Isabel Hilton
COMMENT
Zimbabwe celebrated the 20th anniversary of her independence yesterday with the murder of a second white farmer. This was another government-inspired outrage on the way to what threatens to be a deliberate descent into a more general, armed conflict over Zimbabwe’s colonial legacy.
Two decades ago, Robert Mugabe subscribed to a different vision – that of a nation in which, despite the years of war and repression, the former colonisers and colonised were, if not reconciled, at least mutually tolerant.
It may have been a vision forced upon him, but it made a certain sense. The white colonisers would retain some of the privileges that had come with the land grab that was colonisation, but they would, at least, continue to contribute to Zimbabwe’s economic well-being. An orderly process of land reform would satisfy the demand for social justice without creating fresh injustice to fuel incipient conflict.
Twenty years on, Mugabe is trying to present his Zimbabwe as a nation still in the throes of the anti-colonial struggle, in which the poorest have yet to reap the rewards of their sacrifice.
Land is legitimately an emotional issue in Zimbabwe – as late as 1969, the Ian Smith government reserved half of it for whites. Distribution is still grossly unfair, with more than half of the best land still owned by only 3% of the population. With some 4E000 white-owned farms accounting for more than two-thirds of the best farming land, reform is certainly overdue.
But land reform was envisaged in the 1979 Lancaster House discussions. Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe ever since. If it was an issue of such importance to him, why has it progressed so little?
Before this wave of occupations, the government redistributed land from some 270 white-owned farms, but the land was not given to war veterans or to the rural poor.
Among the 400 beneficiaries were several notable Zanu-PF figures, including such implausible claimants as the attorney general, the mines and tourism minister, the speaker of Parliament, two high court judges and a retired general – none of them conspicuously either subsistence farmers or landless peasants.
With his country on the brink of economic collapse and mired in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with inflation out of control and Aids afflicting one in four of the young adult population, this is the last throw of a dictator who failed, two decades ago, to fulfil the promise to give a field and a cow to each of his supporters, and who now faces electoral defeat.
Humiliated in the referendum that would have allowed him to retain power and unable to present any hope for the mass of unemployed and increasingly desperate people, Mugabe has ditched the model of the nation he has lived with for 20 years – a model that demands he submit to democratic judgment.
Farmer David Stephens may have died on Saturday as much because he was active in the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) as because he was a farmer. The day he died, two black MDC activists were burned alive in a firebomb attack. The MDC argues that the so-called war veterans – most of whom are too young to have been anywhere near the war – have been placed strategically to ensure that the party cannot function in certain key areas.
Today Mugabe’s brand of nationalism depends on the anti-colonial rhetoric of two, even three decades ago. It is rhetoric that still commands some support in Africa, combining as it does an acrimonious dialogue with the old colonial power and a conspicuous legacy in the white farmers or the injustices of the past.
But it masks the real questions of what kind of nation Mugabe is inviting his people to build and whose interests are really served by this episode.
Other African statesmen have been ambivalent about Mugabe’s actions. It is time they spoke out and showed that they recognised the difference between the two national models on offer. The land battle is a damaging and tragic business, but there is something even more important.
Given a chance to express their opinions in the recent referendum, the people of Zimbabwe showed that they were not persuaded by Mugabe’s rhetoric, and that they realised that even if every white- owned farm was to be occupied by war veterans (or Zanu-PF followers masquerading as such) it would only make the crisis that Zimbabwe faces worse.
What matters now is that Zimbabweans hold on to that perception.
So far, the opposition has remained coolheaded. British ministers would do well to do the same. Mugabe has picked this quarrel for his own reasons. There is little that Britain can do or say that will not add fuel to his explosive argument and give him the final excuse to cancel the elections.