Don't look back in Tsvangerai heard you say

An excellent post, partly on the embarrassing episode where Comment Is Free allowed some yank flack to post a finger-wagging excoriation of Wikileaks for its gross irresponsibility in publishing some Zimbabwean cables which were actually published by, err, the Guardian. But moving on to what is in my opinion the more important question, that of precisely what the fuck did Morgan Tsvangerai think he was playing at? Item; the biggest political asset Mugabe has is his ability to portray the MDC as pawns of foreign governments, so maybe it would be a good idea to cut down on the secret meetings with foreign governments[1]. Item; it is not really all that democratic to lie to your voters about an extremely important policy issue. und so weiter.

In fact, the behaviour described in the cables (which pro-democracy independent Zimbabwean newspapers would certainly have published if they had got hold of them) is so scandalous and so inconsistent with the MDC's public position (and with actual policy carried out since the date) that I have quite the old suspicion that the meeting did not actually go anything like how it is described and that the State Department official present transcribed what he wanted to hear rather than what Morgan Tsvangerai actually said. Tsvangerai appears to be well on the way to becoming the Nick Clegg of Zimbawe, as zunguzungu documents, but he's not that stupid or misled.



[1] Mugabe has a long and horrible record of trumping up charges of treason to persecute his political opponents. But if you're meeting with representatives of a foreign government and encouraging them to impose extremely damaging economic sanctions on your own country, I would imagine that Lloyds of London would consider you to have invalidated your being-falsely-accused-of-treason insurance policy.