The Foreign Office cautioned against UK military intervention to overthrow the former Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe in 2004, advising it was not a “serious option”, recently released documents show.
Policy papers show Tony Blair’s government weighed up options on how best to handle the “depressingly healthy” 80-year-old dictator, who refused to step down while the country descended into violence and economic chaos.
Faced with Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party winning a 2005 election, and a year after the UK joined a US coalition to overthrow the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, No 10 asked the Foreign Office in July 2004 to produce options.
Officials agreed the UK’s policy of isolating Mugabe and building an international consensus for change was not working, and had not managed to secure support from key Africans, notably the then South African president Thabo Mbeki, documents released to the National Archives at Kew, west London, show.
Options outlined included: “seek to remove Mugabe by force”; “go for tougher UK measures” such as freezing assets and closing the UK embassy; or “re-engage”, the option advocated by the then outgoing ambassador to Zimbabwe, Brian Donnelly, according to the files.
The FCO paper dismissed military action as not a “serious option,” and advised: “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 wanted to change the situation on the ground in Zimbabwe we have to do to Mugabe what we have just done to Saddam.”
It adds: “The only candidate for leading such a military operation is the UK. No one else (even the US) would be prepared to do so”.
It warns that military intervention would result in heavy casualties and have “considerable implications” for British people in Zimbabwe.
“Short of a major humanitarian and political catastrophe – resulting in massive violence, large-scale refugee flows, and regional instability – we judge that no African state would agree to any attempts to remove Mugabe forcibly.”
It continues: “Nor do we judge that any other European, Commonwealth or western partner (including the US) would authorise or participate in military intervention. And there would be no legal grounds for doing so, without an authorising Security Council Resolution, which we would not get.”
Blair’s foreign policy adviser Laurie Lee warned him Zimbabwe “will be a real spoiler” to his plan to use the UK’s presidency of the G8 to make 2005 “the year of Africa” at a summit at Gleneagles. Lee concluded that as military action had been ruled out, “we probably have to accept that we must play the longer game” and re-engage with Mugabe.
Blair appeared to agree, writing: “We should work out a way of exposing the lies and malpractice of Mugabe and Zanu-PF up to this election and then afterwards, we could try-to re-engage on the basis of a clear understanding of what that means. So we could try a variant of what Brian D [Donnelly] says. I can see a way of making it work but we need to have the FCO work out a complete strategy”.
Donnelly, in his valedictory telegram, had advocated critical re-engagement with Mugabe, though understood Blair “might shudder at the thought given all that Mugabe has said and done”.
Mugabe was finally deposed in a 2017 coup, aged 93. Mbeki claimed in 2013 that in the early 2000s Blair had tried to pressurise him into joining a military coalition to overthrow Mugabe, a claim strongly denied by Blair.
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