There's a whole world out there, Part Two

Political violence and economic disaster continue to swamp Zimbabwe. Even as the European Union prepares to toughen sanctions against Robert Mugabe's brutalizing regime by looking to freeze the overseas assets of businesspeople propping him up, other reports claim

Mugabe is beginning to breathe more easily as a Western diplomatic campaign against his re-election falters....

With neither the United Nations nor the African Union showing much appetite for getting involved in the country's post-election crisis, the opposition's hope that the South African president could be sidelined is fading fast.

Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) came in first in the March 29 presidential election, but, lacking a clear majority, faced a run-off with Mugabe in June. However, MDC withdrew from and boycotted the run-off after a wave of election-related violence which it blamed on Mugabe's group, Zanu PF. The BBC says that

[t]he MDC says 113 of its supporters have been killed, some 5,000 are missing and more than 200,000 people have been forced from their homes since the first round of voting in March.

With the result, naturally, that Mugabe won a "landslide" victory, which is pretty easy when you're the only one running - and when, as shown in a dramatic video taken by a Zimbabwean prison guard who risked his life to record it, government officials literally stand over you and watch who you are voting for. But even the end of the election campaign did not bring an end to the violence, the Beeb also says.

Fear still exists in the Zimbabwean countryside....

Many villagers are still hiding in the bush and mountains, their hopes of a return to peace fading with reports of continuing intimidation.

Over the last few months, many suspected opposition supporters have had their homes torched.

Goats, chickens and cows - symbols of wealth in the rural areas - were taken away to feed ruling party militia at their party bases.

Villagers say the youth militia wearing ruly party T-shirts and bandanas showing President Robert Mugabe's face, are still roaming free and attacking with impunity. ...

"The militia are telling us that during the elections they 'chopped tree branches', now they say 'it's time to uproot them'," says Muchadei (not his real name) an electoral officer in Mashonaland Central, an area hit hard by the electoral violence.

There is supposed to be a mediation process starting up, but there are snags. One big one is that prime mediator is South African President Thabo Mbeki, described as an "old ally" of Mugabe who the MDC regards as biased. But attempts to involve the African Union as mediators were rebuffed. A "memorandum of understanding" was supposed to have been signed on Wednesday, but that failed to happen when Tsvangirai declined to sign, saying he wanted to wait until after Jean Ping of the African Union Commission met with Mbeki on Friday.

Ping was scheduled to meet with Mbeki, but that didn't keep Zimbabwe's government media from charging that Tsvangirai had pulled out of the talks, in what I think to have been an effort to brand the MDC as intransigent and pressure Tsvangirai to sign immediately, which would essentially ice the AU out of any role. Despite that, the Ping-Mbeki meeting was held and the result was

the creation of a "reference group" consisting of AU head Jean Ping, the UN's Zimbabwe envoy Haile Menkerios, and Sadc [Southern African Development Community] official George Chikoti.

"[The group] will get briefings on a regular basis," [Sydney Mufamadi, a close aide of Mr Mbeki,] said.

"If a member of the reference group... wants to make a strategic input, they are welcome."

Although not having the AU directly involved, as MDC wanted, it does go some way toward meeting Tsvangirai's concerns on that front and so just maybe something will happen - even though, as Tsvangirai told the Beeb, such mediation efforts have been going on for eight years and have produced zilch.

And still, through it all, the people suffer. Inter Press Service reports that things like milk, bread, and meat have become luxuries, so much so that the World Food Programme estimates that half the population will need food assistance this year. Unemployment is estimated at 80%. The official inflation rate is 2,200,000% - that's not a typo, inflation is 2.2 million percent. It's estimated that manufacturing has shrunk by about 60% and the overall economy by 70%.

Some blame all the troubles on the seizure of white-owned commercial farms that began in 2000, but a better explanation of the connection to that would be that Mugabe took what could have been a valuable, productive program - expropriation of large estates and their division into smaller farms cultivating produce for local markers - and used it as a means to cement his power by unleashing his supporters in a paroxysm of take-what-you-can-get-no-questions-asked violence, fracturing the estate economy but replacing it with nothing but - well, with nothing.

Laughably but unsurprisingly, Very Serious Economic Commentators have declared that economic sanctions against Mugabe's regime are a bad idea because they hurt "ordinary people" and the solution is "purely political." In addition to wondering just how much more those "ordinary people" can be hurt, when business and business people are serving to shore up a regime that by all reasonable accounts is in power only through oppression, intimidation, and murder, those economic matters are political and neither "business is business" nor "business as usual" can be justified.

Footnote, Unintentional Humor Div.: Jonathan Moyo, described as "an outspoken independent lawmaker" who for five years was Mugabe's information minister (going from critic to supporter to critic in just seven years), said the failure of a UN Security Council resolution on sanctions against Zimbabwe (it was vetoed by Russia and China) "has put pressure on the MDC to take the negotiations more seriously."

So let's see. Mugabe has been in power since 1980. The last presidential election before this year was in 2002, when he won only after having his leading opponent arrested for treason. After coming in second in the first round this year, his party violently intimidated the opposition into not even contesting the run-off. The opposition continues to be suppressed and even terrorized. But it's the MDC that has to "take the negotiations seriously."

Well, of course: Right now, it seems they're the only affected party who will.