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Mugabe’s Enablers
Guest Column | By Rael Jean Isaac | June 30, 2008
Disgust
with Zimbabwe's villainous strongman Robert Mugabe has now mounted to
the point that even his strongest ally, South African President Thabo
Mbeki, has felt impelled to permit a watered down statement condemning
the Mugabe government's "campaign of violence against the political
opposition" to be passed by the UN Security Council. (Mbeki blocked a
stronger statement, proposed by the U.S. and Britain, that would in
effect have recognized opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai as
Zimbabwe's President.) But despite bold rhetoric, especially from
Britain (Prime Minister Gordon Brown called the Mugabe government "a
criminal and discredited cabal"), the fact remains that
well-intentioned Western democracies, no less than Mugabe's thus-far
open supporters (the African Union, the South African Development
Conference, China, Russia), continue to serve as enablers for this Big
Man of Africa.
But first, some background. Mugabe came to power
in 1980 as a revolutionary leader who brought down the white-led regime
in what was then Southern Rhodesia. After putting down a tribal
rebellion in the 1980s (in which Mugabe's forces massacred 20,000
Ndebele civilians) Mugabe was essentially unopposed until 1999 when his
ruling African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu PF) faced a serious
electoral challenge from the new Movement for Democratic Change led by
Morgan Tsvangirai, formerly head of the trade-union federation. Feeling
his hold on power slip away, Mugabe responded with a constitutional
referendum that would have expanded his powers and extended his term of
office by 10 years. The referendum also proposed a novel mode of "land
reform:" the country's large commercial farms would be seized without
compensation and divided among landless peasants.
Despite
Zimbabwe's mineral wealth, its economy depended on agriculture -75% of
its people, directly or indirectly, made their livelihood from it.
Thanks to its large, mainly white-owned commercial farms, the country
produced a surplus of wheat and corn and was the world's second largest
exporter - after Brazil - of flue-cured tobacco, which provided a
healthy amount of foreign exchange. Zimbabwe was dubbed the breadbasket
of southern Africa, with the UN's World Food Program regularly buying
part of its surplus to distribute elsewhere on the continent.
In
a stinging blow to Mugabe, his referendum was defeated on Feb. 26,
2000. That is the date on which Zimbabwe's economic destruction can be
fixed, for Mugabe decided to press ahead with land redistribution,
seeing in this a way to shore up his sinking popularity. Groups calling
themselves "war veterans" - a nod to the struggle against the Ian Smith
government two decades earlier - marched on a number of farms, pulling
down fences, "pegging" their property claims, setting up makeshift huts
and ordering the owners out. Most of the "veterans" were in their teens
or twenties, at best infants in 1980.
In African Tears,
Cathy Buckle, one of the first white farmers whose land was invaded,
wrote a first-hand account of her ordeal. Buckle and her husband, their
seven-year-old son, and their workers would hang on for six months,
trying to continue their normal pursuits, while the "veterans" camped
on their land, cut down their timber, killed their animals, brutally
attacked their workers - one was maimed by a burning hot steel rod
shoved against her mouth - and threatened Buckle at gunpoint. Soon five
competing groups were claiming the property, each clamoring at the
gate. One drunken leader shrieked: "This is my farm. This is my fields.
This is my cows. This is my ostrich." Brandishing a gun, he bragged to
Buckle that he could drop her at 40 paces. The police, repeatedly
called for help, would respond that it was "a political matter."
Finally,
at the edge of bankruptcy, their prize poultry killed by the squatters,
their cattle brutally butchered, their timber and much of their land
burned in fires set by the invaders, the Buckles threw in the towel. In
a sense they were lucky. None of them were physically harmed. Other
farmers were beaten, maimed, shot, hacked to death. y the time the
ordeal was over, Buckle wrote: "We all begin to feel more than a little
like the Jews who were stripped of their human rights, their property
rights, and then their lives in Nazi Germany."
By March 2002
the government had seized 95% of commercial farmland, by the next year
they had seized 97%. Most of the "war veterans" themselves were soon
evicted by police, army units and hired thugs on behalf of a Who's Who
in Zanu-PF, from the chief justice to Mugabe's sister to the police
commissioner and a host of lesser notables, who seized the prime farms.
In a mere two years, Zimbabwean agriculture, and with it the country's
economy, disintegrated. Over half a million black farm workers and
their families were destitute, many of them living by the roadside or
in the bush. In 2002 the World Bank reported that millions faced
starvation, unemployment stood at 80%; and a third of the population
suffered from AIDS, with the death toll reaching 2,000 people a week.
Tobacco production, the chief source of foreign exchange, had dropped
to 70,000 tons, little over a fourth of what it had been only two years
earlier. (By 2008 the situation had deteriorated to the point that
farmers, black and white, tore up their tobacco crop in protest on the
auction floor and pulled out of the sale as state price controls set
the price at levels far below the cost of production.)
