Читать книгу A Predictable Tragedy - Daniel Compagnon - Страница 6

Introduction

When the Zimbabwean flag was raised officially in the early hours of 18 April 1980, symbolizing the dawn of a new era and the end of a bitter liberation war, who could have imagined then that the crowds cheering their hero—Robert Mugabe—would come to hate him some thirty years later after he led them to starvation, ruin, and anarchy? Who would have expected Zimbabwe to become the “sick man” of southern Africa, a security concern for its neighbors, and an irritant in the mind of progressive opinion leaders such as former anti-apartheid lead activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner archbishop Desmond Tutu, who would, in 2008, call for Mugabe’s forced removal from power? As we shall see, this disaster should not have come as a complete surprise since there were, from the beginning, many worrying signs of Mugabe’s thirst for power, his recklessness, and his lack of concern for the well-being of his fellow countrymen and women, as well as the greed and brutality of his lieutenants in his party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF).¹

Behind the suffering of Zimbabweans today are a series of political myths forged by the new regime and outsiders who, until recently, supported Mugabe’s government unconditionally. One of the most enduring was the myth of a democratic multiracial Zimbabwe led by an urbane, educated politician—the mirror image of the bloodthirsty guerrilla leader portrayed in the Western press in the 1970s. Everyone marveled how this bright and magnanimous statesman extended political pardons not only to his rivals in the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) but also to former Rhodesian foes. Even the cynical massacre of thousands of civilians in the early 1980s in Matabeleland in western and southwestern Zimbabwe—awareness of which the Zimbabwean government was able to suppress—did not break the charm.² Rhodesian leader Ian Smith’s illegal white minority regime was despicable on many counts, but many ordinary black people in Zimbabwe realized years ago that Mugabe was no lesser evil, especially as the memories of racial discrimination withered away and social conditions worsened dramatically.³ However, activists and intellectuals who had opposed Smith’s regime and risked death or prison wanted desperately to believe that Mugabe was nothing but good news. Peace and salvation were coming at last and “majority rule” was to set Zimbabwe on the road to prosperity. Openly criticizing the ruling party was perceived for long as siding with the enemy—that is, with imperialism and the apartheid regime in South Africa. Even political opponents failed to analyze the nature of ZANU-PF domination and were repeatedly outmaneuvered by Mugabe.

Many Western journalists, diplomats, political analysts, and researchers familiar with the situation on the ground chose to disregard some inconvenient facts and picked the stories they wanted to believe in. Academics either remained silent or took for granted the Zimbabwean government’s stance, for reasons best known to them.⁴ The belief that ZANU’s liberation war in the 1970s was a legitimate and noble cause somehow blunted the analytical edge of scholarship when it came to Mugabe’s power techniques. Issues of widespread corruption and political murder remained taboo and many continued to hail Mugabe as Africa’s liberation icon—although there were a few exceptions.⁵ Hence, reports produced by human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) over the years (in particular the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (CCJP)/Legal Resources Foundation (LRF) report on the Matabeleland massacres, which was met with a deafening silence by the same academics when first released in 1997) serve better to understand the nature of the ZANU-PF regime than most academic journals and books. It would require an entirely different book to fully explore the root causes and the extent of self-deception in Western academic and political circles on the nature of Mugabe’s regime. Obviously, such bias prevented a sound understanding of the situation in Zimbabwe for more than two decades.

In the creation of this ideological smokescreen, the political mythology underlying the liberation war’s official history played a pivotal role. Mugabe and other ZANU-PF leaders portrayed themselves as liberators who had given birth to modern Zimbabwe. Being entrusted with the task of nation building and eliminating the remnants of the settler state suffices to legitimize the ruling party’s never-ending grip on state power.⁶ Consequently, black Zimbabweans have to feel indebted forever to ruling party leaders for the “freedom” the nation has enjoyed since 1980. In this thoroughly reconstructed history, the contribution of ZAPU and other forces is minimized or blatantly ignored, and the role of the British government in sponsoring the Lancaster House agreement is downplayed. The ruling party ZANU-PF propagated the fiction that the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA), its military arm, won the war on the battlefield and therefore the right to rule.

The war hero cult played an important part in this discourse. Former guerrillas—and many less genuine freedom fighters but true ZANU “big men”—were granted the official status of national and provincial heroes, and burial ceremonies provided recurrent occasions to rehearse the ruling party’s contribution.⁷ However, through the years, the granting of this status—with the pension accruing to the family—was increasingly perceived as tainted by political favoritism. Known nationalist leaders outside the ruling party, such as the late Ndabaningi Sithole (the first ZANU president) and the late Enoch Dumbutshena—repeatedly labeled “traitors” by government propaganda—were denied a burial in the national Heroes’ Acre. On the contrary, Mugabe’s henchmen in the first decade of the twenty-first century (such as Border Gezi or Hitler Hunzvi), who had a limited or nonexistent liberation war record, were buried there, ostensibly rewarded for their contribution to the “Third Chimurenga” (the regime’s code name for violent farm invasions and subsequent political repression since 2000).

