Zimbabwe's choice

Zimbabweans re-elect President Robert Mugabe and the West, unhappy with the choice, responds with the threat of sanctions.

INTERNATIONAL attention was focussed on Zimbabwe as the southern African nation went to the polls in the second week of March. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, orchestrating a vilification campaign by the West against the Zimbabwean leadership, had made it clear that the only outcome the West wanted was the defeat of President Robert Mugabe. The West had hoped to replicate its recent successes in countries such as Serbia where the system was subverted and the voters were manipulated to throw out leaders who do not kowtow to its own agenda. The new British High Commissioner in Zimbabwe was posted in Belgrade at the time the Serbs went to the polls two years ago. The Zimbabweans had reasons to be suspicious.

It was no secret that the British financed the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) led by Morgan Tsvangirai, the former trade unionist. While the British government funnelled money through the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, the Conservative Party did it through the Zimbabwe Democracy Trust. In the run-up to the elections, the British electronic and print media were full of biased stories about Mugabe and the Zimbabwean government. Mugabe was the "hate" figure.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was in the forefront of the disinformation campaign; it even went to the extent of accusing Mugabe of having had a hand in the killing of more than 100,000 Zimbabweans in the last two years. International Human Rights organisations have placed the figure of those killed in clashes between government supporters and Opposition activists at around 160.

The British media and government have conveniently forgotten that it was a Labour government that refused to send in British troops to remove the racist regime of Ian Smith, which declared unilateral independence in Rhodesia in the mid 1960s. The liberation war that followed claimed more than 40,000 lives, mostly of blacks.

Tsvangirai's credibility was considerably dented by the surfacing of a video-tape that showed him talking with a former Mossad agent about the possibility of physically liquidating Mugabe. Tsvangirai is shown offering $500,000 for a contract on Mugabe's life.

Mugabe has not been a particular favourite of the West ever since he took office after the liberation of the country in 1982. Mugabe's leadership was pivotal to the military and political victory of the Zimbabwean African National Union-Popular Front (ZANU-PF) in the anti-colonial war. The colonial power, Britain, and white settlers had tried to prop up more amenable politicians after Zimbabwe gained independence. One of their favourites initially was Joshua Nkomo. Nkomo came from the Ndebele ethnic group while Mugabe belongs to the majority Shona group.

In the late 1980s, when Nkomo was in exile, a section of Ndebeles was encouraged, by the racist regime in South Africa and by the British, to resort to subversive activities. However, Mugabe and Nkomo, who were comrades in the liberation struggle, sorted matters out, but only after considerable bloodshed. Nkomo was inducted into the government in a senior position. As the results of the latest elections show, the Ndebele vote has gone to Mugabe indicating that the rift between the two ethnic groups has healed considerably.

Mugabe also played an important role in the decolonisation process in southern Africa, especially in the events that led to the independence of Namibia and South Africa. He has never hesitated to speak openly about the duplicity of Western policies, especially in the context of Africa. In recent years he sent in Zimbabwean troops to bolster the embattled government of Laurent Kabila in the Democratic Republic of Congo, enraging the West. The governments of Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia had jointly taken a decision to send in troops to prevent a Tutsi-dominated government from being installed in Kinshasa and to protect the integrity of a member of South African Development Community. If the Kabila government had fallen then, it would have destabilised the situation in the region. Terrorist groups such as the UNITA would have exploited the situation to their benefit.

But what led to the West's total disenchantment with Mugabe was the government's seriousness about implementing its long-delayed land reforms programme. Around 6,000 white farmers hold around half the country's 81 million acres (32.4 million hectares) of arable land, employing around 500,000 black workers while 850,000 black Zimbabwean farmers share the rest. The question of land was paramount during the liberation struggle too. The colonisation of land by the settlers took place only in the end of the 19th century with the arrival of white farmers from South Africa.

The ZANU-PF did not start enforcing land reforms immediately after independence fearing that it would trigger an exodus of white people. The examples of neighbouring Mozambique and Angola were too recent. Besides, the Tory government in Britain at the time of Zimbabwean independence had imposed preconditions on the ZANU-PF. Under the terms of the agreement, the Zimbabwean government could not implement land reforms for 10 years after independence, and there were fixed quotas of parliamentary seats for whites for that period making it difficult to pass radical land-related legislation.

