Mbeki’s incompetance is depressing

On Saturday, Mbeki had an hour-long meeting with the election-thief Robert Mugabe in Harare. Emerging from this meeting, our wonderful president said: There is no crisis in Zimbabwe.

According to the Sunday Times, when Mbeki was asked about the invasion of white- owned farms and the beating-up of farm workers, he said: I wouldn’t describe that as a crisis. It’s a normal electoral process in Zimbabwe. We have to wait for the Zimbabwe electoral commission to release the results.

Mbeki says there is no crisis but, more than two weeks after they voted, the Zimbabwean people are being denied the right to an election result. He says there is no crisis, but the people are living under martial law. Opposition MDC lawyers have been harassed, South African equipment seized, and thousands of soldiers, police and members of youth militias are roaming the streets.

On April 7 2004, Mbeki made a speech in Kigali, Rwanda, where, in 1994, at least 800 000 people were killed while the world looked on. Mbeki apologised to the people of Rwanda, saying that South Africa had been looking inwards, at its own elections and transition, and had not spoken up about what was happening in that country.

Then he said: What did we, as Africans, do to stop the slaughter? If we did nothing, why did we do nothing?

Why did the United Nations, set up to ensure that genocide, as occurred when the Holocaust was visited on the Jewish people, did not recur anywhere in the world, stand by as Africans were exterminated like pernicious vermin?

Why were General Romeo Dallaire and his undermanned contingent of UN peacekeepers abandoned by the same people who sent them to Rwanda?

Why did those who dispose of enormous global power that has been used to determine the fate of all humanity decide that the slaughter in Yugoslavia had to be stopped at all costs, whereas the bigger slaughter in Rwanda should be allowed to run its course?

Have all the guilty been identified, whatever their contribution to the commission of the genocide? Have the necessary lessons been learnt? What are those lessons? Who has learnt them? What have these people done with the knowledge they have acquired?

Reading these words today, and looking at the tragedy of Zimbabwe, one wonders what lessons Mbeki himself has drawn. Is his silence and conniving with Mugabe – and now with the military chiefs who have stolen the election – what has he learnt?

Mbeki has for ages blamed the West and the UN for the Rwanda genocide. No doubt, when Zimbabwe is discussed, he will once again conveniently blame the West. But truth is persistent.

Mbeki supports and connives with Mugabe. When the war crimes tribunal for Zimbabwe is set up, Mbeki will loom over it as a supporter of Mugabe.

There is an inexplicable impulse in Mbeki to refuse to see the truth . In the run-up to the ANC’s Polokwane conference last year, he repeatedly refused to step away from the presidential race, despite incontrovertible evidence that he was going to humiliate himself. Indeed, after Mbeki lost even the nomination of the ANC Women’s League to Jacob Zuma, he nevertheless said on TV that he would contest the presidency.

What is happening in the South African government today with regard to Zimbabwe is not foreign policy. It is what happens when a single individual ignores the voice of his own party and people to ram through his own personal and jaundiced view. Our foreign policy has been hijacked to suit Mbeki’s misguided whims.

It is exactly this tendency in Mbeki – an obsessive refusal to back down and acknowledge the truth – that led to him getting whipped in Polokwane.