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 ho spitals, 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. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
