Mr. Mugabe's Deal

Zimbabwe's political compromise leaves a strongman in power. So why should Western governments support it?

ON ITS FACE, Zimbabwe's political agreement delivers everything that President Robert Mugabe could have wished for. Though he lost the presidential election in March, the 84-year-old strongman will get another term as president. Though he managed to reverse the election results by orchestrating a campaign of murder and terror against the opposition, he will still command the armed forces and have the power to declare martial law. He will head the cabinet, and his party will have more ministers than any other. But he will hand off management of his country's catastrophic economic crisis to opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who will have the task of persuading Western countries to lift sanctions and resume aid -- something that Mr. Mugabe could never hope to accomplish.

It's no surprise that an agreement brokered by Mr. Mugabe's longtime apologist and enabler, South African President Thabo Mbeki, is aimed mainly at rescuing his autocratic regime. But what will it do for Zimbabwe's desperate and increasingly food-deprived population? That's much harder to discern from the text of the agreement or the statements made by Mr. Tsvangirai and Mr. Mugabe. At best, the army and Mr. Mugabe's paramilitary thugs will end a campaign of violence that has killed more than 200 people and driven tens of thousands from their homes. Aid groups may regain the ability to supply the hungry; the Red Cross estimates that 2 million are now short of food and that the number could rise to 5 million -- nearly half the population -- by the end of the year.

What Zimbabwe's accord will not do is restore democracy or even lay out a clear path toward it. It will not hold Mr. Mugabe's thugs accountable for their murders, rapes and torching of homes. It will not reverse the disastrous seizure of large, white-owned commercial farms, a policy that in the space of less than a decade has transformed the country from an African breadbasket into an economic wasteland with an official inflation rate of 11 million percent. The agreement even reiterates Mr. Mugabe's ludicrous demand that Britain pay dispossessed farmers for the land he stole.

That's why Western governments have been right to greet the agreement with caution. The Bush administration has offered to deliver emergency food aid, while reserving judgment on whether the new government will merit support. The European Union has explicitly linked a resumption of aid to "steps to restore democracy and the rule of law in Zimbabwe, particularly by organizing transparent multiparty elections." It's hard to imagine those steps taking place while Mr. Mugabe remains in office. But until they do, Western governments should not support a regime whose principal purpose may be to secure their financial support without meeting their demands for fundamental political change.