According to Thabo Mbeki, Tony Blair wanted to overthrow Robert Mugabe by force. The former PM denies this – but would it have been such a bad idea?
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| Robert Mugabe celebrating his birthday in Harare |
These claims have been dismissed mostly as the paranoid ravings of a
deluded despot. But now they have been given force by Thabo Mbeki, the
former South African President, who claims that Tony Blair suggested
their two nations invade Zimbabwe to topple Mugabe.
It is hard to
imagine British armed forces fighting their way into Harare to oust a
man who, for all his many faults, was an elected leader and liberation
hero to his people. But given subsequent events, it is worth asking – if
only in the interests of counter-factual history – whether it would
really have been such a bad idea.
This may sound an absurd
question. But consider the facts. Mbeki said the former British Prime
Minister urged him to join a “regime-change scheme” involving military
force shortly after the turn of the century, a period when Zimbabwe was
slumping into one of the most catastrophic collapses in modern times.
Mugabe
had already been in power for two decades by this time, inheriting the
richest nation in Africa and wrecking it with his corrupt cronies.
Britain, like other Western powers, had ignored the slaughter of 20,000
rival supporters in Matabeleland and indulged him as an ally in the Cold
War while he tightened the noose on his nation.
But by the start
of this millennium Zimbabwe was in a mess and Mugabe’s misrule could no
longer be overlooked. The economy was in freefall, aided by a disastrous
intervention in the Congo war, while rivals were eliminated,
journalists silenced and dissidents tortured. Meanwhile, the HIV/Aids
pandemic had started to rip through the population just as state
services were crumbling and donor support was drying up.
To
distract attention, the campaign of white farm seizures was unleashed, a
brutal and short-sighted solution to necessary land reform. It was
around this time that Blair – once dismissed as “a boy in short
trousers” by Mugabe, who loathed New Labour – was allegedly discussing
intervention.
Nothing happened, of course. But over the next few
years Zimbabwe endured the world’s fastest-shrinking economy as the
second-worst hyperinflation in history –peaking eventually at 231
million per cent, with prices doubling almost every day – ravaged the
country. People would go to the bank to get blocks of money that was so
worthless it would not cover the bus trip home. Prices in stores soared
even as shoppers queued to check out.
Families spent weekends
traipsing across borders to buy basic provisions in neighbouring
countries; the Beit Bridge over the Limpopo heaved with heavily laden
buses, cars and pedestrians taking food back to a fertile nation once
known as “the breadbasket of Africa”. As the government handed
once-thriving farms to supporters, shops were shutting and millions of
Zimbabweans were starving. Hospitals were chained closed and medicines
unavailable, leaving women to die in childbirth for lack of the most
simple treatment.
Life expectancy crashed to the world’s lowest –
just 34 years for women and 37 for men at one stage. Little wonder that
an estimated three million people – one-quarter of the population – fled
the country, while unemployment rose to about 90 per cent for those
that remained.
Mugabe prided himself on Zimbabwe having the
highest literacy rates in sub-Saharan Africa. But many of those fleeing
were the educated elites frustrated by his regime, and he was content to
see potential opponents leave. This was the backdrop to the 2008
election when a weary country voted for Morgan Tsvangirai, only for
Mugabe’s allies to refuse to quit, unleashing horrific political
violence in response. Eventually, the warring parties were forced into
uneasy coalition by diplomats led by Mbeki, who secretly threatened
senior figures with the International Criminal Court.
The
introduction of the US dollar stabilised the economy and life expectancy
has risen – although it remains eight years lower than when Mugabe took
power and repression remains routine. Most Zimbabweans are still
unemployed, poverty is endemic and public services struggle. Even in the
prosperous suburbs people rarely have running water. I joked with one
man about the green water in his pool when I was there in July; he
replied that it was his main supply for bathing and laundry. He washes
from a bucket each day.
Meanwhile, a gangster government in
cahoots with China preaches communism while creaming off vast sums from
the nation’s mineral wealth, especially the world’s biggest diamond
mines in Marange. An official source told me that in one year these
should have delivered more than £1bn to the state, but only £23m was
handed over.
After another dubious election victory this year,
delivered on the back of anti-British rhetoric, the 89-year-old dictator
is pressing ahead with fresh indigenisation policies. Rather than wreck
the economy again, however, he is focusing on bakers and beauticians
rather than bankers and mine operators – let alone the white business
people who aid his regime.
These claims of Blair’s desire for
intervention will fuel the ruling party’s paranoia, especially at a time
of palpable tensions between two camps fighting to succeed “the old
man”. Blair rapidly denied Mbeki’s allegation – perhaps mindful of how
his prime ministership was so disfigured by the foolish invasion of
another foreign country a decade ago. But it is worth remembering not
all his overseas interventions were so disastrous. In May 2000, as the
Zimbabwean meltdown intensified, he sent a small force of British troops
to Sierra Leone to shore up successfully a government threatened by
vicious militias.
It is ludicrous, of course, to contemplate
Britain leading an invasion of Zimbabwe just 20 years after it won
independence. As Mbeki said, it is not our responsibility to decide who
leads the people of an African nation. Equally, it is impossible to
determine whether the whisky-drinking President’s recollection is
accurate given the emphatic denial by Blair – not that the former Labour
leader has always proved the most reliable witness in history.
Yet,
at the same time, it is impossible not to wonder what would have
happened if the South Africans had agreed to lead a military assault to
remove the revolting regime that corrodes their neighbouring nation.
They called him “the crazy old man”, after all, according to one leaked
diplomatic cable. For if they had sent in troops to that shattered state
13 years ago, would Zimbabwe have endured a far less traumatic time and
been in a much better place today?
Independent
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