What drives an 84-year-old political leader, who had ruled his country for close to three decades, to cling on to power at any cost, including that of hunting down, incarcerating and butchering his opponents, whom he perceives as a threat to his ambitions for yet another term in office?
You may think that power corrupts, and that its absolute version corrupts absolutely, but Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has projected a more pathological expression of power, best defined by Edmund Burke, who wrote: "Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though for but one year, can never willingly abandon it."
Leaders of the African Union meeting at a two-day conference in Egypt last Tuesday failed, effectively, to resolve Zimbabwe's political crisis, issuing a lame resolution calling on Mugabe and the political opposition, led by Morgan Tsvangirai, to "engage in serious efforts" to form a national unity government. An attempt by some delegates to punish Zimbabwe by excluding it from regional and continental meetings, and introduce a strong motion censuring the regime, was defeated. There remain, it would appear, African governments that are sympathetic to Mugabe's claim that Britain's and other Western nations' "interference" in Zimbabwe was behind the country's crisis. No mention was made of the fact that Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic change won the first election in March but withdrew from the run-off after a state-sponsored campaign of violence against the party's supporters.
Leadership failures
It is unfortunate that African countries, working in concert, failed to address a pressing African issue on their continent. The meltdown in Zimbabwe is not, sadly, unique to Zimbabwe, for there are leadership failures across Africa, though Zimbabwe's failure, resulting from its president's brazen effort to prolong his rule no matter what, is more extreme in kind and in degree. Surely, African leaders must recognise that a deepening social, political and economic crisis in one country in their continent will systemically affect them all. Just as, for example, the drought that swept across Western Somalia, and across the border in Ethiopia, last year and again this year, has already created a major problem for the surrounding countries, so has political turmoil in Zimbabwe created a demographic problem for South Africa with the influx there of great numbers of Zimbabwean refugees fleeing a land that at one time had been self-sufficient and stable but, thanks to mismanagement, nepotism and corruption in government, is now turned into a empty basket case. Those of us who were around at the time, in the 1950s, recall the independence era when the colonial powers began to withdraw and dozens of new African states were established amid the world's applause and giddy enthusiasm.
A bold experiment by formerly colonised peoples, in nation- building, economic development and social justice, was to be launched. Fifty years on, Africa's misfortunes - its ethnic wars, its droughts, its famines, its genocides - have become legion. To be sure, there are exceptions. Take Botswana, an enduring example of a multi-party democracy, and South Africa, which has emerged intact into a post-apartheid era. But the reality is that, two generations later and half a century after independence, a continent rich in resources has been brought to the edge of despair, its many states burdened by debt, national strife and dictatorial rule.
Back to Mugabe who, I will go out on a limb and tell you here, is beyond the pale. We all read the gruesome news story last week, among many about the man's brutalities against his own people, of the burning to death of a six-year-old boy because his father is an opposition politician. In the face of such thuggery, I too, had I been Tsvangirai, would have been persuaded to withdraw from the presidential run-off on June 27.
That the African Union summit in Sharm Al Shaikh failed to address the issue is indeed, I say, unfortunate. But all is not lost. The United States, with backing from the European Union, is preparing to apply pressure on Zimbabwe's president by pressing for a UN vote next week that would impose sanctions on his regime.
In and by itself that may not be enough. That is why the international community is looking into ways to intervene on behalf of the long-suffering people of Zimbabwe. It would appear that under a new concept, known as "responsibility to protect" and dubbed "R2P", adopted by world leaders at a UN world summit in New York in 2005, intervention in another country is permitted in the event that mass atrocity, and other crimes against humanity, are taking place there, and that country is unable to protect its people. Whether the international community would resort to such a measure remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, Zimbabwe as a nation has become hollowed out, its potential for development disrupted by the predatory politics of an 84-year-old ruler who has worked together with a ruling elite to create or perpetuate privilege for cronies at the expense of the national interest and the interest of the mass of Zimbabweans. Yes, I say in this case, we do have a "responsibility to protect" - or at the least to speak up.
Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He lives in Washington D.C.
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