The
reaction of the West to this Mugabe-induced famine was to feed its
victims. Charitable organizations like Save the Children and CARE vied
with the UN's World Food Program (to which the U.S. is by far the
largest contributor) to provide food and other forms of humanitarian
aid. Since no conditions were placed on the aid - no demands for
economic or political reforms - Mugabe was free to pursue policies that
made ever more of his people dependent on that aid for survival. The
more he devastates the economy, the more people Mugabe can count on the
West to feed. Fully half Zimbabwe's remaining population now requires
international food aid. (It is estimated that between three and five
million people of an original population of 13 million have fled the
country and their remittances from abroad feed at least a million
more.)
Those trying to navigate in the "normal" economy have
their work cut out for them. Hyper-inflation has reached insane
proportions. In May 2008 the annual rate of inflation was 1,063,572%
based on prices of a basket of basic food stuffs. In 1980, when the
Zimbabwean dollar was initiated, it was worth more than the U.S.
dollar. Today you need 8.2 billion Zimbabwean dollars to purchase one
U.S. dollar (and the number soars as I write). Not that most people
could put together a basic food basket. Store shelves emptied in
response to the government's "solution" of declaring inflation
"illegal" and arresting store owners who raised prices.
But
even though the West makes no condition for its aid, Mugabe imposes
conditions for its distribution. While the West sees the aid as
"apolitical," Mugabe has repeatedly used it for his own political ends,
making food available at election time only to those who commit to vote
for Zanu-PF. In May of this year Mugabe ordered relief agencies to hand
over food and other humanitarian assistance to state organs for
distribution to victims of political violence. For a time Mugabe
outlawed the NGOs from operating altogether, accusing them of aiding
the opposition, and while he eventually backed down publicly, "war
veterans" and Zanu-PF militia have continued to block relief agencies
and Aids service organizations from reaching areas where it was most
needed (notably, where voters tended to support the rival Movement for
Democratic Change). Longer term, Mugabe seeks to transfer control of
food distribution from aid agencies to village headmen, i.e. into his
personal web of patronage.
That there is any food grown
commercially at all, that Zimbabwe has not sunk totally into
subsistence farming, is due to the remaining 3 % of commercial farmland
operated by 500 white farmers (out of the original nearly 5,000) who
managed to cling to at least part of their farms. But now Mugabe has
been sending his goons to eliminate these last remnants. Ben Freeth,
who courageously appealed to the South Africa Development Council
Tribunal to declare Zimbabwe's land reforms racist and illegal, sent
out a letter on June 20th recounting his family's current ordeal. "We
were made very aware of impending problems on our Mount Carmel farm
before it even started...People were told that Mt. Carmel cattle and
potatoes would be dished out to them. The election campaign is being
fought on ‘one hundred percent empowerment' i.e. taking everything that
belongs to people who are not black and giving it to Party faithful."
Freeth describes the rally Mugabe held in their little town of Chegutu.
"It turned out that anyone who they believed had been polling agents at
polling stations was covered in cold water. We had frost that morning
and it was cold. They were then told to beat each other with sticks
while the crowd egged them on. The noise went on for a few hours." The
farm was left without electricity and cell phone networks ceased to
operate. "We were left with no communications and our way out onto the
main road was sealed off by a road block. We prayed and read psalm
118." His appeals to the police were met with the response that they
could not react as it was an "issue of land."
While the
beatings, maimings, murders and intimidation perpetrated by Mugabe in
the wake of his electoral defeat have finally focused world attention
on Zimbabwe, for those who followed the last election, as Yogi Berra
might say, it's déjà vu all over again. In the run-up to the 2002
Presidential elections, Morgan Tsvangirai was seized and tried for
treason. (This time round Tendai Biti, the Movement for Democratic
Change's secretary general, has been imprisoned and accused of
treason.) In 2002 government thugs monitored food lines, beating anyone
who was not a card-carrying ZANU-PF supporter. Many hundreds were
beaten and hospitalized for their injuries; one woman was raped with a
rifle butt. Teenaged "Green Bombers" were trained in special "youth
education" camps to beat, rape and murder suspected opposition
supporters; some, hating the brutality they were forced into, fled to
South Africa to tell their story to the South African press. Mugabe
boasted that he would not hesitate to act like a "black Hitler,"
declaring "If that is a Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold." (This
time round, true to his promise, Mugabe has employed the same
techniques tenfold.)
Mugabe announced several years ago that it
was "laughable" to say his land reform program had failed. From his
point of view, perhaps it was a success. It enhanced his status
as a liberation hero throughout Africa where he was celebrated for
ousting the white farmer, never mind that those who lost their
livelihood were overwhelmingly ordinary black citizens. (Repentant
South African novelist Zakes Mda recently described the rousing welcome
Africans from across the continent gave Mugabe in 2002 when he
addressed the World Summit on Sustainable Development. "Here was a
government doing what our own was afraid to: dealing with the problems
of inequitable distribution through one short, swift surgical action.
