Zimbabwe: The struggle for our land .

[sipila]

From: "Stasi" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

Subject: [Peoples War] Zimbabwe: The struggle for our land - Guardian

Thursday, January 24, 2002 12:39 PM


The struggle for our land
Britain is interfering in Zimbabwe in support of corporate power and a
wealthy white minority

George Shire 
Thursday January 24, 2002
The Guardian 

The crisis currently gripping Zimbabwe has its roots in Britain's racist
colonial policies, the refusal of a previous Labour government to act
against the dictatorship of the white minority and the failure of Britain to
stick to its promises after my people finally won independence 20 years ago.
But instead of acknowledging their own responsibilities and helping overcome
the legacy of the past, the British government and media - and their friends
in the white Commonwealth - are fostering a flagrantly partisan mythology
about the conflict in the country, while intervening in support of a
privileged white minority and international commercial interests.

Take the continued white monopolisation of Zimbabwe's best land, which is at
the heart of the upheavals and is routinely presented in Britain as a
spurious pretext to keep a despot in power. In reality, the unequal
distribution of land in Zimbabwe was one of the major factors that inspired
the rural-based liberation war against white rule and has been a source of
continual popular agitation ever since, as the government struggled to find
a consensual way to transfer land. My grandfather, Mhepo Mavakire, used to
farm land in Zimbabwe which is now owned by a commercial farmer. It was
forcibly taken from the family after the second world war and handed to a
white man, because he had fought for king and country. Many of my relatives
died during the Zimbabwean liberation war, trying to reclaim this land. I
joined Zanu, which played the central role in the war, in the late 60s and
there was never any doubt in my mind that it was both a duty and an honour
to fight for that land.

Land reform is now a socioeconomic and political imperative in Zimbabwe. The
land distribution programme of Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF government is aimed
at redressing gross inequalities to meet the needs of the landless, the
smallholders who want to venture into small-scale commercial farming and
indigenous citizens who have the resources to go into large-scale commercial
agriculture. These are modest, but worthwhile, objectives.

The western-backed Movement for Democratic Change opposition, by contrast,
is very reluctant to be drawn on how it would resolve the land question. And
although middle England continues to be fed the tale that nothing was done
about land until the MDC began to challenge Zanu-PF's power base, the truth
is that the white-dominated Commercial Farmers Union has fought the
government's strategy for land distribution at every stage since the 80s.
The Farmers Union and members of the defunct Rhodesia Front, strongly
represented in the MDC, could not care less who governs Zimbabwe as long as
they can keep the land and continue to live in the style to which they have
become accustomed. The lack of money for land acquisition, cumbersome legal
procedures required by Britain in the independence negotiations and the
withdrawal of international donors in recent years - as well as the
explosive political restiveness and farm occupations - have all combined to
force the Zimbabwean government to speed up resettlement.

But of course a process of land acquisition and resettlement of indigenous
landless people cuts across the networks that link the farmers, the
producers of agricultural inputs, the banks and insurance houses, all
dominated by the white minority. And this network also spreads into the
international capital arena. Many poor Zimbabweans believe that the
interests of this white network have been allowed to overshadow the morally
legit- imate cry of the impoverished and landless majority in post-colonial
Zimbabwe. 

While I unreservedly condemn all forms of political violence and criminality
that have come to dominate the contemporary political culture of Zimbabwe,
violence is in fact being perpetrated by people with links to both sides of
the political divide.

In the last couple of weeks alone three people have been killed by MDC
supporters, who also went on a rampage in Harare, petrol-bombing shops
belonging to Zanu-PF supporters. Senior MDC figures have been implicated in
the murder of a Zanu-PF official, Gibson Masarira, who was hacked to death
in front of his family. And in Kwekwe, suspected MDC supporters burnt three
Zanu-PF officials' houses. None of these events has been reported in the
British media. Such MDC violence echoes the activities of the Rhodesian
police and notorious Selous Scouts in the late 70s - which is perhaps hardly
surprising since several are now leading lights in the MDC.

It was the Selous Scouts who killed refugees, men, women and children, at
Nyadzonia, Chimoio, Tembue, Mkushi, Luangwa, and Solwezi, where they still
lie buried in mass graves. David Coltart, an MDC MP for Bulawayo South, was
a prominent member of the Rhodesian police and he and his bodyguard Simon
Spooner - recently charged with the murder of Cain Nkala, leader of the war
veterans in Matabeleland - were attached to the Selous Scouts. The deputy
national security adviser for the MDC, who rose to the rank of sergeant in
the Rhodesian police, was likewise a handler of Selous Scouts operatives
while based in Bulawayo. Mike Orret, another MDC MP, was also a senior
police officer. 

You would never know from the way Zimbabwean politics is usually reported in
Britain that Zanu-PF supports a broadly social democratic programme, focused
on the empowerment of the landless and poor, and is opposed by supporters of
neo-liberal economic policies. Among Zanu-PF's often overlooked achievements
is a massive expansion in education in the past 20 years - from one
university to 14, and from a handful of secondary schools to hundreds of
sixth-form colleges. Sadly, the enormous progress that had been made in
public health has been reversed by the HIV/Aids pandemic, which is reducing
life expectancy. Nevertheless the Zimbabwean government has constructed 456
health centres, 612 rural hospitals, and 25 district hospitals, as well as
providing one provincial hospital in each of the country's eight provinces.
Eighty-five percent of Zimbabwe's population are now within eight kilometres
of a health facility. The 25% coverage of immunisation at independence has
now been boosted to 92%, while antenatal coverage has risen from 20% at
independence to the present 89%.

The MDC has no corresponding programme for mass public health or education,
or rural electrification, or the economic empowerment of indigenous people.
The MDC remains silent when asked about what it will do with the more than
130,000 families who have been allocated land through the fast-track process
if it wins the presidency. (Incidentally, beneficiaries of this process
include known members of MDC, not just "friends and cronies" of Robert
Mugabe.) 

Contrary to the received wisdom in Britain, the best chance of completing
the unfinished business of land reform, and for improvements in public
services, housing, education, clean water, support for people living with
illness and dying of Aids, lies with a Mugabe victory in the presidential
elections. The past few days of vigorous cross-party debate about the
freedom of the press in Zimbabwe's parliament have shown what a vibrant
democracy the country in fact has, with Zanu-PF reflecting a broad range of
political allegiances. The longer-term challenge Zanu-PF faces is to rethink
itself, in the new conditions its victory might help to bring about.

·George Shire is an academic working for the Open University and a Zimbabwe
liberation war veteran.

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Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002


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