Africa protects its dictators, right or wrong

An analytical report in Earth Times examines the track record of African societies – which is riddled with suffering, violence, and many deaths – and African leaders who are fiercely defensive of their own kind when criticised by old colonial powers – all of whom are white.

As African dictators go, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has impeccable credentials. No sooner was he in power at independence in 1980, his army massacred about 20,000 members of a minority tribe. Hundreds of supporters of the country’s pro-democracy movement have been murdered and tens of thousands tortured.

 

The last three elections have been dismissed as rigged. When the presence of 4,500 white farmers proved politically inconvenient, he drove them off their farms and made 1 million farm workers homeless.

 

In 2005, on a whim, he smashed the homes of 700,000 urban Zimbabweans. Under his sway, Africa’s second most prosperous economy has been wrecked in the last seven years, without the aid of a war.

 

One third of the population has fled the country; the rest subsist in abject poverty while his family lives in splendour. Mugabe’s wife, Grace, has a four-poster double bed in an aircraft of the state-owned airline when

she goes shopping abroad.

 

But when European politicians protested his presence at the European Union-Africa summit in Lisbon this weekend, Africa stood as one man in defence of Mugabe’s right to attend. His 14 Southern African neighbours vowed to boycott the summit if he was barred.

 

Then, last week, they went further, saying they would boycott if the summit went so far as to discuss the 83-year old’s abuses.

 

It has not been possible to hold a repeat of the summit since its first meeting in Egypt in 2000, largely because of Mugabe.

 

Portugal, determined to try and make a success of the event, could only wish that he would not come, because crucial issues, such as development, aid and trade, might get sidetracked by what British Prime

Minister Gordon Brown has called the likely “circus” around Mugabe.

 

“It’s a kind of baboon solidarity,” Eldred Masunungure, head of the political science department at Zimbabwe University, said. “In baboon society, they fight among themselves a lot, but as soon as there’s a perceived external enemy, they join together to fight it.

 

“I know it sounds disparaging, but … I can’t think of a better analogy,” he added.

 

“African governments don’t examine the principle, whether it’s right or wrong. They might if it were something completely indefensible, but then the threshold is so very, very high for them to get to the point where they say ‘enough is enough,’ if it’s an African state involved,” Masunungure said.

 

“It’s wrong,” he said. “It means Africa is blindly supporting all sorts of abuses.

 

“It’s not just Zimbabwe, it spans the continent,” he said. He cited the late former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who was applauded at the 1975 summit of the then Organization of African Unity in Libreville, where he

arrived with a cowboy hat and a six-gun on each hip. He had just expelled Uganda’s entire Asian population of 40,000.

 

Africa’s failure to condemn its dictators was “inconceivable in civilized society,” he said. “We still lag behind in terms of defending right and wrong.”

 

Analysts say that the solidarity is driven by a sense of unity against the West stemming from the colonial area.

 

“It’s old black versus white, colonized versus coloniser instinct,” said an African diplomat, who asked not to be named. “It’s astounding that it is still so powerful nearly 50 years after decolonisation.”

 

“It’s going to take a very big effort to try to correct,” Masunungure said. “ASEAN (the Association of South-East Asian Nations) used to back Burma (Myanmar), but they are moving away from that kind of automatic defence.”

 

South Africa, under former Nobel laureate Nelson Mandela, began to evolve an ethical foreign policy after the end of apartheid-rule in 1994, but since he retired in 1999 and President Thabo Mbeki succeeded him, “there is no longer any morality driving South African foreign policy,” Masunungure said.

 

There are indications, however, that what Masunungure calls the “congenital solidarity response” to criticism of African governments is qualified.

 

When the EU-Africa summit furore blew up, African Union (AU) president Alpha Konare said that the body’s support for Zimbabwe was “in principle,” for the right of any African state to attend the Lisbon summit, but did not imply support for Mugabe’s policies.

 

At the weekend, a statement of less-than-fervent support for Mugabe came from president Levy Mwanawasa of neighbouring Zambia, commenting on the refusal of the prime minister of Britain – Zimbabwe’s former colonial power and probably Europe’s most outspoken critic of its regime – to attend the summit if Mugabe goes. He is sending a junior minister instead.

 

“Brown shouldn’t get tired of speaking and he must continue until the harvest of his efforts,” Mwanawasa said. “I appeal to Brown and the entire British nation that they should continue with their efforts until the situation in Zimbabwe is resolved.” – Earth Times