AC Vol 41 No 9
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www.africa-confidential.com 28 April Vol 41 No 9 AFRICA CONFIDENTIAL ZIM/SOUTH AFRICA 2 ZIMBABWE The region rumbles South Africa’s economy is 20 times Comrade Mugabe’s last stand the size of Zimbabwe’s and the The upswing in political violence is about beating back the latter accounts for only 3 per cent opposition not a belated crusade for land redistribution of South Africa’s foreign trade. Yet President Thabo Mbeki is deeply The collapse of the 27 April British-Zimbabwe ministerial negotiations in London on land worried about political and financial redistribution now makes any bilateral agreement unlikely before the parliamentary elections due contagion from the Zimbabwe before mid-August. The issues in the London talks were familiar - land, race, political rights, and crisis. complaints about Whitehall’s meddling in Zimbabwe’s affairs. President Robert Mugabe, under unprecedented political pressure, has little incentive to cut a deal with the former colonial power this ZIM/CONGO 3 time. President Mugabe’s current calculations are overwhelmingly short-term and electoral. More than once his own strategy in the past month has been at variance with his own ministers such as A military trap Vice-President Joseph Msika or Home Affairs Minister Dumiso Dabengwa who have been publicly countermanded by the President. The Congo war is at the heart of President Mugabe’s troubles. Indeed, the ministerial team Mugabe sent to London, certainly Minister of Local Government Withdrawal of Zimbabwean troops John Nkomo and retiring Trade Minister Nathan Shamuyarira, appeared keen to maintain a propping up President Kabila would dialogue with Whitehall, and say they are happy to accept international monitoring of the elections. cause trouble in both Kinshasa and And a day after the failed talks, the self-appointed leader of the liberation war veterans, Chenjerai Harare. But pressure is mounting Hunzvi, ordered them to end the farm occupations which sparked the crisis talks in London. on Kabila and Mugabe - this makes a sustained ceasefire more On a smaller scale, the Zimbabwe crisis has become a domestic political problem for Britain’s plausible. Labour Government, under fire from the Conservative opposition for saying too much and doing too little. Conservative Foreign Affairs spokesman Francis Maude is calling for Zimbabwe to be expelled from the Commonwealth. British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook’s main demand for an end UGANDA - I 5 to government-inspired occupations of commercial farms reflected the relentless coverage by the One way street British media of the white farm owners, 20,000 of whom have British passports. President Museveni’s National Colonial retreads Resistance Movement will win the Mugabe and his Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front negotiators argue that the white referendum in June but there are growing signs of disagreement farms were acquired by imperial conquest not by rule of law; and that white ownership of land was about ‘no-party’ politics in the then consolidated under colonial rule, and extended further under Ian Smith’s Rhodesia Front organisation. Perhaps political regime which had declared independence unilaterally from Britain in 1965. Finally, Mugabe pluralism may come sooner than accuses Britain of betrayal over the US$2 billion trust fund for land redistribution (from Britain, the some of the NRM loyalists expect. United States and the European Union) mooted in negotiations leading up the 1980 Lancaster House Independence agreement. So far Britain has released just £44 million ($69mn.) for land redistribution; UGANDA - II 6 Whitehall says further money is dependent on the ZANU-PF government ensuring that it finances land redistribution to the rural poor - not to senior party officials. Harare says it’s none of Who’s who in the Whitehall’s business who owns land in Zimbabwe. NRM Leader of the Movement for Democratic Change Morgan Tsvangirai is caught in the middle of this argument. He says the British concentration on land occupations plays into Mugabe’s hands by This year’s referendum and next defining the electoral issues as colonial rule and the injustice of white minority privilege rather than year’s presidential election will see a major political mobilisation by political and economic reform. The campaign by veterans of the liberation struggle against white the National Resistance farms, he says, is both a diversion from the real issues and a means of intimidating rural voters, who Movement. Our correspondents show signs of backing the MDC at the polls, by creating no-go areas. offer a guide to the key political Since the Independence elections, Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party’s electoral success has been due as and military figures in the NRM. much to physical strength as to political persuasion. In 1980, ZANU-PF swept to victory in part because its military