Thabo Mbeki made a couple of mistakes in his recent interview on Power FM when he spoke about Zimbabwe and his role as facilitator for the Southern African Development Community in the chaos and thuggery created by Zanu-PF to ensure President Robert Mugabe remains in power.
Mbeki believes the British continued to play a significant role in its former colony 20 years after 1980 independence, in particular after a new political party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) emerged and nearly defeated Zanu-PF in elections months after it launched.
But first to his errors: Mbeki said that Margaret Thatcher failed to impose sanctions against white-ruled Rhodesia after its prime minister, Ian Smith, illegally declared unilateral declaration of independence from the UK in 1965.
By this time, Rhodesia had been self-governing for more than 40 years.
But Thatcher, leader of the Conservative Party, only became prime minister of the UK in 1979.
The British prime minister in 1965 was Labour Party leader Harold Wilson, who detested Smith’s racist policies and insisted there would be majority rule before he granted Rhodesia independence.
He was appalled by the Unilateral Declaration of Independence and immediately imposed sanctions against Rhodesia, and the UN followed.
Mbeki said Wilson failed to go to war against white Rhodesia after Smith’s illegal rebellion against the “crown” because the UK did not want to move against its “kith and kin”, the white settlers.
That was partially true. Wilson could not be sure that the British armed forces would be loyal if they were ordered to kill comrades with whom they had fought in two world wars.
The majority of whites in Rhodesia at the time of UDI had arrived from the battered UK post-1945 and the end of the war against Hitler.
But apart from kith and kin, release of state papers in 1996 created by the Ministry of Defence 30 years earlier, showed it had researched invasion of Rhodesia and strongly advised, for technical reasons, rather then emotional ones, that the British government avoid military intervention in Rhodesia.
“The consequences of failure would be appalling.”
Rhodesia is landlocked and the only access at that time could be from Zambia. (South Africa and Portugal would have not permitted the British to launch attacks against Rhodesia from Mozambique or Beit Bridge.)
So any invasion would mean a journey for troops of 1600km on inadequate roads.
“The invasion of a country with Rhodesia’s military capability under these conditions would, we believe, be without precedent,” according to those British military researchers.
The Rhodesians, with modern fighter jets inherited from the 1963 break-up of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and an efficient and well trained defence force, might retaliate and strike against independent Zambia.
And the only runway in Lusaka at that time was anyway too short for British military aircraft.
Wilson’s Secretary of Defence, Denis Healy did say later he had feared that British forces might rebel if ordered to fight in Rhodesia but that he regretted Wilson went public with the no invasion statement so Smith knew before he declared UDI there would be no military intervention.
Wilson grossly miscalculated that Rhodesia would collapse shortly after sanctions were imposed.
When the British saw Rhodesians were still getting oil to its refinery via a pipeline from the Mozambique port of Beira, the Royal Navy patrolled the Mozambique coast and shipments stopped, so Rhodesia closed its refinery and imported fuel from South Africa.
Mbeki also claimed that the British “kith and kin” influence continued into Zimbabwe. He said in the Power FM interview that the British wanted “regime change”.
He didn’t explain what he meant by “regime change”.
Zimbabwe was an effective one party state since shortly after 1980 independence when Robert Mugabe crushed the opposition, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, and killed thousands and held many of its leaders in detention without trial. Its leader Joshua Nkomo had to flee and went to London.
By 2000, there was a new opposition in Zimbabwe which emerged from the trade union movement, civil society and some leftists and other civil society groups.
The MDC was launched in 1999.
It did want regime change - it wanted to win free and fair elections and regrow the failing economy and restart land resettlement.
But it needed money and its biggest mistake at that time was to be caught on international TV cameras accepting donations from white Zimbabwe farmers.
Ahead of the violent 2002 presidential election, Mugabe stripped the vote from thousands of Zimbabwe-born farm workers if their parents were originally from Mozambique and Malawi.
Mugabe and his security sector lashed out and killed, tortured, arrested, abducted many MDC supporters, including MPs, and spread fear and loathing when the MDC tried to campaign in rural areas which were controlled, in a feudal way, by Zanu-PF.
Journalists, local and foreign, were hounded, so were civil rights groups and the election commission was controlled by the military.
Yes, the MDC made mistakes, and lost its cool and split, etc, and yes, it received funding from white farmers and some Western governments and a bit here and there later on from Nigeria and Ghana.
But apart from Botswana, the region was silent about the gross human rights violations committed by Mugabe and his loyalists.
The AU was quiet too.
In the 2002 elections, when SADC election observers were attacked by some Zanu-PF supporters, the region issued a free and fair judgement on the polls.
The world’s media laughed out loud at a press conference when leader of the South African government election observers, Sam Motsuenyane, told a press conference the polls had been “credible and legitimate”.
When Mbeki became involved more formally in Zimbabwe in 2007, he had little regard for the MDC’s Morgan Tsvangirai.
Despite flawed elections and massive cheating, Tsvangirai got more votes than Mugabe in the 2008 elections, but Zimbabwe was bankrupt, its schools, hospitals and banks were closed.
Tsvangirai accepted a political agreement underwritten by South Africa/SADC in 2008 before cabinet posts in an inclusive government were negotiated.
So it had to fail as Mugabe would keep control of security, intelligence, justice, prisons, police, etc.
The MDC would have the social ministries to rebuild because it could raise international aid, the reason it got the finance ministry as Zanu-PF knew it would not succeed in raising cash from the West for Zimbabwe’s empty treasury.
Mbeki’s work on Zimbabwe did eventually produce a new constitution. But its main reforms - about elections - are ignored. And will be ignored in elections next year.
Mbeki’s success was that he did persuade Mugabe to stop political violence.
The harvest of fear as some call it, remains in rural areas which has the most constituencies.
There will be no free and fair elections until Mugabe goes or dies. As veteran analyst Brian Raftopoulos said after the interview, Mbeki went for “stability” in Zimbabwe, not “democracy”.
* Thornycroft writes for the Independent Foreign Service.