Messages From Zimbabwe

I received an email this afternoon, by way of a response from 10 Downing Street of a petition that I signed online quite some time ago…

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Intervene in Zimbabwe.”

The Government’s response:

“Reports from Zimbabwe have graphically illustrated the appalling and tragic situation in which the people of Zimbabwe now find themselves.

The facts are stark: 4 million people have fled the country; 80 per cent of the population are unemployed; 4 million will be on food aid by the end of the year; and average life expectancy has fallen to just 37.

There is no easy solution to end this suffering. However, the Government is determined to continue to do everything it can to help the Zimbabwean people. We are currently the second largest bilateral donor in Zimbabwe, providing up to £40m a year in humanitarian assistance and for HIV and AIDS care in support of the most vulnerable. In addition, the Government is announcing an additional £8m for Zimbabwe this year, to be delivered through the World Food Programme.

But this alone will not be enough. And working with our international partners we must do more to press the Zimbabwean government to change.

The Government will ensure that the EU maintains sanctions against the 131 individuals in the ruling elite, including President Mugabe, who have committed human rights abuses - and extend sanctions to other individuals where necessary. The Government have successfully lobbied EU partners to agree to send an EU envoy to report back on the situation on the ground. The Government will press the UN Security Council to review Zimbabwe more regularly. The Government also support the important efforts of Presidents Kikwete of Tanzania and Mbeki of South Africa to negotiate a return to democracy.

The Government need to be ready for the day democracy returns to Zimbabwe. The Government are working with international partners to prepare a long-term recovery package for when conditions exist to allow economic reconstruction to begin. This will include measures to help Zimbabwe restart and stabilise its economy, restructure and reduce its debt, help skilled people who have left the country to return home, renovate schools and hospitals, and, very importantly, support fair land reform. Britain is ready to contribute our share to this endeavour.

Britain will not shirk our responsibilities to the people of Zimbabwe. The Prime Minister is determined that the British Government does all it can to help the Zimbabwean people to forge a better future for themselves and their children.”

-o00o-

Is this enough, or is this a democratic ‘washing of the hands’?

I am aware that this is a Labour government and that it was a Tory government that ‘brokered’ the Lancaster House Agreement – but responsibility, no matter which party, leads back to the Union Jack…

Take care.

‘debvhu

I am constantly amazed at the number of people I speak to who say they are determined to stick things out – but ask, are we making any progress towards finding a resolution to the current economic and political crisis? Amazed at the numbers because I really expect most people with options to throw in the towel and decide to move to greener pastures.

The facts are that we are making progress. Looking back, much more progress than I think any of us expected 18 months ago. In March 2006 the newly divided MDC had just held two Congress’s – one in Bulawayo for the Mutambara led group and another in Harare for the group led by Tsvangirai. ZANU PF had just settled yet another challenge to the succession issue and Thabo Mbeki had thrown in the towel - fed up with the infighting in the main political parties and in the lack of progress and consensus.

The international community had likewise decided to sit on their hands for a while - they were deeply disappointed in the split in the MDC ranks, the apparent bickering and also in the seemingly intransient nature of the Zimbabwe situation. Nothing much happened for the next nine months except that the economic crisis deepened and our gradual slide into some form of a failed State accelerated.

Then came the fateful decision in December 2006 by ZANU PF to try to postpone the election to the same time as the Soccer World Cup - June 2010. Mbeki was galvanized into action and moved to try and establish a new strategy for resolving the Zimbabwe crisis. He swiftly moved to secure the basics of the new strategy - get the elections moved back to March 2008 and try to get Mugabe to hold then under free and fair conditions. The preliminary steps seemed too easy to be true - Mbeki spoke with Mugabe in Ghana on the 7th March and Mugabe said yes to both issues.

Mr. Mugabe then made a serious error of judgment - he ordered his security Chiefs to “crush the MDC” so that they would not be capable of fighting an election in March 2008. Four days after he accepted President Mbeki’s suggestions to resolve the crisis, the leadership of the MDC was arrested and beaten in custody. Television footage of the incident was somehow captured and released and a media blitz ensued which in turn galvanized the leadership of the SADC region to sit up and eventually demand action to settle this dispute once and for all. Mbeki got his multilateral approach to the crisis and Mugabe lost a critical regional support base.

On the 29th March 2007, the SADC leadership met in an emergency session and resolved to work with President Mbeki in seeking a resolution to the crisis. Ten days later the details were thrashed out in Harare and formal talks between the MDC (this hated “puppet of the West”) and ZANU PF eventually got underway and have been going on for the past 8 months.

That they have taken place at all is a remarkable victory for the MDC and its allies. That the region has supported the process and insisted that the MDC was a key player is equally astonishing. 18 months ago no one in ZANU PF would have said that this would happen - not in a “thousand years” to recall the words of another tyrant in another era!

Then came the key decision by the MDC to walk out of the process if certain fundamental principles were not recognised and worked into the final agreement. These were principally centred around the issues related to the electoral system and its management, together with the fact that despite the commitment to the talks and to trying to resolve the crisis in leadership democratically, the ZANU PF regime and its thugs had continued to rain down on the MDC and its structures political violence on a scale that threatened the whole process.

The MDC action stirred the South African leadership back into action and last week President Mbeki made a short stop over in Harare to see the main leaders and to resolve the logjam in the talks. The talks resumed immediately after his visit and a revised deadline for the final outcome was set as the 15th of December.

I remain convinced that no one can walk away from this process. The continual praise that Mr. Mugabe heaps on the SADC leadership and South Africa for its role in the process is a smoke screen for what is a very difficult situation for ZANU PF. They simply cannot afford to alienate the SADC and are being forced to accept reforms that endanger their grip on power and their ability to dictate the outcome of the next election. To their fury, the MDC has been given a veto over those issues and we have now used this to force through changes that suddenly make the near impossible seem possible.

