Zimbabwe between fear and worse

I don’t pretend to be an expert on all things, but I do like to try to keep myself well-informed (if not always up to date).  Inspired by hearing Michael Bratton of Michigan State (he is in DC at USIP this year) speak the other day, I decided to poke around a bit and found two things worth recommending on Zimbabwe:  his paper with Eldred Masunungure on “The Anatomy of Political Predation” and this interview with Peter Godwin, author of The Fear.

Bottom line:  Zimbabwe may well get worse before it gets better.  The powersharing government it is suffering under now is doing little to extract it from its misery.  Finding ways of ameliorating the situation without helping bad people will be difficult, but Bratton and Masunungure offer some interesting ideas as well as caveats:

• Insist on evidence of good faith by all parties to implement the terms of the Global Political Agreement as the main precondition for fulsome donor reengagement with the Government of Zimbabwe.
• In the meantime, continue to offer “humanitarian plus” aid programs that help improve the conditions of life of the Zimbabwean people. For the moment, international agencies (such as the African Development Bank, which manages a Zimbabwe Multi-Donor Trust Fund) or non-governmental agencies should be charged with implementing these programs.
• While acknowledging that Morgan Tsvangirai is the most popular politician in Zimbabwe, resist the temptation to back particular leaders or leadership coalitions. Instead of trying to pick winners, international actors should instead encourage the construction of durable rules, procedures and institutions. In particular, they should offer support to those civil society organizations, independent media, and democratic political parties that can help ensure that the next national elections are administered freely and fairly. Such assistance may require helping to build the organizational, professional, analytical, diplomatic and advocacy skills and potentials of non-governmental entities.
• Recognize that the immediate goal of international assistance is to facilitate a legal transfer of political power. The mere convocation of yet one more flawed election or the second-best compromise of another power-sharing arrangement is not enough. Instead, international actors should stand firm in insisting that Zimbabwe’s next government reflects the electoral will of the people.
• The present political settlement lacks economic and military dimensions. Another round of elite pact-making will therefore be necessary, perhaps by including token moderates from the old regime in any future democratic government. A successful transfer of power must also provide assurances to potential political spoilers: that is, those who have committed abuses under ZANU-PF rule or who have benefited from the ill-gotten gains of state patronage. Distasteful as it may seem, offers of future financial and physical security may have to be made selectively to key members of the ruling party and security apparatus in order to ease them out of power.
• This having been said, the West should not be party to any final transition settlement that rules out the prosecution of leaders who have ordered gross abuses of human rights. Responsibility for the culture of impunity in Zimbabwe is broadly shared. It can be traced to blanket amnesties granted over the years by the Rhodesian regime, the British governor at independence, and by the president of Zimbabwe. This cycle must now be broken.
• Despite the ambiguity of its stance as an honest broker, SADC remains key to a resolution of the Zimbabwe crisis. The international community should support and encourage the new SADC contact group – South Africa, Mozambique and Zambia – to engage the ZANU-PF elite and to move them towards peaceful acceptance of the results of a free and fair election. But the precise terms of any permanent settlement are best determined by domestic leadership coalitions rather than by outsiders.
• Western agencies should strategically and skillfully deploy their only real instruments of leverage – policies on international sanctions and promises of future assistance – in support of the above results.  Any fruitful approach must involve considering carefully the appropriate time to relax, suspend, or remove sanctions once the Zimbabwe government has sufficiently complied with the SADC roadmap for political progress toward a genuinely democratic settlement.

I would only add the possibility of supporting the MDC-controlled municipal governments.  This may be inconsistent with not picking winners, but it seems to me important if MDC politicians are to gain both experience of governing and support among citizens. I know of only one such effort–in Serbia during the Milosevic regime the Europeans provided “energy for democracy” to opposition-controlled municipalities.  While I haven’t seen a serious study of the impact, at the time it was regarded as a useful enterprise, one that gave the opposition some valuable experience in governing as well as strong ties to helpful people in the international community.