Beyond reward and retribution, this policy betrays a self-serving appropriation and political manipulation of the country’s history. The nationalist posture remained to this date a powerful political resource for Mugabe and ZANU-PF, both locally and on the international scene, and the vindictive nationalist discourse on stolen land, fallen heroes, and the party’s outstanding contribution to “liberation” was recycled at every election after 1980. Not only was this militant discourse a means to mobilize supporters and silence critics but it provided a convenient excuse to sideline embarrassing issues such as poverty alleviation and bad governance. To a large extent, the political developments unraveling since February 2000 constitute the culmination of this exhausted strategy.

Admittedly there were good enough reasons in the early 1980s for most observers to disregard ZANU-PF’s autocratic tendencies. The regime boasted some early successes in the economic and social realm: growth in education and health services, and an initial increase of workers’ wages—a gain already offset by inflation as early as 1983.⁸ However, these policies were obviously not financially sustainable without a constant inflow of foreign aid, and the initial trend toward poverty alleviation and economic restructuring was reversed in the mid-1980s. While the Western and African Left hailed the so-called Zimbabwean “revolution” in the 1980s and passionately debated its socialist identity and level of achievements, it paid little attention to the true nature of the regime: the retrogressive and authoritarian nature of the one-party state project and the selfish accumulation drive hidden behind the state’s control of the economy.⁹ The Marxist-Leninist rhetoric of the early years served handily to deceive the radical intellectuals, and many rallied behind ZANU-PF in want of better options.

However, rhetoric aside, the government’s economic policy did not depart significantly from the interventionist policies of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) period.¹⁰ Mugabe and many of his associates saw Marxist-Leninist discourse as an idiom of power: they used it initially as a weapon in the guerrilla movement’s “struggle within the struggle,” and they retained it as a useful political tool when in control of the state. Therefore, Mugabe probably did not believe more in socialism than in democracy or human rights—or black empowerment for that matter.¹¹ These discourses had essentially a legitimization purpose.

Mugabe’s agenda of monopolizing power and controlling resources was partly derailed by adverse circumstances, internal squabbles, and more decisively by the resilience of the people in keeping some democratic spaces open: at the university, in the media, in the trade union movement, in the judiciary, and by the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which formed a frontal challenge to ZANU-PF rule. The deep nature of Mugabe’s regime pointed at the surface at least a decade earlier when the police violently quelled students and workers’ protests.¹² The extensive use of repressive legal instruments originally created by the white settler state, such as the Law and Order Maintenance Act and the state of emergency, revealed the remarkable continuity in the security sector from the Rhodesian Front (RF) to ZANU-PF. Nevertheless, it took another ten years for most observers to understand the authoritarian nature of Mugabe’s regime and its contempt for the rule of law. The one-party state mentality prevailed in daily politics and ZANU-PF showed no hesitation to use violence against its opponents when it felt threatened. The relative pluralism of the press in the 1990s—after an era of tight government control in the 1980s—and the seemingly independent and effective court system gave civil society at large, and political activists more specifically, a false sense of strength and security until mid-2000. Almost all opponents and media—reading from columns in the local press between 1994 and late 1999—underestimated Mugabe’s recklessness and cynicism. According to the dominant view, in the mid-1990s—at least in domestic media and the diplomatic milieu—democratization was under way, and a “younger,” “technocratic,” “reformist” ZANU was willing to promote this agenda when conditions became more conducive—meaning when Mugabe retired. This was more wishful thinking than insightful vision, as later years demonstrated. With the food riots, the mass strikes, and the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), 1998 was certainly a turning point. However, for most observers only the violence associated with the farm invasions and the 2000 parliamentary elections was a true eye-opener. Many former ZANU-PF sympathizers then began to criticize Mugabe openly and asked the obvious question: What went wrong?

For analysts on the radical left, Mugabe had sold his soul to international capital when the government adopted the Economic Structural Adjustment Program (ESAP) in the early 1990s;¹³ thus, the land reform was only a political gimmick to divert the workers’ attention from the main struggle.¹⁴ For some others, the nationalist project was derailed by Mugabe’s transformation into a mad autocrat.¹⁵ Further research will perhaps support the view that a selfish ruling class hijacked the nationalist project. Brian Raftopoulos, a veteran social scientist and a committed civil society activist, produced some promising material toward this end.¹⁶ However, most of the literature published on the Zimbabwean crisis to date—with a strong contingent of books authored by foreign journalists formerly posted in Harare¹⁷—consists in chronological accounts of the major developments since February 2000. In these works there is little in-depth analysis offered of the processes leading to the current disaster. The reckless survival politics that plunged the country into ruin and desperation cannot be comprehended without a better understanding of Mugabe’s political trajectory and that of his party since independence. Instead of betraying their original project—purportedly the liberation of the country and empowerment of the masses, as is often alleged, the ruling party’s leaders remained faithful to their true albeit hidden ambition.

