WILL TURKEY’S CRISIS THREATEN NEW HOPES FOR AGREEMENT ON CYPRUS?PAGE 6

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AUGUST 2008

LIBERATIONTHAT HAS DESTROYED FREEDOM Zimbabwe’s disintegration

PHILIP GUSTON – ‘The Wheel’ (1979)

Obama

Barack Obama is a lucky man: young, of mixed race, thought likely to make it to the White House, to succeed one of the most unpopular presidents in US history. He appears better equipped than anyone else to “renew American leadership in the world” (1) – restore the US image and win acceptance and support for US action abroad, rendering it more effective. That includes military action, notably in Afghanistan: “I will build a 21st-century military and 21st-century partnerships as strong as the anticommunist alliance that won the cold war to stay on the offensive everywhere from Djibouti to Kandahar” (2). To anyone who still supposes a multicultural president with a Kenyan father would signal the start of a new era with everyone holding hands, the Democratic candidate has already said that, with all respect to Pink Floyd and George McGovern, his foreign policy is actually a return to the “traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush’s father, of John F Kennedy, of, in some ways, Ronald Reagan” (3). Multilateralism is not on the agenda, but imperialism will be softer, subtler, more inclusive and perhaps not quite so murderous. But the eight-year embargo imposed by President Bill Clinton killed a lot of Iraqis. Barack Obama is talented. His book, The Audacity of Hope, shows a mixture of historical acumen, cunning, political empathy with his opponents – he says he “understands their motives and recognises that they have values which he shares” – carefully balanced statements that say very little but go down well with almost everyone, humour, and conviction. Conviction tempered with a disturbing respect for Clinton who, he said, “had wrung out of the Democratic Party some of the excesses that had kept it from winning elections” (4). What excesses? Opposing the death penalty? Supporting welfare? Defending civil rights? Redistributing incomes? Barack Obama is ambitious. But where will the

legitimate ambition to win elections take him? The evidence of recent months suggests to the right. Not so far as to be interchangeable with Republican candidate, John McCain, or justify the jibe “six of one and half a dozen of the other”. But far enough from his progressive pronouncements early in the campaign and even further from what his most idealistic supporters thought he meant by them. “Yes we can” has become yes, we can criticise an extremely conservative Supreme Court when it prohibits the execution of rapists not found guilty of murder; yes, we can give a speech to the pro-Israel lobby, supporting the most inflexible positions taken by Ehud Olmert’s government; yes, we can automatically associate creativity with the private sector, complete Clinton’s and Tony Blair’s mission to redefine “progressive” and promote a class alliance in which managers and executives are the key players. It gets worse. Emboldened by the massive contributions to his campaign fund, Obama has just dealt a serious, possibly fatal, blow to the system of public funding for election campaigns, announcing that he would be the first presidential candidate since Watergate to waive the fixed state payment ($84.1m in 2008) allocated to all the main contenders in return for an undertaking to limit their expenses to that amount. The role of money in politics is a major problem in the United States and yet Obama has indicated that he is not about to solve it. Elsewhere there is still some chance that he will not prove to be a disappointment and that the true friends of the American people can retain the audacity of hope. SERGE HALIMI TRANSLATED BY BARBARA WILSON

(1) Barack Obama, “Renewing American Leadership”, Foreign Affairs, New York, July 2007. (2) Ibid. This will mean increasing the defence budget and adding “65,000 soldiers to the army and 27,000 marines”. (3) Speech at Greensburg, Pennsylvania, 28 March 2008. (4) Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope , Crown, New York, 2006.

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

The new apartheid? South Africa’s social divide page 3

Syria’s President Assad on the pursuit of peace page 4

Desert dreams:are sustainable Gulf towns just a mirage? page 5

Turkey pulls back from the brinkpage 7

Ethiopia:eco-tourism and new forms of agriculture offer hope page 8

China seeks the middle way on democracy page 10

Italian crime fiction that rewrites the past page 15

East and West in harmony page 16

We can see in Zimbabwe the last agony of an aged national liberation movement,since in a genuinely free election Zanu-PF would have been reduced to a tiny residual sub-culture.It is a frightening example for South Africa’s ANC,watching Zanu-PF take its own people hostage to force them to keep to the script

