Robert Mugabe is making a mockery of liberal interventionism. He has become God’s gift to cartoonists, politicians and commentators. He is depicted wielding clubs dripping in blood. He stands triumphant over a pile of skulls. He is Bokassa out of Idi Amin out of Charles Taylor. He is that old familiar, the African heart of darkness, monstrous, buffoonish, grotesque and evil. There is a sense in which Mugabe’s hysterical anti-British analysis of his predicament is correct. His Zimbabwe is a creature of British imperialism and post-imperialism. Britain duly tolerated the suppression of Mugabe’s enemy, Joshua Nkomo, and Zimbabwe’s conversion into a one-party state. It turned a blind eye to the 1983 Ndebele massacre by Mugabe’s Shona Fifth Brigade. Margaret Thatcher’s Whitehall gave Harare lavish aid and barmy advice, helping turn a viable economy into a basket case of pseudo-socialist kleptomania. Now Zimbabwe is declared outrageous. So what is to be done? The government’s answer is splutter. Abuse is heaped on Mugabe’s head in a ministerial cascade of brutals, bloodthirsties, illegitimates and revoltings. As for sanctions [they] never work. any protracted squeeze leads only to internal economic adjustment. Control of money and goods shifts from merchants to rulers, driving the former to exile and increasing the wealth of the latter. We can portray Mugabe in the press as a bloodthirsty gorilla and impose so-called smart sanctions, in order that Gordon Brown, David Miliband and the rest can feel a little better, but our fine feelings are hardly central to Africa’s predicament. So-called liberal interventionism is a will-o’-the-wisp, a vapid, feel-good refashioning of foreign policy. motivated by self-interest or passing mood. We should send food to the starving of Zimbabwe however much Mugabe distorts the supply. But as for dreaming of toppling him, those days are over. Britain has done enough damage to Zimbabwe over the years. Prudence tells us please to shut up. Excerpted from a comment by Simon Jenkins in ‘The Guardian’