We are going to have an election and I still think it will be in March 2008. We will not have anything like normal conditions for the campaign leading to the elections but at least we will be able to say to the people of this country – you can all vote, vote in secret and the recording and reporting of your vote will not be tampered with this time. Perhaps, just perhaps, we will have a chance to change our government democratically.

In March 2006 there was no way we could have envisaged this situation. It is a real victory for the democratic forces here and for the friends we have across the globe. It is also a victory for African leadership and if we can pull it off, it will help put Africa’s image back on track as a continent of democratic change and hope. But for this to happen we still have a lot to do and a way to go. On our part we will stick to our position without compromise, prepare for the elections by selecting candidates (over 2000 of them) and putting our policies in place and in front of the electorate.

Then its up to you out there - vote and vote wisely. Do not waste your vote on anyone who cannot deliver change and whose policies and stand is not absolutely clear. We have struggled to get us all this chance to resolve the crisis in Zimbabwe - without violence, legally and within a recognised political framework. The rest is up to us - all of us who live here and hold citizenship.

Eddie Cross

Bulawayo, 27th November 2007

It was Ian Smith’s war-damaged left eye that drew people’s attention first: wide open, heavy-lidded and impassive from experimental plastic surgery, it hinted at a dull, characterless nature.

The other was narrow, slanting and slightly hooded. Being watched by it was an uncomfortable experience. Each eye could have belonged to a different person.

A Foreign Office official, in a biographical note to prime minister Sir Alec Douglas Home in 1964, caught the same contradictory appearances: “His pedestrian and humourless manner often conceals a shrewder assessment of a particular situation than at first appears on the surface, and he should not be underrated.”

The advice was not heeded. He held the attention of a fascinated world for more than 15 years with an outrageous rebellion against the British Crown; created a booming economy in the face of United Nations sanctions; and on a shoestring fought a counter-insurgency war that he came close to winning.

His ordinariness and lack of artifice helped make him an extraordinary leader. Farmer, sportsman and quiet-spoken church-going Presbyterian, he saw the world into neat packets of wonderful chaps, terrorists, communists and traitors.

His cold reserve served him both as a Spitfire pilot and in the face of a bawling Harold Wilson. His obstinacy led his personal secretary, Gerald Clarke, to pass on to him a British complaint that “once you have stated your position, they are unable to get you to move”.

Henry Kissinger perceived honour and courage in Smith when he delivered what were effectively the terms of Rhodesia’s surrender, and he wept. He was modest to a fault. He refused to press for the DSO and DFC he deserved after the war, but was not awarded through oversight.

Throughout most of his tenure at Independence, his official residence, anyone could walk down the driveway and knock on the front door.

He was the world’s perfect rebel. Wilson was warned there was a strong likelihood of a mutiny in the British armed forces if he ordered a military suppression of UDI. Former South African foreign minister Pik Botha said Smith could have won an election in South Africa in 1976 while Pretoria was secretly forcing him to accept black rule.

Smith will struggle to lose the image of the arch white racist. But black Zimbabweans after Independence admired him for his unbending, blunt criticism of President Robert Mugabe — giving voice to opinions they dared not utter. As economic decay set in, Mugabe would be haunted by the words of fellow blacks: “It was better under Smith.”

To dismiss his UDI as an attempt to impose a crude white supremacist state is a serious oversimplification. He never evinced the coarse racism of many of his colleagues. His was an anachronistic vision of a sovereign Rhodesia that embodied the traditions and values of an unchanging empire: he saw UDI as a short-term measure that would be quickly resolved, with Rhodesia independent but still closely tied to Britain through the Commonwealth.

The winds of change shattered his vision. By the time he became prime minister, he was up against a Britain that wanted not merely to introduce black rule, but to strip his government of the powers of self-rule granted by Whitehall in 1923.

With the brutality of post-independence Africa vivid in the minds of white Rhodesians, he persisted with “evolutionary, not revolutionary change”.

Thirty-five years after UDI, the racist bogey is less clear. But he remains condemned for ignoring the extreme disparities between blacks and whites, and his refusal to change the situation.

Ian Douglas Smith was born in the village of Selukwe (now Shurugwi) in central Rhodesia on April 8 1919, of a Scottish father, Jock, and Rhodesian-born mother, Agnes. He was educated at Chaplin school in Gweru with moderate academic achievement, captained the first XV and ran the 100 yards in 10 seconds.

He began a Bachelor of Commerce degree at Rhodes University in South Africa in 1938, establishing an impressive academic record and rowing for the university.

War broke out and in 1941 he joined the RAF Empire Air Training Scheme at Guinea Fowl in central Rhodesia. He was posted to 237 (Rhodesia) squadron in the Middle East, flying Hawker Hurricanes.

Taking off from Alexandria on a dawn patrol in 1943, his throttle malfunctioned, he lost height and clipped the barrel of a Bofors gun. He crashed and rammed his face against the Hurricane’s gunsight. He suffered severe facial injuries, broke his jaw, a leg and a shoulder and buckled his back.

Surgeons at the Fifteenth Scottish Hospital in Cairo reconstructed his face and after only five months he rejoined his squadron in Corsica. He realised his dream to fly Spitfire Mark IXs, carrying out strafing raids and escorting American bombers. In mid-1944 Captain Smith was leading a raid on train of fuel tankers in the Po Valley when he made the mistake of going back for a second run.

The Spitfire was hit by an anti-aircraft shell, caught fire and he baled out. Within minutes of landing, a German patrol walked past his hiding place in a bush. He was soon picked up by the Partisani. The five months he spent with them near Sasello, learning Italian, reading Shakespeare and working as a peasant, he regarded as one of the best times of his life.

