Mugabe’s ethnic cleansing campaign
September 4, 2002

The Bush administration’s recent decision to both condemn and demand a stop to Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe’s anti-white ethnic cleansing campaign was welcome, but long overdue.

The fact is that Mugabe is little more than a thug who has been trying to save his own political hide by blaming his nation’s problems on those whites who stayed on after he came to power. They stayed because the former Rhodesia had been their home for generations and they bet they could survive because they were willing to work for the success of the new nation.

It was a bet they were doomed to lose because in making it they discounted the virulent racism of the nation’s new leader — who would almost inevitably target them for extinction. That, in a nutshell, is what is happening now.

Mugabe has gotten away with his effort to force white farmers off their land and get them to leave Zimbabwe for several years for two reasons. First, the West has been so busy worrying about attacks from radical Islamists since last Sept. 11 that much of what’s been going on in Zimbabwe hasn’t generated the kind of interest or scrutiny it might have under other circumstances. Except for sketchy reports, Zimbabwean developments have been overlooked as trivial in comparison to events elsewhere.

Moreover, the prevailing view in the West seemed to be that whatever Mugabe was doing was mainly a local problem. Furthermore, those he’s been going after are, after all, whites who probably got the land he was taking from them at the expense of black Zimbabweans who would now benefit from his quasi-Marxist land redistribution plan. The idea that this sort of black racism is somehow acceptable or at least more acceptable than its white counterpart has made it even more difficult for those concerned about what’s going on in Zimbabwe to be heard.

Now, however, it is becoming clear that Mugabe turned his country into an economic wasteland and has no intention of turning the land he’s confiscating over to any of his own people unless they happen to be close relatives or friends.

What’s left is being used to buy favors abroad. Last week, for example, Mugabe got assurances from that other great African democrat, Colonel Qaddafi, that oil shipments from Libya will continue in exchange for most of Zimbabwe’s property in Britain, 1.2 million acres of seized farmland and the right to claim as many as 10,000 Zimbabwean passports for Libyan citizens who wish to travel internationally but find Libyan papers a bit of a handicap.

But, there will still be some land left. After all, Mugabe is seizing literally thousands of farms. Will this land all go to his black constituents? Apparently not. It seems that he has promised much of it to an international arms dealer who has been negotiating to provide a fleet of MIG 29s Mugabe hopes will make him the strongest guy on his block.

Zimbabwean farmers once exported vast quantities of food to the rest of Africa, but today Mugabe has managed to almost single-handedly destroy the nation’s agricultural infrastructure. In fact, it is now estimated that at least half the country’s 13 million people are on the verge of starvation and most observers believe that millions of these people won’t survive.

In today’s Zimbabwe, the question of who will live and who will die over the next few months is going to be determined by who gets the limited amount of food available in the country or from international aid shipments from abroad.

Mugabe’s plan is simple enough: His friends will eat and his opponents will starve. The Times of London reports that to get a handful of corn today in Zimbabwe, one must be able to prove one’s loyalty to the nation’s president.

Those who aren’t members of his party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front or ZANU-PF, in fact, need not even apply. One village of more than 200 souls who had the incredibly bad judgment to vote against the ZANU-PF in elections held earlier this year has been told that it will get 50 pounds of corn between now and next June … and nothing else.

So, this former anti-colonial leader has managed to impoverish his people, create a famine that could cost millions of lives and turn his country into an international haven and transit point for Libyan terrorists. He’s also managed to demonstrate once again that the wag who described an African democracy as “One man, one vote, one time” had a point.

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David Keene is chairman of the American Conservative Union and a Washington-based government affairs consultant