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Understanding dictators

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Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Peter Godwin, author of “The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe,” about what drives dictators like Mugabe and keeps them in power. Download MP3

 

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MARCO WERMAN: It’s hard not to think of Zimbabwe in connection with what’s gong on in Ivory Coast. In 2008, it actually looked like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe was on his way out, apparently defeated in presidential elections. Peter Godwin chronicles the moment in his new book, The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe.

 

PETER GODWIN: There was this heady moment—this little window of opportunity–that in the end lasted two or three weeks only where it looked like Mugabe would recognize and accept the fact that he lost the election and would actually step down. He suddenly looked tired; he looked his age. I think he was then 84. And it looked like it was all over.

 

WERMAN: It wasn’t all over, though. I mean, he stayed in power. He refused to leave.

 

GODWIN: No. And he didn’t accept it in the end. After consulting with his politburo and probably more importantly, his generals. And I think that’s one of the main points of departure, if you like, between what we have been seeing more recently in places like Tunisia and Egypt and Zimbabwe. In Zimbabwe, if you try and have a mass protest, you wouldn’t be able to put the stems of your flowers down the barrels of the soldiers’ weapons because they’d be too busy firing live ammunition at you. And I think it’s that what we don’t look at often enough when we’re discussing why these uprisings in North Africa succeed. The main determinant of whether they’re successful r not is the reaction of the security forces. So for example, the Egyptian army could have cleared Tahrir Square in and hour if they’d been of a mind to. But crucially they weren’t. Ah, and that’s the main difference with Zimbabwe.

 

WERMAN: They would have come under enormous pressure and international reaction if they had though in Tahrir Square—fired live ammunition on the people. And I suspect wouldn’t the same thing happen in Zimbabwe?

 

GODWIN: Up to a point. I mean, the Zimbabweans, you know, if you see what they did in 2008, where Mugabe launched a campaign of torture on an industrial scale. I mean, in the end, he more or less got away with that. He was sort of forced into a power-sharing agreement. But Mugabe is a very, very good manipulator of international opinion. And in the region, in and in Africa, people are still scared of him—other heads of state and representatives in those organizations.

 

WERMAN: Um, What do you mean by this fear, this violence, this intimidation on an industrial scale? I mean, you saw it up close in 2008.

 

GODWIN: I began to hear this word “politicide” to describe it. Which is…

 

WERMAN: “Politicide”?

 

GODWIN: Politicide, yeah. Or as someone called it, “smart genocide”–I’m doing finger quotes—um, in the sense that, you know, what’s changed is, for example, even since Rwanda, where you know, nine hundred thousand, perhaps one million where killed in that genocide–what Mugabe has learned is that if you start killing people in those numbers, you do risk tipping over into a kind of sense of international revulsion where you do risk international intervention. So, you don’t need to kill hundreds of thousands of people anymore. You need to kill the right fee hundred and scare the rest.  And that’s what he did. I mean his militia and his party supporters and army and police fanned out across the country armed with lists of opposition office bearers.  And these opposition activists, they had their houses burned; they were very savagely beaten; and they were taken away to these newly formed torture bases. I mean, I spoke to so many torture victims, and by the end, I knew what they were going to say next because there was such a pattern to it. And it always incenses me when I hear the word ‘anarchy’ uttered in the same sentence as Zimbabwe. It’s many things, but anarchy is not one of them.

 

WERMAN: Well, you know, the New York Times today writes about the torture centers Gadafi operates in Libya. I mean, reading your book The Fear, it’s impossible not to see the obvious similarities. But it sounds like from the way you describe it: Mugabe is actually much smarter than that.

 

GODWIN: Right. It was very systematic. For the most part, people who had been tortured were then released back into their communities. They limped home, where pushed in wheelbarrows, or whatever—these absolutely horrific injuries. And they acted in a sense like human billboards—I mean they were like advertisements for what happens if you opposed his rule.

 

WERMAN: Peter Godwin, you write in The Fear, about– kind of a lonliness that exists at the top with Robert Mugabe. Do you think, kind of like Laurent Gbagbo in Ivory Coast, that Mugabe just has so few options at this point actually to open the door of the presidential palace and walk out of the country, maybe he’s too scared to step away?

 

GODWIN: Well that’s a very good question. I mean weirdly, the period I was talking about in 2008 before the torture, he was being offered all sorts of deals like Gbagbo is now. But at that time the deals were quite easy to negotiate: you now, he would be the elder statesman, he wouldn’t be prosecuted, he’d be given money, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.  But the torture changed everything.  ‘Cause now you’ve got this real moral stain: systematic human rights abuse. In the old days, before the international criminal court was established, you know, the opposition could give guarantees against prosecution, but now they can’t really. You know, you can run, but you can’t hide.

 

WERMAN: Peter, The Fear is a powerful and personal piece of reporting. So let me end by asking you a personal question. I mean–so much of the Zimbabwe narrative has been about black and white. Your family’s fortunes as a result have risen and fallen. And now whites in Zimbabwe, I guess is fair to say, are like second class citizens. Do you ever kind of, just feel like, ‘to hell with Zimbabwe and Mugabe, I’ll just find someplace where I don’t have that burden?’

 

GODWIN: Absolutely, on a daily basis!

 

WERMAN: How do you continue to kind of reconcile with what’s going on there?

 

GODWIN: Well, it keeps changing. I mean, you keep thinking the story sort of over and it’s not. This book, it has to be said, was an accidental book. I mean, insofar as I didn’t set out to write it. I mean, I went there originally on an assignment for a magazine–for Vanity Fair–to do a particular piece. But then the story just went off on this extraordinary direction. And I then realized very early on when I was taking all this testimony that I had notebooks and notebooks full of these most extraordinary stories and I realized very quickly that I had a kind of obligation. I mean, I’ve said in the book that I’d been always rather allergic to the phrase “bearing witness” thinking it was somewhat pretentious. But the longer I was there recording this, I really had a duty to write about it.

 

WERMAN: Well, you certainly did bear witness by telling extraordinary stories. Peter Godwin’s just written The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe. Thanks very much for coming in.

 

GODWIN: Thank you.

 

 

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