A democratically elected dictator

By Artur K. Vogel

July 2001

Zimbabwe could be a rich country. Out of sheer greed President Mugabe is heading straight for disaster.

“I am going to cut your balls off and I’ll chew them with pleasure, I like it when balls pop between my teeth” shouts the leader of a gang of about 40 attacking the farmhouse of Peter and Nan Goosen. The two of them press against their office door with all their strength, trying to keep the intruders out. “Kill, kill, kill!” shouts the crowd. Their ringleader threatens: “We are going to rape your wife in front of your eyes.”

Peter and Nan Goosen were under siege on their farm outside Bulawayo, in the South of Zimbabwe, on Tuesday and Wednesday last week by a horde of so-called war veterans. Officially, they are regarded as former fighters of the struggle for independence against the white minority government of Ian Smith in the Seventies. But most of them are between 18 and 25 years old; only their leaders could theoretically have taken part in the war. The opposition press in the capital city Harare exposed quite a few of the veterans-leaders as criminals and imposters. In reality, say politicians of the opposition party MDC (Movement of Democratic Change), the “veterans” are actually an assault troupe of President Mugabe’s to drive the farmers off their land. This is supposed to raise his popularity with the rural people for the upcoming presidential elections that have to take place in 2002.

Robert Gabriel Mugabe, 77 years old, clings to power. He is challenged by the popular MDC boss Morgan Tsvangirai, a former union leader. In February 2000 Mugabe lost the referendum for a new constitution and in June 2000 he only narrowly won the parliamentary elections. His ZANU PF got 62 out of the 120 possible seats, and the MDC 58. (Another 10 seats are reserved for tribal leaders, eight for provincial governors named by the President and 12 more for MPs elected by the President.) Mugabe’s election success, although moderate, can be traced back in part to an intimidation campaign involving terror assaults and murders carried out against MDC officials and followers. The Zimbabwean Human Rights Forum lists in its report, published last month, hundreds of names of activists of the ruling party who committed crimes before the elections. Hardly any of the murderers, torturers and rapists were prosecuted.

So the “veterans” had come to “confiscate” the Goosens’ farm. A totally illegal act; Peter Goosen had been served in August 2000 with at “provisional notification to acquire”, and announcement that his property would be confiscated without compensation, but he had filed an appeal with the administrative tribunal. When the High Court of Zimbabwe later called all the confiscation proceedings illegal, the farmer was of the opinion that he could now carry on breeding his ostriches and exporting their meat.

Countless farmers have had similar experiences. The worst goes back more than a year: On 18^th April 2000 dozens of “warvets” were involved in a gun battle against farmer Martin Olds outside Bulawayo, in the course of which Olds killed 13 aggressors and wounded dozens of them before he was killed himself. Since then the incidents haven’t ended. In Chinhoy, 120 km North-West of Harare, 21 farmers were arrested at the beginning of August for “inciting unrest”. Their crime: they came to the aid of a colleague under attack.

What Mugabe is aiming at with his policy of “scorched earth” is not quite clear. Officially they want the land back, stolen by the white colonialists from the Africans. Bit this is only a pretext. An organised land reform process would have been possible a long time ago. The EU, Britain and others were willing to finance it. But the first 780 requisitioned enterprises for the most part went not to landless smallholding farmers but to Ministers, high ranking Military people, government officials and professors. At the end of 1998 a land reform contract was signed organising the handover of hundreds of farms. But it never came to pass.

No one questions the necessity of land reform. Peter Goosen, spurred on by his religious beliefs, says he has been preaching this for years. It is also undisputed that all is not well with the farmhands. “It’s quite right when they call us slaves with pocket money” says foreman V at a large scale enterprise North of Bulawayo. He earns Z$12000 each month (SFr 400 at the official rate and SFr 100 at the black market rate); and ordinary workers earn a meagre Z$2300 per month. “But we would be worse off if we did not have our jobs. After all we live for free on the farm, we get two meals a day and so do our families. The children go to school free of charge and our health care is also free.”

When “veterans” invade, “the farm workers and their families are being chased away, already there are the first camps for refugees”, says L, a social worker from Mutare in the East of Zimbabwe who looks after the children of the farm workers. And David Coltart, Member of Parliament for the MDC and their shadow Minister of Justice warns not to name the farmers as the only victims of Mugabe’s despotism.

Does the President prove chaos in order to call for a state of emergency? He would be experienced in that: Until 1990 Zimbabwe was governed under emergency laws which he inherited from his hated predecessor, Ian Smith. Under a state of emergency rule Mugabe could break up and prolong the presidential elections. It is also possible that Mugabe and his comrades plan a coup d’état at the presidential office as shown by Alberto Fujimori in Peru.

