There are many things that the power-sharing agreement in Zimbabwe between President Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai won’t do.
It won’t bring back Tonderai Ndira, the opposition activist whose lips and tongue were cut off before he was killed by government-sanctioned thugs.
It won’t bring back Abigail Chiroto, the wife of the mayor of Harare, bludgeoned to death and dumped in a mortuary outside the capital city.
It won’t bring back Gibson Nyandoro, the former war veteran whose body was left near an army barracks, used as bait by military men trying to lure his friends and family to their own deaths.
It won’t bring back Emmanuel Nelson, who was slashed in the face and stabbed with a screwdriver.
It won’t bring back any of the dozens, if not hundreds, of Zimbabweans who have been killed in government-sanctioned violence since the country’s March 29 election. And it won’t remove Mugabe, who used a terror campaign to force Tsvangirai out of a June 27 runoff election and maintain his 28-year grip on power.
Here’s what it will do. It will create a chance, only a chance, of weakening Mugabe. It might start to dilute his influence.
Zimbabweans, battered by spiraling inflation and soaring violence, needed much more than that. They needed to see Mugabe driven out of the country he has destroyed. They didn’t get that.
Mugabe remains president under the agreement that was signed last week. Tsvangirai becomes prime minister. Power is to be shared between the president, the prime minister and the Cabinet.
The 20-page agreement is long on vague goals and short on specific solutions. It promises “to give priority to the restoration of economic stability and growth in Zimbabwe.” It promises Zimbabweans freedom of assembly and the right to engage in political activity without fear of violence. And it promises to allow non-governmental organizations doing humanitarian work and food distribution to carry out their work without state interference.
That’s what’s on paper. We’ll see what happens on the ground.
Zimbabwe desperately needs help. Inflation is at 11 million percent. Store shelves are empty, money meaningless. So scarce are basic foodstuffs that, the Los Angeles Times reported, civil servants by day are reduced to begging for food by night. More than four out of five Zimbabweans are unemployed. A failed land reform effort, begun by Mugabe in 2000, has reduced the country, once the breadbasket of Africa, to a continental charity case.
The governing coalition, the agreement says, “Shall seek the support and assistance of the [Southern African Development Community] and the [African Union] in mobilizing the international community to support the new government’s economic recovery plans and programs together with lifting of sanctions taken against Zimbabwe and some of its leaders.”
Not so fast. Africa and the West have to keep the pressure on Mugabe to make this agreement work. That he shook hands with Tsvangirai and signed a 20-page document, isn’t enough.
The U.S. and Europe shouldn’t lift the sanctions they’ve imposed on Mugabe and his cronies until he has proved that he has committed to building a free, fair and democratic society. His signature on a piece of paper doesn’t do that. He’s a despot and he still controls the army, the police and the secret service. The world has to keep squeezing him. It’s a language he understands.
