Should the West back off Mugabe?
In an article describing the bleak situation into which Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has placed his country, the author implicitly touches upon an important ethical dilemma faced by world leaders and those in charge of international legal IGOs such as the International Criminal Court (ICC). That is, does facing the very real possibility of international criminal prosecution create the perverse incentive that leaders will hang onto power (thereby making the situation in their countries even worse), and would it not be more beneficial for the people in that country if the international community were to give guarantees to corrupt and criminal leaders that they will be left alone?
Here is a quick introduction to the issue dividing Africa and the West:
WESTERN dignitaries attending festivities to mark a decade of South Africa’s democracy on April 27, 2004, were struck mute by the deafening applause that greeted Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe.
“I cannot figure out why he is being applauded when he has destroyed his country,” protested Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister and president of the Western think tank, the International Crisis Group.
Mr. Mugabe remains both an enigma and a magnet, attracting Africans and repelling the West. He is at the center of a seven-year-old game of brinkmanship between Africa and the West, fostered by diametrically opposed responses to Zimbabwe’s seizure of land owned by some 4,500 white farmers in 2000. Since then, the two sides have looked each other in the eye to see who would blink first…
Here is the crux of the moral issue. This is one of those paradigmatic moral dilemmas, which comes down to a consequentialist versus a deontological argument. What would you recommend?
Moreover, the trial of Liberia’s warlord, Charles Taylor, in 2006 for crimes against humanity as part of the West’s war on impunity in Africa has removed guarantees for safe retirement, thus diminishing the chance of Mugabe’s exiting. He is running in the 2008 elections.
More Darfur
The United Nations new Secretary-General, Ban ki-Moon, has had an op-ed published [you may require registration to view the article] in The Washington Post today that addresses the situation in Darfur. The article refers to many of the ideas that we raised in class, with as especially intriguing implicit invocation of Homer-Dixon:
Nor is the crisis confined to Darfur. It has spilled over borders, destabilizing the region. Darfur is also an environmental crisis — a conflict that grew at least in part from desertification, ecological degradation and a scarcity of resources, foremost among them water.
Read the whole thing to get the Secretary-General’s accounts of the impressions he gained having visited the area for one week recently.
Darfur and Genocide–Intent versus Motive
Professor Eric Reeves of Smith College has written a compelling op-ed piece in the Boston Globe wherein he addresses the current situation in Darfur:
DOES GENOCIDE continue in Darfur? Do we still see “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, [Darfur's African ethnic groups] as such,” the high standard set by the 1948 UN Genocide Convention? The question acquires urgency as skepticism grows in some quarters about the intentions of Khartoum’s Islamist regime. Genocide is a crime of intent, not motive; if the intention of Khartoum is no longer genocidal, their moral and negotiating equities change considerably in any peace talks with fractious rebel groups.
Thus, there can be a situation in which the motive to commit genocide no longer exists, or is no longer active, but the intent to commit genocide still operates. The rest of Reed’s article helps explain this crucial distinction.
Torture, Russian Style
Is making a person stand barefooted on a prison floor during winter torture? Alexander Herzen, who played a role in the emancipation of Russian serfs in the mid 1800s certainly seemed to think so. Writing in 1830, Herzen says:
“Peter the Third abolished the torture-chamber, and the Russian star chamber. Catherine the Second abolished torture. Alexander the First abolished it over again. Evidence given under torture is legally inadmissible, and any magistrate applying torture is himself liable to prosecution and severe punishment.
That is so: and all over Russia, from the Bering Straits to the Crimea, men suffer torture. When flogging is unsafe, other means are used – intolerable heat, thirst, salt food; in Moscow the police made a prisoner stand barefooted on an iron floor, at a time of intense frost; the man died in a hospital,”
