World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [68]
4 Furious, Mugabe—called a “master manipulator” of the populace even by his detractors—responded as he always had: by playing the race card.
Starting in 1998, in anticipation of the 2000 parliamentary elections, Mugabe called for the immediate seizure of hundreds of commercial farms owned by the “sons of Britain” and “enemies of Zimbabwe.” These calls were delivered at mass rallies and broadcast on national television. As the 2002 presidential elections approached, Mugabe intensified the hatemongering and expropriations. Subordinates were sent into white-owned tobacco fields to mobilize support: “Vote for Zanu PF and you will all be given land, farms, houses. Vote for Zanu PF and there will be peace, jobs, prosperity. Vote for MDC and there will be war. We will get our guns.” Their slogans were: “Down with the whites. Down with colonialism. Down with the MDC. Down with Britain.” The seizures began in earnest in 2000 and have accelerated since.
5
The results have been catastrophic. Zimbabwe’s currency, stock market, tourism sector, and foreign investment have all collapsed. Vast fields of tobacco, maize, sunflower, and sugar lay in charred ruins. Tens of millions of dollars in export earnings have literally gone up in flames. Aid agencies estimate that more than half a million people in Zimbabwe face starvation.
It is generally assumed in the Western media that the opposition MDC, which repudiated the violent land seizures, would have won the 2002 elections had they been free and fair. This might well be true: Mugabe set up far more polling stations in rural areas, where his support was strongest, than elsewhere, and there are plenty of reports of intimidation. On the other hand, African governments have uniformly praised the 2002 elections, which in fact were no more irregular than other elections in Africa that the West has deemed “free and fair.”
6
More important, the MDC was in fact, and was known to be, sponsored and funded by whites. “The problem with MDC,” as one observer bluntly puts it, is that “[d]espite being led by trade unionist Morgan Tsvangirai, despite taking 57 seats in the election (most, but not all, of its candidates were black), despite appealing hugely to an urban black electorate, this is still a party designed for and by whites.” At the MDC party headquarters in Harare last June, according to news reports, “the only black face visible was the security guard outside the front entrance. Within, it was a sea of pale political strategists, organizers, media spinners and volunteers.”
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Even if MDC had won in 2002, pressures for the massive redistribution of white holdings would not have gone away. The land problem—specifically, the problem of a 1 percent market-dominant white minority controlling the country’s best land in the form of three-thousand-acre commercial farms while most members of the black majority live in land-hungry poverty—would remain, ready for another firebrand politician to exploit, if not next year, then two or five or ten years down the road. Nor should it be forgotten that the harsh, free market, belt-tightening policies urged on Zimbabwe in the early 1990s by the United States, World Bank, and IMF created hardship among the nation’s poorest, contributing to the mass popular frustrations that in turn made Mugabe’s confiscatory campaigns all the more appealing. Zimbabwe’s dilemma is that foreign investors and global capital flee whenever the country proposes to upset the white minority’s landholdings—which is why, from 1980 to the late 1990s almost no land redistribution occurred. But placating the interests of the market-dominant minority and the international business community throws fat on Zimbabwe’s democratic fire. Today’s bloody confiscations and the resulting economic collapse are the direct product of the collision between free markets and democratic