Posted on 08/06/2002 3:08:00 AM PDT by Clive
Mugabe has a magical spell. It bewitches his fellow African leaders into acquiescent stooges, and much of the West into embarrassed inaction, every time. It is this: “My people were wronged by colonialism.” Who perpetrated this great wrong? According to Zimbabwe’s president, it is the tiny and shrinking band of white commercial farmers, that’s who. Hence the ‘Third Chimurenga’, or ‘War for Land’.
A quorum of African leaders, Mbeki, Chissano, Obasanjo, seem to believe that the land issue justifies Mugabe’s extraordinary war of terror against his own people and the desolation of the very land he claims. For many long months European and American journalists and politicians fell under Mugabe’s spell and shielded him from criticism or action. Even now the agonising fear that Mugabe will brand his critics as ‘racists’ or ‘neo-colonialists’ turns western governments to stone, an effect seemingly not achieved by Saddam Hussein or the Taleban.
The truth is, of course, utterly different. The white commercial farmers of Zimbabwe have every bit as much right to their farms as has the Japanese to his Tokyo flat or the merchant banker to his terraced house in Mayfair. For the most part they have been amongst the heroes, not the villains, of the last, deranged, 30 months. They were the foundations of Zimbabwe’s economic structure; if Zimbabwe is to survive as a viable nation, so must they.
At a Zanu PF rally earlier this year it was purported that in 1890 Rhodes’s pioneer column took by force not a sparsely inhabited area of uncertain boundaries, but a great nation of successful farms. By our contemporary standards the actions of Rhodes and his followers, even as they carved prosperous farmland from the bush, were wrong (as, presumably, was the contemporary genocide of the Shona by the Ndbele), as was the subsequent disenfranchisement of the vast majority of the African population by educational and property qualification, and a distribution of land over- favourable to the white commercial farmer.
But, by 1980, there were few direct beneficiaries of the original distributions alive; if there were sins associated with the commercial farmers, they were very much the sins of their fathers. By 2000 this was even more the case, many farmers, perhaps a majority, having bought their farms in recent times with large loans and, latterly, with certificates of no interest from the government. And the balance of land ownership had shifted markedly – the big commercial farms counting for little more than 20% of the national area, a moderate proportion by the standards of many nations. The commercial farms occupied some, but by no means all, of the good farm land – often-good commercial management made poor land viable whilst subsistence agriculture, and a lack of title deeds, soon exhausted communal lands. Most important of all the supposed reconciliation of 1980, and the associated constitution, forbade discrimination on the ground of race, and enshrined property rights. Thereafter it should have been not just unconstitutional but illegal to distinguish between a black commercial farmer and a white one. Mugabe not only accepted it, but also propounded it. At the time.
This has long posed a problem for the UK and other powers who acknowledge, when pressed, that they cannot fund a re-allocation of land based upon the skin colour of its owner. Instead they take refuge in uneasy theories about a re- allocation of land to reduce poverty, increasing the number of commercial farms but lowering their hectarage (the models were never very distinct). The farmers, for understandable reasons, also subscribed to land reform with mixed results. Farms did move from white to black hands under these schemes but not always to the right black hands.
The 1998 donors conference provided a sensible and optimistic programme for further re- distribution. In parallel the commercial farmers were making a formal programme less necessary through their sponsorship of a new generation of black Zimbabwean talent – not just managers and, subsequently, owners but also in the varied agricultural support services. They also provided islands of accommodation and facilities, education and healthcare amidst Mugabe’s increasingly arid public systems. By 2020 commercial agriculture in Zimbabwe would undoubtedly have lost any distinctively white aspect. Zimbabwe had, for a time, a template for Africa.
Then, in February 2000, everything changed. To save his discredited political hide Mugabe turned on the architects of his prosperity. Commercial farmers became “enemies of the state”, “a disgrace to the nation”, “Nazis”, and even terrorist manufacturers of anthrax. “It’s war,” cried Mugabe’s unlamented lieutenants, Border Gezi and Hitler Hunzvi. Farmers were murdered, sometimes by agents of the state, their farms invaded, their homes ransacked, their equipment smashed or stolen and their rights trampled in the dirt with those of their beaten workers. When the courts protested at this unconstitutional rampage, the judges were first ignored and then replaced with Mugabe’s cronies. It became an arrestable offence for a white farmer to visit a police station. With the mobs came the most senior officials and politicians of the state: generals, judges, ambassadors, politburo members, even Chiwewe, Zimbabwe’s senior diplomat and negotiator, spitting racial hate and plundering shamelessly.
