Iden Wetherell
Thabo Mbeki’s mission to broker a solution to Zimbabwe’s protracted land crisis has ended impaled on the rock of President Robert Mugabe’s monumental ego, it became clear this week.
In Harare two weeks ago for talks with Mugabe ahead of a crucial visit by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan’s envoy Mark Malloch Brown, Mbeki had nothing to say to the press.
The reason was not difficult to fathom. His self-appointed role as mediator between Mugabe and the international community has come to nought. Instead, Nigerian leader Olusegun Obasanjo, who accompanied Mbeki to Harare, did the talking. He firmly told Mugabe that he should adhere to the laws already in place for land reform.
The year is thus ending on a sombre note. Mbeki’s quiet diplomacy has done nothing to divert Mugabe from his chosen path of lawlessness. Another farmer was killed by armed land invaders this week as Mugabe spoke of war with white farmers at a meeting of his party’s central committee.
This follows eight months of intensive diplomacy, beginning with the Victoria Falls regional summit in April and concluding with Malloch Brown’s unproductive visit on December 1, the day after Mbeki’s.
Malloch Brown was equally blunt with Mugabe. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which he heads, could do nothing until the rule of law had been restored, he told Zimbabwe’s 76-year-old ruler, who has pinned his reputation on the land seizures.
Annan had offered UNDP assistance at the Millennium Summit in New York in September at a meeting with Mbeki, Mugabe and other regional leaders.
A 1998 accord between the UNDP, the Zimbabwe government and donors was ditched last year when Mugabe found it prevented him posing as the agent of revolutionary redistribution. Now, with widespread land seizures in defiance of laws passed by his own government, it seems a dead letter.
When Mbeki took Mugabe’s case for land redistribution to London, Washington and other capitals earlier this year, he was told donors would be keen to fund the exercise so long as it was transparent, law-based and did not disrupt agricultural production. Britain pledged 36-million (about R400-million) if these conditions were met. But Mugabe refused to withdraw the war veterans and their followers from the farms they occupied.
Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa’s remarks a few days ahead of Malloch Brown’s visit denouncing white judges and making it clear the government saw the law as an obstacle to its plans probably helped to scupper the Mbeki/Annan initiative.
Despite his silence in Harare, Mbeki’s public position has become incrementally more robust. From a virtual carte blanche offered at the Victoria Falls mini-summit in April, he has advanced to using the word “wrong” in October to describe farm invasions north of the border. His failure in the first place to define the rules of governance which underpin his vision of an “African renaissance” was in part responsible for Mugabe’s belief that he could get away with ignoring the law, critics say.
Disillusioned, Mbeki now appears to have washed his hands of the problem. Meanwhile, defiant and unmoved, Mugabe this week told his Zanu-PF party’s central committee he would not allow any court impediment to land acquisition.
Mugabe undoubtedly wants to lead his party to victory in the 2002 presidential race on the basis of an agrarian revolution of Pol Pot proportions. Not only does he want to punish white farmers, their workers and urban opposition supporters who have resisted his will, he is also keen to whip his own followers into line.
Zimbabweans have twice shown at the polls this year that they have no wish to be impoverished by his violent land grab. But they have yet to devise ways of stopping their leader from inflicting further damage on an already prostrate economy.