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), NGOs and churches to reverse the electoral defeat he suffered in March. It is a war on unarmed people. Can he win it and what would victory mean?

Scenario one: When the votes are counted after a peaceful, well-organised and credible election on June 27, President Mugabe concedes defeat, congratulates Morgan Tsvangirai, hands over the reins of power and retires. Likelihood? Zero.

The official results of the election on March 29 did not give Mr Tsvangirai more than half the votes so there must be a run-off. To secure victory, Emerson Mnangagwa, one of the architects of the massacres in Matabeland in 1983, with the heads of the police, defence forces and Gideon Gono, the Finance Minister, has launched a violent nationwide campaign to destroy the opposition’s capacity to deliver the vote.

Only the towns that the ruling party now believe they cannot win have been spared. Key MDC organisers have been abducted and killed. The death toll is about 50 so far but may be many more. Anyone suspected of voting MDC is seized and ritually beaten, often on the back, buttocks and legs with whips and sticks, sometimes wrapped in barbed wire.

Another strategy is to force people out of their homes by burning their houses. Driven from their constituency areas, they will be disqualified from voting. MDC leaders are detained. NGOs are ordered to stop work in rural areas so that news of what is happening there cannot reach the outside world. It also means that hundreds of thousands of people, now dependent on food aid, will not be fed. The last strategy is to prepare a massive rigging campaign. Professionals such as teachers, who acted as election officers in the first round, are being intimidated so that Zanu (PF) officials can step in to run the polling.

Opinions vary on whether all this will succeed in cowing the people or if it will make Zimbabweans more determined to cast their votes for the MDC. But even if Mr Tsvangirai were to win the most votes, it is inconceivable that, in its present mood, the regime would concede defeat.

Mr Mugabe believes he won Zimbabwe by conquest, through the liberation war. Zimbabwe was never a one-party state, but to him the function of elections is to confirm his possession. The idea that he could be deposed through the ballot box is unthinkable. His wife has vowed publicly that Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC leader, will never see the inside of State House. To justify his claim – and his war – Mr Mugabe has created a fantasy enemy: Britain. He says the British want to recolonise Zimbabwe, bring back the white farmers and re-create Rhodesia again. MDC is their creation and puppet.

While the key player outside Zimbabwe, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, remains silent on these developments, his probable successor, Jacob Zuma, says they have undermined any possibility of a credible election. He recommends a government of national unity.

This is scenario two: a powersharing agreement between both parties. Likelihood? Minus zero. Neither side wants this election but the possibility of a Kenya-style government of national unity is unthinkable.

Kenya had a lot to lose from political disruption. Zimbabwe has lost it all already. About ten powerful allies of Mugabe do have a lot to lose, which is why they hold on to power at any cost. They could offer the MDC a few places in government, but the MDC would not accept them. The only terms under which MDC would enter a reconciliation government – as they prefer to call it – is if they headed it.

Which brings us to the third scenario: a victory for Robert Mugabe. Likelihood? High. The party was complacent in the first round. It assumed the rural areas would vote Zanu (PF) but they didn’t. This time voters in traditionally loyal areas will be urged, even forced, to the polling stations. That, the campaign against the MDC and rigging might well reverse the result.

This scenario raises three more fundamental issues: the splits in Zanu (PF), the reaction of the region and the economy. Everyone knows a Mugabe victory will not reverse Zimbabwe’s catastrophic disintegration – although there are some who say he is willing to step down but will not be driven from office.

After the declaration of war on MDC, there is no one in the senior hierarchy of Zanu (PF) who would be an acceptable replacement except as a stopgap. The party itself is deeply riven by factions.

If Mr Mugabe wins, the reaction of the regional leaders would be crucial. But since Mr Mbeki’s quiet diplomacy has failed, he appears to have no other policy. The other presidents of Southern Africa are divided. They will not condemn Mr Mugabe but would probably not continue to support him if he wins an election under current circumstances.

The economy can no longer provide the Government with the revenues it needs to keep it in power. No one will lend it money. Every source of wealth has been raided and drained. Inflation is now more than

2 million per cent. African economies do not die, they sink into subsistence, but the Government’s ability to pay soldiers, policemen, party officials and civil servants is at an end. The election itself will drain the last few drops of wealth from the coffers.

These factors create fourth and fifth scenarios.

