Section:GDN 1J PaGe:9 Edition Date:190907 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 6/9/2019 17:48 cYanmaGentaYellowblac
Saturday 7 September 2019 The Guardian •
9
a negotiating alliance to secure
independence. Mugabe’s fi ghters
had forced a bloody stalemate on
the battlefi eld, one that – by simple
paring down of numbers – the
minority white population could
not have sustained for ever. But
the white army was not defeated.
It took the advent of Margaret
Thatcher as British prime minister
in 1979, her foreign secretary, Lord
Carrington , and the diplomacy of
Kaunda and the Commonwealth
secretary general, Shridath Ramphal
- plus the cooperation of apartheid
South Africa – to force negotiations
at the end of 1979 that led to the
transformation of Rhodesia into
Zimbabwe.
The white minority Rhodesian
government, alarmed by the
attrition of the war, contrived a
coalition with moderate black
nationalists. Thatcher was prepared
to recognise the coalition, but
despatched Carrington on a last
eff ort to fi nd a compromise.
Kaunda and Ramphal persuaded
Mugabe and Nkomo to come to
the negotiating table, and South
Africa, anxious not to have a militant
black government on its borders,
persuaded the Rhodesian prime
minister, Ian Smith, to attend.
The truce that resulted was
followed by elections at the end
of February 1980. Mugabe won
a landslide victory. The newly
enfranchised black majority
recognised those who had fought for
them. It was not the result Thatcher
and Carrington had anticipated,
but Mugabe’s national address of
reconciliation between black and
white mollifi ed almost everyone.
Mugabe began his rule in Zimbabwe
as an internationally acclaimed
freedom fi ghter and apostle of
reconciliation.
Almost overnight, he became the
new beacon of Africa. He remained
in power for 37 years, winning every
election. His concern for electoral
validation was in some senses the
mark of a man who, despite all his
intellect and ruthlessness, never
quite got over the bodies sacrifi ced
during his ascent.
Those bodies accumulated as
he held power. The west seemed
unaware of the slaughters he
instigated in Nkomo’s powerbase,
the two Matabeleland provinces
of eastern Zimbabwe, from 1982
to 1987. On the suspicion that
a rebellion was forming among
disaff ected former members of
Nkomo’s guerrilla army, Mugabe
sent in North Korean-trained units to
crush them. Some tens of thousands
of civilians were killed in a “police
action” that turned into a pogrom.
Away from the Matabelelands,
Mugabe’s fi rst years in power
were regarded internationally
as peaceful and democratic. He
easily won the 1985 elections but
in 1990 faced opposition from his
former liberation colleague Edgar
Tekere. Mugabe engaged in a series
of intimidatory tactics that fl awed
an election he would have won
anyway. It set a tone of “democracy
if there is no serious opposition”.
There seemed no irony when, in
1991, the Commonwealth released
the Harare declaration on human
rights (covering all member states),
nor in 1992, when Mugabe lectured
the Chinese on the desirability and
harmlessness of opposition parties.B
ut it was also in
1992 that the land
question returned
to haunt Mugabe.
Carrington had
refused to have land
ownership included
in the negotiations
that led to independence in 1980,
despite Mugabe’s insistence that
most of the landowning settlers were
historically of British origin. Also,
early eff orts at negotiation in the
mid-70s had included compensation
for land nationalisation, paid from
western sources. However, in 1992
drought swept Zimbabwe and
questions of productivity of the land
were swiftly caught up in those to
do with ownership of it. Although
the Land Acquisition Act of that
year was never enforced, it should
have been a warning sign to all that
a gradual, phased and compensated
programme of land nationalisation
should be placed on the agenda
before it was forced on to it.
Instead, when Mugabe
approached the newly elected Tony
Blair about the issue in 1997, he
received such a curt dismissal that
an antipathy towards Blair became
a burning element of Mugabe’s
feelings towards Britain.
After Carrington, the British had
hoped to nudge the question of landownership off the main agenda by
small but regular funds for land
nationalisation. John Major had
ensured that this was the case in
the early 1990s, but Blair adamantly
refused any assurance of increase or
even continuation. This was a lack of
historical comprehension on Blair’s
part. Although Mugabe’s latter-day
views of historical need highlighted
the land question, the struggle for
independence was as much about
racism, equality and freedom.
Carrington thought he could side line
land while delivering an acceptable
breakthrough on the other goals
of the struggle. But the land issue
could not be kept off the agenda for
ever. Two-thirds of the arable land of
Zimbabwe was in white ownership,
acquired by seizure and legislation
in which black voices played no part.
The argument of the white farmers
would have rested on what they had
done to make the land commercially
productive – so the debate, had
Britain been wise, should have been
over compensation, but not over
historical rights. However, it was the
rights issue that, after 1997, Mugabe
wheeled out with great force.
