Zimbabwe

As the Movement for Democratic Change party of Zimbabwe contests the presidential election results that the current party has announced (results that, as of the moment, will keep the current, notoriously corrupt president Robert Mugabe in office), international leaders have been weighing in and influencing the situation. The most powerful actor in a regional summit (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/world/africa/13zimbabwe.html?hp) which met to discuss what was earlier perceived by the world to be a crisis as tension mounted over the election results in Zimbabwe is President Mbeki of South Africa. His declaration that the election stalemate is not a crisis has lent legitimacy to what many see as Mugabe’s unsubstantiated grab for power. This goes to show again that when an actor takes an action that is condemned by international organizations, such as election fraud, which is condemned by the UN, it is still up to powerful external actors to determine how the renegade actors will be reprehended–or not. For instance, although international treaties condemned genocide and bound actors to defend people against genocide at the time of the crisis in Rwanda, because powerful external forces did not condemn the crisis as genocide, almost no external actors were willing to come to the aid of Tutsis in Rwanda. Similarly, even though France and England were implied as guarantors of post World War One European borders, they both pursued a policy of appeasement when Hitler began seizing territories surrounding Germany, lending a quasi-legitimacy to his actions, the way that President Mebki is doing now. It may be that until powerful external actors condemn Mugabe’s actions, as happened to the sitting president in Kenya at the beginning of the year, his grab for the election will continue.