BY RW JOHNSON

The sequence of events which produced the current deadlock in Zimbabwe began on 11 March 2007 when a number of activists and leaders of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), including its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, were arrested, tortured and beaten. The pictures of Tsvangirai as he emerged from hospital, his head so swollen that he could not see, went round the world. He had a cracked skull and needed extensive blood transfusions. One of Tsvangirai’s bodyguards, who had been beaten along with him, later died of his injuries; another MDC activist was shot dead; and scores more were tortured and beaten. But it was the TV footage of Tsvangirai, smuggled out of the country, that exposed the Mugabe regime so badly. If this was what could be done to the leader of the main and non-violent opposition party, everyone could understand the rest in an instant. An unprecedented volume of international protest and condemnation poured in, so vociferous that even Thabo Mbeki’s South Africa, Mugabe’s most loyal supporter, expressed concern and politely asked the Zimbabwean government “to ensure that the rule of law including respect for rights of all Zimbabweans and leaders of various political parties is respected” (see article by Johann Rossouw on page 3). Mugabe realised the harm the TV footage had done and tracked down the cameraman who had taken the pictures, Edward Chikombo. He was abducted from his house in Harare. His body was discovered some days later. The international repercussions of these events were so severe as to cause a change in tactics by Mugabe and Mbeki. Mbeki’s fundamental position was that Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party must, as a fellow national liberation movement (NLM), be maintained in power at all costs. The NLMs of southern Africa are, according to this theory, those movements which successfully used armed struggle to overthrow white rule – that is, the ruling parties of Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. In Mbeki’s and Mugabe’s minds, western imperialism is engaged in a struggle to overthrow the NLMs and restore, if it can, the preceding regimes – apartheid, colonialism or white settler rule. In so doing, imperialism will make use of various local parties as their lackeys – Inkatha and the Democratic Alliance in South Africa, Renamo in Mozambique, Unita in Angola – and the MDC in Zimbabwe. Faced with this onslaught, in which

RW Johnson is Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford,southern African correspondent for the Sunday Timesand author of South Africa:The First Man,the Last Nation(Phoenix/Weidenfeld & Nicholson,2004), Launching Democracy in South Africa(ed with L Schlemmer) (Yale University Press,1994) and South Africa’s Brave New World(Penguin,forthcoming)

Zimbabwe is currently the weakest link, the other NLMs must defend Zanu-PF to the death, for if Zimbabwe “falls”, then South Africa and the others will become the next target. Ever since the Zimbabwe crisis first erupted in 2000, Mbeki had seen his role as one of giving firm support to Mugabe (while insisting he was using “quiet diplomacy” to solve the problem) who was thus to be given a breathing space in which he could carry through his land revolution against the white farmers, extirpate the imperialist lackeys of the MDC – and then re-stabilise his country, with Zanu-PF regaining its de facto position of unchallenged single party. The problem was that Mugabe had damaged his economy beyond repair by getting rid of the white farmers. So the economy and society would not stabilise – decline continued rapidly – and the MDC, despite endless persecution, refused to disappear. Now Mugabe had made a yet further and energetic attempt to make them disappear, but the result had been a massive international reaction which had shaken all the states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Most of these states are not ruled by NLMs, do not share the paranoid imaginings of Mugabe and Mbeki about the re-imposition of white/colonial rule, and are in any case heavily dependent on western aid. SADC has adopted an electoral code of conduct, fully up to Westminster standards, which is supposed to apply to all elections within SADC and western donors (who finance much of SADC’s affairs as well as that of its constituent states) wanted to see it observed. SADC, though normally deferential to South Africa, the regional great power, was thus now pushed by its western donors as well as by some voices in its own ranks, and wanted to see a mediated resolution in Zimbabwe. Mbeki was, accordingly, appointed as mediator. Mbeki led the SADC team in negotiations, which eventually produced a new Zimbabwean constitution, a new Electoral Act and amendments to the Public Order Act. The number of parliamentary seats was increased from 120 to 210, the president’s right to name 30 extra MPs was abolished, and it was determined that to win a presidential election a candidate must win at least 50% on the first round or, failing that, face a run-off within 21 days. SADC emphasised that it did not wish to be embarrassed again by the state-sponsored violence that had marred previous Zimbabwean elections and Mugabe, in return, allowed in election observers from SADC and other states thought likely to sign off on a Mugabe victory as “free, fair and credible”. This new dispensation was essentially a deal between Mbeki and Mugabe to see Zanu-PF returned

Continued on page 2