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Saturday 22 November 2008

Mugabe is the Mobutu of our time

Marian L. Tupy wishes that Zimbabwe would follow the lead of Botswana, a market democracy. For now, it swelters under the oppressive rule of a tyrant who is wrecking his country.

Things turned out very differently. In 1982, Mugabe turned on his once comrade-in-arms, Joshua Nkomo of the Zimbabwe Africa Peoples Union (ZAPU). He unleashed his special forces trained by the North Koreans on Nkomo’s supporters in the Matabeleland, killing some 20,000 in the process. In 1987, ZAPU’s remnants were swallowed by ZANU and Zimbabwe became a de facto one-party state.

Mugabe remained firmly in charge until 1998, when he ordered his army to invade, of all places, the Congo. Following Mobutu’s flight, the Congo descended into chaos. Her new strongman, Laurent Kabila, was faced with internal rebellion that drew military responses from Angola, Chad, Namibia and Zimbabwe on Kabila’s side, and Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda on the rebels’ side. The conflict — Africa’s largest ever — cost Zimbabwe US$15 million per month and tied up one third of Mugabe’s forces.

In return for his help, Kabila gave Mugabe and his generals mining concessions in the southern part of the Congo. The top brass of the Zimbabwean military made small fortunes and developed a taste for riches that Mugabe would later find so difficult to satisfy. Back home, however, the war was deeply unpopular and the Zimbabwean population threw its support behind the newly founded Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) led by a former trade union boss named Morgan Tsvangirai. It was Tsvangirai’s MDC that defeated Mugabe’s plans to change the constitution and extend his rule in a 1999 referendum. Furious at his defeat, Mugabe turned on the white commercial farmers, whom he suspected of giving financial backing to the MDC.

Over the next few years almost all of Zimbabwe’s 4,000 white-owned farms were invaded by state-organised gangs. Some of the farmers who resisted the land seizures were murdered, while others fled abroad. Mugabe claimed that the land would be given to the landless masses. In fact, much of the best land was given to his cronies who proceeded to enrich themselves with such gusto that Mugabe had to plead with them ‘to choose one [farm] and give up the rest’.

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