Here was a black man giving the former colonial masters the finger.")
At home, Mugabe's "land reform" gave him leverage over the previously
independent judiciary, many of whom he corrupted by handing them seized
farms and cemented his hold on assorted political and military
officials, their allegiance also bought with stolen farms, and now
dependent on Mugabe to hang on to them. And, a bonus slap to Western
imperialists, they had now assumed the burden of feeding the population
whose sustenance he had destroyed.
All this is not to say that
feeding Zimbabwe's starving millions is wrong. It is to say that
unconditionally feeding those millions, with no more than feeble
symbolic gestures to sanction the regime, fosters self-righteousness in
the West, and does nothing substantive to rescue the longsuffering
population of Zimbabwe from an increasingly megalomaniacal Mugabe
("Only God who appointed me will remove me") and the truly vicious
coterie that surrounds him. For if the Mugabe regime is reproducing its
behavioral pattern, so too is the West in danger of repeating its own
flaccid and failed response.
In reaction to the massive fraud
and intimidation of the 2002 Presidential elections, the commonwealth
suspended Zimbabwe's membership. An arms embargo was initiated.
So-called "smart sanctions" were instituted, specifically targeting top
regime officials, including Mugabe, who were not permitted to travel
within the EU or to hold financial accounts there. President Bush, on
his first visit to Africa in July 2003 solemnly turned over the
Zimbabwe problem to the good offices of Thabo Mbeki, professing
confidence that he would deal with it.
The result? When the
commonwealth renewed its suspension, Mugabe defiantly left the
organization, further burnishing his anti-colonialist credentials.
China and South Africa became Mugabe's arms supplier. The smart
sanctions turned out to be silly and embarrassingly ignored. For
example, in February 2003 then-French President Jacques Chirac insisted
that they be "suspended" to bring Mugabe to Paris for a three day
Franco-Africa summit where Mugabe, along with his henchmen, was
installed in a 33-room hotel wing and reportedly dined on black
truffles, caviar and filet of pigeon. Yet more offensive, in June of
this year, even as food distribution was being outlawed and his thugs
were murdering scores of the leaders of rival parties and their family
members (the pregnant wife of Harare's new mayor was beaten so horribly
that her family could identify her body only by her clothes and hair),
Mugabe went to Rome for a UN conference on hunger(!) where he held
forth on the virtues of his "land reforms" and blamed the West for all
Zimbabwe's problems. As for Bush's assignment of Zimbabwe to South
Africa's President, Mbeki has simply acted as public relations agent
for Mugabe, his "quiet diplomacy," as Zakes Mda points out, better
described as "complicity."
And what is the West doing now?
Queen Elizabeth has stripped Mugabe of the honorary knighthood he
received in 1994. Prime Minister Brown announced proudly that Zimbabwe
would not be allowed to play cricket matches in England. (Even as Brown
told Parliament he did not want to see anything done that would prop up
Mugabe's regime, Anglo American was planning a $400 million investment
in Zimbabwe's platinum mines.) There is talk of more "smart" i.e.
useless, targeted sanctions. Hopes are again being placed in the South
Africa Development Conference although as long as Mbeki runs
interference for Mugabe, nothing can be expected there. In all this,
there is nothing to give Mugabe's government pause.
Lest the
democratic West merely wind up "enabling" Mugabe (and/or Zanu PF) for
six more years, it's time to go back to the drawing board. A UN force
is not in the cards for China would veto it. Given their fear of the
colonialism brush, the British are unlikely to do more than send in
planes (and sufficient soldiers) to remove Zimbabwe's white citizenry
of British descent should conditions deteriorate further. In the Wall Street Journal Paul Wolfowitz has provided a series of carrots that the West could
offer in the form of development aid, should Mugabe be removed and the
legitimately elected government led by Tsvangirai be installed. But
carrots will not sway the desperate men clinging to power in Zimbabwe.
South Africa and Mozambique between them could bring down the regime
for they provide most of Zimbabwe's electricity and their ports provide
the landlocked country with its access to the world. Barring armed
intervention - by far the quickest and most humanitarian solution -
perhaps a judicious combination of carrots and sticks by Western powers
could induce Zimbabwe's neighbors to impose targeted sanctions that are
likely to work.
Family Security Matters Contributing Editor Rael Jean Isaac is the editor of Outpost and the author of Madness in the Streets: How Psychiatry and the Law Abandoned the MentallyIll(with Virginia Armat).
Guest columns do not necessarily reflect the views of Accuracy in Media or its staff.
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