Affordable Housing Institute : US

An Economist article from some weeks back highlights why Robert Mugabe seems bent on destroying his own cities:

 

 

Just rubbish to Mugabe (Economist caption)

 

But the real reason for this mass destruction may be to drive people back to rural areas. The government’s land redistribution policy, which led to the invasion of the country’s white-owned farms in the past few years, has contributed to the economic catastrophe that now grips Zimbabwe.  On top of a drought and the devastation of HIV/AIDS, the land grab has made food production plummet. The UN’s World Food Programme reckons that 3m-4m people will need food aid this year.  Cooking oil, sugar and Zimbabweans’ staple maize porridge have become very hard to come by in Harare, harder still in the countryside.  Unemployment is probably over 70%; inflation, at last count, was 129%. There is not enough foreign exchange to cover basic imports. Long lines of cars wait in front of petrol stations rumoured to be expecting a delivery.

 

According to Peter Kagwanja, Southern Africa director of the International Crisis Group, which focuses on conflict prevention, pushing people out of the cities has several advantages from the government’s perspective.  Reviving agriculture cannot be done without labour, and most of it left the countryside as commercial farming collapsed.  So far, only a fraction of occupied land has been put to good use.  Without more labour, even subsistence agriculture cannot pick up.  (Many Crisis Group links on Zimbabwe here.)

 

 

Operation Murambatsvina refugees (from Sokwanele)

 

The Economist also provides a link-rich background summary:

 

White-only rule in Zimbabwe ended in 1980 when Robert Mugabe of the Zimbabwe African National Union (now ZANU-PF) became the country’s leader. Mr Mugabe and his party have ruled Zimbabwe ever since, but the once-respected resistance leader now uses thuggery to hang on to power. This has involved the stifling of free speech and the judiciary and the repression of the opposition, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

 

Starting in March 2000, Mr Mugabe’s supporters began seizing land from white landowners.  This helped ruin Zimbabwe’s economy and created worsening food shortages.  The EU passed “smart sanctions” aimed at Mr Mugabe and his cronies in February 2002, but this did not stop them from claiming victory in a crooked presidential election.  In March 2002 the Commonwealth responded by suspending Zimbabwe’s membership.

 

Mr Mugabe, who boasts of ruling until he’s “a century old”, again rigged the polls to steal the general election of March 2005.  Not surprisingly, the country’s population is declining as Zimbabweans flee to neighbouring Zambia and South Africa.  Dissent is meanwhile growing within the ZANU-PF.

 

As Sokwanele (”removing the dictator through non-violent action”) says:

 

Robert Mugabe and those of his partners in crime responsible for the crime against humanity called Operation Murambatsvina, would like nothing better than that the media should move their attention on to other things. But that is the one thing the independent press and the international media must not do at any cost. Mugabe and his apologists would far prefer that Zimbabweans, and the world, should accept the fiction that the military operation is over, the deed is done, and the government is now engaged in the next (positive) phase of rebuilding. But that is so much fiction. The reality is altogether different, and for three reasons.

 

1.       The destructive phase is not yet over, as reports from around the country confirm.

2.       The so-called rebuilding phase, Operation Garikai, is patently nothing other than window dressing – frantic damage control by the regime, without any real substance, after a particularly damaging episode (from their point of view) of exposure to the truth.

3.       The catastrophic consequences of Operation Murambatsvina are not yet over. Far from it. In fact, just as the full extent of the suffering caused by a natural tsunami only becomes evident some time after the tidal wave has struck, so are Zimbabweans only now beginning to see the huge damage inflicted by their man-made tsunami. There is still a story to be told. We dare not fall for the Mugabe fiction, and the world’s free press dare not shy away because of the difficulties or dangers of following the story in a country under fascist rule.

 

“It could never be a correct justification that, because the whites oppressed us yesterday when they had power, that the blacks must oppress them today because they have power.”  Robert Mugabe, 1980

 

Sokwanele’s Zimbawbean blog can be found here.  Their heartbreaking image gallery can be found here.

 

 

Not guilty

 

“We seek power entirely for its own sake.  We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested only in power.  Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power.  The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives.  They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal.  We are not like that.  We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.  Power is not a means, it is an end.  One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.  The object of persecution is persecution.  The object of torture is torture.  The object of power is power.  Not do you begin to understand me?”

– O’Brien, in the place where there is no darkness, 1984, George Orwell

 

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