Their behavior since 2000 sheds a crude light on the nature of their domination, which is in essence autocratic and neopatrimonial. Derived from Max Weber’s typology of the forms of political domination, the concept of neopatrimonialism describes political systems with a certain degree of institutional development, yet with personalized power relations and a trend toward systematic private appropriation of public money by the rulers.¹⁸ Corruption, contempt for the rule of law, and abuse of state power are syndromes of neopatrimonial rule. Among African states, Zimbabwe was in 1980 one of the least patrimonialized—thanks to the relative sophistication of the Rhodesian state—but it changed radically through twenty-five years of ZANU-PF rule. An entire elite connected to ZANU-PF benefited from Mugabe’s tenure in power and accumulated personal wealth at the expense of the nation and its economy, and still today a subtle blend of intimidation and patronage ensures its loyalty. However, the ruling party has long ceased to function as a collective decision-making body, if it ever did, and Mugabe’s ultimate authority cannot be challenged with impunity—a complex situation best captured by the notion of personal rule.¹⁹

Zimbabwe’s top leader’s career therefore deserves close attention, starting with his rise to political prominence in the guerrilla war and culminating in his dominance of state politics for more than twenty years. Although this book’s ambition is not to offer a biography of the Zimbabwean president, his personality and personal history deserve some scrutiny. Since 2000, Mugabe has stubbornly opposed any suggestion of political reform or resignation and is likely to do so to his death. He is a man of consuming ambition who worked very hard to reach his top position. He entertains a superiority complex and belittles other contenders for power—especially those without higher education—including aspiring successors from his own party. People who have met him in private acknowledge his brilliant mind, his sober and even Spartan way of life, and his intellectual sophistication backed by several university degrees. But behind this posture of the modest and seemingly competent statesman there is another Mugabe and a more sinister character: reckless, extremely cunning, and tactically patient, a born political animal. A former guerrilla commander who contributed to Mugabe’s ascent to ZANU’s leadership in the camps admitted having nurtured a political monster: “He was arrogant, paranoid, secretive and only interested in power.”²⁰ A tormented psyche could explain his strange antics and any amateur psychiatrist would be tempted to speculate on possible childhood traumas.²¹ This psychosis of power commonly plagues African political systems.²² However, a psychological line of explanation would not lead us very far in understanding Mugabe’s thirst for power and his cunning ability to remain in control of the state. Mugabe’s mind is clearly behind the social and economic devastation in today’s Zimbabwe, but this is the work of a cold-blooded, rational, political entrepreneur. Resorting to violence, for instance, is part of a shrewd calculation and the focus is always on specific targets: it is not the product of his emotions. For example, he is not known for taking pleasure in witnessing torture and killings, rather the opposite. He is no Idi Amin Dada or Macias Nguema.

In many ways the eventual subjugation of the Zimbabwean society, the violent suppression of any dissenting voice, and the complete collapse of the economy were virtually contained in Mugabe’s political enterprise from the beginning. What needs to be clarified is not “What went wrong?” but rather “Why did it take so long to go obviously wrong?” In other words, we need to analyze Zimbabwe’s society and social institutions’ resistance to authoritarian incorporation, and the national economy’s ability to countenance the predatory tendencies of the benefactors of state patronage for nearly two decades.

This book, therefore, is neither a detailed history of Zimbabwe since independence nor a theoretical essay on African politics, although we do use a few political science concepts. Nor is it a detailed chronology of political developments in Zimbabwe since 2000, and we make no pretense of addressing all dimensions of a complex crisis that has engulfed the whole Zimbabwean society. Our aim is to contribute to a better understanding of the process of institutional decay and growing authoritarianism generated by Mugabe’s long tenure of power, in a country that had high potential in 1980. There was no curse, no Western plot against Black nationalism and Mugabe himself as alleged by the regime’s propaganda, no fatal destiny that took Zimbabwe into the league of derelict, bankrupt, postcolonial African autocracies. For those having hope in Africa’s future it is important to find out how and why this man-made disaster became reality. It is important also to set the record straight about the responsibilities of fellow African and non-African leaders who let Mugabe have his ways and taint the image of the continent through his actions.