Crawling from the Wreckage (20 page)

Mousavi has always faced unrelenting hostility from the ultra-conservative Ali Khamenei. As president in 1981, Khamenei refused to accept Mousavi as prime minister (even though he had been legitimately chosen by parliament) until the Old Man himself, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, intervened and insisted that Mousavi be allowed to take office.

The strong suspicion that this time the election itself was rigged by Khamenei’s supporters to exclude Mousavi from office has only made him more defiant. His website dismisses the regime’s claim that the protests were inspired by Iran’s foreign enemies with contempt: “Isn’t it an insult to 40 million voters … linking detainees to foreign countries? Let people freely express their protests and ideas.”

Rafsanjani, in a sermon at Tehran University last Friday, aligned himself firmly with Mousavi, demanding an end to the media clampdown and the release of people arrested during the protests. He also referred indirectly to the fact that he actually chairs the committee that elects the Supreme Leader, and can dismiss him.

Khatami went further on Monday, calling for a referendum on the alleged outcome of the election. “People must be asked whether they are happy with the situation that has taken shape,” he said. “I state openly that reliance upon the people’s vote and the staging of a legal referendum is the only way for the system to emerge from the current crisis.” It was after that that the protestors reappeared on the streets.

They will not sweep the regime away, and if its henchmen start killing them again they will prudently withdraw from the streets for a while—but only to devise safer ways of making their resentment felt. Meanwhile, a parallel campaign will be waged within the ranks of the Islamic clergy, mixing fine theological points with crass appeals to self-interest. This will not be an epic tale of heroism and martyrdom, but a complicated and mostly obscure contest for the future of the Islamic Republic.

The hard-liners’ hope, understandably enough, was that, after a while, the outrage at Ahmadinejad’s implausible re-election to the presidency would subside into a sullen acceptance of the inevitable. That has not happened. Iran is in for a lengthy struggle, with an unpredictable outcome.

Most African countries are actually poorer now than they were when they got their independence in the 1960s or 1970s. Back then, countries like China and Malaysia were the basket cases; now they bustle and glisten, while flying over most African countries at night is like flying over the sea. There are no lights. And Africans are not just poor. They are besieged by tyranny, corruption and violence. Few people would choose to be born in Africa; nobody would choose to be born there and be female
.

But things can change. Until the recent recession, Africa’s average economic growth rate over the previous eight years was 5 percent. Keep that up, and the gross domestic product will quadruple in less than thirty years. All they have to do is get the politics right
.

More than two years ago, when Kenya’s current opposition leader, Raila Odinga, quit President Mwai Kibaki’s government, I wrote the following: “The trick will be to get Kibaki out without triggering a wave of violence that would do the country grave and permanent damage … Bad times are coming to Kenya.”

The bad times have arrived, but the violence that has swept Kenya since the stolen election on December 27 is not just African “tribalism.” Members of the Kikuyu tribe have been the main target of popular wrath and non-Kikuyu protesters have been the principal victims of the security forces, but this confrontation is about trust betrayed, hopes dashed and patience strained to the breaking point.

Nobody wants a civil war in Kenya, but it’s easy to see why Raila Odinga rejects calls from abroad to accept the figures for the national vote that were announced last Sunday. If Odinga enters a “government of national unity” under Kibaki, as the African Union and the United States want, then he’s back in the untenable situation that he was in until 2005, and Kibaki will run Kenya for another five years.

If Odinga leaves it to Kenya’s courts to settle, the result will be the same: there have been no decisions yet on disputed results that went to the courts after the 2002 election. So when the opposition leader was asked by the
BBC
if he would urge his supporters to calm down, he replied: “I refuse to be asked to give the Kenyan people an anaesthetic so that they can be raped.”

