Zimbabwe -- Get real

ZWNews ^ | September 9, 2002

[Clive]

Africa has lost the right to claim Zimbabwe as its problem. It has used the moral high ground only to prevaricate and to temporize. Zimbabwe is now a problem for the world

Comment

We should not be surprised by the scattered applause in Johannesburg for that knockabout duo Bob 'n' Sam. Attacking and blaming western countries has always been good box office for African leaders over the years, keen to shift their own shambolic record of incompetence and theft onto any handy passing white leader. But we should be grateful to them. For they, and those that applauded them, have, at last, brutally and publicly murdered the terminally ill policy of African rapprochement that has sustained Mugabe so satisfactorily through the last thirty- one months. Now we can move on.

Bob 'n' Sam would have been hard pushed to garnish any applause in downtown Harare. Or Bulawayo. Or Kadoma, unless of course Resident Mugabe's police had been doing a spot of crowd-warming with their batons. This is because those who applauded them in Johannesburg (and those who barracked Secretary of State Powell) were, by so doing, throwing their weight behind:

Totalitarian rule and the infanticide of a fledgling democracy; state-supported murder, thuggery and rape; violent suppression of the opposition; comprehensive abuse of human rights; the death of the rule of law; the death of property rights; the destruction of the economy; famine; the manipulation of food aid; ethnic cleansing in the countryside; the triumph of AIDS; arrant homophobia; the politicization of the judiciary and what remains of the state apparatus and Zimbabwe's mutation into a neo-Maoist hell of labour camps and youth brigades and political starvation and endless, pitiful propaganda. All because an evil old man and his trophy wife do not want to give up power.

The West, the kindly, naive West, can hardly believe in something as awful as Robert Mugabe. Saddam Hussein it can just about understand.but Mugabe? It cannot believe that he can purr in his motorcade out of the desert he has created, fresh from blowing up an independent radio station, and lay down the law to the liberal democracies whose aid is keeping him afloat. It can hardly believe that it must take the rap for his destruction of one of the finest agricultural systems in the world and hear, in tandem, that his exercise in famine and plunder is an unrivalled success. It can hardly believe that an African despot can lie and lie and lie again (and there was the famous 'one farmer one farm' lie again) and still maintain the respect of his peers. The West are now the social workers of Africa, looking after its starving children while those children's elders and 'betters' junket on power and plunder and credit cards. The West receives no thanks in return, just abuse and hatred. We have the likes of Mugabe to thank for that. Abuse and hatred are the flesh and blood of his philosophy.

Meanwhile Obasanjo, Mkapa, Chissano, even Nujoma continue to believe that a policy of damning Mugabe in private and lauding him in public keep their African credentials in order whilst maintaining their oxygen supply of Western aid. The West will pay for Mugabe's destruction of Zimbabwe's agricultural sector. The commercial farmers' famous kith and kin in Europe are already subsidising those who have murdered those same farmers and driven them and their workforces from the land. The West will continue to pay for Zimbabwe until such a time as the population drops to be supportable by the compliant, peasant economy that Mugabe craves.

But we must thank Bob 'n' Sam for one thing: they have publicly slaughtered, once and for all, the feeble policy of African rapprochement that has hamstrung efforts to resolve the Zimbabwe crisis since day one. For over two and a half years the West has been sitting on its hands waiting for an ever changing combination of African leaders to fulfil their promises of returning Mugabe to sanity. All have failed. Yet more bizarrely the worse Mugabe's excesses, the weaker the position of his African auditors. In October 2001 a delegation of African ministers visited Zimbabweans a result of the Abuja Agreement (remember that triumph of British and Nigerian diplomacy?) and witnessed Mugabe condemned by his own people. Those ministers agreed that things must change. So Mugabe tears up the Abuja Agreement, steals the presidential election, steps up his campaign of ethnic cleansing and brutal suppression, and earns the applause of the same ministers who had criticised his lesser excesses 10 months ago. Western politicians would be sickened by the state media coverage of Mugabe's return from Johannesburg that we have had to endure here: an orgy of triumphalism and racism garnished with appreciative sound bites from African ambassadors in Harare: "The message has been made clear to the outside world," trumpeted Zambian High Commissioner Dingiswayo Banda, "that no farmer will be left without land." Meanwhile the farms lie fallow and people eat leaves.

Africa has lost the right to claim Zimbabwe as its problem. It has used the moral high ground only to prevaricate and to temporize. Zimbabwe is now a problem for the world. Sensible, credible commentators are now coupling Mugabe with Saddam Hussein. Saddam may have weapons of mass destruction, Mugabe certainly has one - it is called famine and he has shown that he is prepared to use it. Not famine for this month only, or for this year only, but famine for the foreseeable future. That is the price he demands of Zimbabwe for daring to aspire to democracy. Both Mugabe and Hussein must go and if African leaders howl and wail about imperialism and racism, so be it. If we in Zimbabwe do not care, who are they to stifle the only hope that we have? If Thabo Mbeki really believes in NEPAD and in Africa he should act now. If he does not then he should not complain if the Americans, Germans, British and Dutch do his dirty work for him. Mugabe is an illegal ruler. He is destroying his own country. He must go. If he will not go he must be removed. Get real.

[Clive]

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[Travis McGee]

Forced famine as a WMD: good point. Mugabe will kill more internal enemies with his WMD than Saddam killed with poison gas.