Since receiving less votes than his opponent, the Movement for Democratic Change’s Morgan Tsvangirai, in the March 29 presidential election, Mr.Mugabe let loose a campaign of intimidation, violence, forced relocation,and murder against his political opponents. The international community yet again has proven ineffective in its protestations; for years they have imposed sanctions on top regime officials in an effort to weaken the regime,but to no effect.
In the editorials and columns denouncing Mr. Mugabe, the Zimbabwean tyrant is often described as the “prototypical African Big Man.” And in many ways,he is. Mr. Mugabe treats his people with utter impunity. He defiantly snubs the West. However, policy makers who want to end his rule should stop thinking of him as just another African dictator. In order to craft a policy for dealing with him, it may prove best to think of Robert Mugabe like we do of Islamists.
Mr. Mugabe, of course, is not an Islamist. He is a devout Catholic, educated in Catholic mission schools, and once considered becoming a priest. Nor does he threaten anyone other than his own people. But his twisted political philosophy – a personalized variant of extreme African nationalism – is akin to a fundamentalist religion.
Mr. Mugabe genuinely believes that he is fighting racism and colonialism, 28 years after Zimbabwe became independent of white minority rule. Though there are hardly any whites left in his country anymore, Mr. Mugabe continues to rail against their pernicious influence and he always attacks the MDC as a tool of foreign imperialists.
If the MDC takes over the reigns, Mr. Mugabe alleges, it would be no different than Ian Smith rising from the dead to resume his place as Prime Minister of Rhodesia. Which is why Mr. Mugabe will never agree to a policy that allows the MDC to assume power. The opposition party won the March parliamentary elections, in results that Mr. Mugabe did not officially dispute, but the new parliament has yet to be seated.
Like Islamists, Mr. Mugabe invokes heavenly backing for his cause. “Only God who appointed me will remove me,” he said in a speech last month, “not the MDC, not the British. The MDC will never be allowed to rule this country – never ever,” he said, adding, “How can a ballpoint pen fight with a gun?” This has been Mr. Mugabe’s modus operandi since he was a revolutionary leader.
In Zimbabwe’s first, supposedly democratic election in 1980, Mr. Mugabe threatened to continue his civil war against the cooperative black-white government of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia unless his party won. From the genocide of Ndebeles in the 1980s to the seizure of white-owned farms in 2000, it has been the same ever since.
Unlike many other tyrants, Mr. Mugabe is not in the dictatorship racket for riches. True, he recently built himself a $20 million mansion, and he frequently takes his wife, Grace, on shopping sprees around the world. Yet the amassing of money and other luxuries is not the reason why he sought power in the first place, nor is it the reason he keeps it today.
Mr. Mugabe is an ideological tyrant in the mold of the late leaders of the Taliban or the Mullahs in Iran; to label him as an opportunist is to underestimate what motivates him as well as his staying power. For most of his time as Zimbabwe’s president, Mr. Mugabe has led an austere life. It is for this reason that it will likely prove impossible for the international community to buy him off.
The most crucial sense in which Mr. Mugabe resembles an Islamist is the way in which the international community should deal with him. There is no accommodation with militant Islamists. When America was attacked on September 11, 2001, no one believed that we ought to have negotiated with Osama bin Laden. America and its allies sought the destruction of Al Qaeda and delivered an ultimatum to states that supported terrorism: end your support or pay the consequences.
In dealing with the Iranian nuclear project, European leaders are united with America in the belief that military force should always be on the table, looming in the background as the worst possible option.
In the case of Zimbabwe, military intervention has never been an option. But if an external actor had credibly threatened force against Mr. Mugabe earlier, it’s unlikely we would still be debating how to get rid of him.It’s not too late. The threat need not come from America or Great Britain; indeed, it would be most effective were it to come from neighboring South Africa, Zimbabwe’s economic lifeline. The Zimbabwean army is small, ill equipped, and demoralized.
Yet for reasons that are by now well familiar – sympathy for a former liberation hero, aversion to the power of the labor union movement in the region – the government of South Africa is unlikely to take such a drastic step or even threaten it. That is truly unfortunate. For if history has taught us anything about Robert Mugabe, it’s that, like Osama bin Laden, there simply is no negotiating with him unless it’s conducted at the end of a gun.
Mr. Kirchick, who has reported from Zimbabwe, is an assistant editor of the
New Republic.