Near the end of the war, he and three other allied fugitives made their way through occupied Italy to the Maritime Alps. At one point the conspicuously tall, fair-haired Rhodesian strode unhindered through a German checkpoint. He led his tiny group over the mountains, walking barefoot on ice, until they reached an American patrol on the other side.

In 1946, Smith completed his final year at Rhodes where he was also elected chairman of the students’ representative council.

In 1948, he bought his farm, Gwenoro, in the plains of Selukwe, married Janet Watts and in elections in July, became the Liberal Party MP for Selukwe, the youngest MP ever in the Southern Rhodesian parliament.

Fundamental change shook southern African politics in 1960, when he was chief whip of the ruling Federal Party in the parliament of the Rhodesia and Nyasaland Federation.

Harold MacMillan’s tour of Africa ended with his “winds of change” speech in the South African parliament. Rhodesian whites saw from close up the bloody aftermath of Congo independence. The federation was breaking up and independence was inevitable for Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland as Zambia and Malawi respectively - but, to Smith’s bitter resentment, not for Southern Rhodesia.

At home, the voice of Joshua Nkomo was blowing a tide of black resistance with the hitherto unheard of demand for “black majority rule now”.

White opinion hardened. Smith was behind the formation in 1962 of the Rhodesian Front which easily won elections in December the next year, with Smith deputy prime minister and minister of finance.

He first encountered the Foreign Office at a meeting with foreign secretary Rab Butler at Victoria Falls in December 1963. Butler grandly declared that Britain was “very happy to agree” to independence for Southern Rhodesia, at least at the same time as Zambia and Malawi. No minutes were taken. Smith asked Butler for the undertaking in writing. Butler demurred with: “There is trust between members of the British Commonwealth.”

Smith wagged his finger at Butler, and said: “If you break that, you will live to regret it.”

The expression “perfidious Albion” was fixed in his vocabulary from then on.

In April 1964, Smith became the RF’s leader and prime minister. Almost immediately, he imprisoned the entire leadership of the black nationalist movement, and paralysed it for a decade. Wilson’s Labour victory in October that year was a drastic setback to Smith’s hopes.

He rebuffed Wilson’s opening approaches. It took Winston Churchill’s funeral in January 1965 to bring them together.

Smith attended the funeral, but was not invited to the lunch afterwards at Buckingham Palace. He was at his hotel when the Queen’s Equerry arrived, and expressed Her Majesty’s surprise at his absence.

Smith left immediately and was warmly received by the Queen and Prince Philip. Wilson also buttonholed him there and asked him to come to 10 Downing Street that afternoon.

Both men surprised each other at the absence of personal animosity, but their discussions were the first in 15 years of missed chances.

By October, it was becoming increasingly clear that Rhodesia was heading for a unilateral declaration of independence.

Smith - reinforced by a clean sweep by the RF in an election in May - held that illegal independence and “the maintenance of civilised standards” was better than the chaos that white Rhodesia believed would follow an African government.

The government was fully organised for the likelihood of sanctions. Fuel stocks were built up and other essential commodities distributed. Smith had secured the support of South African prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd and Portuguese president Antonio Salazar, for the continuity of Rhodesia’s trade routes through South Africa and Mozambique.

There followed a series of last-ditch shuttles. Smith went to London on October 5, but his talks with Wilson ended with a communique concluding that their positions were “irreconcilable”. Wilson went on television with his grave appeal to Smith: “Prime minister, think again.”

Ten days later Wilson was in Salisbury, with fresh proposals, which Smith rejected.

There was an unexpected personal understanding between the two men. They were on first-name terms, and Smith remarked afterwards “he was closer to us than he was to them” (Nkomo and Sithole whom Wilson met on this trip).

Wilson also betrayed his sympathies with his remark: “I don’t think Rhodesia is in a position to have one-man, one-vote tomorrow.”

On November 5, Smith declared a state of emergency. His cabinet met on November 10 to discuss final arrangements for UDI. At 7.30 pm British high commissioner Jack Johnstone was allowed to present the meeting with an appeal from Wilson. Wilson telephoned Smith at 8.30 the next morning, when the cabinet was about to take the final vote. For 30 minutes, Wilson pleaded quietly. Smith told him it had already gone too far.

He returned to the cabinet room and told them of his discussion with Wilson. He asked each of his 15 ministers in turn to say “yes” or “no.” It was a unanimous yes.

The declaration was signed in a nearby conference room, beneath a portrait of the young Queen Elizabeth, and for the first time since American independence in 1776, a British colony was in rebellion.

Smith delivered his radio address, telling a stunned and frightened nation: “So far and no further”. Then he went home to bed.

“I was immensely upset,” he wrote later. “There was within my whole system a very strong desire to preserve my links with the history and tradition and culture I had been brought up to believe in. It was a terrible decision.”

In December 1966, with Wilson’s forecast of UDI being “a matter of weeks rather than months” firmly buried, Smith, with British governor Sir Humphrey Gibbs, was in an RAF Britannia on its way to Gibraltar and the frigate, HMS Tiger, for the first contact with Wilson in over a year.

Smith was given a spell at the controls. For 25 minutes rebel prime minister was alone in the cockpit of a British aircraft with Her Majesty’s governor aboard, while the crew had a break. Aboard the frigate, Wilson tried to humiliate Smith. He took the admiral’s cabin and put the Rhodesians in non-commissioned quarters with a shared toilet.

In their first meeting, he shouted at Smith. Smith rose, stared out at the Mediterranean for interminable minutes and then told Wilson to behave himself. Back in Salisbury, his cabinet rejected the proposals.

