Dans un article ce matin dans le NY Times, PETER GODWIN semble douter des effets d'une déclaration d'Hillary Clinton sur Robert Mugabe qui entreprend sa 32e année de pourvoir. Après la capture de Gbagbo, Mme Clinton a déclaré: “a strong signal to dictators and tyrants throughout the region and around the world. They may not disregard the voice of their own people in free and fair elections, and there will be consequences for those who cling to power.”
Selon Goodwin il y a des comparaisons dans la situation des deux pays touchés, mais surtout des différences importantes: But here’s where the stories crucially diverge — why Laurent Gbagbo is no longer in power, while Robert Mugabe, who lost an election in 2008, continues to flout his people’s will.
The most important point of departure was the sharply contrasting behavior of regional powers. The dominant player in West Africa, Nigeria, immediately recognized the validity of Mr. Ouattara’s victory in United Nations-supervised elections, and worked within the regional alliance, the Economic Community of West African States, to unseat the reluctant loser. But Zimbabwe’s most powerful neighbor, South Africa, played a very different role. Instead of helping to enforce democracy, it has provided cover for Mr. Mugabe to stay on.
Partly this is due to what is called “liberation solidarity.” Most of the political parties still in power in southern Africa were originally anti-colonial liberation movements — like those in South Africa, Mozambique, Namibia and Angola — and they tend to abhor the aura-diminishing prospect of seeing any of their fellows jettisoned.
It is also because South Africa eyes the Zimbabwean opposition — which morphed out of a once-loyal trade union movement — through the suspicious lens of its own trade union movement’s contemplation of opposition politics.
As a result, instead of supporting the Zimbabwean opposition in 2008, Thabo Mbeki, then the South African president, bullied it into a power-sharing government of national unity headed by Mr. Mugabe. This democracy-defying model has threatened to metastasize into the mainstream of African politics; that same year it was also applied to Kenya, where a unity government was set up to end post-election bloodshed. When Mr. Mbeki was deputized by the African Union to broker a solution in Ivory Coast, that was the Band-Aid he reached for — but it was rightly rejected by Mr. Ouattara.
Of course, the other crucial difference is that in Ivory Coast, the dictator’s ejection came at the hands of men with guns. The northern rebels moved on Abidjan. The United Nations peacekeepers, trussed by restrictive mandates as always, nevertheless protected Mr. Ouattara until the French expanded an airport-securing operation into something altogether more ambitious. They basically prized Mr. Gbagbo from his bunker, though to avoid bad postcolonial optics, they brought the rebels in to make the final move.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/opinion/19godwin.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire