Slandering Tsvangirai

Africans have been burned - sometimes literally - by many of their would-be saviors, so healthy skepticism about Morgan Tsvangirai is probably warranted. There's nothing healthy about this, though:

The opposition Movement for Democratic Change is seen by the West as the only alternative, but the likely success at some point in the future of Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC, a party bankrolled by the white farmers and supportive of a return to structural adjustment and privatization, may simply deliver Zimbabwe out of the frying pan into the fire.

[...]

There is, however, no Nelson Mandela figure waiting in the wings in Zimbabwe. On the one hand, there's Robert Mugabe. And on the other, Morgan Tsvangirai, who has chosen his advisors from the conservative Cato Institute and the International Republican Institute. For ordinary Zimbabweans, traumatized by war, poverty and increasing lawlessness, it's a classic Hobson's choice. ...

One side is beating, imprisoning and killing political opponents, destroying Zimbabwe's agricultural base, and bringing in economic policies that have created the world's highest inflation rate. But the other is backed by (shudder) classical economists, so it's basically a wash. Got it.

Dawg (who I thought would be more sympathetic toward a former union leader) rattles off all the usual excuses for Third World tyranny: colonialism, the IMF, the slow pace of land reform, and of course, Bush Administration policies. I suppose they're retroactively responsible for what Mugabe was doing in the early 1980s, too:

We slipped into Matabeleland with the help of local people, and gathered evidence of some of the massacres carried out there between 1982 and 1986.

It began as an attempt by Robert Mugabe, who was then prime minister of Zimbabwe, to deal with about 500 dissidents. These were followers of his rival, Joshua Nkomo, and mostly belonged to Nkomo's militia, Zipra.

Mr Mugabe ordered the Fifth Brigade, which had been trained by the North Korean army and had a number of North Korean officers serving with it, to root them out.

[...]

Nowadays, many in Matabeleland describe the campaign of murder as genocide.

To find out how many people died, we went to the quiet precincts of the Catholic cathedral in Bulawayo to meet Joseph Buchena Nkatazo. He co-ordinated an investigation carried out some years ago by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace.

Mr Nkatazo told us that in the areas where they had been able to investigate, they had found evidence of more than 20,000 deaths. He was sure there must have been many more elsewhere.

I rarely agree with Dawg, but I usually respect his opinions (and he does make some interesting points about our relative apathy toward Zimbabwe, compared with our outrage toward South African apartheid). This time, though, he comes way too close to that fine line between explaining Mugabe's tyranny and excusing it.

Damian P.

Posted by damian at June 25, 2008 09:17 AM