ZIMBABWE: forward or reverse?

AuthorLaidlaw, Christopher
PositionAnalysis of recent election

Christopher Laidlaw gives an eye-witness perspective on the recent Zimbabwe election.

It seems such a short time ago that an assortment of wise men and revolutionaries sat around a table in Lancaster House and hammered out an ungainly compromise for the future of Zimbabwe. To many in that country, however, it has seemed an eternity and the road to some sort of political stability has been a rocky one. Much of what happened in the lead-up to the recent election shows just how precarious the concept of democracy has become.

In order to understand the passion that the election aroused, at least in the minds of the international media, it is important to be clear on how, and why, the issue of access to land suddenly became so important. The election was, of course, rather more than just a national plebiscite about the land issue. It was also a severe test of the credibility and sustainability of the current regime, and of its increasingly remote and autocratic helmsman, Robert Mugabe, whose attempt to misuse the land issue as a means of clinging to power proved to be a very high risk strategy. Did he succeed or did he fail? A bit of both really.

The issue of whether or not outside observers would be welcome hung in the balance for some time before Mugabe reluctantly, and without much good grace, agreed to a Commonwealth group being accepted. The atmosphere was thoroughly soured by the efforts of a group of people from the National Democratic Institute in Washington who visited the country in May and promptly pronounced to the world that there was no chance of a free and fair election in light of the intimidation that had already taken place. They might well have been right, but it made life for all other observers that much less comfortable thereafter. Zanu seized on this pronouncement as an example of the West having made up its mind before the election had taken place and with friends like this who needed enemies?

Frosty reception

Don McKinnon arrived in Harare to a particularly frosty reception from Robert Mugabe following the extremely critical Commonwealth Ministerial Group report on Zimbabwe, and Mugabe made it known that he was greatly offended by what he considered an act of unjustified interference in a sovereign nation's internal affairs. The President was at verbal war with the British, who mishandled the situation badly by reacting so vociferously to his every utterance. The various remarks by Robin Cook and, particularly, Peter Hain served only to raise the temperature higher. All this did was provide Mugabe with more ammunition to shoot holes in Britain's record in Rhodesia -- a large and very inviting target. Mugabe made it plain that he would not accept any British observers on the Commonwealth team and McKinnon, wisely, did not argue with that. And so a Commonwealth invitation of sort was issued, Mugabe obviously having judged that to decline the Commonwealth, the body that opened the way for his accession to power twenty years earlier, would be to push the envelope a little far.

No such invitation was issued to the European Union, which had announced, grandly that it was coming anyway, as did a variety of the teams -- from the OAU, SADC, the South African Parliament and several other Western countries, including Australia and Canada. Not to be outdone by their Democratic Institute rivals the Republican Institute also launched themselves into the action, only to find that, like the British, Americans were no longer welcome and they went home again, unaccredited, and very hot under the collar.

At the end of his visit to Harare McKinnon was reported, or was it misreported, as saying that he thought that subject to a cessation of intimidation, the conditions for a free and fair election were more or less in place. These remarks caused an uproar, especially in Whitehall. The government-owned media in Zimbabwe seized on his words like beggars at a banquet and hailed this as a recognition that all was well. It made for an interesting start for the small advance Commonwealth group, of which I was a member, with the government crowing that we were on their side and the opposition bemoaning the Commonwealth's lack of objectivity. The advance group went to some pains to reassure people that the Commonwealth had not yet made its mind up and we were making some progress on this front when Don McKinnon's second pronouncement (from the safe distance of London) -- that the conditions for a credible election were not in place after all -- reversed everyone's perception of us. By this time it had become important not to take life too seriously.

Two-fold task

The advance group's task was two-fold: to establish a visible presence, particularly in the areas where intimidation had been most rife and to prepare an analysis of where and how the main observer group could best be deployed. It became...

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