Julian Assange Sits Back While Zimbabwe Sets Back

As Julian Assange secures $1.5 million in book deals, supposedly to help pay his legal fees to fight the sexual assault charges against him in Sweden, Wikileaks has brought a major blow to the prospects for democracy in Zimbabwe, a country that has been on a painfully slow climb towards democratic government under the drawn out tyranny of Robert Mugabe. Like other tyrants, Wikileaks plays right into the sinister agenda of a clinging dictator like Mugabe, as detailed by Christopher Albon today in The Atlantic:

The topic of the meeting was the sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by a collection of western countries, including the U.S. and E.U. Tsvangirai told the western officials that, while there had been some progress in the last year, Mugabe and his supporters were dragging their feet on delivering political reforms. To overcome this, he said that the sanctions on Zimbabwe "must be kept in place" to induce Mugabe into giving up some political power. The prime minister openly admitted the incongruity between his private support for the sanctions and his public statements in opposition. If his political adversaries knew Tsvangirai secretly supported the sanctions, deeply unpopular with Zimbabweans, they would have a powerful weapon to attack and discredit the democratic reformer.

Later that day, the U.S. embassy in Zimbabwe dutifully reported the details of the meeting to Washington in a confidential U.S. State Department diplomatic cable. And slightly less than one year later, WikiLeaks released it to the world.

The reaction in Zimbabwe was swift. Zimbabwe's Mugabe-appointed attorney general announced he was investigating the Prime Minister on treason charges based exclusively on the contents of the leaked cable. While it's unlikely Tsvangirai could be convicted on the contents of the cable alone, the political damage has already been done. The cable provides Mugabe the opportunity to portray Tsvangirai as an agent of foreign governments working against the people of Zimbabwe. Furthermore, it could provide Mugabe with the pretense to abandon the coalition government that allowed Tsvangirai to become prime minister in 2009.

Read the full story here.

Lauryn Oates is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist.