Subject: [smygo] Mugabe's Tightening Grip
From: Dan Clore 
Date: 16 Dec 2002 00:39:33 -0600

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AFP

Friday December 13, 10:45 PM 

Zimbabwe will meet West's hostility with hostility to
whites: Mugabe

Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe warned that he would
react to what he called Western hostility against his
government by taking a more negative stance against whites
in the southern African country.

"The more they (western countries) work against us, the more
they express their hostility against us, the more negative
we shall become to their kith and kin here," Mugabe said in
a speech to open the annual conference of his ruling
Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF)
party.

Mugabe lamented that some European countries, Australia and
New Zealand have been sucked into Zimbabwe's dispute with
its former colonial power, Britain, and warned that they
will be treated as enemies of Zimbabwe.

"The difference is between us and Britain but if they want
to see us as enemies, fine -- we will treat them as such."

Relations between Zimbabwe and its former colonial power
have soured in recent years as Mugabe's government embarked
on a massive campaign to seize white-owned land and give it
to landless blacks.

Mugabe said white farmers who tried to resist the the land
reform scheme "committed an unforgivable sin... which shall
always live against them". 

"We saw who they were, what they were and we realised we had
nurtured enemies among us, so we started treating them as
enemies, enemies of our government, enemies of our party,
enemies of our people."

Mugabe scoffed at allegations of bad governance and human
rights abuses saying it was "rubbish" coming from people who
yesterday turned Zimbabweans into slaves.

"Where was democracy when our land was being seized? Where
was justice? Where were human rights when we were being
arrested?" he asked. 

The Zimbabwean leader admitted that the land reform exercise
has not been perfect and still has "some way to go."

He said that while some people had still not taken up land
allocated to them, there were claims and counterclaims on
already settled land.

"People are fighting for land, some are being moved after
being settled to make way for others," he said.

Mugabe promised that he will personally lead a team that
will visit all the provinces of the southern African country
to carry out an audit of who owns what. 

"Do not fight each other," he appealed. 

Zimbabwe embarked on a controversial and sometimes violent
land reform programme in early 2000. The exercise saw white
landowners being dispossessed of their land to make way for
landless blacks. 

To date, the government claims to have re-settled 374,000
small-scale black farmers on 14 million hectares (42 million
acres) of formerly white-owned land.

The land exercise is said by aid agencies to be partly
responsible, along with a drought that has hit five other
southern African countries, for the hunger threatening close
to eight million Zimbabweans, or about three-quarters of the
country's population. 

ZANU-PF's three-day conference is taking place against a
backdrop of the worst economic crisis to face the country
since independence in 1980. Basic goods are running
seriously short and inflation is in the triple digits and
continuing to climb. 

Mugabe, in his speech to hundreds of his party officials and
supporters gathered in the small town of Chinhoyi, some 115
kilometres (70 miles) north of the capital, did not refer to
the current crisis but blamed the economic meltdown on
"imperialism." 

Mugabe ruled out a government of national unity with the
opposition in the country.

"To include (Morgan) Tsvangirai in my government... let them
go hang wherever they are," Mugabe said in his address.

"We continue to rule this country to the best way possible.
We will accept those who want to work with us harmoniously
.. but those who set themselves up as our opponents and
enemy we will ... react in the same way towards them," he
said.

Mugabe's Tightening Grip

Interview: Zimbabwean Editor Iden Wetherell

by Elijah Zarwan
World Press Review Web editor
Dec. 16, 2002 

Iden Wetherell, editor of the Zimbabwe Independent, is the
2002 recipient of World Press Review's International Editor
of the Year Award. World Press Review presents the award
each year to an editor or editors outside the United States
in recognition of enterprise, courage, and leadership in
advancing the freedom and responsibility of the press,
enhancing human rights, and fostering excellence in
journalism. 

Wetherell is one of 13 Zimbabwean journalists charged with
"abusing journalistic privilege" under a new media law and
has been charged three times under the Censorship Act. He
played a prominent role in student politics in the 1970s,
heading the student council at the University College of
Rhodesia (today the University of Zimbabwe). He took a
bachelor of arts honors degree in history followed by a
masters in philosophy and a Ph.D., and then lectured in the
history department. 

