Zimbabwe Round-Up

Quick news from Zimbabwe round-up. In the latest elections the opposition won the parliament and had somewhere between a plurality and majority victory for the Presidency. The official results haven’t been released for weeks and will be highly tainted. Opposition figures are being arrested and harrassed, although that’s fairly par for the course for Mugabe’s regime.

Johanne over at Democratic Piece found that Mugabe is having a hard time getting more guns. The reason is that citizens of other African countries, out of solidarity, aren’t let a Chinese cargo ship dock to offload them

The New York Times reported today that Angola prohibited the offloading of the arms shipment destined for Zimbabwe. The Chinese vessel carrying the cargo - the “ship of shame” as it’s called in African newspapers - previously attempted to unload the 77 tons of arms - including rockets, ammunition, and bombs - in Durban, South Africa, but was blocked by dock workers.

Angola, a longtime ally of Zimbabwe, was probably Zimbabwe’s best hope for receiving this arms shipment. After Durban, the vessel bypassed Namibia when the Legal Assistance Centre of Namibia announced in advance that it would thwart the ship from unloading. After a second failure to unload, the ship will likely now return to China.

Speaking of Zimbabwe, Mark Irvine, a friend over at the PCR blog, found a great quote in a NY Times story by Barry Bearak about his imprisonment for doing election coverage in Zimbabwe:

I was being charged with the crime of “committing journalism.” One of my captors, Detective Inspector Dani Rangwani, described the offense to me as something despicable, almost hissing the words: “You’ve been gathering, processing and disseminating the news.”

I tend to agree with the analysis of Jack, also at the Democratic Piece. A democratic transition is likely in progress. That was my feeling once I heard about the major electoral losses being suffered in [parliament]. If that kind of news is getting out, it’s probably already mostly over. Question is just how the end game plays out. Mugabe is an amazingly inept leader, inflation is presently at wheel barrel of money levels. He’s basically just in power because he was an anti-colonial revolutionary leader (once again, thanks George Washington for only serving two terms, much obliged). Some of that lot proved good people, many of them were greatly corrupted by power. However, happily, it’s a generation that’s literally dying off. As it leaves, the countries in question can begin to recover from another terrible legacy of colonialism.

[Updates: Jack fixes my clarification noting, sensibly, that there’s a transition in progress but it won’t necessarily be democratic. See comments. Makes sense to me.]

Comments

[Jack]

I'm fairly confident that there's a transition going on. Whether it'll be democratic is another question. The Kenya example is instructive: institutional rejiggering to effect a power-sharing agreement.

[Greg Sanders]

Jack: Good distinction. Also thanks for stopping by.

I think it is pretty safe to say that the opposition ends up better represented after this, but that doesn't mean that the transition will be peaceful, constitutional, or particularly election based.

That also suggests a line of research, I wonder if illiberal democracies or countries with outright sham elections tend to have easier transitions than those with none at all. However, it would seem difficult to control for period effects, as you see a lot more "elections" than you used to. So if there is a correlation, as I think there would be, it may be other factors at work.

[Moti]

I think that, from the sound of it, it's likely to be democratic; I haven't been paying attention over the weekend, but last I heard, Tsvangirai was rejecting any notion of allowing Mugabe to stay on when that was advanced.

I suppose that really, it's in the long term where we have to consider whether it was really democratic. If the people who currently won leave office when they lose peacefully, then it may be easier to consider it truly changed.

I have to say, even if other countries (like South Africa) aren't stepping up to make Mugabe respect the election results, at least they're not helping him kill off the opposition more. That's a sort of encouraging sign.