UK thought of army overthrow of ‘depressingly healthy’ Robert Mugabe | EUROtoday

Military motion to take away Robert Mugabe was deemed not a “serious option” by the Foreign Office, regardless of mounting frustration inside Tony Blair’s authorities over the Zimbabwean dictator’s refusal to relinquish energy, newly-declassified recordsdata reveal.

Documents launched to the National Archives in Kew present that Downing Street pressed the Foreign Office to plot new methods to exert strain on Mugabe, as the previous British colony descended into widespread violence and financial chaos.

A No 10 adviser warned the prime minister that the deteriorating scenario might show a “real spoiler” to his ambition of creating 2005 “the year of Africa” on the Gleneagles G8 summit.

However, the Foreign Office was pressured to confess that few efficient avenues existed for intensifying strain on the veteran Zanu-PF chief who, at 80, remained “depressingly healthy” and decided to remain till he had secured a succession to his liking.

An choices paper, drawn up in July 2004, was fast to rule out any use of army pressure. A yr after the UK joined a US-led coalition to overthrow the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, it mentioned that this time Britain can be by itself if it tried to invade.

“The only candidate for leading such a military option is the UK. No one else (even the US) would be prepared to do so,” the paper mentioned.

“Any UK military intervention would result in heavy casualties (including on the UK side). Nor would there be any obvious end state or exit strategy.

“Short of a significant humanitarian and political disaster – leading to large violence, large-scale refugee flows and regional instability – we decide that no African state would comply with any makes an attempt to take away Mugabe forcibly.”

Thabo Mbeki, who was president of South Africa at the time, subsequently claimed that in the early 2000s, Mr Blair had tried to pressurise him into joining a military coalition to overthrow Mugabe.

Mr Blair strongly denied the claim, but the suggestion that military action had previously been mooted may explain why, in 2004, the Foreign Office was so quick to make clear that it was a non-starter.

The files show that Mr Blair was, however, attracted to a suggestion by the outgoing British ambassador Sir Brian Donnelly who urged him to engage with Mugabe to try to persuade him to step aside once parliamentary elections due in early 2005 were out of the way.

In a valedictory telegram to the prime minister’s foreign policy adviser Sir Nigel Sheinwald, he pointed to Mr Blair’s success in getting the Libyan dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to give up his weapons of mass destruction after years of being treated as a pariah by the West.

“I can effectively perceive why you and the Prime Minister would possibly shudder on the thought given all that Mugabe has mentioned and achieved,” he wrote.

“I additionally recognise Mugabe’s distinctive place in our demonology creates some particular issues with UK public and parliamentary opinion. It is a political name.

“All I can say is that you steeled yourself to do it with Gaddafi, another megalomaniac, often irrational de facto dictator. The payoff more than justified the effort.”

Mr Blair appeared to love the thought, writing: “We should work out a way of exposing the lies and malpractice of Zanu-PF up to the election and then afterwards, we could try to re-engage on the basis of a clear understanding of what that means.

“I can see a approach of creating it work however we would wish to have the FCO work out a whole technique.”

But Foreign Office officials in London were deeply sceptical warning such an approach had been tried before and failed, and would risk “trying like a U-turn for nothing”.

At the same time they warned imposing new sanctions, on top of the international measures already in place, would be counterproductive, hurting ordinary Zimbabweans while allowing Mugabe to persist in his “huge lie” that the UK was responsible for all the country’s woes.

More than two decades after the liberation struggle against white minority rule which brought him power, they concluded, Mugabe would not step aside without “overwhelming strain” and the only realistic course was to “hold agency” until he chose to go of his own accord.

Sir Brian’s successor, Rod Pullen wrote: “He just isn’t mad (as some recommend), neither is he merely clinging to energy out of worry (as others recommend). Rather he comes throughout as believing he has enterprise to complete.”

In the occasion, that enterprise was to stay unfinished for one more 13 years till he was lastly deposed in a coup in 2017 aged 93.