Radical elements in the ZANU-PF accused Mugabe of being soft on the white settlers. Many of the hardliners quit the party on these and related issues in the late 1980s. However, impressive gains were made in the areas of literacy and health care. The literacy rate is around 80 per cent. But things started going bad for the Zimbabwean economy in the mid-1990s with the fall in commodity prices.

The government was forced to cut on expenditure, adversely impacting on the social sector. Health care and education are no longer free. The lack of a credible Opposition made the ruling party complacent. Corruption spread into the higher echelons of the government. The goal of "revolution" that Mugabe had initially given so much importance, was lost sight of. The ZANU-PF committees in the countryside, which liaised with the government ministries and departments, had become inactive by the early 1980s.

The ranks of the educated unemployed started swelling. The scale of the disillusionment became obvious when the government lost the referendum on a constitution, held two years ago. The parliamentary elections that followed provided further proof of the government's growing unpopularity. The two electoral exercises in which Mugabe faced reverses showed that the country is among the freest in the continent and that the ZANU-PF government is not an authoritarian dispensation as made out by its critics.

The Opposition is allowed to run newspapers. In the last two years, Mugabe has no doubt tightened the screws on the Opposition, which he now describes as the stooges of colonialism.

Many people even in Britain believe that their government's motives are guided to a large extent by racism and colonialism. Tony Blair's hatred for Mugabe surfaced openly after the Zimbabwean government gave "war veterans" (guerillas who fought in the liberation struggle) the green signal to occupy some selected white-owned farmland. The privileges of the small, white minority seems to be of paramount importance to New Labour.

Mugabe has also started talking seriously about nationalising not only land but also privately owned industry, making him perhaps the only head of state in black Africa who openly espouses the ideals of socialism and renouncing the panacea of the free market. This is anathema to the West. In recent months Mugabe has been emphasising on the need for another "revolution". He harks back to the liberation war when the goal was to overthrow white power and regain the land. These goals were yet to be fulfilled. "Capitalist imperialism" is once again the great enemy for Mugabe, if his recent rhetoric is any indication.

Mugabe's frequent references to "democratic centralism" and the need to move away from the old capitalist economy have found a receptive audience. During his swearing-in ceremony, he promised to accelerate the land reform process. He called on the Opposition to cooperate and not be swayed by Western governments. Mugabe said that Britain, the former colonial ruler, and its "white allies" in the West had described the elections as not free and fair because the candidate they favoured had lost.

Observers from African countries gave a clean chit to the Zimbabwean election commission for the supervision and conduct of the polls. But the West reacted by announcing that it was imposing sanctions on Zimbabwe. Blair had earlier failed to get Zimbabwe ejected from the Commonwealth. African Commonwealth leaders were incensed by the lobbying conducted by Britain, Australia and New Zealand against Zimba-bwe at the recent Commonwealth summit in Australia. South African President Thabo Mbeki even suggested that Britain was welcome to walk out of the Commonwealth if it was not satisfied with the majority stand on the Zimbabwe issue.

Well-wishers of Zim-babwe are trying to impress upon Mugabe on the need to set up a broad-based government of national unity that will help bridge the current divide in Zimbabwean society. Although the Opposition polled only around 42 per cent of the vote, it has proved that it has a strong support base in urban areas. Around 56 per cent of the electorate cast its vote in the election, which Blair and company said was insufficient. Polling stations were kept open for more than two days to enable citizens to cast their votes, though it was true that the urban areas had fewer polling stations than rural areas, where Mugabe's support base is.

Many African leaders want Mugabe to take the Opposition into government in order to avoid punitive international sanctions. With experts predicting that the country's economy will take some time to recover, it is in dire need of international financial assistance. With the agricultural output showing no signs of increasing, huge amounts of food will have to be imported to avoid a possible famine. It is to be seen whether Mugabe will be accommodating. In recent months, the 78-year-old Mugabe has been saying that he wants to go down in history as a true revolutionary who fought colonialism and imperialism.