do it yourself

Promising:

The opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai is in talks with advisers to President Robert G. Mugabe of Zimbabwe, amid signs that some of those close to Mr. Mugabe may encourage him to resign, a Western diplomatic source and a prominent Zimbabwe political analyst said Tuesday. The negotiations about a possible transfer of power away from Mr. Mugabe began after he apparently concluded that a runoff election would be demeaning, a diplomat said.

It’s early days yet but could it be that after the shameful failure of the West/Africa/ whoever/ to intervene on behalf of the people of Zimbabwe, that the people of Zimbabwe have managed to intervene on their own account? This certainly seems to recapitulate the colour revolution playbook:

In previous elections, the MDC has claimed victory before the official results were announced, only to see this victory become a mirage. In 2008, the MDC has adopted an electoral strategy of having its own vote-counting to counter subversion, with supporters and "election monitors" sending in their tallies via mobile telephones. On this basis, the MDC has claimed that Tsvangirai has already won at least 60% of the presidential poll, against Mugabe on 30%.

This strategy of pre-emption is designed to put the state's electoral machinery on the defensive, and make it harder for the state to claim a comprehensive victory for Robert Mugabe and Zanu-PF.

I don’t doubt that the opposition actually won the elections. But my guess is that the the campaign around them was aimed to intersect with a growing awareness in Mugabe’s inner circle that he’s running the place so far into the ground that he’s taking them down with him. So this time the people’s voice must be heard.

Previous elections seemed to follow a pattern where the MDC would claim victory while using Mugabe’s brutality against them as a means of exerting moral force internationally. If they’re now thinking local and in so doing have come up with a more effective means of getting rid of Mugabe, this raises the question of whether the promise of intervention actually helps keep dictatorships in power through distracting the opposition.

Thought experiment. Zimbabweans manage to get rid of Mugabe through their own efforts. So how's Zimbabwe going to look in five years time compared to Iraq?

Comments

[ejh]

Indeed

[Dan Hardie]

I feel too that it's much better for oppressed populations to chuck out their dictators rather than wait for the heavily-armed cavalry from outside to do the job. But do you have any evidence that this was either the key reason for the past failure of the MDC, or even a key reason for ditto?

The post above is a ton of theory to an ounce of evidence. Perhaps the MDC did fail largely or entirely because their gameplan was 'scream loudly and wait for the invasion force to arrive'. It seems to me just as likely that the MDC got stuffed at past 'elections' because they were an unarmed opposition party, trying to stay within the law and also divided among pro- and anti-Tsvangirai factions, up against a totalitarian thug backed by cadres who stopped at almost nothing. Getting rid of dictators is dangerous, which is why efforts to do so very often fail.

If they do succeed in getting rid of Mugabe this time round- and that is one hell of a big 'if'- perhaps it will be because they've got a more realistic attitude towards the likelihood of foreign intervention, but perhaps it will also be because Zimbabwe is now so thoroughly trashed that even leading Zanu-PF types are worrying about their future.

'So how's Zimbabwe going to look in five years time compared to Iraq?' Maybe better, maybe worse: depends on a lot of things. Like whether anyone in the outside world gives enough of a stuff to chip in a few billion of reconstruction aid, and whether the Shona and the Ndebele hate each other after all Mugabe's rabble-rousing, and whether Tsvangirai has got a clue, and what happens to the MDC/'reformed Zanu' coalition that takes power after Mugabe has gone. If it takes power. If Mugabe goes.

[dsquared]

MDC have actually been really quite good and consistent about keeping arms' length from their "supporters" overseas - they lost an election pretty badly early on through being successfully portrayed as the party of British farmer interests and learned the lesson. I also think that "a totalitarian thug backed by cadres who stopped at almost nothing" is a bit of an exaggeration if one compares it to the real totalitarian thugs of Africa who really do stop at nothing, like al-Bashir or someone; the MDC have always worked within the democratic process because they've always fundamentally believed in it, and while I am not going to make excuses for Mugabe, he has not actually committed mass murder (against the MDC that is; the massacres of the 1980s are on his rap sheet of course).

I think it's a case of "every war is different" once more here; this method worked for MDC because of the particular politics of Zimbabwe, and the real lesson is that Tsvangerai understood them a lot better than the Daily Telegraph did. The only generic lesson I suppose is yet another instance of English-speaking expats being a very poor source of information.

[redpesto]

Iraq? Why not compare it to Serbia? Okay, it got bombed over Kosovo, but in the end the people got rid of Milosevic without any 'regime change' invasion from the US/UK. I've always had this belief that there was a big pile of patronising assumptions in the idea that the Iraqi's couldn't do their own liberating.