In Sunday's Washington Post, Paul Collier proposes a military coup as a possible solution to Zimbabwe's current crisis. He writes as follows:
So how can the grossly excessive powers of the Mugabes and Shwes of the world be curtailed? After Iraq, there is no international appetite for using the threat of military force to pressure thugs. But only military pressure is likely to be effective; tyrants can almost always shield themselves from economic sanctions. So there is only one credible counter to dictatorial power: the country's own army.Realistically, Mugabe and Shwe can be toppled only by a military coup. Of course, they are fully aware of this danger, and thus have appointed their cronies as generals and kept a watchful eye on any potentially restless junior officers. Such tactics reduce the risk of a coup, but they cannot eliminate it: On average, there have been two successful coups per year in the developing world in recent decades. A truly bad government in a developing country is more likely to be replaced by a coup than by an election: Mugabe will presumably rig the runoff vote scheduled for Friday by intimidation. Or he could follow the example of the last Burmese dictator, who held an election, lost and simply ignored the result.
I find it a little awkward to be writing in praise, however faint, of coups. They are unguided missiles, as likely to topple a democracy as a dictatorship. But there is still something to be said for them.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the international community has taken the rather simplistic position that armies should stay out of politics. That view is understandable but premature. Rather than trying to freeze coups out of the international system, we should try to provide them with a guidance system. In contexts such as Zimbabwe and Burma, coups should be encouraged because they are likely to lead to improved governance. (It's hard to imagine things getting much worse.) The question then becomes how to provide encouragement for some potentially helpful coups while staying within the bounds of proper international conduct.
It is dismaying to read comment of this order. Does Paul Collier know anything about Zimbabwe? He gives the game away in the first paragraph of the article: when we say the government of Zimbabwe, he writes, what we really mean is President Robert Mugabe. This simplistic assumption that one 80 year old is responsible for everything that's happening is ridiculous. And it leads too many people to assume that getting rid of Mugabe is the solution to the problem. Even Morgan Tsvangirai (who has little reason to exonerate Mugabe on any score) believed that Mugabe would have accepted the election results but was prevented from doing so by his hardliners.
The idea that the military would be a reforming alternative to this one-man caricature of government is equally dubious. Given the role of the security forces in the violence against ordinary citizens, and given the privileges they enjoy under the present setup (not to mention their seeming veto over the results of the first round of voting), a coup hardly seems the way to change direction. More likely, it would increase repression. In fact, should Mugabe 'wobble' a coup might very well occur - but to make things worse rather than better, as with the Burma model (which Collier also reduces to a one-man problem). It is possible that a coup of the (much) lower ranks might successfully remove the ruling elite but the history of such coups is not encouraging (as Liberians and Sierra Leoneans could testify).
The real responsibility for resolving this crisis lies with the UN and the provisions for intervention under its Charter. But no one would bet their pension on the UN Security Council fulfilling its obligations. The one slim, poor, weak hope, it seems to me, is that the SADC countries will intensify their criticisms, shame Mbeki into supporting them, isolate the regime economically and so pressure Zanu into a negotiated compromise. That would leave the criminals in government largely unpunished and still in control of their loot but it might yet stop or moderate the violence. If not, the countries of the region are going to fill up with Zimbabwean refugees and the same ethnic-cleansing pressures that are part of the xenophobia in South Africa might well become more widespread. (Morris Szeftel)