What Mugabe has achieved so far is a catastrophic economy. Financial advisor and newspaper commentator Erich Bloch summarises soberly: Nearly 80% of the population live below the poverty line. The foreign trade deficit amounts to 140 million US$ or 235 million SFr per month. The gross domestic product will go down by 8 to 12% this year. Agricultural production, which accounts for about 20% of the whole economy and provides nearly 1 in 5 Zimbabweans with a direct or indirect income, will shrink by half this year, and “because of the collapse of law and order investments fail to come”. Yet Zimbabwe could be a rich country; abundant mineral resources are available, there are wide, fertile agricultural areas and there is still undeveloped potential for tourism. With her strategic position between South Africa, Botswana, Mozambique, Zambia and Namibia, Zimbabwe would be predestined as “service centre” for the region.

“Zimbabwe is not a democracy but a dictatorship, whereby the dictator has been elected by the people” means Bloch. This is no contradiction; after all, Hitler too came to power legally in 1933. Bloch knows what he is talking about; his parents escaped Nazi Germany in the thirties. Mugabe actually is one huge misunderstanding since he first became Prime Minister in 1980 and later President. In 1979 colonial Rhodesia, ruled by a white minority government, became democratic Zimbabwe. Governments, Human Rights Activists, Third World groups and at the frontline us journalists, welcomed Mugabe full of enthusiasm. This man, stamped by both Catholic morals and Maoistic austerity, seemed predestined for the role for the “new” African leader. Not a rapacious potentate by a modern democrat, bound to the public weal. Enthusiasm makes blind. Mugabe has long since become an ordinary African kleptocrat. He moved millions abroad, his wife Grace is involved in fraud scandals, his nephew gets the most lucrative government orders. Already by the beginning of the eighties, the applauders should have looked just a little bit closer to discover Mugabe’s dark sides. Hardly in power he designed the murderous plan against the minority time of the Ndebele in the South and against his rival, the Ndebele leader Joshua Nkomo. “What Mugabe did in Matabeleland and in the Midlands province can be called genocide,” says David Coltart in his austere lawyers’ office in Bulawayo; “Genocide, not in the dictionary sense but in the sense of the Convention of Genocide, which the UN General Assembly published in 1948.” There it includes, “deeds done with the intent to wholly or partially destroy national, ethnic, racial or religious groups”

In January 1983 Mugabe sent the so-called Fifth Brigade to Matabeleland, a North Korean trained unit, directly responsible to him. “Almost immediately there were first reports of atrocities” states a report by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace entitled Breaking the Silence. The report makes horrible reading: hundreds of murders, kidnappings, rapes, tortures, mutilations and arson are recorded meticulously. It was Mugabe’s aim to force Nkomo to relent and break the opposition of the Ndebele by murdering all men between fifteen and forty, and systematically raping women and girls. In Breaking the Silence, 3000 murders are recorded. The authors assume there must have been at least double or even triple as many. Mugabe was successful; at the end of 1987 Nkomo signed a “contract of national unity”. Mugabe is a clever politician of insatiable power-hunger. “If necessary he will let the whole land tumble down a ravine, provided he can stay in power,” assumes B, Psychology Lecturer at Harare’s University. “But all his actions backfired on him,” registers David Coltart; twice, in June 2000 and February 2001, the printing press of the Daily News (the only opposition newspaper) got bombed, but it continues to publish. Mugabe threw out foreign journalists with the result that there are now more here than ever, disguised as tourists. And finally, he appointed Jonathan Moyo, who’s making a laughingstock of the government.” Moyo, Professor of Sociology at the University of Harare and a former critic of Mugabe, is the new Minister for Information and Public Relations. He invents the most astonishing stories, causing the public to immediately dub him the “Propaganda Minister”.  According to last week’s edition of the government paper The Herald, Moyo says that it’s a proved fact that farmers in Chinhoy paid their staff to ransack their farmhouses. “You can’t get much madder than this” is the opinion of farmer David Joubert in Turk Mine, North of Bulawayo. Joubert has gained first-hand experience with the self-styled justice of the “war veterans”. They not only burned down one of his luxurious hunting lodges in his private conservancy but also attacked him physically about two months ago.

But so far Joubert has successfully defended his vast estate (300 square kilometres), unlike Peter and Nan Goosen. Having defended themselves successfully on Tuesday last week, they were attacked again on Wednesday afternoon by a truckload full of drunks. Luckily the Goosens were saved from the mob by a member for the ZANU central committee and three Land Rovers full of policemen. But, “we were ordered to leave the farm and this time we did not resist”.

Nan and Peter Goosen are still optimistic and David Coltart also thinks everything will come right. “We have no weapons, but we get out strength from our bond, from the knowledge to be morally right and form our belief in God’s justice”. However, not even the MP wants to exclude the possibility of a catastrophe totally; “should Mugabe win next year, he will destroy the country totally”.