Posted on 08/17/2002 3:16:14 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Zimbabwe's brutal dictator, Robert Mugabe, retains a small band of supporters, some of whom justify his tyranny as an effort to right historical wrongs. They contend Mugabe wants to give land unfairly seized by racist whites a century or more ago to poor blacks who deserve a plot of their own.
Mugabe's supporters are right about this much: He has earned a place in history -- right alongside Stalin and North Korea's Kim Jong-il, megalomaniacs who condemned millions of their own countrymen to starvation. As half of Zimbabwe's population of 12 million hovers near famine, Mugabe has ordered the nation's white farmers, who are responsible for most of its food supply, to stop planting and surrender their farms for redistribution.
Among Africa's frequent man-made catastrophes, this is one of the worst. Just a few years ago, Zimbabwe not only fed itself but also sold foodstuffs to other countries, bringing vital foreign currency to its treasury. But a few years of blatant misrule -- coupled with a severe drought -- have brought the nation to the brink of disaster.
If a racist white dictator were creating conditions that starved millions of black Africans, the Congressional Black Caucus would have demanded severe sanctions, and a long line of African-American celebrities would be lining up to picket the nation's embassy, taking turns getting arrested and handcuffed for the TV cameras. But Mugabe's thuggery has barely roused America's black elite.
Perhaps they have been taken in by Mugabe's explanation -- clever because it relies on bits and pieces of historic truth. In the colonial era, whites did steal the most fertile acreage, leaving 1 percent of the population in control of about 70 percent of the land.
But here is the dirty little secret of Mugabe's land reform plan: Many farms taken from whites have not ended up in the hands of destitute black peasants. Instead, Mugabe has turned them over to his wealthy cronies. The black poor have taken to calling them "cellphone farmers" because they use their rural holdings as weekend retreats.
If Mugabe had wanted to leave a legacy of historic import, he should have abandoned any notion of redistributing land. Subsistence farming is an ancient idea best left to slowly die off -- as is already occurring throughout the Western world. The African continent is crisscrossed with tiny agricultural plots that only lead to deforestation and soil erosion as farmers clear-cut ever more land in a futile effort to eke out a living.
Instead of tiny subsistence farms, Mugabe could have created a prosperous future from industry and tourism, building hotels and game preserves that would provide decent jobs. If he offered an educated work force and a democratic government, foreign investors would stream in.
And when he started out, Mugabe seemed to be just that sort of leader. In 1980, after he became the head of state of a previously white-ruled nation, he called for racial reconciliation, encouraging white farmers and business owners to stay and help the country to grow. Back then, the nation was stable; the press was free; the courts were independent.
But it was not to last. Mugabe grew increasingly autocratic, muzzling the press, jailing critics and ignoring the courts. Earlier this year, he faced stiff electoral opposition from a reform-minded opponent, so he rigged the election in his favor. His seizure of land is simply a desperate attempt to buy popularity.
Of course, it isn't working. As millions face starvation, they grow increasingly restive. Mugabe can only retain power by cracking down more brutally.
And as he does so, his nation will sink quickly into ruin -- another African calamity.
Cynthia Tucker is the editorial page editor. Her column appears Sundays and Wednesdays.
His mother's family came from England, his father's from South Africa. Lyn, his wife, goes back further: Three generations of family are buried in their front garden.
The couple once visited Europe on a three-month holiday; he hasn't been back since. ''It's the last place in the world I would want to live,'' he said.
After leaving school, Shand served in the Police Anti-Terrorist Unit, to fight Mugabe's guerrilla movement. After Zimbabwe's independence in 1980, many whites in Rhodesia, as the country was then known, moved to South Africa, fearing black rule. But Shand stayed because he believed Mugabe's promises of reconciliation.
Shand said he did not oppose land redistribution to help landless blacks. ''The majority of white farmers are in favor of land reform, but we want it done in a systematic manner,'' he said. ''Not like this.''
Like many white farmers, Shand has invested his hopes in a recent High Court ruling forbidding the state from seizing property if the banks carrying mortgages on the property had not been informed of the evictions.
But Mugabe has ignored unfavorable judgments in the past, and in a fiery speech Monday he warned his government would ''brook no impediment and suffer no avoidable delays.''***
Wonder what happened to Tucker? She used to be among the most disgusting shills for left-wing cause celebres' that I ever had the queasiness to read. But here I see her actually condemning a brutal dictator who was once beloved by the media.... darn! Must be time for the Second Coming...
Carolyn
White skin makes Mugabe shudder. Shameful silence in response to ethnic cleansing in Zimbabwe***He will go on shuddering until he has rid Zimbabwe of its white population. But you won't hear Africa's leaders speak up for a threatened minority, nor will the African secretary-general of the UN, Kofi Annan, rally the international community to support the beleaguered farmers of Matabeleland. And I would bet anything you like that we won't hear any of our Western leaders use the phrase 'ethnic cleansing'. That would create an obligation to intervene to protect the vulnerable, and, for all the fine rhetoric, this simply will not happen. The whites of Zimbabwe have been abandoned. Some will try to hang on and hope that Mugabe dies of old age or is eventually overthrown; but most will eventually be driven out, the victims of Robert Mugabe's racism and our indifference. As Naomi Raaff said, it's over.***
Not condemming Mugabe, that's for sure, after all he's a fellow Marxist. No, they're "helping" by setting up border stations for fleeing refugees.
Marx/Engles thought they'd come up with a plan for restructuring industrial societies (Germany in fact).
The plan only bore serious fruit in rural, backward, and unproductive cultures. The Soviet Union, attempting to apply socialism to industrial power, fell on it's butt inside one long lifetime. China's rural communism was able to oust one set of (Russian designed) autocrats only to replace them with another. Although the source of power and means of ascent changed, China is ruled today pretty much the way it has always been ruled. New mandarins and large armies to keep the masses employed and in line; still relying on population as it's prime asset.
While great wars were being fought, allegedly between communism and capitalism, the bottom half of the third world - Africa - devolved still further into rural marxism. Rather, into something based on marx and encouraged by a western inability to sustain leadership in the wake of a war that served to destroy confidence along with millions of people.
Even in the US, the apparent winner in the mid-century war games, recovery meant entrenchment of socialist policies simply by promoting those schooled in them during their brief idalistic phase and passed on to the hedonistic generation that followed. (Incidentally killing off or marginalizing many of those less inclined to self worship in a couple of smaller, "limited", controlled (?), wars along he way.)
So today we are not faced with socialism as the evil empire but as the insidious whine of entire continents and subcontinents unwilling even to attmpt to help themselves but highly versed in hatred, repression, and in manipulating their United Nations. We, he west and the US, look upon these nasty little people as our own failures; neatly enforcing the guilt our academics have assigned to "the white man's burden". This despite having spent fifty years attempting to assure that there should be no distinction between "white" and any other form of man or woman in our own society.
I truly do pine for the days when a broad ocean was sufficient barrier against the world. I also pine for the days when western civilization had some faith in itself. (I read about both in history books that are probably now long out of print & I'm afraid to look at their replacement tomes because I think I know what I'd find.)
Sorry, but I should now be able to suppress any desire to post a rant for another six months or so.
You put that very well, neighbor. Coming soon to America, I fear.
righting historical wrongs
Hopefully, we'll hang on long enough to see these societies mature out of their "teen" years and adopt good government. Some are more advanced than others. Then there's the U.N., a twisted "Eddie Haskel," gumming up everything by pushing their socialist ideas to constantly undermine democracy.
There still are good books out there but they're buried under all the dreck the LIBERAL publishing houses print, not to mention all the garbage fed to "students" in public schools.
Rants are good.
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