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From: Jim Yarker [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2002 9:52 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Zimbabwe: "The Struggle for Our Land" (a must-read) 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. Theland
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 j
ust "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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