PAGE: Betraying African dreams

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By Clarence Page

COMMENTARY:

If you've been following the sad news in Zimbabwe, you will hear the irony in the name of its capital city, Harare. In the language of the Shona people. It means "One who does not sleep."

When I slipped into Zimbabwe a few years ago as a board member of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, I slept restlessly in fear of arrest. President Robert Mugabe had shut the door on visas to outside journalists. Attacks have since increased against the press and anyone else who does not toe Mr. Mugabe's political party line.

And Zimbabweans sleep more fitfully. Some of the reasons are spelled out in a list of the Zimbabwe's dead, compiled and distributed by Mugabe's political opposition to international media and reported by Paul Salopek, the Chicago Tribune's prize-winning Africa correspondent.

There's a man who was attacked and beaten after sitting down to eat dinner. Another was killed while tending his garden. A woman's targeted husband was not home, so she was killed as a warning to him. Another woman was locked in a room at the shopping center and burned with plastic all over her body and in the mouth. A man was given rat poison and, when that wasn't enough to kill him, he was slaughtered with an ax.

More than 80 known victims were killed in the run-up to Mr. Mugabe's June 27 sham of a reelection. The carnage and intimidation have not stopped. The country's economy is a wreck. It takes millions of Zimbabwean dollars to buy a loaf of bread, and the prices go up every half-hour or so. As many as 80 percent of the workers are unemployed. Peaceful sleep is a luxury.

Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, was poised to win the runoff, despite Mr. Mugabe's best vote-stealing efforts, but withdrew to stop the brutal state-sponsored attacks against thousands of his supporters.

At 84, Mr. Mugabe clings to power against all pretense of carrying about the lives or liberty of his country's people. He cares only for power.

It wasn't always like this. I remember when Mr. Mugabe was viewed as one of Africa's brightest postcolonial hopes. Like South Africa's Nelson Mandela, Mr. Mugabe was imprisoned for opposing white-minority rule. Freed in 1975 after 11 years in prison under the breakaway British colony of Rhodesia, he led a resistance movement that ended with his election in 1980 as prime minister of the newly named Zimbabwe.

But power corrupted him. In the early 1980s, his special forces, assisted by the North Korean army, massacred about 20,000 members of the Ndebele tribe who supported a rival leader. In 2000, he defended the seizure of land from white farmers by self-proclaimed "war veterans." The country deteriorated rapidly from food exporter to food beggar.

Ian Smith, white Rhodesia's last prime minister, observed poignantly before his death last October, "I was wrong about Mandela, but right about Mugabe." Indeed, Mr. Mugabe has always been on his best behavior only as long as his own power is not threatened. Subject him to something so humbling as an honest election and, as far as he's concerned, everybody gets hurt.

He paints himself as Africa's champion. That's a mockery of the Pan-African dream for which he once stood. Instead he's a retro-throwback to the old Big Man system of kleptocracy and pseudo-democracy: "One person, one vote, one time."

So Nelson Mandela, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Sen. Barack Obama have condemned his violence? So, the United Nations Security Council have joined the condemnations? So, the Queen of England has revoked his knighthood? So, you think Mr. Mugabe cares?

Mr. Mugabe cares only for power and, perhaps, keeping himself and his cronies for having to answer for war crimes at The Hague. Instead, he is coddled by bodies like the African Union.

At last week's AU meeting in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheik, the presidents of Kenya and Senegal were most prominent among the few who sharply rebuked Mr. Mugabe for embarrassing the continent. Most of the African Union urged a power-sharing deal between Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai. But, like resolutions the U.N. and others have passed, it had no enforcement teeth.

Zimbabweans still wait in vain for what they really need to hear, a strong rebuke of Mr. Mugabe's arrogance from their neighbor, South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki. As the region's designated negotiator in the Zimbabwe crisis - and president of the region's biggest economic and political powerhouse - Mr. Mbeki could almost single-handedly persuade Mugabe to retire to a comfortable villa somewhere.

Through carrot-and-stick threats of international sanctions against the landlocked Zimbabwe and Mr. Mugabe's cronies, Mr. Mbeki could save his legacy and Africa's future. Instead, Mr. Mbeki behaves, in the words of an old African fable, like a mouse in the pocket of Mr. Mugabe's elephant while the grass suffers - and does not sleep.

Clarence Page is a nationally syndicated columnist.