Labour’s betrayal of Zimbabwe

Peter Oborne reveals the scandalous consequences of the government’s timid approach to Robert Mugabe, a tyrant who is now creating a famine among his own people

This autumn Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of Africa, is on the verge of man-made famine. Soon refugees will be pouring out over the borders, above all into neighbouring South Africa. According to the United Nations six million people -half the population – are in peril of undernourishment or starvation.

Most famines are to some extent man-made. But very rarely are they created deliberately, as an act of government policy. Stalin engineered a rural famine to exterminate the kulaks in the 1930s. So it is with Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean President. He has already set about eradicating his opponents. Aid agencies have noted that food is being diverted to Mugabe’s political clients. Hundreds of thousands of black farmworkers are being lifted off the land, and dumped.

The white farmers left in Zimbabwe are, in statistical terms, not much more than an irrelevance. But they enable Mugabe to propagate the notion that he is the victim of a racist, colonial conspiracy. This elaborately constructed fantasy cuts less and less ice in Zimbabwe itself. But it seems to work in neighbouring countries, and above all in the regional superpower, South Africa, which has sat by as Mugabe has embarked on murder, torture, expropriation and ethnic cleansing. Mugabe’s fantasy has carried great weight, above all, with the British government. The Zimbabwean President’s constant emphasis on Britain’s colonial past has had an astonishing effect. It has almost completely emasculated Tony Blair and his ministers. Again and again, in their quest for an excuse for inaction, government ministers have reverentially prayed in aid the anticolonialist sentiments of the Zimbabwean President.