Will the Candidates Recognize Morgan Tsvangirai as President of Zimbabwe?

24.06.2008

Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, is the legitimately elected president of Zimbabwe. Or at least he should be. He won that country's presidential election (and his party won its parliamentary election) on March 29th, a victory that has been denied to him and his colleagues over the past three months as Robert Mugabe has murdered nearly 100 opposition supporters, tortured many more, and driven thousands from their homes. A week after the election, the Zimbabwean junta announced that Tsvangirai did not win an outright majority, thus forcing a runoff scheduled for this Friday. On Sunday, however, Tsvangirai announced that he was dropping out of the election, stating that "we cannot stand there and watch people being killed for the sake of power."

--James Kirchick

Posted: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 3:41 PM with 4 comment(s)

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rlgordonma said:

I admire your sympathies here, Jamie, but what exactly would this accomplish unless we were willing to embargo Zimbabwe and/or support a coup. The latter is not going to work, as much as we'd like it to happen; our military and position in the world are too compromised at this point. An embargo may be interesting, because at this point, it could only possibly hurt the elites. (How much worse off could the country folk get?)

June 24, 2008 3:55 PM

Rhubarbs said:

And let's not overstate the case. A midlevel American bureaucrat isn't capable of "certifying" the results of a foreign election.

Anyway, I grow tired of the right's fantasy that American "recognition" is a magical elixir craved above all other things by the world's tyrants. Go ask Raoul Castro and Ayatollah Khamenei just how effective American non-recognition has been in overthrowing their dastardly regimes. We should get over ourselves to the extend of ceasing the pretense that the rest of the world cares very much about our attention and "recognition." It is not the business of the federal government to "send messages." We elect the government to do things, or to refrain from doing things -- to take or refrain from taking actions, not to symbolism.

As long as the tyrant Mugabe actually rules Zimbabwe, his is the government we should "recognize" and correspond with, state to state. It can be our policy that Mugabe's power is illegitimate, and that we regard Tsvangirai as the winner of the late elections, but it's essentially masturbatory to pretend, as "recognition" implies, that the Mugabe regime is not the government of Zimbabwe and that Tsvangirai is actually the president. He's not. He should be, but until Mugabe is induced to give up power -- and by "induced," I enthusiastically include the prospect of lethal force -- he will not actually be Zimbabwe's head of state.

So the question is not whether either candidate is prepared to pretend that reality is not what it is. The question is what either candidate is prepared to do to change the reality of Mugabe's continued rule.

June 24, 2008 4:27 PM

chrismealy said:

I dunno. Why don't you call President Gore and ask?

June 24, 2008 7:40 PM

The Plank said:

Pace Jamie’s Zimbabwe blogging : I am worried. The latest, extraordinarily distressing news from the

June 25, 2008 10:40 AM