Why Zimbabwe’s military sticks with Mugabe

Zimbabwe’s military will continue to support President Robert Mugabe and his Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front and unless a large faction of the military defects to the opposition, the ZANU-PF government will be able to prevent a broad, violent challenge to its rule for the foreseeable future, a United States publication says.

Foreign Affairs, which describes itself as the leading magazine for analysis and debate of foreign policy, economics and global affairs, says in its latest edition: “To be sure, protesters have already clashed with the police and ZANU-PF partisans. But even if the violence continues, it likely will not lead to a real civil war so long as the ZDF is under the firm control of loyal officers.”

The magazine says there are three key reasons why the military will stick with Mugabe and ZANU-PF.

“The first source of the civil-military cohesion is ideological. During the liberation war, ZANU’s leaders indoctrinated the group’s membership with a shared set of values—an unusual blend of Marxism-Leninism and traditional spiritualism—in order to maintain discipline in the ranks and boost its appeal among the peasantry. The group went further than most armed movements to instill its revolutionary ethos among its members by, for example, attaching political commissars to each of its guerrilla detachments. These ideological foundations became a source of solidarity and common identity among civilian and military officials after independence,” it says.

“Second, during the war, ZANU exploited crises to unify its military and political leaderships. The pressures of conflict can make insurgent movements implode, often by encouraging political and military figures to turn against one another. But in ZANU’s case, civilian leaders and frontline commanders worked together for their movement’s survival. Their cooperation eventually became routine, creating trust—and a shared responsibility for policymaking—between civilian and military elites.

“ZANU was pushed to the brink of defeat a number of times in its war against the Rhodesian state. The pressure reached its apex in 1975, when the organization was reeling from the assassination of its party chairman and co-founder, Herbert Chitepo, the imprisonment of its military leaders in Zambia, and the widespread infiltration of the group by agents of the government of Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith. To stave off ZANU’s collapse, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, the movement’s military wing, consolidated its authority and cut back on defections by doubling down on military discipline.

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