Senior Fellow and Vice President for Programs is quoted in The Atlantic on the UN's role in Zimbabwe's upcoming elections.
Zimbabwe, a potential economic powerhouse ruined at the hands of one of the most restrictive and longest-tenured dictatorships on earth, is heading for a potential turning point. A mostly peaceful, popular referendum on March 16 approved a relatively progressive constitution that includes a theoretically strong bill of rights, and presidential elections will likely be held later in the year. But the current president is the 89-year-old Robert Mugabe, who took power in 1980 and has shown no subsequent appetite for giving it up. In 2008, his ZANU-PF party unleashed a wave of violent intimidation and repression after Mugabe lost the first round of a presidential election to the Movement for Democratic Change's Morgan Tsvangarai, a crisis that only ended when the opposition agreed to a power-sharing scheme in which Mugabe essentially remained in charge. The upcoming election is another chance for the MDC to score an electoral victory over Mugabe -- but also a chance for ZANU-PF to violently cement its control.
In a plausible worst-case scenario, this coming year will bear a similarity to the crisis of 2008. With elections planned for an as-yet unannounced date later in the year, the country could be heading towards another inflection point, or even another explosion -- situations in which international organizations would take on heavy humanitarian and moral responsibilities. "The UN was being asked, and will be asked in the future, to play a key role in the transition in Zimbabwe, and they have been completely contaminated by their behavior," says Todd Moss, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, and an official in the State Department's African Affairs office during the 2008 election crisis. "It comes down to trust. Who is the UN supposed to be working for? The signals were pretty clear that parts of the UN office in Harare were working very closely with ZANU-PF."
The next election will give the UN the opportunity to demonstrate just how much its approach to Zimbabwe has changed. At the moment, the successful constitutional referendum raises the possibility of an election that is at least procedurally sound. But ZANU-PF had the opportunity to yield power when it was defeated in the 2008 vote. Instead, it chose to intimidate its opponents into submission. Zimbabwe and Zambia are co-hosting the UN World Tourism Organization's general assembly in August of this year, raising hopes that an influential faction within ZANU-PF genuinely wants to reintegrate their country with the rest of the region and the international community more generally. A clean vote would be an ideal place to start. But Moss sees little reason to believe that the party's brutal electoral calculus has changed. "There's no prospect of an opposition victory as long as Mugabe is alive," says Moss.
This year's vote could be no more legitimate than 2008's. Five years later, UN still boasts the largest and most capable humanitarian operation on earth. If the election starts to resemble the 2008 crisis, lives will depend on the UN doing a better job of upholding its values and responsibilities than it did the last time around.