SA’s domestic, foreign policies inseparable

For South Africa’s patriotic newspapers were conscious of a more disturbing problem: that South Africa’s undermanned, sickly and perhaps less than neutral defence force was in no shape to take on a peacekeeping role, let alone a serious outbreak of fighting, in our next-door neighbour.
Here is a crucial factor in Mbeki’s policy towards Zimbabwe. Other factors were also underplayed or overlooked. For instance, the start of President Robert Mugabe’s farm invasions was also a time when Mbeki automatically got his way.
In one interview, he dismissively asked how he was expected to stop things happening in another country. The ugly events broadcast on TV created no pressure on him at home or abroad. He did not need to say there was no crisis.
As President Mugabe went from bad to worse and international outrage grew, this approach could not work. Now, to admit there was a problem would mean having to take action, and Mbeki was well aware of another stumbling block. President Mugabe enjoyed strong support in the African National Congress (ANC) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC).
South Africa’s military back-up was unreliable and the political will to impose Western-style sanctions on a former struggle ally was absent. The Presidency had no answer to the calls to do something — except to assure everyone that quietly, behind the scenes, Mbeki was using diplomacy.
This innocent enough escape was soon labelled “quiet diplomacy”. Intended only to fend off charges of inaction, these words suggested Mbeki was “handling” a brother and comrade and could settle everything peaceably.
No one asked what Mbeki was using quiet diplomacy for. Was it to rein in President Mugabe, or to get him to stand down? Was it to bring the MDC to power? Was it to uphold universal human rights?
No South African government could have seriously contemplated such objectives. Diplomacy unsupported by coercion cannot achieve them.
The Zimbabwe crisis for Mbeki was about the direction of South Africa’s foreign policy. His prime aim was to preserve South Africa’s security and regional stability. That meant keeping out the West and avoiding any action that divided the ANC.
For President Mugabe’s desperate faction, the matter was simpler: Power at all costs. He threatened publicly that the MDC would never govern and must have said the same to Mbeki in private.
Powerless before naked power, Mbeki’s only option was to persist in trying to confine the fallout to Zimbabwe. He kept South Africa’s borders closed (at least technically) and never wavered from lending President Mugabe full diplomatic support.
No wonder a common accusation is that Mbeki was President Mugabe’s lackey or that the two are cut from the same cloth. Both views are wanting.
While Mbeki is a proud son of Africa and a dedicated foe of neo-colonialism, he is also every inch a politician. Mbeki had the authority to disembarrass himself of the ZANU-PF leader, if only rhetorically. Jacob Zuma did so immediately after his election at Polokwane. What stopped Mbeki doing so earlier?
It is not because as South African president, and later as SADC mediator, he could not take sides. It cannot be explained away as incurable stubbornness. And it is faintly absurd to suggest that it was purely out of sympathy for President Mugabe.
Maintaining the regional status quo involved a major domestic benefit for Mbeki. As his problems with Zuma and his union allies deepened at home, it kept a like-minded, post-liberation opposition from coming to power on his doorstep.
Domestic and foreign policies are never separable. How South Africa’s new president acts over Zimbabwe will depend, just as it did with Mbeki, on how he reads the situation at home.

– Paul Whelan is an international history graduate of the London School of Economics & Political Science, and a freelance writer.