Scenario four: The unpaid Armed Forces and police could break up into pro and anti-Mugabe factions within the party. Some may support the MDC. As the Armed Forces disintegrate, warlords take over local areas. Zimbabwe begins to look more like Somalia. Likelihood? Possible.

Scenario five. The miracle. Some random factor not in the equation at the moment suddenly turns history. Maybe the death or defection of a key Mugabe ally: Mr Gono, the Finance Minister, for example, who has been churning out increasingly worthless banknotes. Now he is of no further use, but, rich and ambitious, he may not see a future with Mr Mugabe. His defection breaches the wall of the fantasy castle and reality crashes in. Mr Mugabe and his chief lieutenants seek refuge in Equatorial Guinea and a government of national unity is set up.

Likelihood? Impossible to say. But Southern Africa has been known to produce miracles before.

With an unerring sense of timing, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe arrived in Rome yesterday, thereby demonstrating the profound limitations of international diplomacy. Indeed, it’s hard to think of any other single gesture that would so effectively reveal the ineffectiveness of international institutions in the conduct of human rights and food aid policy. Even someone standing atop the dome of St. Peter’s, megaphone in hand, shouting, “The U.N. is useless! The E.U. is useless!” couldn’t have clarified the matter more plainly.

For Mugabe is in Rome at the invitation of the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, which is holding a conference on the international food crisis. He is also in Rome despite the fact that he has been formally forbidden from traveling to Europe by the European Union, which considers him persona non grata: For the past several years, he has beaten and murdered his political opponents in Zimbabwe so blatantly that even the Europeans noticed.

Nevertheless, it seems that the Italians can’t prevent Mugabe from being there this week. Since the summit is a U.N. event, U.N. rules take precedence over European or Italian border rules. This is not the first time Mugabe has taken advantage of this little loophole, either: He attended a U.N. food conference in Rome in 2002, during which he stayed at a five-star hotel on the Via Veneto, sent his wife out shopping and bragged about how his “land reform” program — i.e., the wholesale theft of land from white Zimbabwean farmers and its redistribution among political supporters — was going to enrich his nation’s food supply.

It hasn’t. According to Oxfam, 80 percent of Zimbabwe’s population now lives on less than $1 a day, thanks to Mugabe’s policies, and lacks access to basic foods and clean water. Inflation is at 100,000 percent, this year’s harvest was poor, and Zimbabweans are fleeing their country in large numbers. Meanwhile, Mugabe is notorious for using food aid as a political weapon, distributing it only to those who reliably vote for him. Thus does his presence at a U.N. food summit contain layers of troubling irony. Stephen Smith, the Australian foreign minister and one of Mugabe’s more vocal critics, put it less delicately: “Robert Mugabe turning up to a conference dealing with food security or food issues is, in my view, frankly obscene.”

And the timing couldn’t be worse: The United Nations is still (or should be) smarting from its recent failure to persuade Burma’s generals — also notorious for using food aid as a political weapon — to accept any outside help. As a result, a month after Cyclone Nargis hit the Burmese coast, a quarter of a million or so Burmese are still not receiving a steady supply of food and water. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon did, after much wrangling, visit Burma, and the generals did, after much stalling, agree to allow a few foreign aid workers to enter the country. But even the highest-ranking U.N. food relief official recently conceded that ” urgent work remains” to be done there. Translation: The regime still refuses to let relief workers travel to the afflicted region, still refuses to let others into the country, still refuses to let foreign ships land on the coast with aid.

In fact, the root of Burma’s humanitarian crisis is a political crisis. The root of Zimbabwe’s humanitarian crisis is a political crisis, too. But because the United Nations was never set up to deal with political crises, it can’t really address these humanitarian crises either. Officially, the United Nations has to respect the decision of the Burmese government not to feed its people. Officially, it has to invite Mugabe to Rome, despite the E.U. ban. Indeed, one U.N. official justified Mugabe’s presence on the grounds that the United Nations is “about inclusiveness, not exclusivity” and besides, the food issue is so serious and this week’s food conference is so significant that “the rest is irrelevant.”

That, of course, is nonsense: In this case it is “the rest” — the vicious dictatorship, the manipulation of agricultural policies for political ends, the fear and violence — that matters, not the rise in international commodity prices, the mass planting of crops for biofuels, or drought. To their credit, European leaders have tried to address “the rest” and put pressure on Mugabe by restricting his movements, shunning meetings he attends, seeking to demonstrate that his behavior is unacceptable. Though not especially effective so far, this isn’t a pointless policy: Mugabe clearly cares how Europe treats him or he wouldn’t go out of his way to defy its ban.

The European boycott might work better, however, if the United Nations didn’t help the Zimbabwean leader flout it. Indeed, the United Nations should join it. If this really is a serious food conference, after all, then an egregious abuser of his own country’s food policy has no place at the table.

“Things on the ground,” e-mailed a friend from a groaning Zimbabwe, “are absolutely shocking — systematic violence, abductions, brutal murders. Hundreds of activists hospitalized, indeed starting to go possibly into the thousands.” The military, he says, is “going village by village with lists of MDC [Movement for Democratic Change] activists, identifying them and then either abducting them or beating them to a pulp, leaving them for dead.”

In late April, about the time this e-mail was written, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa — Zimbabwe’s influential neighbor — addressed a four-page letter to President Bush. Rather than coordinating strategy to end Zimbabwe’s nightmare, Mbeki criticized the United States, in a text packed with exclamation points, for taking sides against President Robert Mugabe‘s government and disrespecting the views of the Zimbabwean people. “He said it was not our business,” recalls one American official, and “to butt out, that Africa belongs to him.” Adds another official, “Mbeki lost it; it was outrageous.”

It is also not an aberration. South Africa has actively blocked United Nations discussions about human rights abuses in Zimbabwe — and in Belarus, Cuba, North Korea and Uzbekistan. South Africa was the only real democracy to vote against a resolution demanding that the Burmese junta stop ethnic cleansing and free jailed dissident Aung San Suu Kyi. When Iranian nuclear proliferation was debated in the Security Council, South Africa dragged out discussions and demanded watered-down language in the resolution. South Africa opposed a resolution condemning rape and attacks on civilians in Darfur — and rolled out the red carpet for a visit from Sudan’s genocidal leader. In the General Assembly, South Africa fought against a resolution condemning the use of rape as a weapon of war because the resolution was not sufficiently anti-American.

When confronted by international human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch about their apparent indifference to all rights but their own, South African officials have responded by attacking the groups themselves — which, they conspiratorially (and falsely) claim, are funded by “major Western powers.”

There are a variety of possible explanations for this irresponsibility. Stylistically, Mbeki seems to prefer quiet diplomacy with dictators instead of confrontation. Some of his colleagues in the African National Congress (ANC) — South Africa’s ruling party — argue that because Mbeki was an exile during apartheid instead of a prisoner or freedom fighter, he has less intuitive sympathy for prisoners and freedom fighters in other countries. South Africa clearly is attempting to league itself with China and Brazil in a new nonaligned movement — to redress what one official calls an “imbalance of global power,” meaning an excess of American power. And longtime observers of Mbeki believe that racial issues — including Mbeki’s experience of raw discrimination during the London part of his exile — may also play a role. He lashes out whenever he believes that Westerners are telling Africans how to conduct their lives, or who their leaders should be. So for years he viewed AIDS treatment as a plot of Western pharmaceutical companies — and now he helps shield Mugabe from global outrage.

Whatever the reasons, South Africa increasingly requires a new foreign policy category: the rogue democracy. Along with China and Russia, South Africa makes the United Nations impotent. Along with Saudi Arabia and Sudan, it undermines the global human rights movement. South Africa remains an example of freedom — while devaluing and undermining the freedom of others. It is the product of a conscience it does not display.

Zimbabwe is the most pressing case in point — reflecting a political argument within South Africa and a broader philosophical debate.

The labor movement within the ANC, led by Jacob Zuma, is close to the opposition MDC in Zimbabwe (which also has labor roots) and is highly critical of Mbeki’s deference to Mugabe. Zuma’s faction has provided planes to transport MDC leaders. The labor faction of the ANC is using the Zimbabwe crisis to argue that Mbeki is “yesterday’s man” — indifferent to the cause that gave rise to the ANC itself.

And this debate is clarifying a question across southern Africa: Did revolutionary parties in the region fight for liberation or for liberty? If merely for liberation from Western imperialism, then aging despots and oppressive ruling parties have a claim to power. But if for liberty, those who work for freedom in Zimbabwe must also have their day.