Wilson and Smith next met in October 1968 aboard HMS Fearless. This time Wilson, on the advice of his secretary, Lady Falkender, treated Smith hospitably, but resolution remained elusive.

Edward Heath’s Conservative government in 1970 made far more progress with Smith and an agreement was ready for conclusion, pending only the approval of the black population. Unrest and overwhelming resistance greeted Lord Pearce’s mission to assess black opinion, and the bid failed.

The ensuing 70s ended the complacency of booming, peaceful UDI Rhodesia. Guerilla forces opened their long war against Smith with an attack on Altena farm in Mount Darwin in December 1972. In April 1974, the right-wing regime in Portugal was toppled in a coup. In October 1974, South African prime minister John Vorster launched his policy of “détente” with black Africa.

He demanded that Smith release the black nationalist leaders in detention. Smith gave in and agreed, and the relationship with his most important ally was suddenly undermined.

Without warning Smith, Vorster removed the contingent of South African police guarding the northern border against guerilla incursions. Smith was shocked. One could expect this from the British, he said, but now with the South Africans, “there was obvious deceit”.

Vorster kept on squeezing Smith. The supply from South Africa of fuel, munitions and aircraft spares for what was now a substantial war began to dry up. The Rhodesian war effort was severely curtailed.

Smith’s impotent anger was clear in his remark then: “I longed for those carefree days when I was flying around the skies in my Spitfire, saying to myself: ‘let anyone cross my path and he will have to take what comes his way’.” Vorster’s first attempt to bring Smith and the black nationalists together was in August 1975, in the majestic setting of South Africa’s luxury White Train parked in the middle of the bridge over the Victoria Falls.

Smith laid down his position, the nationalists barked demands and they broke up in a muddle after about an hour.

His trip to Pretoria on September 18 1976, to meet United States secretary of state Henry Kissinger, signalled the final stage of his rebellion. A few months before he had made his famously regrettable statement: “I don’t believe in black majority rule ever in Rhodesia, not in a thousand years.”

The trip began inauspiciously. At a rugby test match between the Springboks and the All Blacks, Vorster had the Rhodesian delegation shunted to the side of the VIP stand, well away from his own group. “We were on our own,” Smith said.

The meeting in the American embassy in Pretoria was an event of great emotion for both the Rhodesian farmer and the world’s most powerful diplomat. Kissinger proposed black majority rule in two years, and any subsequent proposals would be infinitely worse.

As he spelt out the situation, he was wiping tears away from his eyes. “This is the first time in my life I have asked anyone to commit political suicide,” he told Smith. “You have no alternative. I feel for you.”

Smith was sunk in despair, but awed by Kissinger. “He spoke with obvious sincerity and there was great emotion in his voice. For a while words escaped him,” he said.

Kissinger’s ultimatum was “the coup de grace”, he said. “We were rudderless after that.”

In September 1977, Smith did the unthinkable. Without consulting his cabinet, he flew to Lusaka in the private jet of Lonrho chairman Tiny Rowland, for a day’s talks with Kenneth Kaunda, a few kilometres from a major guerilla base. The Zambian president “couldn’t have been kinder”, but the initiative failed.

Smith again tried to settle without the rest of the world and pursued a settlement outside the military alliance between Nkomo’s and Robert Mugabe’s Patriotic Front. On March 1978, he signed the “internal agreement” with Bishop Abel Muzorewa, the Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole and two tribal leaders.

The country’s first one-man, one-vote elections in April 1979 drew a 63% turnout, were won by Muzorewa’s United African National Council and the country became Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. Nearly no-one recognised it and the war continued. Smith vacated his office and Independence for Muzorewa on May 31 1979 and moved into a plain double-storey in the suburbs.

Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative victory in May finally resulted in the Lancaster House constitutional conference in London under foreign secretary Lord Carrington.

Smith was irrelevant at Lancaster House, raging fruitlessly against the “treachery” of almost everyone from Carrington to members of his own delegation. When they voted in November on the proposed constitution, Smith was the only dissenter.

He boycotted the post-agreement party, and went to dinner instead with former RAF colleagues and Douglas Bader. He refused to attend the “nauseating” signing ceremony on December 19. On March 2 1980, near the end of vote counting in the just-ended election, it was clear that Zanu PF was heading for an overwhelming victory. Smith was surprised to receive a call to meet Mugabe at his house.

Mugabe assured Smith he would adhere to a private enterprise economy and to retain the confidence of the whites. He referred to the country as “this jewel of Africa“.

Smith went home in astonishment and told Janet he hoped he had not been hallucinating. Mugabe “behaved like a balanced Western gentleman, the antithesis of the communist gangster I had expected,” he said.

Zanu PF won 57 out of the 80 black seats created by the new constitution, but the RF won all 20 white seats, with Smith still the party leader. For the Independence celebrations on April 18, he went on holiday to South Africa, telling Mugabe it would be “the tactful thing to do”. The two men met several times, until in 1981 Smith criticised his plans for a one-party state. Mugabe stopped the meetings.

In December 1982 Smith was briefly arrested, his Harare and Gwenoro homes were searched and he was forced to surrender his passport. To Mugabe’s chagrin, Smith was returned to parliament in the 1985 elections, but a year later was suspended for denouncing black majority rule, and again in 1987 for dismissing Mugabe’s threats of sanctions against South Africa as “a waste of time”. Before he could return, the constitutional provision for 20 reserved white seats was abolished.

Smith leaves behind two stepchildren, Robert and Jean, from Janet’s previous marriage. His and Janet’s own son, Alec, died of a heart attack in London last year, to Smith’s deep grief.

(Source)

Ian Smith only once doubted the wisdom of his decision to declare UDI and lead Rhodesia into a 15-year civil war to protect white rule.

