World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [67]
CHAPTER 5
Backlash against Markets
Ethnically Targeted Seizures
and Nationalizations
In Zimbabwe, for three years now, furious mobs wielding sticks, axes, crossbows, iron bars, sharpened bicycle spokes, and AK-47 automatic rifles have invaded and ripped apart white-owned commercial farms. Usually by the hundreds, sometimes a thousand at a time, the invaders—with noms de guerre like “Hitler” and “Comrade Jesus”—ransack and destroy, hurling stones and gasoline bombs, singing revolutionary songs, drinking crates of looted beer, fighting over bread and tinned beef, beating, raping, abducting. “They were really like wild dogs,” sobbed a terrified victim. After grabbing food, money, and clothing, they “grabbed four chickens, cut their throats and barbecued them as they watched the house they had set on fire burn down.” Hospitals are flooded with victims of violence: resisters, black or white, faces smashed to a pulp, deep welts zigzagging down their backs, some shot at point-blank range.
1
These assaults have not been spontaneous. Rather, they have been sponsored and encouraged by the Zanu-PF government of President Robert Mugabe, which has designated over three thousand farms, covering millions of acres and overwhelmingly white-owned, for confiscation. “We are taking our land,” Mugabe has said. “We cannot be expected to buy back our land that was never bought from us, never bought from our ancestors!” To thousands of cheering supporters in December 2000, he declared, “Our party must continue to strike fear in the heart of the white man—our real enemy. The white man is not indigenous to Africa. Africa is for Africans. Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans.” When middle-aged Zimbabweans marched for peace, they were bludgeoned by police.
2
Many have described the violence directed at Zimbabwe’s white farmers and their black farmhands as “anarchy.” But if this is anarchy, it is an anarchy born of democracy. Moreover, this “anarchy” follows a highly predictable, worldwide pattern. Democratization in Zimbabwe arrived with independence in 1980, in the face of a 1 percent former-colonizer minority owning 70 percent of the nation’s best land.
Mugabe was a hero of Zimbabwe’s revolutionary movement. In 1976 he declared, “in Zimbabwe, none of the white exploiters will be allowed to keep an acre of their land.” That promise helped him sweep to overwhelming victory in the closely monitored 1980 elections, and repeating that promise has helped him win every election since.
3 On taking power in 1980, Mugabe was as popular as Nelson Mandela was in newly postapartheid South Africa.
It is easy to demonize Mugabe. But in an ugly sense Mugabe has behaved as a highly rational vote-seeking politician, and the recent violence and seizures are direct products of the democratic process. In 1980, heavily pressured by Britain, Mugabe agreed to a ten-year moratorium on major land reform: Zimbabwe’s whites would be allowed to keep their vast estates in exchange for their tacit political support. After the deal expired in 1990, Mugabe stepped up his rhetoric about nationalizing white-owned land, particularly whenever elections rolled around. Nevertheless, largely out of fear of losing foreign investment and World Bank and IMF loans, Mugabe redistributed almost no white farmland in the nineties.
Meanwhile, Mugabe’s popularity waned. Complying with IMF free market austerity measures led to sharp price hikes, unemployment, and widespread disenchantment among Zimbabwe’s poorest. These hardships were exacerbated by drought and massive crop failure. Crime rates increased. At the same time, Mugabe was plagued by one corruption scandal after another. In the late 1990s, Zimbabwe’s white farmers and corporations, anxious over Mugabe’s intensifying calls for confiscation of their land and sensing weakness in