I worked through the night, got approval from Harare after a series of unanswered calls and crackly connections, and sent the draft off to Brooks, who said she’d run the piece in the next issue. I went to bed. It was June 25, two days from the election.
I awoke to emails from Brooks, telling me how pleased she was with the article and how the piece “got great play over here.” Through the morning, I was treated to the words I wrote being repeated back to me in TV and radio news broadcasts and on news sites from all over the world.
CNN said: “‘We do not want armed conflict, but the people of Zimbabwe need the words of indignation from global leaders to be backed by the moral rectitude of military force,’ Tsvangirai wrote in Wednesday’s edition of the British newspaper The Guardian.”
The Hindustan Times wrote: “The opposition leader had said in Britain’s Guardian newspaper that the United Nations had to go further than verbal condemnation of President Robert Mugabe and move on to ‘active isolation’ which required ‘a force to protect the people.’ .
The New York Times reported: “‘Zimbabwe will break if the world does not come to our aid,’ he (Tsvangirai) wrote in The Guardian newspaper in London.”
One reason the article was so widely covered is because a formal call from a recognized political figure for intervention from UN peacekeepers in their own country was rare, if not unprecedented. In hindsight, it was probably naive to call for a move beyond rhetoric and into action. I had thought the moneyshot term, calling for UN Peacekeepers, was strong enough to make a point, but vague enough to avoid detailing it. I also wanted to pressure the Mugabe government, and perhaps oblige it to back off.
Asking for peacekeepers from outside was not an isolated call: Figures such as Desmond Tutu had also made the argument for international peacekeepers in Zimbabwe at this time. The US Ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad, told media in June the Security Council was considering “further steps” in Zimbabwe, an oblique reference to possible intervention. The Security Council had just condemned the violence in a unanimous and unprecedented vote. And, in any case, there were reports that some African countries, such as Tanzania and Angola, were indeed mobilizing peacekeepers to send to Zimbabwe.
Surely then, I thought, the world would focus on this critical situation and lives would be saved. I had bolstered my profile with a major newspaper, enhancing my ability to get future work published for my clients. And my client in this case must have been pleased, since I had given his case such volume and reach.
An email from The Guardian later in the morning informed me that Tsvangirai’s office was saying the article was “wrong” and “causing problems.” The Comment page editor was in a tizzy and the newspaper ethics committee had been mobilized. I felt crushed.
My first impulse was to check everything. Doing so was important for the credibility of Tsvangirai, who, as the only viable opposition to Mugabe, was crucial to Zimbabwe’s future. There had to be an explanation. The PR in me kicked in: We needed to find a credible counter-narrative to remove the stain of potential disaster from me and from them.
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