That moment of doubt occurred in April 1980, during a meeting with Robert Mugabe, who the previous day had taken office as the first Prime Minister of Zimbabwe.

Mugabe had summoned Smith to Government House and Smith was surprised to be greeted with a warm handshake and a broad smile; after all, the country’s new Marxist leader had promised his people that, come liberation, he would have Smith publicly hanged in Harare’s main square.

At that meeting, Mugabe told Smith he was acutely aware that he had inherited from his old adversaries, the whites, a jewel of a country, and he praised its superb infrastructure, its efficient modern economy, and promised to keep it that way.

Smith, completely disarmed, rushed home in a state of excitement,and, over lunch, told his wife, Janet, that perhaps he had been wrong about a black government being incapable of running his beloved Rhodesia.

As he told me years later: “Here’s this chap, and he was speaking like a sophisticated, balanced, sensible man. I thought: if he practises what he preaches, then it will be fine. And for five or six months it was fine…”

The simple, trusting banality of Ian Smith’s words may, in fact, offer more clues to the catastrophe that has been Rhodesia/Zimbabwe over the past half-century than any number of political or academic tracts.

The point is Mugabe was not the sophisticated, balanced, sensible man Smith had briefly hoped for. Even as he was shaking Smith’s hand, he was plotting the destruction of another group of political enemies, the Matabele, and was soon to send Korean-trained troops into Matabeleland to conduct a campaign of torture and murder that has still to be fully exposed.

It is estimated that between 10,000 and 20,000 civilians were murdered and as many again disfigured and tortured in what the Matabeles call the gukuruhundi, the washing away after the storm.

The sensible chap, in fact, turned out to be the type of African leader that “good old Smithy”, as his supporters called him, had campaigned against throughout the UDI years. He became the embodiment of corrupt, violent, amoral African dictatorship - just as Smith had warned his supporters.

Let us not forget the context of Smith’s determination to hang on to white rule in the 1960s.

At the time that he claimed to be defending “civilised standards”, Rhodesians had already witnessed the flight of Belgian refugees from the Congo; Idi Amin had trashed Uganda, and Mobutu Sese Seko was about to introduce an even more brutal and dysfunctional regime in neighbouring Zaire; immediately to the north of Rhodesia, Kaunda’s Zambia was in a mess, riddled with corruption and economically mismanaged, and Malawi was being similarly misruled by the eccentric despot Hastings Banda. So why, Smith argued, would Mugabe be any different? Why, indeed.

Smith was a simple man and it was his rather humourless, one-dimensional Rhodesian-ness that at once made him a hero among his own people and a figure of derision among his enemies. I spent hours interviewing him for a book I was writing in the early 1990s and he never once smiled or told a joke. He was the same dour, Calvinistic character whom I had so strongly opposed as a young white liberal growing up in Rhodesia, and who at the time represented all that was wrong about white minority rule in Africa.

At our meetings, he spoke endlessly about how Rhodesians had been more British than the British, how Churchill - had he been alive - would almost certainly have emigrated from corrupt, liberal England to Rhodesia, and how this small community of decent, fair-minded whites had been betrayed by, well, just about everybody he could think of - the Tories, Labour, the Afrikaners, the OAU, the UN. Not surprisingly, he called his ponderous autobiography The Great Betrayal.

It was easy to mock Ian Smith, but he was right - both about the betrayals and about the quality of most African politicians.

He has particular resonance this week, as heads of the Commonwealth convene in Uganda, a country with an interesting democratic history.

However ponderous, however humourless and unsophisticated he was, Smith had run a successful emerging African country and, although the whites were the main beneficiaries, there was increasing prosperity among the black population.

Above all there was a sound, intelligently managed economy, free from the post-colonial blight of corruption.

Today, Zimbabwe is a failed state with a non-functioning economy, a once-flourishing agricultural sector now moribund, and a population on the brink of starvation. According to a UN Development Programme index, life expectancy there today is one of the lowest in the world. So much for liberation.

Although the first 20 years of Mugabe’s rule saw a slow, somewhat even-paced decline, the calamitous collapse has been achieved in little more than half a decade, an extraordinary feat of self-destruction when one considers that it took more than a century for Ian Smith’s white antecedents to carve a modern, functioning, European-style society out of raw African bushveld.

But that has been the story of post-colonial Africa and, although this week’s obituaries will largely dismiss Smith as a colonial caricature, a novelty politician from another age, if you were to go to Harare today and ask ordinary black Zimbabweans who they would rather have as their leader - Smith or Mugabe - the answer would be almost unanimous. And it would not be Mugabe.

It is perfectly ironic that Mugabe’s deputy information minister, Bright Matonga, when told of Smith’s death this week, described him as a man “who brought untold suffering to millions of Zimbabweans”.

Those words surely apply more to his own leader than to Ian Smith.

I have always held IDS close - and consider him a hero. I am saddened by his death, and I know that he is now with his beloved Janet.

“The cause of his death is unknown but he had been ill for some time at a residential home in South Africa.

He illegally declared independence from Britain in 1965 and his white minority government led the country for 14 years amid international scorn and sanctions.

Following a bitter bush war with black nationalists, his government was overthrown by Robert Mugabe in 1979, leading to the creation of Zimbabwe.

Speaking to the BBC in 1998 about his assumption of power, Mr Smith was adamant it was justified.

“There was good reason for what we did. We set up a committee of top civil servants and ministers on three different occasions to look at this and every time they came back and said we had no option.

“Had we not resorted to this the country would have degenerated into chaos and confusion,” he said.

Years of civil war followed the declaration of independence. Mr Smith denied this was caused by the actions of his regime.