So far, South Africa — of all places — sides with the despots.

These days, as I watch Robert Mugabe tighten his 28-year-old stranglehold on Zimbabwe while the forces of opposition try to pry away his fingers, I can’t help thinking back to a conversation he and I once tried to have about T. S. Eliot, poetry and the month of April.

Let me explain.

At the time, nearly 30 years ago, Mr. Mugabe was an unknown leader of a guerrilla movement trying to overthrow white rule in what was then Rhodesia. I was a New York Times foreign correspondent covering Africa. And Rhodesia itself was a delusional outpost of colonial living in which many of the 270,000 whites appeared blissfully unaware of a war being pressed on behalf of the seven million blacks. They sipped sundowners beside swimming pools, played bowls on a clipped lawn in Salisbury Park and listened to a daily radio broadcast to pick up snatches of the Shona language like “Take out the garbage.”

I first heard mention of Mr. Mugabe in May 1976 in the Quill Club of the Ambassador Hotel, a watering hole where Prime Minister Ian Smith’s police, guerrilla sympathizers, reporters and agents from various factions suspended normal antipathies for the sake of gossip. We foreign correspondents used to toss around names of the ultimate leader of the emergent new country like miners testing gold nuggets: Would it be Joshua Nkomo? Ndabaningi Sithole? Jason Moyo?

A Guardian correspondent named James McManus, who looked particularly dashing in the safari suits we all wore, pulled me aside and said he was putting his money on a new man called Robert Mugabe. No one knew much about him, he said. But he was a Shona, which meant he belonged to the largest tribal group. He was said to be operating out of Mozambique, then notorious as Rhodesia’s hard-line communist neighbor. And most intriguing of all, he was an intellectual, a teacher who loved the poetry of T. S. Eliot. Understandably, this last bit of information got to me.

Quite a bit later, I found myself in Maputo, the lovely seaside capital of Mozambique. I made inquiries, met a few people and traded a dinner of prawns for a valuable phone number: that of Mr. Mugabe’s office. I tried calling for an appointment, but the phone was not working. I went back to my contact for an address and soon found myself walking up the stairs of a dreary high rise on the city’s outskirts. I knocked at the door and was admitted to a room in which a young woman sat, chewing gum, at a desk that was largely empty save for the non-functioning phone. I explained my mission and was shown to a couch, where I waited for some time before being ushered into Mr. Mugabe’s presence.

He was in the one other room of the apartment. It, too, was largely bare, though guerrilla posters were taped to the walls and it had, as I recall, a tiny balcony overlooking a grim courtyard. Mr. Mugabe sat behind a large, uncluttered wooden desk. He did not stand to greet me but nor did he hesitate to shake my hand. He seemed surprised to see me, though I learned he had heard of my desire to meet with him. He was not averse to granting an interview to the Western press and I gained the impression this was among the first he had given.

I looked him over. He was thin, dressed in a simple short-sleeved shirt and trousers. (No camouflage uniform in evidence.) He was disappointingly nondescript in appearance, with small eyes hidden behind large glasses. He was unsmiling but polite; he offered me a cup of tea and took one himself. The cups were brought in by the receptionist-secretary. He took small, cautious sips.

He answered all my questions slowly and seriously. He said that it would be a mistake for the United States and Britain to lift economic sanctions against the Rhodesian regime (that was a rumor at the time). He quietly called a government offer for the guerrillas to lay down their weapons, “ridiculous.” Speaking of weapons, he mentioned that his particular faction had been getting them from the Chinese but had hopes of switching to Moscow as a supplier. “We can only request, as we have been requesting all along,” he said disarmingly, holding his palms up. “They haven’t said no, but they have not yet said yes either.”

As the interview seemed to be drawing to a close — he was looking frequently at his watch — I couldn’t repress that unsatisfying feeling that I had won a headline but hadn’t really learned anything about the man himself. He was expressionless. His voice hadn’t risen. His small eyes hadn’t broken through the mask of placid assurance and even, it seemed, remote indifference. Surely there must be a key to unlock this enigma.

“So,” I said. “What is it exactly that attracts you to T. S. Eliot?”

He gave me a blank look and stood up.

“You know,” I added, “‘The Waste Land.’”

For the first time incomprehension crossed his features, maybe even a flash of irritation.

I persisted. “April is the cruelest month …Eliot. The poet. You know.”

