Foreign Office cautioned against UK military action to overthrow Robert Mugabe | Robert Mugabe
Recently released documents show the Foreign Office warned against UK military intervention to oust former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe in 2004, advising it was not a “serious option”.
Policy papers show Tony Blair’s government is considering options on how best to deal with the “depressingly healthy” 80-year-old dictator, who has refused to resign as the country descends into violence and economic chaos.
Faced with the 2005 election win of Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party, and a year after Britain joined the US coalition to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, Number 10 asked the Foreign Office to come up with options in July 2004.
Officials agreed that the UK’s policy of isolating Mugabe and building an international consensus for change had not worked and had failed to gain support from key Africans, most notably South African President Thabo Mbeki. National Archives at Kew, West London, demonstration.
The options outlined included: “Trying to remove Mugabe by force”; “using tougher measures in the UK” such as freezing assets and closing the UK embassy; “Re-accession” or “re-accession”, which was the option advocated by Zimbabwe’s then ambassador Brian Donnelly, according to the files.
The FCO document rejected military action as “not a serious option” and recommended: “We know from Afghanistan, Iraq and Yugoslavia that changing a government and/or its bad policies is almost impossible from the outside. If we really want to change the situation on the ground in Zimbabwe, we must do the same thing to Mugabe as we did to Saddam.”
He adds: “The only candidate capable of leading such a military operation is Britain. No one else (not even the US) is prepared to do this.”
It warns that military intervention would cause heavy casualties and “have significant consequences” for the British population in Zimbabwe.
“We are of the opinion that no African state will accept any attempt to remove Mugabe by force, barring a major humanitarian and political disaster leading to major violence, large-scale refugee flows and regional instability.”
It continues: “We do not believe that any other European, Commonwealth or Western partner (including the United States) would authorize or participate in military intervention. Nor would there be any legal basis for doing so without an authorizing Security Council Resolution, which we cannot obtain.”
Blair’s foreign policy adviser, Laurie Lee, warned him that he “would be a real spoiler” in Zimbabwe’s plan to use the UK’s G8 presidency to make 2005 the “Year of Africa” at a summit in Gleneagles. Lee concluded that with the possibility of military action gone, “we should probably recognize that we have to play a longer game” and re-engage with Mugabe.
Blair seems to agree, writing: “We need to find a way to expose the lies and malpractices of Mugabe and Zanu-PF by this election, and then we can try to re-engage with a clear understanding of what that means. So we can try a version of what Brian D. said.” [Donnelly] he says. “I can see a way of making this work but we need the FCO to develop a full strategy.”
Donnelly had advocated a critical re-engagement with Mugabe in his farewell telegram, but understood that Blair “might shudder at the thought, given all that Mugabe has said and done”.
Mugabe was finally deposed in a coup in 2017, at the age of 93. Mbeki claimed in 2013 that Blair tried to pressure him to join a military coalition to oust Mugabe in the early 2000s; this claim was vehemently denied by Blair.