“The civil war was caused by people who left our country and were brainwashed in Russia, in China.

“They were power hungry people who wanted to take their country over immediately and were not prepared to wait for the evolutionary process.”

(Source)

Rest well, good sir…

Just this past weekend we have had three deaths of people closely associated with us. This is becoming all too common and points to the crisis here taking on a new dimension. Yesterday a young man walked through the door – he had just arrived from the UK where he has married and works for the London Police. He was here to see to the needs of his parents and I said to him that one of the things that worried me was that the crisis was now reaching beyond empty supermarket shelves and becoming life threatening in many ways.

Two of the deaths this weekend were relatively young people – one was a tuberculosis death, the other a sudden death in hospital from causes unknown. Our cemeteries are expanding exponentially as people with HIV fail to get a proper diet and are unable to receive treatment of any kind once they become AIDS sufferers. The third death was a grandmother who had been ill for some time.

The statistics are horrendous - 1,6 million orphans - nearly a third of all children, increasing at the rate of 350 a day. Nearly 1000 deaths a day - the highest child mortality in the world, the highest maternal mortality levels in Africa, if not the world. Add to this 3500 AIDS deaths, 1000deaths from Tuberculosis, 550 deaths from Malaria every week. Add to that water borne diseases as urban water supplies go untreated and sewerage systems fail and effluent plants fall into disrepair. Add to even these terrifying statistics the toll from malnutrition and even starvation.

Yet the regime here shows no sign that it is even aware of the nature and extent of the crisis. They act as if almost every citizen was an enemy and that their deaths were therefore a matter of little significance. Their total preoccupation with the retention of power overrides all other concerns. It is astonishing to say the least, especially for someone like myself who knows personally, so many of the leadership. I doubt if we will have 8 million people in the country by the time of the proposed elections in March 2008.

That is half the population we predicted for the country by 2003 of 16 to 17 million. It chills me to think that just a few years ago we heard of that statement by Didymus Mutasa that Zimbabwe would be better off with 6 million people who supported ZANU PF. Chilling to think that they thought like that years ago and that this process of self destruction and genocide was in fact planned and deliberate, not simply the results of crass ineptitude. This is in a new league all by itself. It makes Pol Pot and the Rwandan genocides look amateurish and clumsy.

In the face of this unfolding human tragedy on a scale (in relative terms) not seen since Stalin and Hitler, I find the whole attitude of the media incomprehensible. Just take two headlines in the past two days – “Tsvangirai backs down” in the Standard and then today “Violent clashes outside MDC Headquarters” in Harare in ZimDaily. Both refer to the story about the MDC Women’s Assembly decision to remove Lucia Mativenga from her post as Women’s Chairlady of the MDC Women’s wing and replace her with Theresa Makone.

In the first instance it was the decision of the Women in the MDC to move against their leadership. It was the representatives of all districts and provincial Assemblies that met and elected Theresa Makone virtually unanimously. The fact that Lucia has decided to fight back is nothing new or extraordinary - its politics. By doing so she has exhausted what sympathy and support she had in the leadership of the MDC and the matter is now a dead letter. Theresa’s election still has to be reported formally to the National Executive but she is already hard at work organising the Women’s wing in a way that we have not seen for years.

But the local press (forget the State controlled media - that is just a sick joke) and the South African press are making a huge story out of the whole thing. Suggesting that the MDC might split again (a repetition of the October 2005 incident that did such damage and from which we are just recovering). That is simply nonsense.

But when it comes to the really big issues - like that of the silent genocide that is killing millions of our people or the tidal wave of refugees flooding out of Zimbabwe into neighbouring countries, the media does little except pick up the occasional incident - such as the tragic story of the man who died of starvation outside the Home Affairs Office in the Cape.

The wholesale abuse of Zimbabweans in South Africa and in Botswana goes largely unreported. Journalists pay scant regard to the real story that is cleverly disguised and hidden by ZANU PF rhetoric and propaganda.

When I read the story today of the Matabeleland massacres in the 80’s and I think that I lived through that in Bulawayo, was very largely ignorant of what was going on in my own backyard, then I realize the full extent of the failure of our press and media. Those who did do something were simply not visible to the ordinary men and women. The media, by their very nature, have a responsibility to search for the real stories in any situation and then to publish those stories with integrity and conviction.

The Soweto massacre was one such incident carved into the mind of the world by a vigorous press and media. It involved the killing of 62 young people who were protesting the use of Afrikaans in schools. Set that against the thousands dying every week in Zimbabwe as a consequence of a delinquent and rapacious regime. It bears no comparison – yet I see no significant media campaign around this issue.

Let’s keep these things in perspective. There is only one agenda in Zimbabwe today and that is how to remove ZANU PF from power and replace it with a government that will restore sanity to the country. Anyone supporting any other agenda, no matter how justified in normal circumstances, is just perpetuating our misery and mortality.

Eddie Cross

Bulawayo, 19th November 2007

(Source)

I often write about Mugabe telling the whole world that the United Kingdom has reneged on their side of the Lancaster House Agreement – at least in so far as the land reform program is concerned.

In my book “Without Honour” I state, categorically: “History must show that the only people that kept their word were the Rhoesians. And for their part, they were consigned to the pages of history.”

I have yet to find a full copy of the Lancaster House Agreement, but once I have secured it, I will make it available on the internet.

I received an email today which put much of what I have said about the UK handing money to the Mugabe government which he has failed to account for and overlooks when making his regular accusations.

From that email which I am hugely grateful for – if for nothing more than it assists in proving my point…

The email was headed “Is Professor Mutambara a Deluded Clown?” - but I have used the information therein in a slightly different manner.

“It seems that Mutambara, similar to some other leading ZANU PF crooks that have earlier been exposed to western cultures, have easily renewed adjusting to the local pre-historic jungle mentality.

