THE scene was a school in Johannesburg where children from across South Africa gathered last week to wish the man they all call "grandfather" a happy 90th birthday. As Nelson Mandela took in their smiles from his red chair – one of the many visits, book launches and charity events in the run-up to his actual birthday this Friday – he told them of his vision for the future.
"Feature yourselves as the stars that show the way to a brighter future for our country, the continent and the world," the elderly statesman said in words that could equally have been addressed to his successor as president of South Africa, Thabo Mbe
ki.
This week, Mbeki's shortcomings will be fully illuminated by the bright nostalgic light surrounding Mandela. Indeed, political commentators on Mbeki's eight years as head of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) are no longer holding back.
"We were lucky – truly blessed – to have Mandela in charge at the time of our transition (from apartheid]," wrote Barney Mthombothi, editor of the Financial Mail, South Africa's equivalent of The Economist, in its most recent edition. "Few people could have navigated the turbulence of the time successfully. It's sad to see the current lot (the ruling ANC] trashing his legacy, behaving like rats in a sack. We're approaching a future without his commanding presence with some trepidation."
As southern Africa's problems deepen, Mthombothi is hardly alone in pointing the finger at Mbeki, whose increasingly feeble reign will end when new elections are held in May next year. Some are even debating which of his failures are greatest. His refusal to acknowledge the link between the HIV virus and Aids may be seen in future as his prize defect. Six million South Africans are infected and nearly 1,000 die from Aids-related illnesses each day; another 1,000 become HIV-positive daily.
But the immediate focus is on his handling of Zimbabwe. For eight years Mbeki has been officially mediating the catastrophe in Zimbabwe, which shares a 160-mile border with South Africa along the Limpopo River, through a strategy of "quiet diplomacy".
He has resented any interference from elsewhere, and was so angered by the proposed intensification of sanctions against President Robert Mugabe and other Zimbabwean leaders by the UN Security Council that he successfully sided with China and Russia to veto punitive action.
South Africa currently has a two-year, non-permanent seat on the Security Council. While it has no veto itself, it allied with China and Russia and voted on Friday night against the tough sanctions proposed by Britain, the US and their supporters.
British Foreign Minister David Miliband described the votes by Moscow, Beijing and Pretoria as "incomprehensible", while Britain's ambassador to the UN Sir John Sawers said the UN had failed in its duty. "The people of Zimbabwe need to be given hope that there is an end in sight to their suffering. The Security Council today has failed to offer them that hope."
Miliband aimed his most vehement criticism yesterday at the Russians and the Chinese, whose veto forced him to defend Gordon Brown's earlier statement at the G8 summit in Japan that there was effective international support for harsher sanctions.
Miliband said: "It is right that in the end people have to show their cards and the vote (on Friday] showed that, in the end, the Russians and the Chinese – I wouldn't quite say put two fingers up – but effectively they blocked action.
"The Russians and the Chinese were briefing in all sorts of directions. You have to get people to front up because in the end there was hiding going on behind the nods and the winks. The Russians signed a G8 statement. Their president at the meeting agreed to the statement, which called for, among other things, financial sanctions on the Mugabe regime. So the Prime Minister was absolutely right in what he said."
In Harare, Zimbabwe's capital, there were celebrations among Mugabe and his supporters, including the Joint Operations Command of military men who run the country as a black junta. "President Mugabe is happy to know that the UN is still a body where there's equal sovereignty of every member and there are checks and balances within the system that protects the weak from the powerful," said Zimbabwe's UN ambassador Boniface Chidyausiku.
Mugabe will now see little need to make concessions following the blocking of the draft sanctions resolution. Chidyausiku added: "It is great news. It's a reflection of the rule of law in the UN that nobody has monopoly on how things should be in the Security Council. Reason has prevailed."
But the western democracies will now become wearier than ever of Mbeki's failed diplomacy.
With Mbeki's task now looking impossible, the US launched a scathing attack on him in the wake of the veto. America's UN ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said: "We are surprised by what appears as Mbeki appearing to protect Mugabe, while Mugabe uses violent means to fragment the opposition. I think he (Mbeki] is out of touch with the trends inside his own country."
Khalilzad accused South Africa of protecting the "horrible regime in Zimbabwe," calling it particularly disturbing given that sanctions eventually undermined the apartheid government that had oppressed South Africa.
The American ambassador disparaged Mbeki's mediation effort. "There isn't anything serious going on in terms of negotiations," Khalilzad said. "The South African effort, President Mbeki's effort, so far has been a failure. President Mbeki's actions appear to be protecting Mr Mugabe, and to be working hand in glove with him at times, while he, Mugabe, uses violent means to fragment and weaken the opposition."
It is the latest example of South Africa failing to support action against repressive rulers, despite the ruling African National Congress' own backing for sanctions when it was leading the struggle against apartheid.
Last year the country voted with China in the Security Council against a resolution calling for the Burmese junta to stop attacking ethnic minorities and engage in substantive dialogue with the democratic opposition.
With three million Zimbabwe refugees already inside South Africa, seriously destabilising the country's fragile social and economic structures, the UN High Commission for Refugees last week said a new flood of Zimbabweans has begun crossing the Limpopo, risking the crocodiles which periodically seize people fleeing Mugabe's state. But, said UNHCR spokesman Yusuf Hassan, the pattern of the exodus has changed in the past few weeks.
In the past, most Zimbabwean refugees travelled alone, hoping to raise money to send back to their impoverished families, but now the crisis is driving entire families out of the country. Hassan said: "We are now seeing an increasing number of families arriving as a result of political violence, with several people showing signs of beatings or torture."
Many experts predict another two million Zimbabweans could flee into South Africa before the end of the year, making it the biggest outflow of refugees since 10 million Bengalis fled from the then East Pakistan (later to become Bangladesh] into India in 1971.
When the G8 in Japan agreed to try to tighten sanctions and appoint a special UN envoy to Zimbabwe, this represented a vote of no-confidence for Mbeki, who is the official mediator appointed by the 14-nation Southern African Development Community and the 53-member African Union.
The G8's decision to put Zimbabwe directly on the UN's agenda put the world's most powerful states in direct conflict with Mbeki, who has insisted that Zimbabwe is an African problem to be resolved by Africans and, above all, by him.
Unfortunately for Mbeki, who has frequently stated there is "no crisis" in Zimbabwe, the killings by Mugabe's followers of more than 113 opposition supporters since early April and the farcical one-man presidential election of June 27, in which 84-year-old Mugabe declared himself re-elected to power for another five years, proved too much for the G8 leaders. The G8 were persuaded that the African solution had failed miserably.
In South Africa, where even Mbeki's own party is starting to distance itself from his stance, the contrast with Mandela's all-embracing presence is stark. Mthombothi wrote last week: "Mandela united the country. Mbeki has divided it."
