Ian Boyne, Contributor
THE RACE card has for long been a convenient and handy tool in the game of oppression, scapegoating, denial of human rights and egomaniacal rule. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is merely the most recent to play that hand.
Zimbabwe's pull-out of the 54-nation Commonwealth last week, following the vote for continued suspension of that country for rigged elections, and human rights violations, has sparked intense debate around the world over the issues of colonialism, imperialism and racism. The battle lines are being drawn on racial and ideological lines and, as usual, reason and balance are the casualties. Mugabe has exploited the rhetoric of race and colonial history to garner support among black developing nations and ex-colonies, pitting them against 'the white Commonwealth' led by Britain, New Zealand and Australia, which have been potent critics of the Mugabe regime.
In some of the harshest rhetoric ever delivered by a political leader against the head of another state, Mugabe has constantly hurled insults at Britain's Tony Blair, accusing him of wanting to recolonise Africa and dictate to sovereign states like Zimbabwe, while hypocritically suppressing the right of blacks in his own country.
Mugabe and those who support him say that rather than standing up for "The Commonwealth's values" which Tony Blair said scored a victory by the vote to continue the suspension of Zimbabwe, Blair and his 'kith and kin' are really standing up for the white landowners whom Mugabe dispossessed in a 'fast-track' land reform programme beginning in 2000.
OVER-LORDSHIP
In a speech delivered by one of Mugabe's lieutenants and reported in the Government-controlled newspaper The People's Voice (February 24-March 2), Britain was accused of trying desperately to remove Mugabe from power. Britain, said the party official, was using its "sinister arsenal that it has amassed from its years of over-lordship of other countries" to destabilise Zimbabwe. He went on to say that "The target of all this imperial froth and venom is Comrade Robert Mugabe, a ferociously intellectual African with unbending pride and unshakeable belief that the black race shall once again have its encounter with destiny as it overcomes the blight of slavery and the violent alienation of colonialism." This is the kind of rhetoric which usually finds resonance among certain progressives and Afrocentrists.
There are also those who point to the hypocrisy of Western countries like Britain which ignore human rights violations in countries which share its passion for the 'war on terrorism' ... and which indeed are themselves the violators of human rights. The sight of Tony Blair lecturing Robert Mugabe about respecting law and order and constitutionality while he himself flouted international law and the United Nations Security Council in waging war against the sovereign state of Iraq is too hard for many to bear. In an article in Britain's respected Guardian newspaper on Friday, December 5, the Director of Amnesty International UK, Kate Allen asks, "Why pick on Robert Mugabe?" While noting Mugabe's human rights violations Amnesty has an excellent 2003 report on those violations -- Allen chastises the UK Government for being "the only country in Europe to derogate from the European convention on human rights in order to rush through the 2001 Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act. It has used it to imprison 14 foreign nationals for up to two years without charging them or bringing them to trial. They face the prospect of remaining in detention indefinitely on the basis of secret evidence that they have not been allowed to see and, therefore, cannot challenge."
Also, he attacks Australia for clamping down on the right to asylum and for enacting policies which "enable it to hold for months scores of people who have been recognised as refugees in detention centres a policy branded by the UN delegation as 'offensive to human dignity'." Allen also criticises India, Nigeria, Uganda, the Bahamas as well as Jamaica for alleged human rights violations. So why pick on Robert Mugabe? Because he dared to upset some big white land owners and because he has been a thorn in the side of the colonialists, some charge.
But as the editorial in last Monday's Guardian puts it, while Britain and India have also infringed human rights, "Mr. Mugabe's regime stands out over its relentless, systematic undermining of the independence of the judiciary and other institutions, its gross economic irresponsibility and its attacks on individual liberties and the free Press." The Guardian is no right-wing publication, as the leftist columnist Observer and my journalistic mentor, John Maxwell, will affirm.
DEBUNKING THE MYTH
It's been a familiar and cynical game which has been played all the time by dictators and power-hungry egomaniacs: trotting out emotive rhetoric, pointing to the obvious ills of critics and hoping to blindside others in the process. More often than not, the Left falls for it and does not take a principled stand for certain values, even if they are being conveniently championed by hypocrites.
While Tony Blair is severely compromised morally over his role in the invasion of Iraq, there is no moral equivalence between his regime and Robert Mugabe's. Let's colt this racist game right now and deal with some facts. Even Monthly Review, one of the most respected socialist journals in the United States, could say in its May 2002 issue that "for all the Western hypocrisy, the Mugabe (election) victory was nonetheless the product of brutal force. And the division between the observer missions did not break down cleanly along North-South, national racial or class lines." Indeed, the socialist monthly goes on to state that "the voices of dissent and anger from the urban poor and workers were louder than those in the West."
