HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- 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
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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