* Daniel Flitton

* December 12, 2008

Mugabe has destroyed his country and we have allowed him to do it.

THE death toll from Zimbabwe's cholera epidemic is already put at more than 700, while the United Nations fears an outbreak of 60,000 cases in the weeks ahead. On top of this, nearly 6 million people desperately need emergency food aid.

This is bad enough, yet to properly capture the scale of this human tragedy, you must look beyond these staggering numbers. This is merely the latest catastrophe to afflict what should be Africa's bread basket, but is widely seen as the continent's basket case.

What makes Zimbabwe's troubles all the more depressing is how it reflects an absolute failure of the international system, which is based on the division of the world among sovereign governments, each formally independent, each supposedly in control of a demarcated territory.

For the most part, this system works for the betterment of humanity. A government's ultimate purpose is to ensure the physical safety of its citizens. The state allows for secure possession of property and a legal framework to enforce contracts, essential ingredients of a capitalist economy.

Yet on each of these elementary measures, Zimbabwe fails. And the rest of the world is apparently powerless to stop Robert Mugabe dragging his country deeper into the abyss.

Zimbabwe's current predicament is the cost of dividing the planet with thick lines on a map, fortifying those borders and demanding (and in return, recognising) a right of non-interference.

Mugabe has ruthlessly exploited this sense of national self-determination to hold on to power. Britain is blamed for its past sins and accused of a hidden agenda to re-colonise the country. The strongman preaches this same hysteria to deflect any and all criticism. His chief political opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, is derided as a white man's "condom" and a stooge for the West.

Mugabe justified a campaign of forcible farm seizures that have crippled the Zimbabwe economy by blaming Britain, after Tony Blair's government refused a decade ago to pay compensation for land redistribution.

With the local inflation rate now measured in the millions, Mugabe responds by printing ever more 100 billion dollar notes. He has stacked the courts and the army in his favour, and rants about international conspiracies to end his rule.

It may be crude politics, but it has worked to keep him in power.

Through a mix of incredible stubbornness and violence, he has comprehensively out-maneuvered his opponents. And all the global condemnation of his despotic rule has come to nothing. Zimbabwe has fallen through the cracks.

The Commonwealth has tried to mediate the crisis, and failed. The regional group, the Southern African Development Community, has failed. Both the African Union and the United Nations have failed. No one has hauled Mugabe off to the International Criminal Court.

The world can loudly express its outrage, but as the situation in Zimbabwe has shown, this amounts to mere noise if the target chooses to be deaf. Other than hoping the 84-year-old tyrant drops dead, there seems no solution.

The notion of a "responsibility to protect" offers a thin hope. This is the idea that rather than a right of non-interference, governments actually have an obligation to protect people from systematic violence.

Where a local regime fails in that duty, the responsibility to act and protect human rights, by military force if necessary, passes to the international community. After the idea was refined among academics and international jurists over many years, in 2005 world leaders offered support. Zimbabwe seems an obvious candidate to test this resolve.

But generating sufficient political will remains the biggest obstacle. Acting on this supposed responsibility means finding outsiders willing to bear the cost — in blood, by sending a military force into harm's way, and in treasure, by paying the enormous and long-term cost of having to prop up the entire country.

No outside government has so far volunteered to fulfil this apparent international responsibility, and none seems likely to.

Zimbabwe illustrates the weakness of the responsibility-to-protect idea — the difficulty of getting governments to recognise wider interests to humanity outside their own sphere of control. Where would such responsibility end? In Somalia? Congo? Sudan?

The governments most likely to act are those with direct interests at stake. In Zimbabwe's case, its neighbours, for instance, which bear the brunt of refugee flows and now the risk of a rapid spread of disease.

Special expectations fall on South Africa. So far Pretoria has absorbed the pain emanating from next door and hoped to encourage a political solution. Nor has South Africa always taken a constructive approach to efforts to remove Mugabe.

The next step — a military intervention — would be almost impossible to manage given South Africa's growing list of domestic problems. Can the rest of the world really demand more, without showing more willingness to carry the burden itself?

Of course Mugabe should go. He is the Zimbabwe's biggest problem. But the larger failing is a world system of governance that permits such a disaster to occur.

Daniel Flitton is diplomatic editor.

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/zimbabweans-pay-dearly-for-worlds- failure-20081211-6wng.html?page=-1