Mugabe and Mbeki

Joe Lauria's got an interesting piece on Thabo Mbeki's "quiet diplomacy". It's hard to fathom how Mbeki makes sense of his position, given this exchange:

I asked him: "Do you feel you can be objective about Robert Mugabe, given his legendary status as a fighter against colonialism and the loyalty you might feel towards him that may make you unable to see what he is today, 30 years later?"

Mbeki scoffed at my question. "No, I've heard that story told. I think that one thing that could happen is that the people might credit us with the capacity to think. I know as much as you do," he said, "that when something is wrong, it is wrong. The fact that I came from the liberation struggle doesn't mean I can't recognize a wrong thing. So this argument, that because all of us come from liberation struggles, when something goes wrong, even in our own movement, we won't recognize it because of some loyalty to ourselves ... We are perfectly capable of recognizing something that is wrong."

Mbeki defended his "quiet diplomacy" to the hilt, widely denounced as enabling Mugabe. The furthest he would go with my question was: "There are many things wrong with the politics of Zimbabwe, otherwise why go mediate something that is right?"