[Translated from the analysis of GegenStandpunkt Publishers on Radio Lora München from May 8, 2000]

Crisis in Zimbabwe:

The destruction of a neo-colonial idyll

For corpses in Africa to attract the attention of observers in the civilized world of democratic imperialism, a few thousand deaths must occur due to hunger, epidemics, or allegedly purely natural disasters. Hence, ever since the former British colony of Southern Rhodesia began operating under the name of the Republic of Zimbabwe, it has not exceeded the limits of normality for a state in the “Third World” due to either a 20% AIDS infection rate of the (non-white) population nor an unemployment rate estimated at 50% (coincidentally, again exclusively among blacks). The massive increase in infant mortality since the IMF and World Bank ordered the government to cut its health budget to one-fifth was also acceptable under the heading of an “austerity program to maintain the country’s creditworthiness.”

But now something monstrous has apparently happened: two white farmers have been killed in an attempt by a group of people, immediately exposed in this country as a “mob,” to force a redistribution of arable land by occupying white-owned land. And the question of guilt has been clearly decided: President Robert Mugabe has been identified as the villain who is to blame for the fact that Zimbabwe may soon no longer be a travel destination for European citizens who can afford it. Firstly, the man ran everything down there quite well for almost 20 years and, secondly, there is no pretense that the demands being made by the landless “rabble” he encourages come out of thin air: Anyone who wants to can read in the newspaper that 5,000 farmers of European origin own four-fifths of the land that is worth cultivating. And a comparison of the statistics in country encyclopedias from different years shows that this percentage has steadily increased in favor of the white farmers in the 20 years of African majority rule.

No wonder that the former guerrilla leader, who has been said to have affinities with the People’s Republic of China, was a prime example of successful democratic state formation in Africa for many years as president and was praised accordingly in the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The Republic of Zimbabwe was a particularly successful product of decolonization because it allowed the main beneficiaries of the colonialist plundering of land and people to remain in the country: Invited by the black government and constitutionally protected by a 10-year guarantee of a white blocking minority against constitutional changes and thus changes to the property system. The mines thus remained in the possession of multinational companies with headquarters or branch offices in the Republic of South Africa. And 5,000 large landowners were able to welcome among their wage slaves for plucking tobacco some from the ranks of retired veterans of the Liberation Army, who had hoped that their war against the settler regime of Ian Smith would lead not only to a black head of state ruling over the country, but also a piece of it for themselves to live on.

Their leader, Robert Mugabe, had promised them that, but also and above all that his movement, which adorned itself with the epithet “Patriotic Front,” wanted to establish a genuinely strong African state.

For this program, any interference with the property rights of the white master race was out of the question. Such a thing would have jeopardized the economic strength of the new state. It was, after all, dependent on the export of tobacco. In view of this, the distribution of suitable land to the unemployed masses, who would then merely vegetate on it as subsistence farmers, seemed like a “dangerous experiment.” (As Robert Mugabe said in his first government statement, subsequently mutating from “communist terrorist” to “Good Old Bob” in the eyes of his white citizens). Although ZANU-PF retained the slogans of “African socialism,” it never fell for the audacious idea of setting up viable, meaning state supported, agricultural production cooperatives for the black farmers, at least on fallow or usable lands bought up by the government. This would have jeopardized the newly acquired reputation of the black majority government as the guarantor of a “free market economy.

In the Republic of Zimbabwe, the idyllic coexistence of the black state program and the continued enrichment of the colonial rulers who remained in the country was successful for over a decade. Their windfall ensured a positive trade balance for the state, as well as sufficient baksheesh for the ruling party functionaries. What is today blamed on the extensive corruption of the long standing autocratic rule of the Mugabe party was for many years considered a successful example of harmonious cooperation between blacks and whites in one state.

The model country in southern Africa was plunged into crisis by the drastic fall in the prices for gold, chrome, zinc, and nickel paid on the world market and the declining international demand for tobacco. At the same time, with the end of the East-West confrontation and the pacification of the Republic of South Africa, the interest of the Western metropoles in securing a sphere of influence in a strategically important area waned. In other words, the money that was said to be for “development aid,” used for supporting a congenial local government, was cut.

In recent years, Zimbabwe has had to spend half of its national budget servicing its accumulated foreign debt, and the trend is rising. The contribution of white tobacco farmers, on the other hand, is decreasing. The Mugabe government’s response was to cut back on all “consumer spending,” i.e. state handouts to support the unemployed masses and provide social security to wage laborers in the mines, industry and the countryside. For this, Zimbabwe was praised by the IMF and World Bank for the last time. Unforgivable according to the logic of the world market, however, was the increase in the pension fund for invalids and veterans of the liberation war by an incredible 50 million dollars. This was the ruling party’s way of securing loyalty from its most loyal supporters in view of the deterioration in living conditions for the black majority of the population. Since then, the external value of the Zimbabwean dollar has fallen, the stock exchange in Harare has been closed from time to time and, worst of all, Zimbabwe was unable to pay a foreign bill for the first time this year – that of the South African electricity company, which regularly cuts off the power to the entire country as a warning.

A referendum on expropriating without compensation farmland that had been uncultivated for more than two years was intended as a political offensive. The white farmers reacted indignantly, as they had reduced the area under tobacco cultivation in order to slow down the fall in prices due to shrinking demand by reducing supply. Because the referendum also included a law giving the president extended powers, the farmers mobilized a new opposition party with a lot of money and unleashed a campaign to “save democracy” from the “tyrant” Mugabe. In the meantime, the entire civilized world has become very concerned about democracy in Zimbabwe – the same civilized world that considered it genuinely democratic that, under Zimbabwean electoral law, for 10 years the vote of one white person counted about as much as the vote of seven black people.

ZANU lost the referendum by the narrowest of margins, but this did not prevent the rest of the world from nowon seeing Mugabe as “completely isolated” and consequently dismissing the squatters as a “paid mob.” It is also clear that the next parliamentary elections will only not be “rigged” if ZANU screws up and decent Negroes from the opposition party come to the helm, having drawn the only permissible conclusion from 20 years of Zimbabwe’s subjugation to the “objective constraints” of the free-market world order: The reason for their misery does not lie in this, but rather in “mismanagement” and “embezzlement” of the country's wealth by “corrupt” rulers with a poor understanding of democracy.