wing, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, dominated the countryside. During the clampdown on its one-time rival, the late Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe POINTERS 8 African People’s Union, in 1982-83, North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade troops killed more than 2,000 civilians in the ZAPU stronghold of Matebeleland. On the eve of the 1990 elections, the then Côte d’Ivoire, Vice-President Simon Muzenda’s bodyguards attacked members of Edgar Tekere’s opposition Angola, and Nigeria Zimbabwe Unity Movement party in Gweru and shot parliamentary candidate Patrick Kombayi six times, twice in the groin. Cheque in the post; gems and guns; promises, promises. Following the February 2000 referendum failure (AC Vol 41 No 4), ZANU-PF has resurrected the land issue as a means of tightening its grip on the rural vote. Senior ZANU officials concede the 28 April 2000 Africa Confidential Vol 41 No 9 parliamentary polls will be close-run. They accept they will lose Mbeki’s main objective has been to end the Congo war and make the country’s two biggest seats - Harare and Bulawayo - and maybe the Lusaka II ceasefire work, through a delicate balance of moral other big towns such as Masvingo where the vote is ‘fluid’. But suasion and economic pressure on President Robert Mugabe. they insist they can still hold the countryside where 65 per cent of Disrupting Harare-Pretoria relations would lose South Africa the the electorate live. Independent polls show there have been important little leverage it has in the Congo war - but ‘quietly, quietly’ draws changes in the countryside since the 1995 elections. As economic fire that Pretoria isn’t doing enough to stop the Zimbabwe crisis conditions in the towns have worsened, fewer workers have been from further damaging the regional economy. able to send back funds to their extended families in the countryside. Perhaps wisely, Mbeki is distancing himself from the diplomatic Criticism of the ZANU-PF government by Zimbabwe’s relatively efforts of the former colonial power, Britain, in Southern Africa. well-educated population (the beneficiaries of state largesse in the Almost since its election in 1994, the African National Congress 1980s) is growing fast. government has been accused of working for the mlungu (white The government is being held responsible for what the popular man) in the region, where anti-colonial and anti-West sentiment is singer, Thomas Mapfumo - ‘the Lion of Africa’ - has called in his rising again. It remains to be seen whether the Mbeki approach is latest hit single, the ‘disaster’. The referendum defeat showed that compatible with the ‘ethical’ policy of Britain’s Foreign Minister, electorally, ZANU-PF is vulnerable. Translated into electoral Robin Cook. After considering all the African factors, Mbeki has terms 61 constituencies voted ‘No’ with the MDC in the referendum concluded that the only way to tackle the regional crisis is by trying and only 59 voted ‘Yes’ with ZANU-PF. The referendum took a above all to persuade the combatants in the Congo and Angola - divided and ill-prepared ZANU-PF by surprise; in the coming Mugabe, Laurent Kabila, Angola’s José Eduardo dos Santos parliamentary elections, ZANU-PF’s tactics, brutal as they are, are and Namibia’s Sam Nujoma - that they would gain real economic dominating the agenda. and political advantages by enforcing the Lusaka II peace accord, ZANU-PF knows its popularity is at an all-time low. A recent agreed in Kampala last month. survey among 1,900 households, 1,000 of them rural, conducted by Gallup for the Helen Suzman Foundation found that 68 per cent of Cross-border chaos the respondents believed their lives had detiorated during the last That doesn’t mean Mbeki isn’t appalled by the killings of opposition five years. supporters in Zimbabwe and the violent occupation of farms: many Among those advocating political change, 71 per cent believed ANC politicians remember the apartheid regime’s tactics in their living standards had fallen, and even among ZANU-PF kwaZulu-Natal, where thousands of lives were lost in state- supporters, the percentage was 62. So, Tsvangirai believes the sponsored violence. Zimbabwe’s crisis undermines the rule of law MDC can defeat ZANU-PF with a majority of the 120 elected seats. and property rights, spreads instability and damages the talk of an MDC supporters hope they can win as many as 90 seats so that it African renaissance which attracts foreign investors to the region. will be difficult to rig the result. The critical votes could lie with Mbeki’s officials fear the economic and political consequences if the first time voters, the so-called ‘born-frees’, the more than 35 per tens of thousands of Zimbabweans cross into an already xenophobic cent of the electorate born after 1980 who are frustrated by the South Africa. Above all Mbeki wants to prevent the collapse of the economic crash and have no established allegiance to ZANU-PF.