Canada should take tougher line with Mugabe Hope fades in Zimbabwe

There appears to be no substance to recent reports that leading figures in Zimbabwe’s dictatorial governing party, the African National Union (ZANU-PF), had agreed to a deal under which President Robert Mugabe would retire from power in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

That’s unfortunate for Zimbabwe, because the present government continues to destroy one of southern Africa’s most promising societies.

There is the destructive and scandalous game of “land reform,” in which violent gangs — ostensibly veterans of the civil wars of the 1980s — took over operating farmland, often killing and maiming owners and farm workers to spread terror.

There is the government’s shackling of the judicial system, notably by forcing judges from office whenever they made, or appeared likely to make, anti-government decisions, and by appointing new and compliant judges to replace them. There is its politicization of the machinery of state, in making the police complicit in the criminal acts of the “war veterans.”

There is ZANU-PF’s abuse of the elections in 2002, when the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) was harassed and voters intimidated. There is the government’s suppression of the press, which has extended to arson, torture and attempted murder.

Then there is Zimbabwe’s Vietnam: Mugabe’s foreign adventurism in the Congo, from which 2,000 Zimbabwean soldiers have recently returned. This intervention in another country’s civil war is known to have enriched cabinet ministers and senior staff officers, but for ordinary Zimbabweans it has meant further impoverishment. Imperialism does come with a price, after all, and the object of the game is to make others pay it.

And all this lies atop a completely preventable famine, one that owes its origins to the destruction of one of southern Africa’s most successful agricultural economies in the name of land “reform.”

Yet when Commonwealth heads of government met after last year’s fraudulent Zimbabwean election, many African leaders wanted the evil papered over. (Botswanan President Festus Mogae was an honourable exception.) Prodded by the British, who stood to be saddled with the greater part of the bill for Mugabe’s antics, and by Australian Prime Minister John Howard, rapidly staking out a reputation as the Western World’s most resolute leader, the organization suspended Zimbabwe for a year.

Being shut out of the Commonwealth for a year is an insubstantial sanction, but it was what the organization had to hand. Even so, the Canadian government sought a diplomatic “compromise” that would have softened the wrist-slap further. Not for us the inconvenient straitjacket of the facts; no regime is objectionable enough, nor any measure innocuous enough, that Canadian diplomacy can’t find a way to water down the consequences of bad behaviour. If our proconsuls remain obsessed by our 1950s role as the “honest broker” between the First and Third Worlds, they have lost sight of the “honest” part, and are practising diplomacy for diplomacy’s sake, the ideology of the spineless.

Mugabe’s government pretends to the Zimbabwean people — and possibly, also, to itself — that the famine has external origins. The sanctions-that-aren’t-sanctions and the West’s refusal to deal with the regime caused crop failures; the vestiges of colonialism keep the people from producing from the land. Or, that failing, it’s all because of the drought. This, while formerly productive farmland lies fallow, and gangs roam across the redistributed land.

Food aid — provided entirely by the West — is distributed according to political tint; ZANU-PF supporters can eat, and party heavyweights can sell food, but MDC supporters get nothing. And as famine spreads, it is becoming even more of a political tool. When cabinet ministers openly muse about how much better off the country would be with fewer people — as long as those people are committed to the Revolution — we are seeing something not far removed from the genocidal famines of the 1930s in the Soviet Union.

At the same time, the farms stand idle, the squatters having simply appropriated the land and driven off the agricultural workers. Now reports are circulating that the squatters are slaughtering domestic animals and game on the farms — precisely as had been predicted.

In 2000, Robert Mugabe said that when land “reform” was completed, the mining sector would see the same thing. At least one mine, the Procter gold operation near Mberengwa, has already been seized. When the “war veterans” have destroyed the farms and come for the mines, where will our government be?

Playing, yet again, at “soft power,” and guaranteeing that in this, as elsewhere in world affairs, we stay a joke. There may be little we can do to help Zimbabwe; but we can trust our government to do even less.