HUGO YOUNG, Pretoria | Tuesday
SENIOR army officers in Zimbabwe have secretly warned the South African government that they may launch a coup against Robert Mugabe if the growing political and economic crisis results in riots. Pretoria has strongly advised against any move to overthrow the Zimbabwean president by force but has been made aware of the circumstances in which it may be attempted.
According to senior sources in Pretoria, Zimbabwean military commanders believe the looming failure of the maize crop this year will create a food crisis and prove a critical flashpoint. Zimbabwe has all but run out of foreign exchange to import maize if, as looks likely, supplies of the staple dry up and a partial failure of the wheat crop begins to take hold in about October.
A South African official said: “There’s a serious danger of food riots, which would become politicised. This is when the military are getting ready to intervene.”
A food crisis would take place against the background of political turmoil which already ranges the Mugabe government in a bitter struggle against the opposition Movement for Democratic Change led by Morgan Tsvangirai.
The Zimbabwean military has told the South Africans that in such a conflict it would be expected to side with the civilian police to suppress popular protest and shore up Mugabe.
The military has told the South African government it will refuse to use force against ordinary Zimbabweans, and if Mugabe’s regime orders it do so, it would instead opt to take power. South African officials believe that senior officers have already laid plans to do so.
The judgment in Pretoria is that these preparations do not reflect conventional power-hunger on the part of the army, so much as a reluctance to take sides in an intensely politicised civil crisis brought about by the government’s failed agricultural policy.
But the identity of the key military figure and prospective coup leader casts doubt on such optimism. According to South African intelligence, this would be the present head of the Zimbabwe air force, Air Marshal Perence Shiri.
Air Marshal Shiri is considered a hardliner, who has played his own part in the agriculture crisis. He formerly commanded the Fifth Brigade of the army which is widely held responsible for the massacre of tens of thousands of people while putting down an uprising in Matabeleland between 1982 and 1987.
More recently, as head of the air force, he helped to coordinate the occupation of hundreds of white-owned farms, and authorised the flying of the war veterans’ leader, Chenjerai Hunzvi, between them.
That a man such as Air Marshal Shiri should be actively contemplating the overthrow of Mugabe confirms the widely held view that the greatest threat to the Zimbabwean president’s power is not the political opposition but his own allies who fear he may drive the country to ruin.
The military’s backing for the government has been wavering for some time. One major source of contention is the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. While some senior and retired Zimbabwean officers have become very rich, with stakes in mining and diamond concessions in Congo, there is widespread discontent within the army at the conduct of the war and the sacrifices demanded of the troops.
Some officers also fear that their country’s sharp economic decline and the growing political violence threaten the comfortable lifestyle many have enjoyed.
Mugabe’s position has not been made any more secure by the death in a car crash at the weekend of his defence minister, Moven Mahachi. Mahachi was a hardline supporter of the president and considered one of his most loyal allies.
The hardening fear of a military coup adds to the alarm of South African leaders about the consequences of chaos and violence in their northern neighbour. Zimbabwe is the largest African market for South African products, and the breakdown there already poses an economic threat.
The new fear is of hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans streaming over the South African border in a desperate search for food on top of a steady flow of more educated people seeking jobs in the cities.
Thabo Mbeki has for many months made clear to Mugabe his concern at the evidence of political and economic collapse. Though the South African president is criticised in some quarters for not attacking Mugabe publicly, Mbeki’s private conversations with him have been, according to Pretoria, intense, though their effect is muted by the Zimbabwean’s insistence that he does not need to take instructions from a man who has only been president for two years.
South Africa regards Mugabe’s scorn for financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund as, in the word of one senior official, “suicidal”. With private sector bank lending virtually inoperative, his rejection of the advice of the international body is held by Pretoria to be evidence of personal withdrawal from the real world.
Pressure on Zimbabwe’s leader intensified late last week when the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, on a visit to South Africa, accused him of using “totalitarian methods” and failing to stop war veterans from “terrorising” the country. In the wake of the Powell visit, the South African foreign minister, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, said South African and Zimbabwean officials would meet soon “to make suggestions to them on how we think we should work together”. – The Guardian
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An army guarding power and profits May 29, 2001
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