Groups supports Mugabe profiting from misrule

Washington Post:

A leading international research group urged southern African leaders Tuesday to offer Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and his closest allies amnesty from prosecution in exchange for political reforms that might end years of misrule.

The International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based organization that studies conflicts worldwide, also said that negotiators should offer to let Mugabe and key supporters keep fortunes amassed during Zimbabwe's long decline. And the group said a government of national unity, including the nation's opposition leaders, would be possible only if they agree not to reverse controversial land seizures of white-owned commercial farms since 2000.

Such concessions, backed by the lure of an economic rescue package, might prompt the political breakthrough necessary to allow free and fair elections and Mugabe's eventual departure from power, the group said. The idea drew immediate criticism from some Zimbabweans but suggested a possible way forward in a stalemate that long has seemed intractable.

"You have to have some safeguards and guarantees for the establishment for this to happen. Otherwise the status quo will remain," Francois Grignon, director of the Africa program for the International Crisis Group, said in a telephone interview from Nairobi.

Grignon also suggested a truth and reconciliation commission -- modeled on South Africa's system of trading amnesty for full confession after the fall of apartheid -- to bring to light crimes committed during Mugabe's 27 years in power.

Several former African presidents, such as Charles Taylor of Liberia, faced prosecution after leaving office. And though advocates of international justice applaud such efforts, political analysts say they can present obstacles to peacefully ending destructive political stalemates.

Zimbabwe's leading opposition group, the Movement for Democratic Change, said no political party had the power to grant Mugabe amnesty for his misdeeds, including extensive allegations of the ongoing assault, torture and murder of dissidents as well as the massacre of thousands of Ndebeles, a minority group, during the 1980s.

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It sounds like a despots' right proposal by a group that is willing to tolerate genocide and even reward it. It is one thing to make a deal with the devil and it is very much another to make a deal that allows him to stay in power and escape any consequences for his evil. They need to do a better job of explaining their rationale for what looks like a very unjust proposal.