Let's debunk some myths. Romanticisers in Jamaica and the world point gloriously to Mugabe's giving land to the poor, oppressed blacks as an act of liberation after centuries of white rule. Many of these persons are unaware that when the blacks began to take over white properties forcibly, they were strongly opposed by the Mugabe regime and threatened with strong state action. A report in one of Mugabe's propaganda arms The Herald on October 31, 1998 said, "President Mugabe yesterday re-emphasised the need for orderly land resettlement and warned that action will be taken against villagers who continued to invade farms. Comrade Mugabe said that although the Government was committed to the resettlement programme it did not condone the invasion of farms. Government will be forced to take action against such people."
Interestingly, the paper even quotes one Government official as warning that, "There is no point in rushing through the (land reform) programme. If we do so the country will go down and end up with sand and patches of grass here and there." What made the radical change in the thinking of the Mugabe regime? The parliamentary elections of February 2000. The peasants were charging the Government with not delivering on its promises and the rhetoric of the peasants was anti-Government, not just anti the white plantocracy.
The Mugabe Government, sensing that it was losing control over the growing momentum of peasant unrest, hijacked the peasants' struggle, transformed its rhetoric into an anti-white, anti-colonial one and enlisted the support of the famed 'war veterans' and party loyalists in grabbing land. The Mugabe regime was stunned by the defeat in its referendum on constitutional change in 2000 its first electoral defeat since it assumed power in 1980.Mugabe, who has seven degrees, is no fool.
In an enlightening essay in the Fall 2003 issue of the scholarly journal African Studies Quarterly, there is an enlightening essay on "Narratives on Land: State-Peasant Relations Over Fast Track Land in Zimbabwe." The essays draw on empirical research which was done with peasants and which highlights the peasants' own scepticism over the motives of the Mugabe regime. There are some choice quotes from the peasants.
ANIMAL SKIN
"Why are they fast-tracking now? What has happened is for the election. They think we don't know. We have seen this before. After the election they forget about us the land issue is a smokescreen only, they are not serious about it." Another peasant says, "The Government treats us like dogs. You know how a hunter treats his dogs? When the dogs catch the prey, the hunter chases the dogs away. Then he skins the animal, places the animal skin beyond the reach of the dogs, lest the dogs eat it. After cooking the meat the dogs are not given anything..."
Comment the African scholars: "The current narratives by the state suggests that the Government acts in the interest of the peasants and speaks for them, but this metaphor of the hunter and the dog is one of many told by the peasants." The empirical evidence indicates that the resettlement of people on lands has not been welcomed by many the peasants who have shown a preference for industrial jobs. But Mugabe, like Stalin and Mao before him, with their forced industrialisation and collectivisation, made the people's desire subservient to his own. His slogan for the election was 'The Land is the Economy and the Economy is the land'.
Mugabe's systematic and thoroughgoing corruption of the constitution, the judiciary, the executive and the Press has been chillingly chronicled by Susan Boosen in the essay, 'The Dualities of Contemporary Zimbabwean Politics: Constitutionalism versus the Law of Power and the land 1999-2002,' in the Fall 2003 issue of the African Studies Quarterly. "Dirty tricks, electoral manipulation and violence against opponents have been an integral part of ZANU-PF (Mugabe's party) since it came to power in 1980," says Boosen.
Another excellent and well-documented paper which graphically highlights the human rights violations in Zimbabwe is Amnesty International's May 2003 report 'Zimbabwe: Rights Under Siege. Workers', women's and journalists' rights have been trampled and Press freedom has been totally suppressed. Zimbabwe today has been called one of the 10 most dangerous countries on earth to be as a journalist.
DESTROYING ZIMBABWE
Mugabe's recklessness and dictatorship have hardly been of help to the black masses whom the leftists and Afrocentrists are supposedly defending against Blair, Bush and other 'hypocrites'.
The December issue of African Business magazine says inflation has now jumped to 1000 per cent in Zimbabwe and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation said last week that some 5.5 million Zimbabweans, half of the population, are in need of emergency food assistance.
Life expectancy is an astonishingly low 40 years for men and 37 years for women. Some 33.7 per cent of the population is suffering from HIV/AIDS. The economy and society have been devastated by the Mugabe dictatorship which makes any defence of Mugabe in the name of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism horrifically cruel.
Last weekend Mozambique President Joaquin Chissano, the head of the African Union, accused the Commonwealth of adopting tactics of "pressure and punishment" on Zimbabwe. Then he delivered himself of a not unfamiliar justification for African terror and rape of human rights: The view that the older (white) members of the Commonwealth could not understand the situation of those "trying to build democracy" in states only recently emerging from "abject racialist powers. This is why I feel it is unfair."
It is this kind of asinine and vulgar propaganda which is an insult to our intelligence as black people.There is also a view, a carry-over from the position of the Marxist-Leninists, that "first-order rights are the preserve of the bourgeoisie while substantive social rights, of which land is the most basic, is made out to be the legacy of the liberation war." (African Studies Quarterly).
As in the case of other dictatorships, like Cuba's in our region, the masses have to suffer sanctions and economic hardships because of an elite steered by a strongman. The fact that Mugabe is 79 might provide the only glimmer of hope of the Zimbabwean people today.
Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist. You can send your comments to ianboyne1@yahoo.com.
