Posted on 08/13/2002 6:35:30 AM PDT by Clive
"Let Mugabe count his threadbare blessings. They, and his corrupt henchmen, the richest neo-Maoists in the world, are just about all he’s got left"
Comment
President Mugabe of Zimbabwe sometimes seems to think that he is winning. Since the constitutional referendum of February 2000 he has lived in fear and craved two things: legitimacy and security. Ironically he has sought to impose legitimacy by force, less ironically he maintains his security the same way. So is it working? In recent weeks we have certainly seen actions on the part of Zanu PF that imply a new sense of confidence.
Mugabe has, once again, declared that he will only accept court rulings that he likes. He has continued his economically suicidal and illegal land programme as his people go hungry. The Kadoma mayoral election was the Zanu PF cocktail of intimidation, rigging and fraud mixed yet more strongly. The comical cases against Tsvangarai, Ncube and Gasela for treason and against Fletcher Ncube, arrested in his hospital bed where Zanu PF had put him, for murder, are to go to trial. Is this Mugabe resurgent?
Certainly there are broader themes that must warm his evil heart. He must realise now that he will receive nothing but support, overt or tacit from his fellow African leaders. Any utterance of his that might be construed to be placatory, or even just less than usually rabid, produces a chorus of sycophantic declarations that he has regained his senses and that now is the time for rapprochement, engagement and mediation. Any particularly vile act of unconstitutional savagery or folly produces the same fatuous chorus ventriloquising through their various ministers that Britain is to blame and that now is the time for rapprochement, engagement and mediation. It is upon these malleable stooges that the British Minister for Africa, Valerie Amos, has publicly pinned her hopes for change in Zimbabwe. Some hope.
Yet more important to President Mugabe must be the incredulous realisation that whatever he does the West will still feed Zimbabwe. This is splendid news. He has dismantled the engine of reliable agricultural production and given the parts to his supporters. He has settled all distribution on the GMB, an organisation that now exists to enrich senior Zanu PF officers and feed the Zanu PF foot soldiers. His ministers are proud to announce that food will only go to Zanu PF supporters and that the MDC will starve, even that only those who support Zanu PF have the right to live.
Yet still the aid maize pours in, freeing up Mugabe to spend his hard-stolen cash on important things like arms and pay-offs for the army and police and to maintain his stumbling youth brigades. This last is most important: rumour has it that there are a couple of families in Mutorashanga who haven’t been beaten senseless for months now and one can’t have that kind of sloppiness. Better still, it now transpires that the UNDP now plans to give some Zimbabwean banks (run by Mugabe’s cronies) $85m US dollars which they will lend to licensed grain importers (Mugabe’s cronies) who will use the money to import food for Mugabe’s cronies. Why so complicated? Far simpler just to make cheques payable to Robert Gabriel Mugabe.
Mugabe and Zanu PF don’t even have to ask the bank managers of the West for a loan. They can just shout abuse, and beat people up, in the street outside the bank and still get the readies shovelled out through the windows. If you hear hysterical laughter as you drive to Borrowdale don’t worry – it’s just the Politburo celebrating their realisation that the white man really is as stupid as they’ve always thought.
Far from supporting British nationals and their ‘kith and kin’ the white farmers, the UK, or at least the British government, has sought to distance itself as far as possible from such embarrassing relatives. Mugabe now surely realises that Valerie Amos’s priority is to avoid being accused of racism or colonialism. That’s it. Under such circumstances to watch, listlessly, the destruction of white-run businesses by an illegitimate regime, and then leap in to feed, probably indefinitely, the Zimbabweans left destitute makes perfect sense.
So, a country on its belly in the dust, a people broken by hunger and fear, too hungry and tired to resist Mugabe’s subsidised thugs, a supine and malleable chorus of senior African statesman and a main ‘enemy’ hamstrung by its own tangled and hypocritical moralities. Should Mugabe contemplate this squad of grubby blessings and breathe a sigh of relief? He would be foolish to do so for that squad is outnumbered a thousand to one by the vast army of troubles that surrounds him.