Mugabe had always been
committed intellectually to a vision
of black culture having its historical
moment. The achievement of [email protected]
@guardianobitsMugabe with
Morgan Tsvangirai,2012. Below, visiting
London, 1994
REUTERS, REX
administrative and fi nancial chaos
descended. For what Mugabe never
factored in to his pastoral vision
of African heritage was that the
agricultural economy of his country
was based not on a romanticised
sense of peasant ownership but on
an aggressive modern agriculture
industry that sold food and tobacco
on the international markets.
Mugabe and Z anu-PF won the
2000 parliamentary elections,
then the 2002 presidential ones.
He followed this with victory at the
2005 parliamentary polls. But he
resorted increasingly to violence
and vote-rigging. The violence could
be naked, but the rigging was of a
highly sophisticated nature and no
one has yet uncovered all the details
of how it was done. Away from polls,
everything the MDC could throw at
Mugabe – strikes and protests – was
met by repression, heavy-handed
police action and violence from
hired thugs and paramilitaries.
Tsvangirai was charged with treason
and, though acquitted, a campaign
of psychological harassment was
unleashed on him.A
dispirited
Tsvangirai
then faced
the combined
presidential and
parliamentary
elections of
2008 with a split
among MDC supporters. All popular
wisdom and political punditry
suggested that he would be crushed.
Mugabe was supremely confi dent.
But the ruination of the country
had been such that the electorate
insisted on change. By some
estimates, Tsvangirai and the MDC
won 56% of the vote. Mugabe and his
party panicked. Counting promptly
stopped.
There followed many weeks
of painstaking recounts of the
opposition’s vote until it fell below
50%. A runoff was then declared for
the presidency, which prompted
Mugabe to resort to further violence
and intimidation. Tsvangirai
withdrew in protest and Mugabe was
declared the victor.
He had stolen it, but the nature
of the theft was such that, at last,
other African countries would
not stomach a pretence of such
magnitude. President Thabo Mbeki
of South Africa made intense eff orts
to bring Mugabe and Tsvangirai
together. It was a protracted twisting
of arms that eventually led to a
fractious power-sharing coalition.
Mugabe remained president, his
generals and hard men remained
powerful and rich, while Tsvangirai
was made prime minister and given
the task of lifting Zimbabwe out of
the economic mire that Mugabe had
caused. Mugabe’s party made life
diffi cult for Tsvangirai at every step.
Even so, Tsvangirai’s eff orts
at government, including the
appointment of Tendai Biti as
fi nance minister,
and Biti’s wise
ministrations ofthe black personality in terms of
both its heritage and its place in
the modern world was of extreme
importance to him. However, given
a choice between the fulfi lment
of that heritage – and to Mugabe
that increasingly came to mean
ownership of the land – and place
within modernity, then he was
prepared to choose heritage.
In many ways 1997 was the year
that marked the beginning of the
downturn of Zimbabwe. Although
Mugabe had won the 1995 elections
easily, the advent of the war veterans
as a pressure group made itself felt
soon afterwards. The economy was
slowly but markedly deteriorating.
Civil society began to campaign
with increasing eff ect for a new
constitution, and Mugabe began to
express his immense distaste for the
British legacy in Zimbabwe.
Had Mugabe retired in 1995,
he would have been hailed
internationally as a great leader.
The slaughters in the Matabelelands
would have been considered an
unfortunate aberration. As the
century turned, Mugabe was well
into his 70s. He fi nally seized the
land, but bankrupted the country
he had fought so hard to win,
divided his own citizens, oppressed
those who refused to support him,
and created in the midst of a new
national poverty a class of oligarchs
who stole money from his “historical
moment” and supported him as
much for their own gain as their
deep belief in him and his vision.
Land was gained, but equality and
freedom lost.
Recovery with good management
was still possible. Mugabe, however,
was sucked into the war then raging
in the Democratic Republic of
Congo. This caused great expense,
but it also helped him to consolidate
the support of his generals as they
were given free rein to plunder
the mineral resources of the DRC.
However, the public expense and
other economic issues, coupled with
Mugabe’s increasingly authoritarian
demeanour, prompted the creation
of the Movement for Democratic
Change (MDC), led by Tsvangirai,
in 1999. It became immediately
apparent that the new opposition
party had a national following.
Against all Mugabe’s
expectations, it defeated him in a
referendum in early 2000 that he
had called over constitutional issues,
including an amendment to give
the presidency even more power. It
was his fi rst defeat, and although it
had not been at an election, Mugabe
came to recognise the opposition’s
strength and was determined that, in
elections to come, he would triumph
over Tsvangirai and the MDC.
Shortly after the referendum,
the pro-Mugabe war veterans
were unleashed to begin the
seizure of white-owned farms, andHis antipathy
towards Tony
Blair became
a burning element
of Mugabe’s feelings
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