As he ushered me to the door, his bewilderment seemed to turn to anger.

“I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” he said, closing the door firmly behind me.

Words are deadly in today’s Zimbabwe. “Winner,” “recount,” “treason” and “democracy” carry barbs and built-in explosives. Ordinary Zimbabweans are suffering at the hands of an authoritarian regime with no sense of proportion or timing, a dictatorship with no scruples.

First, we are being led to believe that my party, the Movement for Democratic Change, was not the winner of the March 29 election. The world is expected to believe that the results are not only inconclusive but also somehow wrong. According to Robert Mugabe‘s regime, “winner” means that the MDC has garnered votes to which it has no right and that his party lost out only through unfair means.

This ignores reality. If any party has been denied votes by foul means, it is the MDC. But in today’s Zimbabwe, “recount” means “stalling for more time.”

Intimidation and stuffing of ballot boxes are common practices of Mugabe’s government. In fact, the regime has no qualms about demanding a recount when the results have still not been fully released, raising questions as to just what are the grounds for a recount.

In the tense aftermath of the election, those who acted upon their convictions and voted their consciences, in hopes of establishing a true democracy, have been branded as threats to the state. Panicked government officials are bullying voters thought to have cast ballots for my party. Already, casualty numbers are rising.

The accusation of treason has also been hurled at me. “Treason” means I am unable to return home for fear of my life. But while I am used to these sorts of abuses from Mugabe, we cannot allow the truth to be concealed.

Mugabe has attempted to sell the belief that this election was democratic and that Zimbabwe is a functional democracy.

Let us take a closer look at democracy, Mugabe-style: His is a “democracy” of votes obtained through violence and intimidation. This is a “democracy” in which freedom is a faded banner, waved occasionally over the heads of a battered people, and not the central foundation of a free nation. This is a “democracy” built on human rights abuses, corruption, denial, widespread injustice and the deaths of innocents.

Mugabe’s “democracy” is a hollowed-out shell, and in his Zimbabwe, the term “democracy” means “denial of truth.”

The world must know: There is an all-out crisis in Zimbabwe. Unfortunately, South African President Thabo Mbeki has sought to deny this truth, despite all evidence to the contrary. Given his status as leader of the region’s major power, Mbeki’s bizarre analysis has underpinned inaction not only in Africa but also elsewhere within the international community.

Thankfully, wiser heads in South Africa’s ruling party and elsewhere have sought to marginalize Mbeki’s disinformation. Those of us struggling for true democracy in Zimbabwe hope that quiet diplomacy is being replaced by a more active approach.

As that diplomatic process generates further discussion and assessment, we who support democracy in Zimbabwe can only hope that the Mugabe regime’s actions are soon shown for what they are: attacks on democracy itself.

Zimbabweans have been here before. They vote, the opposition wins despite the pressures and threats to keep Zanu-PF in power, and Robert Mugabe brazenly fixes the figures to stay on and take his country to new depths of decline.

The three weeks since the election have seen the initiative swing back and forth between Zanu-PF and Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change. The MDC caught Zanu-PF off balance by swiftly producing its tally of results and claiming victory. Zimbabwe’s rulers were clearly shocked that Mugabe took only four in 10 votes and appeared to have lost parliament for the first time since independence 28 years ago. They looked seriously vulnerable.

But Mugabe regained the initiative. He sat on the presidential election results while giving himself a second chance by, in effect, calling a run-off ballot with Tsvangirai, even though official figures had not been released. Zanu-PF then unleashed its tested tactic of beatings and murders to terrorise rural voters and curb the MDC’s ability to campaign in a second round. Once again the opposition was left looking powerless and unable even to protect its own members from systematic violence.

The MDC called a general strike this week, the first test of its ability to mobilise popular protest since the election. It was a flop. That was no surprise. The few people with jobs cling to them. Before the election, the MDC had one eye on the Kenyan opposition’s mass mobilisation after vote-rigging there, but Zimbabweans are generally more fearful and passive. The MDC leadership, to its credit, is also reluctant to risk people’s lives by calling them on to the streets.

Zimbabweans looked to their neighbours for support but were let down, particularly by South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki. He said there was no crisis in Zimbabwe and played into Mugabe’s hands by calling the long delay in releasing the election results part of the normal electoral process. Mbeki kept the lid on the 14-nation Southern African Development Community (SADC) at its summit last weekend; some leaders were less indulgent of Zimbabwe’s president, but Mbeki pressed his own agenda aimed at easing Mugabe out with dignity but keeping Zanu-PF in power.

