Election standoff in Zimbabwe: The
threat of imperialist intervention



By Ann Talbot

5 April 2008



“Zimbabwe Waits
to Exhale” ran the headline in this week’s Time magazine.



The eyes of the world’s media are fixed on President Robert Mugabe and the
only subject under discussion is “Will he or won’t he go?” In the meantime, a
quiet and little remarked process is going on behind the scenes. There is a
creeping process of regime change under way that will affect not just Zimbabwe,
but the entire region and marks a new phase in the recolonialisation of Southern
 Africa.



The British and US governments are engineering the transition to a new
regime that will be more open to transnational investment, will allow the
resources of Zimbabwe
to be more freely plundered and make a well-educated English-speaking working
class available for exploitation.



Despite the economic and military shocks that Britain
and America
have suffered in recent years, they have not reversed the wave of neocolonial
adventurism that they began with the invasion of Iraq.
The setbacks they have suffered in Iraq
and the economic crisis they face have only made them more determined to
salvage their position of dominance by military means.



Under Labour, the UK
economy has become almost entirely dependent on finance capital, and the most
dangerous and speculative areas of finance capital at that. In conditions of
mounting recession, the UK
is relying on its military capacity as never before. Brown, like Blair before
him, has tied himself to the coattails of the US,
and the same partnership that invaded Iraq
and Afghanistan
is menacing Iran
and has set its sights on Zimbabwe.
Britain gave up
its hold on Zimbabwe
very reluctantly and sees an opportunity to reestablish itself there.



Archbishop Desmond Tutu has already called for British troops to go into Zimbabwe
and insisted that it would not be an aggressive force. “It is merely ensuring
that human rights are maintained,” he claimed. A peacekeeping force was needed,
Tutu said, because “The situation is very volatile. Many, many people are
angry. I doubt that they are jus t going to sit back and fold their arms. They
are going to take to the streets and I am fearful.... We have seen what
happened in Kenya.”



Tutu is using his prestige as a Nobel laureate and anti-Apartheid campaigner
to make an extraordinary move seem right and necessary. Speaking later the same
day at a memorial service for anti-Apartheid activist Ivan Toms, he called on
Mugabe to stand down.



“I mean when your time is over, your time is over,” he said. Mugabe had
played a pivotal role in the armed struggle, so, “We hope he will be able to
step down gracefully, with dignity.”



In writing Mugabe’s obituary before he has left the presidential palace,
Tutu is speaking for a layer of African nationalist opinion that senses that
the “wind of change” is now blowing the other way and that they need to
accommodate themselves to a more aggressive attitude on the part o f the major
powers. Whether Mugabe retires from the political scene gracefully or stands
and fights, the present crisis is an indication of a shift in world politics
that has brought to an end the period when nationalist regimes could present
themselves as liberators of the African masses.



There are indications that Mugabe might attempt a military clampdown on the
opposition. Foreign reporters have been arrested in recent days, the election
headquarters of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has been raided, and
army roadblocks encircle the capital, Harare.
Deputy Information Minister Bright Matonga told reporters, “President Mugabe is
going to fight to the last, and he’s not giving up, he’s not going anywhere, he
hasn’t lost the election.”



But Mugabe cannot halt the underlying processes that have undermined his position
by military means alone. The crisis brought on by the election was the product
of a p rotracted economic change that has now produced a sudden political
shift. The government-appointed Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has been forced
to admit that the ruling party ZANU-PF has lost control of parliament and has
still not released the result of the presidential elections, strongly
suggesting that Mugabe has lost.



Mugabe’s last hope of retaining power is to claim that neither candidate for
the presidency won a majority and that there must be a runoff between him and
MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai. During a further election campaign, he could hope
to use intimidation and ballot rigging to win a majority. But Mugabe could once
command mass political support because of his role in the war against the white
racist regime that ruled what was then Rhodesia.
To admit that he can no longer secure more than 50 percent of the vote is to
admit defeat. A victory in the second round would merely postpone the day of
reckoning. He has been fatally wounded by the election, and his opponents
inside and outside ZANU-PF are aware of this fact. It would only be a matter of
time before he was challenged again.



His hold on power has been unravelling for almost a decade. As long ago as
1999, when the MDC first emerged out of the Zimbabwe Trade Union Congress, the World
Socialist Web Site noted that trade union and business leaders, who had
been happy to work with Mugabe since he came to power in 1980, were becoming
increasingly restive.



“As Zimbabwe
slides towards economic collapse, the trade unions have stepped in to form a
new political party,” we wrote. “But this is a party that will look after the
interests of big business, the rich farmers and inward investors, not the
working class.”



That same year, the WSWS desc ribed the way in which the International
Monetary Fund was tightening the screws on Zimbabwe:



“Zimbabwe is
in the hands of the moneylenders who are laying claim to everything in sight.
These standby credits will ensure a huge transfer of wealth from one of the
world’s poorest nations to the international bankers and transnational
corporations.”



Since then, Mugabe has tried every method in his power to escape from the
grip of the international bankers and corporations, without success. He refused
to implement IMF measures, stopped repaying his loans for a time, and seized
the land of white farmers and redistributed it to his supporters. He demolished
working class shantytown districts, leaving thousands homeless in “Operation
Murambatsvina,” and suppressed all opposition with the utmost ruthlessness.



In his latest bid to maintain an autarkic economy that did not depend on
international finance or Western companies he has turned to China, which has
become one of the major backers of his regime. China’s
need for platinum and chromium to feed its booming economy gave Mugabe the
chance to survive a little longer. Mugabe’s “Look East” policy saw trade
between the two countries increase to US$100 million. China
is one of the biggest investors in Zimbabwe.
But in recent months, Beijing has,
if not cut Mugabe adrift, at least adopted a lower profile.



David Dorwood of the Africa Studies Institute of La Trobe University,
Melbourne, told Australian Broadcasting Company News that Beijing had concluded
that it was only a matter of time before Mugabe went: “They want to secure
their resources with the new administration and therefore are sort of taking
less of an active role in propping up the ZANU-PF and Robert Mugabe.”



China’s
interest in Zimbabwe
would “persist irrespective of the government,” Dorwood said. Beijing
would welcome a Tsvangirai administration because “Zimbabwe
has become really quite dysfunctional. The Chinese need to have reliable
infrastructure.”



Mugabe supporters have seen China
as fundamentally different from Western governments and companies. They have
held China up
as the liberator of Africa because of its
long-established connections with Mugabe that go back to the Cold War. But
Chinese companies must work in the same economic environment as every other
company in the world, and Zimbabwe’s
platinum and chromium come higher in their scale of priorities than any thought
of preserving Mugabe’s hold on the presidency.



The tiny space for manoeuvre that China
allowed Mugabe is therefore closing. In the countryside, even his most fervent
supporters admit that it is time for him to go. The generals and heads of the
security services may be prepared to back him a little while longer, at least
until they can negotiate a suitable deal, but the rank and file of the army are
as alienated from his regime as the rest of the Zimbabwean population.



Britain has
let it be known that an unprecedented £1 billion IMF-backed aid package is
awaiting the arrival of Tsvangirai in the presidential palace. It was being
discussed at the NATO summit in Bucharest
this week. If the opposition has to fight a run-off election, it will use this
promised aid package as an incentive to voters.



The UK
government’s Department for International Development has been running what
they call “turn-around models” for Zimbabwe,
and if a Tsvangirai government comes to power, Britain
will insist that its economic strategy is followed. The aim will be to bring Zimbabwe’s
100,000 percent inflation rate down within a ye ar. Such a programme would be
far more damaging than even the most severe of previous Structural Adjustment
Programmes imposed on African countries by the IMF. The aid would be dependent
on the working class and rural poor bearing the cost of the fight against inflation.



In 2002, Eddie Cross of the MDC wrote to the WSWS in an attempt to elicit
our support for his party’s economic policies. We rejected his overtures and
wrote:



“You say that the IMF and World Bank would help Zimbabwe
get debt relief, but what attacks would you have to impose in order to get it?
As you well know you would have to privatise every state asset in Zimbabwe.
Your Economic Stabilisation and Recovery Programme states that within its first
100 days an MDC government would begin the process of privatising all
parastatals, which you would aim to have completed within two years. In every
country where these measures have been applied they have meant mass
unemployment, escalating poverty, the destruction of whole industries and
infrastructural collapse.”



The US has
long been a supporter of the MDC and opposition elements within ZANU-PF. A year
ago, the WSWS pointed to US Ambassador Christopher Dell’s remark that Zimbabwe
had “reached a tipping point” and to the report of the US State Department that
it was funding “pro-democracy elements” in Zimbabwe.
Dell clearly favoured regime change then. The role of the MDC in this situation
will be to control the working class and rural poor whose needs they cannot
possibly meet. With US and British backing, it may prove to be an even more
oppressive regime than the present one.



Tutu wants British troops deployed in Zimbabwe
because he fears that the population has been driven to such a point of
desperation that there will be a popular uprising that the MDC will not be able
to contain. That such a scenario could even be contemplated, let alone
seriously discussed in the media, more than a quarter of century after the
colonial Rhodesian regime was overthrown is a measure of the failure of the
nationalist movement.



Mugabe is a determined and capable nationalist leader, but he has proved
incapable of breaking free from the grip of imperialism. His entire perspective
has proved to be bankrupt. Zimbabwe
has remained in a position of semi-colonial dependence from 1980 onwards.



The crisis that Mugabe faces in Zimbabwe
is only the most acute expression of what is happening to regimes throughout
the continent. A long-established political formation is unravelling before our
eyes. Kenya was
pitched into crisis following its recent election. In Sou th Africa,
Jacob Zuma is challenging President Thabo Mbeki. In each case, the form of the
political crisis and its intensity is different, and yet all express the same
phenomenon. The African nationalist movement has lost its social base and all
semblance of political legitimacy.












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