For a start Mugabe is old and sick. Those who know him talk of the way that periods of energy and lucidity are interspersed with periods of apathy or incoherence. As journalist Fergal Keene memorably noted (speaking of Mugabe’s generals) ‘turkeys do not vote for Christmas’ but with every day that passes the enthusiasm grows to replace Mugabe with someone who looks a little less like Santa Claus. The Zanu PF regime that he heads is rotten with incompetence and jealousies. The only people that support it are the people that are directly paid by it: army, police, youth brigades, squatters, hired rabble and profiteers, drunk on injected resentment, greedy for plunder. Mugabe has to carry through the days the secret humiliation of being thrashed in two consecutive elections by a brand new party headed by a political novice. Even wholesale intimidation was not enough and Mugabe’s henchmen had to pull out all the stops to steal the counts. Should Mugabe ever suffer self- knowledge he will know himself to be one of the most loathed despots in the world, within his country and beyond it. No amount of fraternal embraces with uninterested third world leaders is going to change that.
Then there is the little matter of the economy and the yawning gap where it used to be. The West may be able to apply copious sticking plaster but it cannot heal the wounds where Mugabe has sought to amputate the agricultural sector, nor revive the withered stumps that were once tourism and manufacturing. Mugabe does not have enough hard currency to repay his creditors and that is an embarrassment that will become yet more pressing as the tobacco money dries up and the mining revenue continues to decline. Zimbabwe is bankrupt. A bankrupt dictator has two options if he is to survive: to isolate his country or to find some new source of forex. Mugabe cannot do the former and there are ominous signs on the latter front that the Libyans are getting weary of pouring in money and oil and getting nothing back. After all, it’s not as if they’re the EU. The Army and the Police, (not the US dollar-insulated upper ranks of course) grow weary of being paid in increasingly worthless bits of paper. And we, the 99% of Zimbabweans worse off, hard up and increasingly desperate, we know who to blame for our misery. It certainly isn’t George W Bush. We know, as well, that things are not going to improve until Mugabe goes.
But worst of all, most bitter of all for Mugabe must be the complete failure of his land programme. When he found his security threatened in 2000 he raised high the old flag of land, a cause so emotive that it justified murder, illegality and famine. It has, he claims, won him two elections. But where is his army of new farmers? Here and there there are handfuls of squatters growing crops or preparing land. More common are areas where tides of squatters flow in and out, some squatting in new-built huts but without the means, or the inclination, to farm.
Most common of all are swathes of land the commercial farmers, who own them, are forbidden to farm but which are now empty of anything but abandoned huts, relics of one disastrous squatter season. The squatters have gone home. Just as bad, it is increasingly clear that most of the A2 farmers know nothing of farming and have no intention of trying. Why should they risk their capital if the banks won’t? A nice house in the country, a dacha, yes. But risking money hard won through tough years as a politburo secretary? All those gruelling lunches in the Monomotapa Hotel? Not on your life – not when you have to rely on buffoons like Agriculture Minister Made or the even more ludicrous Ignatius Chombo. Mugabe called for a crusade and only the profiteers and the down and outs came, the people who will always welcome the chance to blame their individual failures on a defenceless, and relatively prosperous, minority.
This provokes an interesting question: if Mugabe won two elections through the support of those who yearned to farmland they believed stolen from them – where have they gone? Can it be that, as surveys showed before the elections, what people really care about are employment, health care, AIDS, education and inflation? If so there are two explanations for Mugabe’s victories: one is a strong vote from the ‘we’d like to be starved/beaten up/raped/dispossessed some more’ lobby; the other is that Zanu PF fixed the elections. I think we know the answer to that one.
Mugabe has failed to silence the free press, to muzzle all the judges and magistrates, to drive the farmers from the land and to crush the MDC which, like some aggressive vine, grows yet more strongly underground. Mugabe’s regime is broke with no prospect of being anything else. He himself may be able to have remote peasants beaten up or killed but he can’t even control his own finance minister. Worst of all he can contemplate a smashed and hungry country and know that we all know its condition to be his fault. Completely. Given a choice between his country and himself he unreservedly embraced the latter. We all know that too. Let Mugabe count his threadbare blessings. They, and his corrupt henchmen, the richest neo-Maoists in the world, are just about all he’s got left.
"He eats alone."
Therein lies the problem. The incredibly stupid white Western liberals turn a blind eye because this goes against all their *teaching*. It does remind me of white Western liberals trying to deny the mass-murdering in Pol Pot's marxist Cambodian regime, and then liberals like Noam Chomsky saying that IF it happened, it was the U.S.'s fault somehow.
If by some miracle, the world press could focus on the self-induced mass starvation that is and will be going on in Zimbabwe, maybe pressure could be brought to bear. But it won't happen as Mugabe is a third-world marxist dictator, and the liberal lock-step, mindless training teaches the Euro and U.S. media to do the liberal version of a "Seig Heil!"
BUMP!
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