Despite the ugly scenes of recent days, Kenya is not an ethnic tinder-box where people automatically back their own tribe and hate everyone else. For example, it is clear that more than half the people who voted Mwai Kibaki into the presidency in the 2002 election were not of his own Kikuyu tribe, because the Kikuyu, although they are the biggest tribe, only account for 22 percent of the population.

Kibaki’s appeal was the promise of honest government after twenty-four years of oppressive rule, rigged elections and massive corruption under the former president, Daniel arap Moi. If he had been just another thug in a suit, most Kenyans would have put up with Kibaki’s subsequent behaviour in the same old cynical way, but his victory was seen as the dawn of a new
Kenya where the bad old ways no longer reigned. It is his abuse of their high hopes that makes the current situation so emotional.

By 2005, Kibaki’s dependence on an inner circle of fellow Kikuyu politicians was almost total and the corruption was almost as bad as it had been under Moi. The British ambassador, Sir Edward Clay, accused Kibaki’s ministers of arrogance and greed, which led them to “eat like gluttons” and “vomit on the shoes” of foreign donors and the Kenyan people. The biggest foreign donors, the United States, Britain and Germany, suspended their aid to the country in protest against the corruption.

Most of the leading reformers quit Kibaki’s government in 2005, and in the weeks before last month’s election, their main political vehicle, the Orange Democratic Movement, had a clear lead in the polls. That lead was confirmed in the parliamentary vote on December 27, 2007, which saw half of Kibaki’s cabinet ministers lose their seats and gave the opposition a clear majority in parliament. But the presidential vote was another matter.

Raila Odinga won an easy majority in six of Kenya’s eight provinces, but in Central, the Kikuyu heartland, the results were withheld until long after the vote had been announced for more remote regions. Observers were banned from the counting stations in Central and from the central tallying room in Nairobi—and on December 30, Samuel Kivuitu, the chairman of the electoral commission, declared that Kibaki had won the national vote by just 232,000 votes in a nation of thirty-four million.

It stank to high heaven. Ridiculously high turnouts were claimed for polling stations in Central—larger than the total of eligible voters, in some cases—and 97.3 percent of the votes there allegedly went to Kibaki. It was an operation designed to return Kibaki to office while preserving a facade of democratic credibility, but no foreign government except the United States congratulated Kibaki on his “victory,” not even African ones, and local people were not fooled.

Within two days, Samuel Kivuitu retracted his declaration of a Kibaki victory, saying that the electoral commission had come under unbearable pressure from the government: “I do not know who won the election … We are culprits as a commission. We have to leave it to an independent group to investigate what actually went wrong.”

But Kibaki is digging in, and innocent Kikuyus—many of whom did
not
vote for Kibaki, despite the announced results—are being attacked
by furious people from other tribes. Meanwhile, the police and the army obey Kibaki’s orders and attack non-Kikuyu protesters. It is not Odinga who needs to accept the “result” in order to save Kenya from calamity; it is Kibaki who needs to step down.

He probably won’t, in which case violence may claim yet another African country. But don’t blame it on “tribalism.” Kenyans are not fools, and they know when they have been betrayed.

About 1,300 people were killed in the ethnic violence following the 2007 election, and several hundred thousand were burned out of their homes and wound up in refugee camps. Mediation by former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan led to a power-sharing deal in which Kibaki remained president, Odinga became prime minister (a post that was resurrected for the occasion), and the two parties joined in a “grand coalition” that left only a tiny opposition group in parliament. There has been little progress on the list of reforms that was agreed to, but many of the politicians from both parties who were appointed as ministers have done quite well. The popular verdict is that “they’re eating together,” and the decline of Kenya continues
.

It has not fallen as far as Zimbabwe, however. Zimbabwe is much less complex ethnically than Kenya and it once had the best-educated population in English-speaking Africa, but the leader of the liberation war is still president thirty years later, and he just will not let go
.

Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was right to withdraw from the runoff presidential “election” in Zimbabwe on Sunday. Thousands of his supporters have been kidnapped and tortured by President Robert Mugabe’s thugs since the campaign started, and eighty-six have been murdered already. Thousands more would probably have suffered the same fate if the election had gone ahead, and it would all have been for nothing. Mugabe was determined not to let the opposition win, regardless of what the voters did. He even said so.

“Only God can remove me,” Mugabe has been saying in recent
speeches, vowing that he would refuse to give up the gains of the liberation war because of an ‘x’ on a ballot paper. He claims that the major opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (
MDC
), is part of a plot by the British government, Zimbabwe’s former colonial ruler, to reimpose white rule on the country.

Whether this is genuine paranoia or merely low cunning, it lets the eighty-four-year-old president justify the reign of terror he has unleashed against opposition supporters since he lost the first round of the election to Tsvangirai as “a second liberation war.” In wars, you can kill people who oppose you, and you are not obliged to count the enemy’s votes.

So, many opposition party organizers have been killed, and in rural areas thousands of them have been driven from their homes in order to give Mugabe a clear run in the runoff election. And Mugabe’s strategy was clearly going to succeed: either he would win a majority of the votes because enough
MDC
supporters had been terrorized into staying home, or else he would win the count later on.

He didn’t win the count the first time, in late March, because he was overconfident. He let too many foreign observers in, and he allowed local vote tallies to be posted up at polling stations and didn’t realize that opposition activists would photograph them. Whatever the real vote count was, Mugabe’s tame Zimbabwe Election Commission (
ZEC
) was unable to massage the outcome enough to give him a first-round victory: most of the local voting totals were too well documented.

After a month’s delay, the
ZEC
released results showing Tsvangirai with about 48 percent of the vote to Mugabe’s 43 percent. That was enough to force a second round of voting, since a candidate had to get more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round to avoid a runoff.

It was the best that the
ZEC
could do for Mugabe, but it was a huge humiliation for the liberation-war hero who has ruled Zimbabwe since independence in 1980. His advisers should have seen it coming, however: Mugabe has misgoverned Zimbabwe so badly that this once-prosperous country now has 2 million percent inflation.

One-quarter of the population have fled to South Africa to find work and support their families. Many more at home would be starving without the remittances from South Africa, as foreign food aid only gets through to supporters of Mugabe’s
ZANU
-
PF
(Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front) Party. And public health has been neglected so
badly that Zimbabweans now die, on average, at a younger age than any other nationality in the world.

Mugabe may not even know these statistics, but armed forces chief General Constantine Chiwenga, now the real power behind the throne, certainly does, and so do other regime members. They just don’t care. If they lose power, they lose everything, for almost all their wealth was acquired illegally, and they have killed too many people.

In the past week, there have been reports of senior military and political figures showing up at torture sessions of
MDC
militants who were subsequently released. The message was clear: we do not fear prosecution for this because we will never relinquish power.

So Morgan Tsvangirai had to decide how many more lives he wanted to sacrifice in order to force Mugabe to steal the election openly. But how would that discredit Mugabe any more than the crimes he is committing right now? And what good does it do to “discredit” him?

Mugabe is a scoundrel and a tyrant, and the people who run his government and his army are brazen thieves, but there will be no effective intervention in Zimbabwe from outside. The only African leader who has enough clout to do that is South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki, and he will never act against his old friend Robert Mugabe.

Other African leaders will cluck ineffectually, but nothing will be done. Zimbabweans are on their own, as they always really were. Tsvangirai and a majority of the
MDC
have belatedly realized that there is no point in waiting for justice to prevail—but they have probably not yet thought beyond that. Basildon Peta, the head of the Zimbabwean Union of Journalists, certainly has. As he wrote after Tsvangirai announced his decision: “I hope it won’t be another long round of Thabo Mbeki’s timid mediation while Zimbabwe continues burning. The
MDC
must now do what it should do to rid Zimbabwe of this shameless criminal. The opposition party knows what that is, though I can’t print it here.”