It finally happened on the second weekend of September—a few weeks later than the South African mediators had hoped—on a houseboat on Lake Kariba, northern Zimbabwe. The South Africans were led by senior political figures from the ANC liberation wing. This was important, as the Zimbabwean government’s position has always been that a liberation revolution was still being fought—to free the land, and to resist a globalisation that privileges the west. The breakthrough came when the Zimbabwean delegations were persuaded to drop their public posturings for private talks. This had never happened before. Concessions and agreements on both sides began to flow.
To be sure, the South Africans were slow about it—painfully so. But the hardline Blairite rhetoric—spun as racist by Mugabe—was an impediment to them too. It is harder to intervene in one’s own backyard than it looks—the South Africans were polite enough to remark only in private that Europe too had found it hard to intervene in the Balkans, taking years and very great suffering before doing so. And the entire thrust of African nationalism has centred on independence from external intervention.
2008 is, however, election year—not only in Zimbabwe but in South Africa too, where phone-in radio is dominated by complaints about the 3m Zimbabwean refugees. Like illegal migrants anywhere, they take the menial jobs; when jobs are not available, they turn to crime.
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