He spent the period 1976-79 in exile, mostly in Zambia and
Botswana, returning home in early 1980. He returned to the
University of Zimbabwe to teach but then branched out into
secondary education. He lectured part time in the UZ Faculty
of Education in the mid-1980s and was editor of the Journal
of Social Change and Development from 1980-89. He was also
an editor for Ravan Press publishers in Johannesburg and
taught history at the University of Natal, South Africa.
Wetherell joined The Financial Gazette as assistant to the
editor in 1992. He became deputy editor of the Zimbabwe
Independent when it was established in 1996 and became its
editor four years later. 

During his recent trip to New York to receive World Press
Review's award at a ceremony at the United Nations,
Wetherell agreed to be interviewed about the political
dimensions of famine, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's
crackdown on civil society and the press, Zimbabwe's role in
the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and how the U.S. media
can do a better job of covering Zimbabwe. 

WPR: We've heard reports that the Zimbabwean government was
preventing non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like Oxfam
and Save the Children from distributing food aid. This was
in areas sympathetic to the [opposition] Movement for
Democratic Change (MDC)? 

Iden Wetherell: Yes, in Binga, an area up near Lake Kariba,
and--significantly--an opposition stronghold. It's also an
area which development has bypassed, not only under this
government, but also during the colonial era. People from
around there are among the most disadvantaged anywhere,
historically. In such a situation, the politics of food
becomes a primary factor. Mugabe's government has been
accusing the British high commissioner [Brian Donnelly] of
manipulating food aid, of phoning agencies and telling them
where to distribute. In fact, Britain, the European Union,
and the United States are the biggest donors of food aid and
they are accountable to governments, to parliaments, for
expenditure. They are in a situation where it is understood
that the [Zimbabwean] regime is using and abusing food aid
to favor its supporters, and to the disadvantage of
opponents. The diplomats have a responsibility to ensure
that their own country's donations, whether handed out
directly or through the offices of the World Food Program,
are properly and professionally distributed. I think that
was what the British high commissioner and other European
Union diplomats have been doing; they have been going in on
the ground and seeing what was happening. 

Then you have the incident in Insiza--a constituency in
southwestern Zimbabwe, which the government just won back
from the MDC in a by-election. In that campaign, the World
Food Program (WFP) identified supporters of the ruling party
as hijacking food supplies, and actually stealing them and
redistributing among their own supporters. The WFP said we
cannot continue to condone that, and they suspended their
work there. And that was interesting, because in August we
[at the Zimbabwe Independent] accused the World Food Program
of being a little Pollyannaish about the food distribution. 

They were saying, "We can't see any politicization of food
supply." Various spokespeople were saying that, and we were
saying, "Stop being so naove." So I'm glad to see they've
worked it out. We still have problems with various U.N.
agencies being slow to speak out. But I'm glad [the World
Food Program] did in this case. 

To what extent do you think the causes of the famine are
political and to what extent do you think the famine is just
caused by the drought? 

I would say, "90 percent political." We've had droughts
before. One thing you must remember about these farmers who
have been dispossessed is that--whatever their
ancestry--they were among the most skilled farmers in
Africa. And the first to admit that are the South Africans,
whose farmers are a great deal less versatile and less
experienced in terms of developing new varieties of seed
maize [corn] and cattle production--and, above all, in
pioneering work in wildlife management. You might not know
that most commercial farmers had relationships with their
neighbors, allowing game to cross farm frontiers freely and
to conserve forest and river systems on their properties.
These were called "intensive conservation areas"--a unique
program in Africa. They have all gone now. 

So we have to consider a number of things. First of all, by
buying and seizing land in a completely arbitrary, ad hoc,
and untrained way, you are completely disrupting
agricultural productivity. Therefore, the food no longer
reaches the market internally and you are no longer able to
export to earn foreign exchange in order to import essential
commodities, such as fuel and power. The collapse of the
commercial sector has huge implications. And don't forget
that Zimbabwe not only had a record of food
self-sufficiency, but also fed countries in the
region--something we took completely for granted until this
year. Now [the collapse] means we have an import bill to
meet in foreign exchange we don't have. So the deliberate
sabotage of agricultural production, the blind refusal to
permit farmers to go on farming, even in the short term to
get over the season, to build up stocks of maize, that has
terrible implications for people who are already short of
food. So I have no doubt--nor does anybody else--that
Zimbabweans could well have survived a serious drought this
year, if a plan had been in place and stocks had been
conserved, just with elementary planning. 

