Why Britain should have invaded Zimbabwe
According to Thabo Mbeki, Tony Blair wanted to overthrow Robert Mugabe by force. The former PM denies this – but would it have been such a bad idea?–Ian Birrell, the Independent
Robert Mugabe has long claimed that Britain wanted to overthrow him, using this to smear his political opponents as Western stooges and shore up support for his kleptocratic regime in Zimbabwe. He has warned over the years of looming invasion, of hit squads sent to kill key aides and gunboats despatched from London.
These claims have been dismissed mostly as the paranoid ravings of a deluded despot. But now they have been given force by Thabo Mbeki, the former South African President, who claims that Tony Blair suggested their two nations invade Zimbabwe to topple Mugabe.
It is hard to imagine British armed forces fighting their way into Harare to oust a man who, for all his many faults, was an elected leader and liberation hero to his people. But given subsequent events, it is worth asking – if only in the interests of counter-factual history – whether it would really have been such a bad idea.
This may sound an absurd question. But consider the facts. Mbeki said the former British Prime Minister urged him to join a “regime-change scheme” involving military force shortly after the turn of the century, a period when Zimbabwe was slumping into one of the most catastrophic collapses in modern times.
Mugabe had already been in power for two decades by this time, inheriting the richest nation in Africa and wrecking it with his corrupt cronies. Britain, like other Western powers, had ignored the slaughter of 20,000 rival supporters in Matabeleland and indulged him as an ally in the Cold War while he tightened the noose on his nation.
Army Reserve Major, Bernard Gaynor, has called on the Minister for Defence, Senator David Johnston, to halt the Australian Army’s plan to issue cuff-links and lapel pins that place the Rising Sun badge on a rainbow backdrop – the symbol of LGBTI political activism.
