President Robert Mugabe is responsible for much of Zimbabwe’s terrible suffering. But so long as Africa’s leaders allow Mr. Mugabe and his henchmen to bully them into silence - with phony claims of anticolonialism and national sovereignty - they are fully complicit.
Leaders from South Africa, Angola, Mozambique and Swaziland said last month that they had failed to find a way to implement a power-sharing agreement between Mr. Mugabe and the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. They handed the problem over to a summit of the 15-member Southern African Development Community. The group must come together quickly and be ready to bring whatever pressure is necessary to force Mr. Mugabe to finally cede real power.
While Mr. Mugabe wrangles and delays, most of his countrymen are going without adequate food, medicine or fuel. Inflation is running at an incomprehensible annual rate of 231 million percent.
Mr. Tsvangirai won the first round of Zimbabwe’s presidential election but was forced to withdraw from the runoff by Mr. Mugabe’s army-backed thugs. After considerable international pressure, Mr. Mugabe grudgingly agreed to accept a power-sharing deal. Then he announced that his loyalists would run the major ministries, including those that control the army and the police.
Mr. Tsvangirai is insisting that Mr. Mugabe cannot keep control of the Home Affairs Ministry, which runs the police. Mr. Tsvangirai painfully knows why that is so important: He has been repeatedly arrested and harassed by the police and was beaten and tortured to within an inch of his life in March 2007.
In a statement late last month, the participating southern African leaders “noted with concern disagreements in the allocation” of the Home Affairs Ministry and spoke of the need “to further review the current political situation in Zimbabwe as a matter of urgency.”
We hope that behind the diplomatic patter there is a true sense of urgency and disgust that will finally galvanize all of southern Africa’s leaders to quick and effective action. Until then, the rest of the world must keep up the pressure: denying visas to Mr. Mugabe’s cronies; freezing their bank accounts and other assets; and looking for other ways to make clear that the looting and terrorizing of Zimbabwe will no longer be tolerated.