What’s the point of the Zimbabwe elections?

This has been another traumatic week for Zimbabwe. For a country that has been under constant assault from a regime desperate to hold on to power for the best part of a decade, this may be stating the obvious. But this week has, perhaps, been a watershed in the demonstration of state callousness and disrespect for its people, for its disregard of the rule of law and for its disdain international opinion. It was a week which began with Mr Robert Mugabe in Rome to push his now discredited and well-worn argument that Zimbabwe was a victim, not of his own incompetence and failure, but of international intrigue and conspiracy led by the British and Americans.

But it was at home in Zimbabwe that the real drama and tragedy was unfolding. First was the twice detention of the “opposition” leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, by the Zimbabwean police. What was his crime? He was campaigning for the run-off presidential elections to be held end of June. It should be remembered that this is the same man who convincingly beat Mr Mugabe in the previous round of elections held at the end of March. After more than a month of procrastination in releasing the election results, more than enough time to manipulate the numbers, Tsvangirai still beat Mugabe by five percentage points (about the same margin with which Nicolas Sarkozy, the reigning French President, beat his rival, Sigolene Royale, in the 2007 French elections). It is also Tsvangirai’s party which is now the majority in the Zimbabwean parliament. So to keep referring to him as a leader of the opposition, though this may reflect the status quo, is a serious contradiction in terms and a disregard of the democratic will of the Zimbabwean people.

It is thus a very sad indictment that the popularly elected leader of the people of Zimbabwe has not only been denied the right to lead the people who have elected him to but is now being intimidated and humiliated through unjustified arrests and detentions so that he cannot effectively campaign to prove, yet once again, that he, and not the present incumbent, is the preferred choice of the people of Zimbabwe. As if stopping Tsvangirai from campaigning was not enough, the police have now banned all campaign rallies of his party, the MDC. There is an element of desperation now amongst the ruling elite in the country which borders on recklessness. The army and security services chiefs have been issuing all manner of threats to force their subordinates and their families to vote for Mugabe and have, in blatant violation of the provisions of the constitution, taken very partisan positions in support of their despotic mentor and benefactor.

The question now is, what is the purpose of holding the election if the intention is to ensure that only Robert Mugabe emerges the winner? What is point of spending the very scarce national resources and of wasting the energies of a tired and traumatised society in holding yet another election when the voice of the electorate is not going to be respected? It has become all too apparent that the run-off will neither be free nor fair by any measure or standard. However Mr Tsvangirai believes that his hour has come and that, despite all the odds and all the shenanigans of the ruling elite, he will emerge victorious yet again. Well, this remains a possibility but not the probability it would have been had the turf been a bit more even.

The second bad news for Zimbabwe this week was the detention of foreign diplomats in Bindura which triggered an international furore. It is reported that the British and American diplomats were detained for a long while and threatened by war veterans and security forces with harm when they went to investigate reports of political violence. I am not a buff on diplomatic conventions, but I believe that this sort of thing cannot be done without triggering a serious international incident. The respect for diplomatic immunity is one of the most sacred international conventions and it is both sacrosanct and inviolable. So for the Zimbabwe government to allow its supporters to engage in activities that violate this important tenet is either an act of sheer stupidity or recklessness. How they can expect to have gotten away with that, only God knows.

For me this incident raises two critical issues. Firstly why is it that it is only the British and Americans who are interested in investigating human rights abuses in my country? Where are the rest of the African diplomats, especially those of the SADC which have been mandated with resolving the political logjam in Zimbabwe? If Africa’s problems should be left to the Africans to solve, why should the British and Americans continue to play a prominent role in diffusing the serious human rights violations taking place in the country? In my mind it has become all too clear that our African leaders do not care a hoot about issues of human rights. They are much more concerned with observing meaningless and self-serving niceties of national sovereignty and Pan-African solidarity.

I believe it would have been weightier if, for example, the South African and Zambian embassy officials had been investigating the human rights cases so that they can accurately brief their principles who are grappling with the problem of finding a solution to the meltdown taking place in their neighbourhood. But no, the African diplomats prefer to stay in their spacious chanceries and pretend that there is nothing amiss. Of course, I do sympathise with them because I know that the reality is that they will not receive any protection from their own governments if they started poking their noses into so-called “internal matters” of a sovereign country. Imagine what would happen to the South African ambassador if he told his president that there are actually problems when his boss believes that there is “no crisis”!

The second concern I have with this diplomatic incident is that it will discourage some other diplomats from continuing to investigate the serious abuses of human rights taking place in the country. There will be a belief that if diplomats from powerful nations can be mistreated with such utter contempt of international norms, much worse can happen to diplomats of weaker nations. This is an intimidation tactic that seems to work very well. But as with any negative tactic, it can backfire quite dramatically, as the Zimbabwean government are just waking up to. After much effort to keep the country out of the UN Security Council agenda, the incident has just pushed the country back onto the agenda. But much worse, the country has now acquired a reputation for roguishness which, even its erstwhile supporters, is ashamed to be associated with. So the country is quite assuredly moving backwards.

To cap what has been a dramatic and eventful week, the Zimbabwean government announced the suspension of all aid activities in the country until after the election. This was done under the pretext that aid organisations have been campaigning for the opposition. This decision means that millions of people who now depend on aid organisations for food, health, water and other social services will loose that support and will be left exposed to hunger and suffering. The expectation may be that hungry people will vote for the government but the truth is that people now know that the aid agencies are there because the government has failed in its first and foremost duty – to look after its people. The people no longer believe in the government and that is why they voted for the opposition. No amount of threats, intimidation and punishment will assuage the people from their disdain and dislike of the present government. Not even the imposition or threat of hunger will stop the tide of change.