Alvaro Vargas Llosa: Four lessons learned from Mugabe's horrific regime
[Alvaro Vargas Llosa, author of Liberty for Latin America, is the director of the Center on Global Prosperity at the Independent Institute.]
Robert Mugabe's defeat in the recent elections in Zimbabwe is the beginning of the end for that country's octogenarian tyrant. Although the government claims that opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai fell short of the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff election, only a massive fraud in the second round followed by a brutal clampdown on demonstrators will keep the man who has governed that country for three decades in power for a little longer.
Joseph Conrad could have been describing Mugabe's regime when the character Marlow, in Heart of Darkness, said about an ivory company: "reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage." Many lessons can be learned from Mugabe:
The first is that, to a large extent, African anti-colonialism degenerated into a mixture of racism, Marxism and populism to become something akin to the exploitation it had risen against. Of all the colonial-era guerrillas who became masters of their countries after independence, Mugabe was among the worst. His first few years were misleadingly reasonable--he stood for reconciliation, private property and mature relations with the outside world. Only when he was challenged politically did he begin to cloak his tyranny with the ideological "respectability" of socialism and nationalism. Whether it was the massacre of thousands of people from the Ndebele tribe in the 1980s or, in this decade, the violent campaign of land expropriations against whites--most of whom had acquired their land in the open market by then--Mugabe's denunciation of a neocolonial war of aggression against his country was a perfectly calculated chicanery aimed at justifying his villainy.
The second lesson is that ... it is very hard for one country to learn the lessons of another. When, in October 2001, Mugabe took Zimbabwe back to Marxist socialism, countries like Tanzania had already become failures following that same script. Conversely, neighboring Botswana had become a success story by building a democracy under the rule of law based on some aboriginal traditions and by letting free commerce regenerate a country that in 1965 had been the third poorest in the world.
The third lesson is that, pan-African protestations notwithstanding, Africans oppressed by other Africans should expect little solidarity against their dictators from the rest of the region. For years, a group of governments led by South Africa legitimized Mugabe's atrocities. President Thabo Mbeki and 13 other southern African leaders whitewashed the rigged election of 2002, adding insult to the injury suffered by thousands of opposition supporters who were murdered, beaten or, under an urban planning scheme called Operation Restore Order, expelled from their houses and businesses....
Read entire article at New Republic
Robert Mugabe's defeat in the recent elections in Zimbabwe is the beginning of the end for that country's octogenarian tyrant. Although the government claims that opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai fell short of the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff election, only a massive fraud in the second round followed by a brutal clampdown on demonstrators will keep the man who has governed that country for three decades in power for a little longer.
Joseph Conrad could have been describing Mugabe's regime when the character Marlow, in Heart of Darkness, said about an ivory company: "reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage." Many lessons can be learned from Mugabe:
The first is that, to a large extent, African anti-colonialism degenerated into a mixture of racism, Marxism and populism to become something akin to the exploitation it had risen against. Of all the colonial-era guerrillas who became masters of their countries after independence, Mugabe was among the worst. His first few years were misleadingly reasonable--he stood for reconciliation, private property and mature relations with the outside world. Only when he was challenged politically did he begin to cloak his tyranny with the ideological "respectability" of socialism and nationalism. Whether it was the massacre of thousands of people from the Ndebele tribe in the 1980s or, in this decade, the violent campaign of land expropriations against whites--most of whom had acquired their land in the open market by then--Mugabe's denunciation of a neocolonial war of aggression against his country was a perfectly calculated chicanery aimed at justifying his villainy.
The second lesson is that ... it is very hard for one country to learn the lessons of another. When, in October 2001, Mugabe took Zimbabwe back to Marxist socialism, countries like Tanzania had already become failures following that same script. Conversely, neighboring Botswana had become a success story by building a democracy under the rule of law based on some aboriginal traditions and by letting free commerce regenerate a country that in 1965 had been the third poorest in the world.
The third lesson is that, pan-African protestations notwithstanding, Africans oppressed by other Africans should expect little solidarity against their dictators from the rest of the region. For years, a group of governments led by South Africa legitimized Mugabe's atrocities. President Thabo Mbeki and 13 other southern African leaders whitewashed the rigged election of 2002, adding insult to the injury suffered by thousands of opposition supporters who were murdered, beaten or, under an urban planning scheme called Operation Restore Order, expelled from their houses and businesses....