The New York Times - July 3, 2008
Roger Cohen

That's the kindest verdict I can find for the listless mediation in a devastated Zimbabwe of Thabo Mbeki, the South African president. Faced by all the brutal expressions of his neighbor Robert Mugabe's megalomania, Mbeki has prodded here and there, like a learned physician mildly intrigued by a corpse.

As a once flourishing economy has imploded, as inflation has assumed Weimar proportions, as millions have fled to South Africa and as an octogenarian tyrant has dispatched goons to murder and ravage, Mbeki has gone on mumbling that the people of Zimbabwe must solve their own problems.

They tried by giving a clear victory to the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, in the March 29 election. But the 48 percent to 43 percent lead over Mugabe fell short of an absolute majority, conveniently so, allowing the liberator-turned-despot to terrorize his way to a sham second-round victory and sixth term.

Enough already! Mugabe in his labyrinth is ruinous. That, however, has scarcely bestirred Mbeki of "What crisis?" fame. As Georgina Godwin, a Zimbabwean journalist, put it: "Mbeki's quiet diplomacy is comatose."

Herding cats is easier than finding significance in the Delphic utterances of Africa's Mr. Imperturbable. I interviewed Mbeki back in 2003, along with my New York Times colleague Felicity Barringer. The conversation yielded a 345-word story, huge given Mbeki's erudite-sounding vacuity, worthy of a Soviet apparatchik.

Mbeki did, however, say that he'd been urging Mugabe to meet with his political opponents - sound familiar? - and declared of Zimbabwe: "The political problems and conflicts they've experienced, I think they'll get over that."

Right.

That was five years ago. Now, we hear that Mbeki's hopeful of arranging a meeting between Mugabe and Tsvangirai, and we have the African Union calling this week for a Zimbabwean "government of national unity."

Fine sentiments, but it's late in the day. I can't see Tsvangirai, even if he were offered the post of prime minister, finding any "unity" with Mugabe and his militarized ZANU-PF party, which he wants to disarm.

This mess is Mugabe's, but Mbeki has been his enabler. Why? The filial respect of a fellow African liberation fighter? Distaste for Tsvangirai, a former trade union leader, at a time when Mbeki's own power has been undermined by South African trade unions and their man, Jacob Zuma? A loathing of Western interventionism?

No doubt the above play a part, but I think the real clue lies in Mbeki's previous act of blind stubbornness, whose harvest was not the blood of neighbors but of his fellow citizens.

For more than three years, Mbeki indulged in a bout of AIDS denialism that stopped antiretroviral drugs from getting to millions infected with H.I.V. Hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths ensued.

Mbeki was never specific about the roots of his dissent, now sidelined if never disavowed. But when asked in Parliament in 2004 if he believed widespread rape played any role in spreading AIDS, he exploded:

"The disease of racism," he said, led to blacks being portrayed as "lazy, liars, foul-smelling, diseased, corrupt, violent, amoral, sexually depraved, animalistic, savage and rapist."

The link between H.I.V. and AIDS, in this angry vision, was a fabrication foisted on Africans by whites determined to distract the continent from real problems of racism and poverty, and accepted by blacks afflicted with the slave mentality engendered by apartheid.

Mbeki's pseudoscience was death-propagating nonsense. But his theories of sexuality under apartheid were not.

I spent enough time under apartheid to see that the portrayal of blacks as sexual animals was integral to a white policy of dehumanizing them. More than once, I was asked with a boozy sneer by South African whites if I could ever imagine being attracted to a black woman.

So when Mugabe rails against the white colonialists, and expropriates white farmers, and portrays himself as the African fighting back white colonialism - when he resurrects the long struggle - I suspect he strikes a chord with Mbeki, whose own pragmatism is no Mandela-like conciliation.

"The racial petulance lives on in Mbeki," said Peter Godwin, whose superb book, "When a Crocodile Eats the Sun," chronicles how he and his sister Georgina saw their family's life in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, destroyed. "He's the black intellectual living with the fact that whites think they are better."

Mbeki should read Godwin's book. It might even inspire him to criticize Mugabe. But then, he'd say, it's a white man's work. And that's the truth.

But what the disaster of Mugabe and of Mbeki's nonmediation teaches us is that the wounds of a racist past, however deep, cannot justify a nation's dismemberment. Mugabe must go, South Africa move on, and Mbeki must consider the blood that has flowed from his myopia and now tarnishes his legacy.

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