Dialogue: Zimbabwe faces civil war unless dictator reined in

The Commonwealth continues to tiptoe around Robert Mugabe's blatant abuses of human rights and democratic processes, writes BISH McWATT.

The obscenity that is the Zimbabwean Government of Robert Mugabe was illustrated in two news items little more than a week apart.

The Zimbabwean Financial Gazette of December 5 reported: "Huge quantities of guns and ammunition are also being imported into Zimbabwe, including a consignment of 20 wagons ... that was said to have left Beira destined for Harare this week."

Then in the New Zealand Herald of December 15: "The United Nations food agency wants $US54 million from international donors to provide emergency food aid for half a million people in Zimbabwe."

This image of Mr Mugabe with a begging bowl in one hand and cash for guns in the other is the tragedy of Zimbabwe today.

The Commonwealth has tiptoed around this situation for more than two years. South Africa, Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique, Botswana and Namibia manage a level of self-deception and appeasement that bodes ill for the future of democracy in that part of Africa.

The white Commonwealth is scarcely less accommodating. It seems that if a black government engages in murder, torture, kidnapping and denial of basic human and political rights, only muted noises are made.

An example of the weak-kneed Commonwealth reaction to Mr Mugabe's duplicity arose out of last September's failed Ajuba Agreement, by which Zimbabwe was to "take action against intimidation and violence", stop "further occupation of farmlands, restore the rule of law" and commit "to freedom of expression".

In return, international financial help for a land reform programme would be activated.

Yet between the time of the agreement and the arrival of a Commonwealth delegation to see if its terms had been implemented, violence and land occupations continued, legislation was drafted by the Zanu-PF Government to further restrict civil liberties and democratic processes and police remained loyal to the ruling party rather than the law.

The Minister of Agriculture, Joseph Made, tried to deceive the delegation about the true nature of the situation. The subterfuge was uncovered only when a white farmer, defying threats of retribution and intimidation, read a statement to the delegation.

The lengths to which Mr Mugabe is willing to go makes a mockery of the norms of honest political engagement. Despite this, when the ministers of the Southern African Development Community met in late December, the Malawi Foreign Minister, Lilian Patel, stated that she was "gratified to learn violence had reduced significantly".

Perhaps she should have read the Zimbabwe Human Rights Forum report for November - six deaths or executions, eight kidnappings, 881 cases of property damage and 115 cases of rape or torture. It tells of people having their heads forced into ant-bear holes, having their mouths filled with sand and being beaten by gangs armed with chains, sticks and rubber hoses.

Unless official visitors are willing to go into the countryside and speak to the victims, Mr Mugabe's henchmen will see that a sanitised view is presented. No wonder he does not want foreign election monitors unless they are toadies from states he can rely upon.

Not that much faith can be put even into impartial monitors. The perversion of the electoral system has been going on for at least two years. Tens of thousands of disenfranchised workers from white farms are starving throughout the countryside. Armed Zanu-PF supporters have made sure they will not appear on voting rolls or at polling stations.

New laws are so restrictive that even white Zimbabweans find it difficult to get registered or find that, having done so, their names do not appear on the rolls.

Unless monitors are in Zimbabwe now, unless there are enough to saturate the rural areas, and unless they are not just from countries approved by Mr Mugabe, the results of the elections will be a travesty of democracy.

The opposition MDC, unable to gain access to state-run television, attacked by state-supported Zanu-PF militias and denied protection by a politicised police force and court system, struggles to get its message across.

In the last week of December four of its members were killed, including Titus Nheya, a parliamentary candidate. MDC provincial offices have been burned down or vandalised by Government supporters. This included the office in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second-largest city, where a mob of about 1000, who arrived from Harare by train, looted shops and attacked people in the street. Then, watched by the police, they hurled petrol bombs at the MDC offices.

They then moved to the city hall where staff, council workers and scores of whites were beaten up simply because municipal elections had returned an MDC mayor. The police made no arrests.

On the other hand, a protest march of about 50 MDC supporters in Harare was dispersed by riot police armed with shotguns and tear gas. Several arrests were made.

All this was in the name of land reform, which is undeniably needed. But there can be little confidence in the way it is being carried out.

Mr Mugabe has had more than 20 years to initiate a just and efficient system of reform that would have preserved the productive capacity of Zimbabwean farming and its ability to feed its own people, export surpluses, bring in foreign income for development of the county and finance the declining rural infrastructure. In all these areas there has been abject failure.

Cathy Buckle, author of African Tears, had this to say after touring the areas around her abandoned farm: "I ... travelled a couple of hundred kilometres and saw for myself the state of the crops on Zimbabwean farms. On the entire ... journey there were less than a dozen fields on the roadside growing a saleable crop. Of these not one was maize, Zimbabwe's staple food. There were many dozens of little patches, some perhaps as big as one acre, where newly settled farmers have claimed a vast field and managed to plant only a minute fraction of it with food.

"Zimbabwe's newly settled farmers have not planted enough food for themselves, let alone surplus with which to support 13 million Zimbabweans ... vast environmental degradation lies along the roadsides for us all to see."

This peasantisation of agriculture is guaranteed to produce periodic famine. It is already producing the migration of the hungry and those with globally marketable skills. It flies in the face of all modern agricultural systems necessary to support an urbanising and modernising society in Zimbabwe.

The irony is that the corruption and mismanagement that halted international aid for reform more than two years ago still goes on. Last month, the head of Zimbabwe's police, Commissioner Augustine Chihuri, arrived on a white farm and told the owner he had two weeks to vacate because Chihuri was the new owner.

This, along with a 100 per cent pay rise for the police and Army, means there are considerable advantages to being a Government supporter.

There are about 40 days to go to the presidential elections. Unless the result is a victory for democracy and human rights, the initial stages of a civil war will follow soon after. What alternative is there?

And part of the responsibility for this will lie with those who failed to put pressure on the Zimbabwe regime soon enough or strongly enough.

* Bish McWatt is a retired Auckland teacher.