By Obie Madondo
Western leaders have only their arrogant, supremacist and manipulative attitude to blame for the spectacular defeat of the draft “United Nations Security Council resolution” to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe. In pushing for the sanctions, they played dirty, engaged in open moral blackmailing and totally ignored reality.
Russia and China’s giant-killing veto was a direct indictment of this undiplomatic attitude.
Russia’s UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said sanctions would have taken the UN beyond its mandate in trying to punish political disputes by "artificially elevating them to the level of a threat" to international peace and security. Churkin believed the sanctions move was “illegitimate and dangerous”.
Russia is accusing the West of vindictiveness, lying and exaggeration in the name of the UN here. Moscow is alleging an attempted derailment of the UN Charter for self-interests that have nothing to do with helping Zimbabweans out of the Robert Mugabe dictatorship.
Chinese Ambassador Wang Guangya accused the West of “nation-tinkering” and attempted theft of the Zimbabwe political crisis from the domestic scene, where it belongs.
An examination of the anatomy of this failed sanctions campaign will justify the indictment of the West by both Russia and China.
The West’s first response to Mugabe’s June 27 re-election purported to highlight global indignation at the suffering that Mugabe has imposed on Zimbabweans. The West rejected the result and moved to de-legitimize Mugabe’s stolen mandate. Both the US and European Union (EU) called for the outright recognition of Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), as the legitimate president of Zimbabwe.
Surely, Tsvangirai can not be the “legitimate” president of Zimbabwe. He won the March election, held under an undemocratic electoral arrangement he consented to, but failed to score 50-plus percent.
But the West had no clear strategy to turn rhetoric into reality. The two weeks leading to the G8 Summit in Japan witnessed a powerful diplomatic offensive as leaders of G8 and EU countries took personal charge of their countries’ offensive against Mugabe.
In Berlin, Chancellor Angela Merkel guaranteed that Germany and the EU would seek "all possible sanctions" against Mugabe, and “think up all possible sanctions and check to see what more we can do…”
In the UK, Queen Elizabeth II finally stripped Mugabe of the knighthood she bestowed on him in 1994. The Queen knighted Mugabe well after he slaughtered 20 000 innocent, defenseless, ethnic Ndebele villagers in the early 1980s.
In Canada, the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper finally imposed travel, work and study bans on “senior Zimbabwean officials”. Like all Western countries, Ottawa protested neither Mugabe’s 1980s genocide nor the Queen shameless honor.
But this time playing tough with Mugabe promised domestic political capital. Harper faces a possible federal vote likely to be dominated by climate change and the gridlocked war in Afghanistan.
Thanks to the disastrous Iraq War, domestic sub-prime mortgage meltdown, an economy hurtling toward recession, huge budget deficits and a plummeting dollar, the majority of Americans consider US President George W. Bush’s presidency to be a failure. Many say history will record him as the worst US president.
In the UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s ruling Labour Party came fifth in a June Parliamentary by-election in Henley-on-Thames, near London. John Kampfner suggests that the party “might not just lose the next election, but be wiped off the map”.
Sanctions on Zimbabwe would have handed the three leaders a diplomatic coup.
But the West’s campaign could only hold with solid African backing. In Zimbabwe Tsvangirai tried to sabotage South African President Thabo’s SADC-mandated mediation effort. He reportedly personally asked Mbeki to arrange a meeting with Mugabe. The dictator, Mbeki and Arthur Mutambara, leader of the smaller faction of the MDC showed up. Tsvangirai shamed them by boycotting the meeting at the last minute.
Elsewhere in Africa, Botswana rejected Mugabe’s re-election and but curiously agitated for Zimbabwe’s expulsion from the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC).
Kenyan Prime Minister, Raila Odinga, called on the African Union (AU) to suspend Zimbabwe. Odinga belongs at The Hague. 1 500 Kenyans were slaughtered in the aftermath of last December’s election because of his criminal political negligence.
As the Western leaders pushed for sanctions, the Western media reprised the collusive posture it assumed on the eve of the disastrous invasion of Iraq. The western media hung on to every word Western leaders and their African mouthpieces said. No one bothered to explain how exactly new sanctions would topple Mugabe while guaranteeing a meal on the table for Zimbabweans.
At the end of June the New York Times carried the sad story of Blessing Mabhena, an 11-months old Zimbabwean baby boy whose legs had allegedly been broken by Mugabe’s thugs. The story drew global outrage. The papers later confessed that the story had been exaggerated.
As the G8 summit began, the Canadian media choked with news of Harper taking the lead to convince G8 leaders to act against Zimbabwe. The British media said the same of Brown, and the American media of Bush. Who exactly was trying to convince who? Why all the convincing if the case against Mugabe was clear-cut?
As the summit progressed, world public opinion had been won over, but not quite. Brown went for the kill and used shock tactics to shame the G8 into line. He showed all a picture of the charred body of Joshua Bakacheza, an opposition members murdered by Mugabe's thugs.
African countries needed a special kind of manipulation. Brown urged Africa to “now see [that] what is happening in Zimbabwe is damaging the credibility of Africa as a whole.” Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper suggested that seven African leaders were cautioned that Africa’s negative perception in G8 countries could adversely affect the flow of aid dollars. Ah, dollars!
The West ignored Presidents Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete and Abdoulaye Wade of Tanzania and Senegal, respectively, who insisted that the AU favored a negotiated settlement and a government of national unity. By pushing ahead with the sanctions agenda the West clearly showed contempt for the African sentiment and position.
But the West’s biggest faux pax was its deliberate disregard of the true positions of both Russia and China. They banked on negotiations the UN headquarters in New York. But, as Russia and China showed with the veto, the UN Security Council is a theatre of international politics where influential countries exploit global problems, however small, for self-interest.
China’s economic paw is all over Africa. China is now among Zimbabwe’s biggest trading partners. Beijing also sells arms to Harare. Beijing had everything to lose from imposing sanctions on Mugabe.
For Russia, the Zimbabwe sanctions vote provided the opportunity for simultaneous revenge against the US and UK. During the G8 summit, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev criticized the U.S. deal to place parts of a missile-defense shield in the Czech Republic. He promised to respond. The US thought Medvedev was bluffing? The UK accuses the Russian state of complicit in the fatal poisoning of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko. The UK thinks Moscow is amused? A resurgent Russia is currently repositioning itself as a powerful anti-dote of the West?
The G8 countries and members of the UN Security Council exploited the Zimbabwe crisis for selfish self-interest. Moscow and Beijing walked away with the bounty. Maybe it’s time for the sore losers – US, UK, Canada and their EU allies – to yield and give a negotiated settlement the chance.