Mutambara has failed to mention that relevant Civilized Western Diplomats involved at Lancaster House deny any commitment to fund following ZANU PF looting of land and private assets.

True to his denial agenda, Mutambara forgets to mention that ZANU PF reneging of the Abuja Agreement on Zimbabwe Land Reform, as dated 6 September 2001.

He also forgets that:-

After 1992, Britain made funding for land acquisition conditional on transparency and the implementation of controls to ensure that acquired white commercial farms ended up in the hands of the ‘landless poor’. Mugabe failed to react.

The British Government indicated that land reform issue was initiated in 1996 when the Zimbabwean government was asked to submit proposals for the three million pound United Kingdom land resettlement grant.

“The UK government will work with a future administration that upholds the rule of law, respects democratic principles and promotes sound economic policies,” was stated.

On June 5th 2004 - Minister for Lands, Land Reform and Resettlement John Nkomo said that all land, from crop fields to wildlife conservancies, would soon become state property.

Farmland deeds would be replaced with 99-year leases, while those for wildlife conservancies would be limited to 25 years.

Kleptomania by ZANU PF solidarity comrades has actually been in place since 1980!

More Facts:- No provision was made in the Lancaster House Agreement for a specific fund to support land reform.

At a Zimbabwe Donors Conference in March 1981, £17-million (about R240-million) was raised for development in Zimbabwe, including land reform.

Between 1980 and 1985, the UK provided £47-million for land reform: £20-million as a specific Land Resettlement Grant and £27-million in the form of budgetary support to help the Zimbabwean government’s own contribution to the programme.

By 1988, the Land Settlement Grant had been largely spent.

The then UK Overseas Development Agency fully endorsed the resettlement, which had taken place and suggested measures for further improving the UK-funded programme.

The Zimbabwean government did not respond to these proposals and the grant was closed in 1996 with £3-million unspent.

In 1998, the Zimbabwean government hosted a land conference in Harare, involving international donors and multilateral institutions. Both the UK and Zimbabwean governments endorsed the fundamental principles agreed at the conference: transparency, respect for the rule of law, poverty reduction, affordability and consistency with Zimbabwe’s wider economic interests.

Quote – 2004/05/07 - Lancaster House - The Facts (Nick Sheppard, British High Commission Pretoria)

“We keep hearing that the UK failed to honour commitments made at Lancaster House to finance land reform in Zimbabwe. This was repeated in the letter, Quanta simply states the obvious (May 4).

Here are the facts.

There was no commitment to fund the land reform process in its entirety. The UK promised to donate funds, and to galvanize other donors, making clear we could not be the only contributor.

We kept our promises more than R6bn in bilateral support, plus more than R570m specifically for land reform.

Far from being “unwavering in their pursuit to resolve the land question”, it was not a priority for most of the 24 years of ZANU PF government.

Despite attempts by the United Nations Development Programme and others to devise a land reform strategy, Zimbabwe showed little enthusiasm.

Until, under pressure from impending elections, they decided the UK was a useful scapegoat for Zimbabwe’s economic problems. And despite commitments made by Zimbabwe in 1998 and 2001 to implement a fair and sustainable land reform programme, illegal farm occupations and violent land grabs continued.

It is not the British government that has reneged on commitments.

It is simplistic to blame Zimbabwe’s problems on the failure to reform land.

Is land to blame for human rights abuses and political violence?

Or corruption and economic mismanagement?

Or rigged elections and lack of press freedom?

The UK has not abandoned Zimbabwe.

We continue to supply food aid more than R940m since September 2001. And we remain willing to re-engage on land.

But we can only work with the Zimbabwean government when the rule of law and representative government are restored and with a land reform programme that makes a sustainable improvement to the lives of all Zimbabweans.”

On June 10th 2004 British embassy spokesperson Sophie Honey said:-

“The UK has not reneged on commitments (made) at Lancaster House. At Lancaster House the British government made clear that the long-term requirements of land reform in Zimbabwe were beyond the capacity of any individual donor country.

Since independence we have provided 44 million pounds for land reform in Zimbabwe and 500 million pounds in bilateral development assistance.

The UK remains a strong advocate for effective, well managed and pro-poor land reform. Fast-track land reform has not been implemented in line with these principles and we cannot support it.

In September 1998, The ZANU PF government called a donors conference in Harare on land reform (LRRP II); 48 countries and international organisations attended. The objective was to inform and involve the donor community in the programme. The donors unanimously endorsed the land programme, saying it was essential for poverty reduction, political stability and economic growth. They particularly appreciated the political imperative and urgency of the land reform, and agreed that the “inception phase” covering 24 months should start immediately.

In 1998, Mugabe arranged a three-day ‘donors’ conference in order to raise $ 6 billion for land acquisition. Some 22 donor countries attended the Harare conference and pledged financial support on stringent conditions, requiring Mugabe to formulate a policy that met transparency and poverty-alleviation criteria.

Land acquisitions were also to be on a willing “buyer seller” basis at market-related prices. Mugabe failed to implement the necessary mechanisms and received no donor aid.

The IMF also delayed the release of a multi-million US dollar aid package until Mugabe explained his farm-acquisition policy, and provided details of his government’s funding of its Congo involvement. Mugabe ignored the IMF and funding was consequently frozen.”

Mutambara has accused the West of practicing double standards.

2005/09/22 - Quoting Chinamasa “All title deeds of the farmers have been cancelled, with the British government having sole responsibility to compensate the evicted farmers.”

On 2006/03/03 Mutambara claimed that the British government reneged on the Lancaster House agreement, while white farmers “were guilty of resisting land reform” (otherwise known as wilful uncompensated grand-asset theft).

