Time to remove Mugabe from Zimbabwe – not the Australian cricket team 
Posted By Mirko Bagaric on May 16th, 2007
If the Australian government really cared about the people of Zimbabwe it would desist from futile grandstanding in the form of preventing our cricketers touring there. Instead our government would take decisive action by removing the murderous Robert Mugabe regime from power.
History shows that sporting boycotts only do two things: punish sports fans and deny competitors the opportunity to display their skill. They didn’t work at the 1980 Russian Olympics and in South Africa in 1970s and 1980s. The South African ban in particular was a disaster, denying the world the opportunity to see some of the most talented sportspeople in history, such as Barry Richards and Clive Rice, ply their skills.
Prime Minister Howard has labelled Mugabe a ‘grubby dictator’ and accused him of using ‘Gestapo’ tactics. Howard has correctly noted that Mugabe has presided over the ‘systematic and brutal oppression of civil society and political opposition’. The Mugabe regime has summarily killed and beaten untold numbers of people and Zimbabwe now has the lowest life expectancy rates in the world. On average women die at the age of 34 years – remarkably, this is down from 62 in 1980.
The futility of Australia’s opposition to Mugabe underlines much of what is wrong with international affairs. In the end, talk of no tolerance towards despots is just that. The typical response to dictators who go about summarily monstering their own people is feigned concern following an isolated news report then the world gets busy doing nothing about it, apart from the occasional sports ban.
The number of people killed in internal conflict and through wanton acts of dictatorial violence since the Second World War (170,000 million) massively exceeds the total number of people killed during both major wars. There are some appalling examples of governments massacring their ‘own’ people. In 1994 the genocide in Rwanda resulted in 800,000 people being murdered in 100 days; Pol Pot killed two million and in the 1970s 300,000 people were murdered in Uganda, while 1.5 million were killed in Ethiopia. It is easy to multiply such examples.
In all cases, the rest of the world knowingly stood idly by – although some of these events sparked ‘furious’ debates at UN headquarters.
Time for a perspective check. The devastation currently occurring in Zimbabwe should be used to put in place a clear framework regarding the obligation of the international community to prevent the killing and starvation of citizens by their own governments.
As international law currently stands, the main obstacle to getting rid of tyrants who kill thousands of their own citizens is state sovereignty. However, this concept is overrated. Invisible lines on the earth’s surface have no moral standing and can’t trump moral standards which are of universal application.
In reality, the main disinclination to stop preventable mass killings of strangers in other parts of the world is that they are strangers and are in other parts of our world. It is true that the world (or parts of it) has, on rare occasions, ‘stepped up’ and drawn a line in the sand and said ‘no’ to despots, stopping them from more mass killings of their citizens.
Successful interventions include Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in 1979; Tanzania’s intervention to remove Idi Amin from Uganda in the same year and NATO’s invasion of Yugoslavia in 1999. The success of these interventions and the absence of criticism of such action demonstrate that state sovereignty is no barrier to humanitarian interventions. In fact it shows that respect for state sovereignty is an excuse, rather than a reason for the inaction of the world community.
At present, humanitarian intervention is opportunistic and expedient in nature.
It is time for a fundamental global re-think to this approach. Humanitarian intervention should be transformed into a duty upon the world’s nations. Human life, especially when there are thousands at stake, is too important to leave to chance. If this problem is not expressly addressed now, legal and social commentators are likely to be addressing the same issue into the 22nd Century.
We should not wait until then. It is only reasonable to believe that waiting will result in future generations seeking solutions while lamenting the killing of another 170 million or more people by their own government. Surely, one century with 170 million preventable deaths is sufficient reason to seriously consider fundamental reform of the global approach to government-sponsored killings of their own people.
So when is humanitarian intervention appropriate?
This is not difficult. Humanitarian intervention should be mandatory in cases of large-scale government sanctioned killings. The Security Council should be given the authority and responsibility to muster Coalitions of the Willing, perhaps selected by ballot, to supply the necessary resources. If it fails in its role, citizens from countries ruled by despots should be conferred automatic citizenship rights to Security Council member nations – nothing like self interest to stimulate action.
There’s a job already waiting for the Security Council in Zimbabwe. Rather than wasting time on futile cricket bans, Australia needs to act on its supposed new found concern for the people of Zimbabwe and petition to the Security Council to authorise an international force to remove Mugabe.
This is something that would uplift cricket and non-cricket fans alike.
A version of this was in the Geelong Advertiser on 16 May 2007.