A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

The government’s policy of land seizures and tolerance for chaotic disruptions on commercial farms led to the collapse in food production.  The impact of the farm invasions has extended beyond food security, beyond Zimbabwe’s balance of payments crisis, and beyond the plight of the thousands of individual expropriated farm owners.  The land grab has intensified the suffering of Zimbabwe’s most vulnerable segments of society – the rural and urban poor. 

The above is not a novel statement.  Many development experts and editorialists have made similar observations over the last few years as Robert Mugabe's government has dismantled Zimbabwe's economy, dissolved its democracy and mangled its good name.  What is unusual is that this statement -- and much else -- was delivered in Zimbabwe last week by the American Ambassador there, a man named Christopher Dell.  His speech deserves to be read in full.

Now, Dell is a career Foreign Service Officer with a lengthy record of service including some difficult postings in Africa and the Balkans.  His is not the record of a guy who does a lot of policy freelancing; it is more than likely that everything in his speech reflected Bush administration policy and was fully cleared before delivery.  But we should never underestimate the nerve it takes for any American diplomat to confront the government he has been assigned to, and say the things that government arrests its own people for saying.

The reaction Dell has provoked is what veteran observers of the Mugabe government might have predicted:  threat and bluster mixed with personal insults from the government-controlled press.  In context, this is a sign that Dell is doing the job we need him to do in Harare.  There is little the United States can do directly to stop Zimbabwe's government from wrecking what for many years was a model of democratic development on a continent that desperately needed one.  Zimbabwe is just too far away, and the one nation that could have discouraged Mugabe's destruction of the rule of law in his country -- South Africa -- has instead supported him. 

An American Ambassador, though, can speak the truth.  He can call an aspiring dictator's lies by their right name.  Zimbabwe is not Uzbekistan; it is a country that ten years ago could feed itself, had experience with democracy and the rule of law and  had a bright future to look forward to.  Mugabe has taken all of that away and we cannot bring it back, but he will not be in power forever.  Someday Zimbabwe's people will look back on this period of their history with shame and chagrin; they will remember what America said about it at the time -- what Christopher Dell said for us last week.