Daso-Blog

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.