Tsvangirai also faced the dilemma of the run-off vote. The MDC said he would refuse to participate on the grounds that he won the election outright. But that became a difficult position to maintain, particularly when the MDC’s own count gives him only a fraction above the 50% threshold needed to avoid a run-off. To shy away from the second round risked making Tsvangirai appear afraid of a head-to-head contest with Mugabe. But what point is there in his participating if it ends up legitimising another stolen election while supporters are bludgeoned into submission?

Subsequently Tsvangirai regained the initiative to some extent by saying he is after all prepared to take Mugabe on in another vote as long as the process is open for the world to see. Here the MDC leader has learned one of the lessons of Kenya’s political confrontation in seeking to draw support in the rest of the continent – and his regional tour of the past week may pay off. Mbeki’s own African National Congress has broken with him over his handling of Mugabe, and that has laid the ground for others in the SADC to follow. Tsvangirai felt emboldened enough after his meetings with the ANC’s new leader, Jacob Zuma, to call for Mbeki to step down as mediator in favour of Zambia’s president, Levy Mwanawasa, who wants Mugabe out.

If the ANC and other governments in the region have the courage to decry the charade and refuse to legitimise another rigged election, Mugabe may cling on but he will do so as a fatally weakened and unwanted despot.

Once again, Robert Mugabe and his cronies are attempting to maintain their grip on power in Zimbabwe. While disheartening, this act of political thuggery does not diminish the victory of democracy over dictatorship in a country ravaged by misrule and ignorance. Ultimately, this is a victory for the strong hearts and sturdy backs that have carried us here: a victory for all Zimbabweans.

But democracy is an orphan in Zimbabwe. Since the infamous universal declaration of independence in 1965 made by the white government of Ian Smith in what was then Rhodesia – in an effort to block the extension of suffrage to the country’s black majority – the cry of democracy has been ignored. Mugabe’s 28-year rule has similarly undermined the development of institutional democracy.

Adept at stealing elections from the hands of voters, Mugabe is now amassing government troops; blocking court proceedings where we have attempted to seek an order simply for the electoral commission to release the final tally of the March 29 poll; raiding the offices of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC); and casting a pall of suppression and gloom over the country. The feared militias, made up of misguided activists and the same war veterans who pushed for and benefited from the disastrous land confiscations from the late 1990s, are being mobilised. This can only mean, despite some earlier evidence to the contrary, that sanity has been discarded along with truth in the offices of Zanu-PF.

The parliamentary majority the MDC has already attained has clearly been replicated in the presidential results. The MDC has tracked every polling station and recorded the results as they are released, and we can guarantee that Zanu-PF and Mugabe have met their demise in the face of Zimbabwean democracy. As official results will confirm when at last released, a mooted presidential run-off (initiated if no individual reaches a 50% threshold) is a sham. Our country is on a razor’s edge.

How can global leaders espouse the values of democracy, yet when they are being challenged fail to open their mouths? Why is it that a supposed “war on terror” ignores the very real terror of broken minds and mangled bodies that lie along the trail left by Mugabe?

This is a time for strong action. We urge the International Monetary Fund, at its meeting this week, to withhold the £1bn of aid to Zimbabwe unless the defeated ex-president accepts the election results in full and hands over the reins of power. This is also the time for firm diplomacy. Major powers here, such as South Africa, the US and Britain, must act to remove the white-knuckle grip of Mugabe’s suicidal reign and oblige him and his minions to retire.

We have assured Mugabe that the new government will not pursue him legally through government offices. The work ahead is monumental and we need no further self-made distractions. Recrimination is not on the new government’s job list. Our agenda is to restore the rule of law and good governance; to face up to our dire health problems, including an HIV-Aids epidemic; to reconstruct our once cutting-edge education system; to bring our abundant farmlands back into health; to tackle rampant inflation and over 70% unemployment; to encourage foreign investment and public works spending; to depoliticise our security services; to stamp out corruption and graft. Every day the new government is denied, these problems each get worse.

The new leadership is committed to nurturing democracy in Zimbabwe and to begin rebuilding our shattered country. It is time to make a stand.