The world’s attention towards Africa could not be more peripatetic. Last month, the battered face of the leader of Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change, Morgan Tsvangirai, was beamed around the world after President Mugabe’s thugs tortured the former trade unionist and shattered his skull. Western governments condemned the action, editorial pages disapproved of it, and the world quickly moved on.

But the past two weeks have seen a further deterioration in the situation. Reports are scarce because of a ban on foreign press entering Zimbabwe. Suspected opponents of Mugabe have been abducted and tortured, and a cameraman suspected of smuggling out video of the violent crackdowns has been murdered. This state-sanctioned violence has been only a piece of a new defiance emerging from the Mugabe regime; last week the state-controlled newspaper, the Herald, warned the British political attaché in Zimbabwe, Gillian Dare, that she risked “going home in a body bag.”

It has become de riguer among the press to call on South Africa, the regional power and, at present, Zimbabwe’s lifeline, to act. Newspapers ranging from the Los Angeles Times to the Wall Street Journal have reprimanded South Africa for its silence and complicity in Mr. Mugabe’s crimes. These remonstrations are necessary and right, but no matter how much international outrage there is over the horrors of Zimbabwe, there is little hope that South Africa will ever do anything close to what the West wants it to do.

To understand why, it is essential to comprehend the history of the African National Congress, which has ruled South Africa since the country’s first postapartheid election in 1994, and its relationship to Mr. Mugabe’s Zimbabwean African National Union-Patriotic Front.

ZANU-PF is not just a Tammany Halllike political club; it is the liberation movement that wrested Zimbabwe from colonial oppression, and thus, it is more than just the unquestioned savior of the Zimbabwean people. It is the state itself, according to the dictates of African politics.

As early as the 1970’s, when he was fighting the Bush War against Rhodesia’s white minority regime of Ian Smith, Mr. Mugabe was endorsing the notion of the one-party state. The faction fights that he instigated with his guerilla comrade, Joshua Nkomo, waged on after Mr. Mugabe became prime minister in 1980. Despite what those in the Carter administration, who played a major role in legitimizing Mr. Mugabe over the moderate bishop, Abel Muzorewa, wanted to believe, Mr. Mugabe was no democrat and had no pretensions to be viewed as such. Since achieving power, he has done everything to confirm that he will not tolerate opposition.

The African National Congress was the political movement that led the fight against a racist regime and was catapulted into power not just because of the charismatic leadership of Nelson Mandela but also because it could rightfully claim a great deal of responsibility for ending apartheid. While South Africa is a fully functioning democracy with opposition parties, this rubric exists in spite, not because of, the ANC.

The ANC would prefer that no opposition exist, and when the ruling party does acknowledge the leading opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, it is acknowledged as a “neo-Nazi,” “racist,” or, perhaps more charitably, a “neo-colonialist” organization.

The ANC sees itself implicated in the story of ZANU-PF. The fact that Zimbabwe’s ruling party is violent and thuggish might act as a self-comforting mask for South Africa’s more benign leadership, but the ruling parties in both countries do not differ significantly in their attitude towards their roles within the political structure of their respective countries. If black Zimbabweans are successful in overturning ZANU-PF, then it will raise frightful questions for the ANC about whether it too merits continued black support.

But Mr. Mugabe knows his fellow African leaders well. Departing a conference of the Southern Africa Development Community earlier this month, he told the press, “We got full backing; not even one [SADC leader] criticized our actions.” Most ironic about this fiasco is that the ANC — which demanded that the international community drop everything it was doing and end apartheid — has taken the completely opposite track towards its very own neighbor, where a black despot is inflicting crimes against his own people far worse than anything the racist regime in Pretoria ever committed.

The most that the embattled Zimbabwean opposition can hope for is that the president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, will quietly pressure Mr. Mugabe to move from the presidency to a ceremonial position. This would allow another ZANU-PF official to take the helm for the country’s 2008 presidential elections. The move would serve the ANC’s goals of deflecting the world’s attention from Mr. Mugabe, while also preserving the political power of its sister liberation movement.

At this point, anything is better than Mr. Mugabe. But the ANC’s complicity in his atrocities over the past seven years is something that no act of diplomacy can salvage.

Mr. Kirchick, who reported from Zimbabwe last year, is the assistant to the editor in chief of the New Republic.