As the final, and unkindest cut of all, Mugabe corrupted the hitherto loyal workforces, demanding that bankrupt farmers not only leave but also pay massive state-decreed pay-offs to their workers, the latter terrified and desperate as Mugabe’s howling emptiness closes around them. “The land is ours,” screamed Mugabe. By the same argument New York must be returned to the Manhattan Indian, Sydney to the Aborigines, and Zimbabwe…..to the Bushmen the Shona displaced in about 900 AD.
Some misguided observers have noted that it is unfortunate that the West has been obsessed with the farmers, not Mugabe’s numerous other victims. This is absurd. Tony Blair and his diplomats have fastidiously shunned any association with their kith, their kin, their nationals or anyone else who might claim acquaintance. For two years the West lifted not a finger to help the farmers. Having made the inexcusable, and diplomatically insane concession that land is at the core of Zimbabwe’s crisis last year, British Foreign Minister Jack Straw now shrugs and says there is nothing he can do.
However, now that the destruction of the farms has conjured famine out of a once prosperous land it is, so says, Foreign Ministry official Baroness Amos, Britain’s “moral obligation” to feed the starving. Saving the farmers would, presumably, have been colonial. Replacing them with aid is a moral obligation. Western aid now flows to the same people who, in the past two years, have destroyed crops, sabotaged or stolen farm machinery, and shut down farms.
Whilst Israel’s conflict with Palestine fuels furious debate in England, a bare handful of ruling party Labour MPs turn up to the British Parliament when the Conservative Party debates Zimbabwe. Andrew Young, former US representative to the UN, is quoted by Mugabe’s press as saying that the farmers should burn in hell for their impudence. Ghaddafi wants them to pay up and flee. Even the UNDP, godparent of sustainable development, becomes morally ambivalent in Zimbabwe. What horrible crime have these commercial farmers committed? They have put far more back into Zimbabwe in expertise and revenue and education and prosperity than they have ever taken from it. They have been successful businessmen and women in an African country. Tony Blair does not seem to have that problem with Asian businessmen in England.
And yet, despite these tides of hate and indifference 75% of the white farmers hang on: battered, barricaded and broke. As the much- vaunted new middle classes of Zimbabwe have fled to new lives abroad, the farmers have clung to their homes and to their people. This coming week Mugabe plans to arrest nearly two thousand of them for just that crime. Courteous, unpretentious, pragmatic people, the farmers have not taken up arms, but instead have turned grimly, time and again, to the police, Mugabe’s most enthusiastic accomplices, and to the law, now near fatally infected with Mugabe’s parasites. Many farmers have been brave, some have been heroic. Yet still no one speaks for them.
There is only one valid response to Mugabe’s land grab and that is that it is wrong: immoral, unconstitutional, illegal, racist. Equally there is only one solution and that is a complete return to the land situation as it was in December 1999. Once Mugabe’s imminent demise is concluded, those farmers still on their farms should be encouraged to resume farming. Those displaced must return or, if they cannot face it, must receive the promise of a full and fair compensation. Mugabe’s evils will not begin to seep away until this has been achieved.
Zimbabwe’s prosperous agricultural sector was built upon a complex foundation of dams and water rights, barn capacities and crop rotations, veterinary disciplines and land management. You cannot destroy such a system and then rebuild it in a year or even a decade. Commercial agriculture stands between Zimbabwe and a future as an aid junkie, a dependent nation trashed by yet another African madman. White farmers are not anachronisms from a distant colonial past, they are amongst the guardians of Zimbabwe’s future viability. They have every right in the world to be so. Now, in their darkest hour, it is time for the world to acknowledge their value, and rights, and reach out to help them.
Documenting the deluge.
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