He didn’t mention the £44 million that was disbursed from 1980 to 1996 for land redistribution or what happened to the 1998 donors’ conference plan.”

This all makes the most interesting reading and reinforces to me the ability that Mugabe and his followers have of reforming the truth to suit themselves.

Take care.

‘debvhu

I write daily and often, amongst other things, about the mediated talks in South Africa.

And I have been interested in the beginning of the payback for the opposition MDC, following their support of the recent constitutional amendment.

Maybe this is the beginning that I am waiting for. A modicum of common sense. A suggestion of some sensibility.

But I remain unconvinced.

As yet…

“The Zimbabwean government has published a draft bill to reform electoral laws following a surprise agreement last month between the ruling party and the opposition, a state-run daily said Saturday. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change reached an agreement with the government in late September on the adoption of a bill that would pave the way for joint presidential and legislative elections next year. The Herald newspaper said the draft Electoral Laws Amendment Bill 2007 would bar the military, police and prison officers from any involvement in elections beyond providing security. It would empower aggrieved candidates to demand recounts and require that the government-appointed electoral commission consult all contesting parties before marking constituency and ward boundaries, the report said. It would also compel public broadcasters to report impartially and give equal airtime to all candidates, said The Herald.

Previous elections in Zimbabwe have been tainted by charges of electoral fraud and complaints over the role of the military in the running of the polls. The main opposition and western observers claimed the country’s last presidential polls in 2002 were rigged to hand President Robert Mugabe victory, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose targeted sanctions on the veteran ruler and members of his inner circle. The election reform bill is expected to be submitted to parliament within 30 days. Mugabe was chosen in March by his ruling ZANU PF party to stand again as its candidate in presidential elections in 2008.”

About the only problem I can see initially is controlling the military, police and prison officers from interfering in the ballot. They work as autonomous bodies and I can’t see ZANU PF actually being able to exercise that sort of control.

And it worries me that included in the list is not the war veterans, the youth brigades and the youth militia. Who is going to control them? And what written assurance will the opposition seek to prevent these people becoming involved? What protection will the opposition and their supporters have to prevent the outside interference affecting the ballot result?

Take care.

‘debvhu

(Source)

President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has given the green light to broad electoral reform, according to sources in his ruling ZANU PF party who say Mr Mugabe has recognised that clear progress on this front must be made if the Southern African region and the West are to come through with an economic rescue package. The government is expected to table the so-called Electoral Laws Amendment Bill in parliament when it reconvenes on November 20, political sources said. Among other provisions, the bill would oblige state-run media to provide free and fair access to opposition parties, bar soldiers, police and other state security agents from polling places during elections, remove polling stations from locations susceptible to pro-government pressure such as army barracks and traditional chief homesteads, and increase the independence of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission.

Ruling party insiders say some top ZANU PF officials opposed the reforms mooted in South African mediated crisis resolution talks, the president endorsed them late last month with support from Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa - lead negotiator in the Pretoria talks - and brought the party’s central committee and politiburo on board. Some in the ruling party fear that if elections in 2008 are internationally condemned, Zimbabwe could fall much deeper into a crisis that is already profound. Other reform items are likely to be added to the amendment bill once talks between ZANU PF and the Movement for Democratic Change resume next month. Sources close to the talks say negotiators have already agreed a number of reforms. Lawmaker Tongai Mathuthu of the opposition faction headed by the MDC founder Morgan Tsvangirai told VOA the media reforms in particular will be welcome if they are implemented.

(Source)

Take care.

‘debvhu

Mugabe’s official thugs claim the life of a true Zimbabwean heroine.

Yesterday - Sunday, November 11 - we buried Maria Moyo. A thousand people came to her graveside at Bulawayo’s Hyde Park Cemetery, to mourn the death of a gallant woman who stood up against the appalling injustice of our country’s government, and paid the ultimate price for her courage.

Mrs Moyo was one of the founders of Women Of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA), in 2003. Together with her fellow leaders Jenni Williams and Magodonga Mahlangu, she led peaceful marches and demonstrations against human rights abuses. She demanded respect for women. She asked for justice. In Zimbabwe she asked for too much.

In the short four years of WOZA, she was arrested ten times. Each time she was physically and mentally abused by the police. The last arrest came on August 24. It resulted in her death. No doubt the police consider this a positive outcome. This is what happened.

Six members of the police Law and Order section, the department usually responsible for the torture of opposition activists, burst into her home in Mabuthweni suburb in Bulawayo at mid-day. They found Mrs Moyo in bed, seriously ill with pneumonia, the result of her previous ill-treatment at the hands of the authorities.

Her family pleaded with the police not to take her away, saying she was too ill to be moved, but they refused to listen. She was arrested, dragged outside, and put in a police vehicle along with four other women, all members of WOZA.

They were taken to Khami dam on the outskirts of the city, where for five hours they were interrogated, abused and tortured. At one point they were tied up with ropes, and told they would be dumped in the sewage-polluted waters of the dam. Only a party of passers-by, including a photographer, prevented the threat from becoming a reality.

By this time Mrs Moyo’s condition was clearly deteriorating. It is thought that the police didn’t want her to die while in custody. They drove her back to her home, and left her there. Her family took her to hospital, where her condition slowly worsened. She died on November 6.

At the funeral, her co-leader Magodonga Mahlangu said this: “I would like it to be known that the police are responsible for her death… She will be remembered for her ready smile even in harsh jail conditions. She will be remembered for her courage and comitment. May her soul rest in peace in a better place than the living hell of Zimbabwe.”

Maria Moyo was 57. She leaves a husband, nine children, and 12 grandchildren. And she leaves us all, much the poorer for her loss.

(Source)