Zimbabwe -- Land reform a cover for Zanu war on opposition

Business Day (Zim) ^ | August 23, 2002 | Richard W Johnson

[Clive]

I HAVE spent the past two weeks in Zimbabwe, watching the surreal spectacle of white farmers being arrested, in the middle of a famine, for continuing to try to grow food on their land.

When asked how did it come to this, my mind drifts back to 1999 when Morgan Tsvangirai told me that he was planning to launch a new political party to fight President Robert Mugabe.

I agreed he could be sure of massive urban support, given his trade union connection, but asked how he planned to extend that into a countryside which was very much under Mugabe's thumb. The workers all go home to rural families, he said: they will spread the word.

And so it transpired but of course the job was easiest among the 2- million Zimbabweans, farm workers and their dependants, who lived on white-owned farms. When, in February 2000, Mugabe was defeated by 54% to 46% in his constitutional referendum the humiliated Zanu (PF) government spoke angrily of how farmers had driven lorry loads of farm workers to vote, implying that the farmers had somehow influenced their workers to vote the same way they had.

In fact as everyone knew when, at independence in 1980 the farmers had voted heavily against Mugabe and their workers massively for him, this had also ended all notions of farmers delivering the farm worker vote.

But the real point was that the world of the white farm was that part of the countryside which was least under Mugabe's thumb.

It was a milieu in which farmers' wives ran schools and charities for AIDS orphans. When famine struck the communal land areas Mugabe would ruthlessly link food handouts to the holding of Zanu (PF) membership cards but on white farms the farmers ensured workers and their families never starved without enquiring about their political views.

In effect, white farmers created a social umbrella protecting those beneath from the harshness of Zanu (PF) hegemony. It was inevitable that when an opposition mass movement was launched in the cities it would quickly connect up with the world of the white farm and, as February 2000 showed, the resulting coalition could eject Mugabe from power.

The rest of the world regards Mugabe as a madman but there was in fact a steely rationality in the way he then decided to destroy the world of the white farm. Within weeks the war vet invasions began and the frightful tale of murder, torture and intimidation unfolded. This was all done under the pretence of "land reform" but only those like President Thabo Mbeki who wanted to fool themselves ever believed that.

Mugabe had, after all, not bothered much about land reform for 20 years. Vast tracts of land taken over by the state stood empty, but Mugabe made no move to redistribute this land or the land owned by Zanu (PF) fat cats any more than he was willing to take up white farmers' repeated offers to make more land available for redistribution.

Such constructive schemes were besides the point for Mugabe's aim was deliberately destructive: the social milieu of the white farm must be destroyed so that the opposition's coalition could never win.

Only this destructive logic can explain why war vets invaded game farms which could never support human settlement, why their first acts were always intimidatory and why they so often destroyed irrigation equipment: their aim was to drive white farmers off the farms, not make them viable settlements in the future.

This was also why last week saw Zanu (PF) in schizoid mood, denouncing some farmers for staying on their farms after August 10 and others for "faking" or "stage-managing" their own evictions. Similarly, Mugabe's bitterest attacks were reserved for Britain, the biggest donor of famine relief. Yet without donor aid, the population could be cut by half.

For while Zanu (PF) and Mbeki have maintained the pretence that the aim of this genocidal policy is to hand land over to a successor class of productive black farmers, the witching hour has struck: with no sign of that class.

Without doubt the result will be to turn flourishing farms back into barren bush: already a journey through the Zimbabwean countryside reveals a picture of dilapidation and desolation. The results will be famine not just this year or next but as far ahead as one can see. The fact Mbeki has quite literally gone hand in hand with Mugabe all the way, trumpeting the pretence that this devastation is actually about land reform, sheds a garish light on our president's professed interest in "sustainable development".

Johnson, former Oxford academic and former director of the Helen Suzman Foundation, is a freelance writer and journalist. He is an Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.

[Clive]

"... there was in fact a steely rationality in the way he then decided to destroy the world of the white farm."

[Clive]

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[xJones]

The results will be famine not just this year or next but as far ahead as one can see.

A typical Marxist dictator, nothing matters but power. Mugabe's 78, but who will be his Zanu successor? A ruling class of thugs that will never starve and couldn't care less if millions of Zims do.

[Travis McGee]

bttt