There's no reason at all why a drought should lead to
starvation. If you look at the countries in the region,
those that are best surviving the current drought are those
that best manage their agricultural sectors, which are South
Africa, Botswana, and Namibia. If you look at the record of
Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi, these are the countries which
have least effectively managed their resources. So it is
political, and it has a political cause. 

You mentioned that South Africans recognize the productivity
of the Zimbabwean commercial farms. How, then, do you
explain South Africa's silence, or lack of criticism, of
Robert Mugabe's regime, given the land crisis, given the
attempts to silence the opposition, given all the
difficulties that regime has imposed on the country? 

I think [South African President Thabo] Mbeki is calculating
the political danger to himself, the danger of being
wrong-footed by the PAC [Pan Africanist Congress] and the
land lobby. They have already been liaising with Zimbabwe,
very much to the consternation of the Office of the
President in Pretoria. There have been traditionally close
relations between the PAC and ZANU-PF [Mugabe's ruling
Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front].
Historically, ZANU-PF didn't support the ANC [African
National Congress, South Africa's ruling party]. So there
is, in Pretoria, very considerable worry about the PAC
stealing a march on them politically on the land issue, and
therefore a need not to be seen to be resisting land reform. 

Civil society in Zimbabwe is saying, "That's not the point.
You don't have to oppose land reform, you merely have to fix
the land reform so that it is done in a way that is legal,
transparent, benefits those most in need, and doesn't
disrupt agricultural production." Mbeki can't seem to find
it within himself to pronounce on that. That's the problem. 

Why doesn't he allow himself to be guided by South Africa's
own constitution, by its own principles of the rule of law
and good governance? Why doesn't he speak about the
importance of good governance in the region? He is unable to
do the right thing. He shouldn't make fatuous pronouncements
that he's not going to invade Zimbabwe when nobody asked him
to. 

He seems to be paralyzed by a number of things, like he was
with the HIV thing. But he has a tendency toward
demagoguery. in the sense that he feels the need to express
solidarity with other regional leaders who resent the
pressure being put upon them to address and resolve
Zimbabwe's crisis. So they tend to express themselves in
nationalist terms, which is not really the point again,
because nationalism doesn't have to be about expressing
solidarity with the rulers in the region. It should be about
expressing solidarity with peoples and their democratic
aspirations, with their right not to be starved to death by
a brutal tyrant. If they have a rogue ruler in their midst,
whom they have allowed to carry on, that is a problem they
have to address. They have to address the problem if they
want to be taken seriously by the outside world. If they
want to be taken seriously, they cannot ignore this problem
[of Mugabe] and hope it will go away. It won't. I think that
is the failure of Mbeki's foreign policy, that he is unable
to tackle this issue head-on, and to deal with it in the
correct way. 

Have you seen the pressure on Zimbabwean civil society
increase recently? 

Yes, absolutely. It's part of a concerted campaign to crush
civil society in Zimbabwe. Civil society emerged in the
1990s, when Mugabe's regime was perceived as failing in its
commandist aspirations. The command economy, with its large
public sector, wasn't generating jobs, or, clearly, any
investment. So civil society mushroomed when it was manifest
that Mugabe's policies had failed, when all Zimbabweans saw
that it was time to take a new direction. So civil society
strengthened and began to take liberties and freedoms to
which it was entitled by the Constitution, but which ZANU-PF
had been reluctant to accord and was resentful in allowing.
So there was that resentment. But so long as the
international community was being engaged, there was the
need to be seen to be allowing those freedoms. What came
about was a setback to Mugabe. Civil society was allowed [to
exist] as long as it didn't affect his electoral majority or
threaten his political ascendancy. 

Mugabe's first real electoral defeat was the product of
civil society. In 2000, civil society mobilized around the
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