Ulterior Motives

The world's media are presenting the mounting crisis in Zimbabwe as a struggle for land: white farmers besieged by landless black peasants. But in fact this is a struggle for democracy. President Robert Mugabe is using land as a pretext for something more sinister. What we are witnessing is an attempt to strangle at birth the country's first effective opposition. It is no less than an effort by President Mugabe to throttle democracy itself.

We should not allow the telegenic human drama on the white farms to obscure this reality; the land issue is simply a plume of dry ice pumped onto the political stage to hide ulterior machinations. Land reform is common cause in Zimbabwe everyone wants it, the white farmers too, as they have no future without stability. It was humiliation at the ballot box not the land issue that triggered Mugabe's fury.

To dwell on land now is to accept Mugabe's bogus agenda. Let's keep in mind the sequence of events that led Zimbabwe to the present abyss: in February, Mugabe held a referendum designed to rubber-stamp a further inflation of his already massive presidential powers. Tacked on as a sweetener for the rural poor was a clause authorizing the government to confiscate land without compensation.

But the referendum became instead a focus for public disgust with the ruling kleptocracy, and with the economic chaos that this corrupt elite has caused in what should be a land of plenty. Despite the opposition being denied access to the electronic media, the people voted no, dealing Mugabe his first-ever electoral defeat. The wave of farm invasions, and of attacks on the Movement for Democratic Change, the opposition movement which spearheaded the no vote, began shortly after this stinging popular rebuke.

The whites were targeted for two reasons: they were identified as major suppliers of funds for the MDC, and the farmers in particular were blamed for mobilizing their employees to vote no. What we see now is payback time.

Mugabe, the man who would be emperor, may have donned new clothes, but they are in fact vintage attire. For much the same reasons that Fidel Castro does, Mugabe pulled on his old olive green army fatigues, the vestments of the battlefield, to emphasize the victories of the past and distract from the failures of the present. And as he punches the air Mugabe rails against an antique and increasingly irrelevant colonialism, like an adolescent who refuses to grow up and take responsibility for his own mistakes.

What is happening in Zimbabwe today is essentially the work of one old man who would sacrifice the peace of an entire nation for a few more years of power. He has choreographed this crisis. The so-called war veterans are mostly thugs bussed in on government vehicles; some of them are allegedly armed by Mugabe's ZANU-PF party. With his blessing these gangs of squatters have flouted the courts and ignored the timorous police. But there is terrible danger in these tactics the flask of anarchy, once uncorked, releases a malevolent genie that cannot be contained at will.

Even if the immediate crisis is damped down, the fundamental fabric of the country has already been sorely damaged. Tobacco, which provides about 40% of the country's desperately needed foreign exchange each year, is languishing in barns where it will rot if farmers are not there to cure it. The blacks who live and work on "white" farms, nearly 2 million of them, will soon be without income if commercial agriculture collapses. And the 60% of Zimbabwe's manufacturing industry which services the agricultural sector will collapse too. Many white farmers are in hock to the banks. If they default, the financial sector will suffer.

The West preaches to Africa the necessity of good governance and transparency. But in its response to the blatant political thuggery which has caused this economic mayhem, the West's residual colonial guilt, like a phantom limb, keeps twitching. Which is why it is essential that we remind ourselves that this is not just a story about a few beleaguered whites this is a story about millions of beleaguered blacks as well.

This is hardly the first time Mugabe has shown signs of the autocrat within. In the Matabeleland in 1983-84, he unleashed his North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade on a civilian populace with orders to kill, and kill they did. But we have to go back further to the first election faced by the newly emerging Zimbabwe in 1980 to find the last time that Mugabe faced any real opposition. His election pledge then to a populace traumatized by seven years of civil war was: Vote for me, the war continues. Today the hired thugs who do his bidding are chanting the same chilling hymn of violence: If we lose elections due within the next four months, they threaten, we will go back to the bush and fight. This isn't democracy, this isn't even close. This is holding peace a hostage to power.

Peter Godwin is the author of 'Mukiwa A White Boy in Africa'