Reporting from Zimbabwe: why the sanctions must be lifted

I’m sitting in a stuffy office in Bulawayo’s business district, struggling to get reliable internet access, while listening to young people’s accounts of their disheartening attempts at entrepreneurialism. On the desk in front of me is a pile of national newspapers filled with conflicting reports of the recent Zimbabwean elections. In some ways, this picture sums up how Zimbabwe comes across to the outside world: difficult to connect with, flailing economically and endlessly contradictory.

On Thursday, Mugabe enjoyed the rapture of his seventh presidential inauguration. Today the controversy surrounding the Zimbabwean elections is fast dropping off the international news agenda. There has not been a repeat of the situation in 2008, when there was loud international condemnation of the electoral process amid economic turmoil and accounts of widespread and violent voter-intimidation. Even the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangari, has retracted his challenge to the results in the constitutional court – most likely because he is aware that there is not the momentum to make his challenge viable. This weekend, the world’s attention is already elsewhere, as Western governments and observers focus on Egypt and Syria.

Non-violent elections are not particularly newsworthy, especially in the current climate of coups, revolutions, and counter-revolutions sweeping North Africa and the Middle East. But I do wonder how much more attention Zimbabwe would be getting internationally if Tsvangari had won the July elections. Understandably, international observers are moving their attentions elsewhere, confounded that Mugabe has somehow survived what appeared to be political self-destruction just a few years ago.

As a student of social anthropology, my instinct is to try to connect the attitudes of ordinary Zimbabweans to the machinations of international diplomacy. Considering how the international community should deal with a politically resurrected President Mugabe, in the light of the daily reality in Zimbabwe, is an important exercise.

A month ago, there was much talk here of the European Union lifting sanctions if the August elections passed “freely and fairly”. Verifying the elections was complicated from the start by the barring of UN and Western observers; instead, Western nations were forced to rely on observers from the African Union (AU), as well as those from neighbouring countries under the auspices of the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

Responses to the elections have been mixed and unclear, especially to those within Zimbabwe. Government and opposition media outlets produce absurdly differing accounts. ZBC Radio, the government-controlled radio station, regularly announces that another nation has “proudly endorsed the people’s revolutionary mandate given to His Excellency Comrade Robert Gabriel Mugabe”. Radio listeners were told that the vice-president of China, Li Yuanchao, was flying in for the inauguration to “celebrate democracy in a sister republic” – but it turned out that a smattering of minor officials turned up in his place. Neighbouring Botswana, on the other hand, defiantly spoke out against Mugabe’s victory, and it seems that there is now a diplomatic scuffle underway between the two SADC members.

Despite the difficulties surrounding election observation, the official account currently circulating here is that the elections were “free but not fair”. This verdict in itself poses another series of challenges – it is not clear how the international community should engage with the Zimbabwean government now that there is such a fuzzy picture of the elections. To lift the sanctions would clearly not be politically palatable for the West, eager not to endorse Mugabe’s rule. It seems that the sanctions will quietly remain in place, and the US State Department has indicated it has no intention of loosening them at the moment.

Mugabe may no longer be quite the pariah he was five years ago, but there is not quite the impetus to rehabilitate him and his crooked regime at present. If anything, I would suggest that “ushering him in from the cold,” as David Smith recently suggested in the Guardian, is simply not worthwhile for the international community considering that he is almost 90. Sometime in the not too distant future the international community will be dealing with his successor; perhaps then relations with the outside world will stand a better chance of rehabilitation.

The current situation with the sanctions is not ideal for reasons other than diplomacy. Despite the fact that the sanctions are designed to target the elite – travel bans and asset freezes for Mugabe and 250 or so of his inner circle – the ultimate subjects of diplomatic actions are some 12 million Zimbabweans who have endured extreme economic turmoil for over a decade. Within Zimbabwe, however, it is widely thought that that the sanctions have done much to bring about the country’s economic decline, a notion enthusiastically promulgated by Zanu-PF in its propaganda. Sanctions provide an easy explanation for the economic situation – one that deflects responsibility from the ruling party.

The finger of blame for economic crisis is, therefore, pointed firmly at the West. As a close friend said to me over dinner recently: “If Zanu-PF have been successful at anything, it’s been the circulation of the idea that the West has an agenda.” Although an unlikely suggestion outside Africa, the so-called Western agenda is firmly attested by many in Zimbabwe. That “agenda” is to keep poor countries like Zimbabwe down, through sanctions, enforcement of debt repayment, trade barriers, and IMF/World Bank structural adjustment policies. In this interpretation, these factors serve to reinforce the political and economic dominance of the West, while inhibiting, and actively prohibiting, growth in Africa. To many ordinary Zimbabweans, these actions are also uncomfortably reminiscent of colonial rule and imperial meddling.

The ultimate problem with sanctions is that they weld economic issues to political ones. Whether or not sanctions actually affect the economic reality for people on the ground, they are perceived to make people’s everyday livelihood harder to ensure. And once the West has initiated the dialogue in terms of sanctions, it’s hard to get out of their stranglehold. The West is forced to continue discussing the ‘democratic deficit’ in Zimbabwe in terms of which commodities should be withheld, or which bank accounts should be frozen. This doesn’t make sense to ordinary Zimbabweans, and it’s easy to see why.

During my three weeks in Zimbabwe, I’ve spoken with a widely diverse range of young people as part of my research – members of both Shona and Ndebele ethnic groups, university graduates and high school dropouts, township-dwellers and wealthy urbanites, NGO founders and aspiring entrepreneurs. The desire to be free of sanctions, and to assert a renewed, positive image of Zimbabwe, is something that genuinely unites all these people across demographic divides.

Removal of the sanctions would improve the situation for everyone I’ve spoken to on various fronts. It would be a boost to Zimbabwean pride and attitudes towards the Western world, and simultaneously remove the sanctions as a scapegoat for Mugabe’s problems. It would partly clear the path for foreign investment, by giving Zimbabwe an international stamp of approval. It would not so much usher Mugabe in from the cold as usher in the country from a period of being a notorious international pariah – a label that Zimbabweans have come to feel is bitterly unfair.

Most crucially, it would lead the way for diplomacy framed in terms other than sanctions. There’s only so much longer that one can wonder how the world would have looked if Tsvangari had won. It’s time for a dose of realpolitik in the West’s attitude towards Zimbabwe – which must start by lifting the sanctions.

To protect the identity of the family with whom she is staying, Rowan Jones is a pseudonym. For more information about this story, contact Alex Buxton, Office of Communications, University of Cambridge, amb206@admin.cam.ac.uk 01223 761673