Zimbabwe, only occasionally newsworthy for the last two decades, has suddenly become a top destination for foreign correspondents. Almost every day extremely critical stories from Zimbabwe are given prominent space in the Western world's media, including in Australia.
The country's President, Robert Mugabe, was profiled in an article in the "Sydney Morning Herald" with an unflattering photo and the insulting headline "Last kicks of a dying donkey".

Last week, the ABC's "Foreign Correspondent" joined the chorus with an attack on Mugabe, blaming him and his party, ZANU, for the country's very real economic woes.

Zimbabwe was colonised by the British South Africa Company in 1895 under the name of South Rhodesia. White settlers moved in under the protection of British guns. By 1960 they accounted for only five per cent of the total population but occupied 70 per cent of the land -- and the most productive land at that.

In the 1960s and '70s the national liberation movements that were sweeping away the political control of the colonialists in many of the African states arose in Rhodesia as well. The white colonial regime was forced to manoeuvre and attempted to install a native puppet but his rule was short.

The armed liberation struggle was waged by Mugabe's ZANU and Joshua Nkomo's ZAPU.

ZANU won a landslide electoral victory in 1980 and later joined with Nkuomo's ZAPU to form a coalition government. However, the white settlers maintained their control of the farming land and hence, the main economy of Zimbabwe.

There had been a political revolution but not an economic one. The native population continued to live in poverty.

With the breakup of the Soviet Union, which had backed and given support to the national liberation movements on the African continent, the ruling coalition of the Zimbabwe African National Union -- Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) decided to relinquish its Marxist-Leninist and socialist commitment and eliminated any reference to "scientific socialism" in its program.

Mugabe made an appeal to set aside "pure socialism" and opted for social democracy and a mixed economy.

Reliance on the IMF
This policy, in effect, meant reliance on the IMF and acceptance of the economic and political demands of the IMF and the World Bank.

IMF loans were granted to the Zimbabwe Government but they only intensified the poverty of most of the Zimbabwean people. Servicing the national debt accounts for over 25 per cent of exports.Today, half the population is unemployed. Inflation reached 25 per cent in 1991.

ZANU's principal support is in the countryside, but Zimbabwe is ravaged by AIDS. About 25 percent of the total population is HIV positive, and many people in country areas are simply too exhausted by disease to work -- or to vote.

Corn production fell by over 60 percent last year and this was contributed to by the AIDS epidemic.

The 4,500 white farmers predominantly grow cash crops, and the Africans -- whose land the whites thieved from the indigenous population in the first place -- live in squalid villages or slum suburbs of the towns and work for the white "planters". This, or they starve.

Opposition
It is not surprising that in these circumstances opposition to the Mugabe Government should arise. It comes from two directions.

On the one hand, from workers and peasants, from the unemployed, from trade unions and other progressive organisations disappointed and frustrated with their continued poverty.

On the other hand, it comes from the white farmers and the former colonial powers that dream of regaining their complete control over this potentially rich land.

The present campaign is being whipped up as revolutionary changes are taking place on the African continent.

Apartheid has been overthrown in South Africa, Namibia has won and consolidated its independence, the imperialist backed UNITA forces have been defeated in Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is breaking free from its long colonial status, Libya has retained its independence.

These and other developments are not acceptable to the former European colonial powers and to the US.

While the Mugabe Government has not fulfilled the aspirations of the Zimbabwean people, his Government sent troops to help maintain the independence of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and provided assistance to the ANC during its struggle against apartheid.

The one-time guerrilla leader against British colonialism is being demonised as a megalomaniac whose time has passed and who needs to hand over leadership to people more acceptable to the former colonial masters.

The leader of the country or the country as a whole is vilified in the media, with the political leaders of the Western powers playing a prominent part.

The process is familiar. It has been used against Panama's Noriega, Libya's Gaddafi, and most recently Yugoslavia's Milosevic. It was used against the Soviet Union, Cuba, Iraq, Iran and now against China.

When President Mugabe warned white farmers in Zimbabwe not to use force against the landless African peasants who were squatting on the whites' farms -- saying it would only cause greater violence "and none of us want that" -- the media asserted that Mugabe had started encouraging Africans to launch violent attacks on white farmers.

Murdoch's Sydney tabloid "The Daily Telegraph" on April 11 regaled readers with a succession of horror stories of white farmers and their wives being terrorised by "drunken mobs of squatters howling war cries and brandishing axes".

In another story, a white farmer was "beaten and whipped in front of his wife and children" until he agreed to sign over half his farm to the squatters. Significantly, this article is datelined from London, not Zimbabwe.

When Mugabe was elected President in a landslide victory over the white settlers in 1980, it was (in the words of "The Washington Post") "celebrated by Zimbabwe's black majority and greeted with aid and goodwill from Western governments".

But two decades of the West's "aid and goodwill" has inevitably left Zimbabwe in a mess.

Landless peasants
The country is faced with the impossibility of reconciling the demands of the World Bank and IMF (representing transnational corporations and Western "investors") on the one hand, and the aspirations of the landless peasants, who fought the independence struggle against British colonialism, on the other.

"The Washington Post" in an editorial on February 1 complains that Mugabe "balks at reforming his unproductive state-dominated economy".

Mugabe and ZANU, on the other hand, have apparently decided that the ravages caused by globalisation and the World Bank's structural adjustment programs demand the implementation of another sort of reform, one that is long overdue in Zimbabwe: land reform.

The white planters are using their wealth and position to fight the Government every inch of the way, using the courts (another hangover from British colonialism) to block land reform.

Destabilisation, economic disruption, "pro-democracy" demonstrations, the fostering of black against black and ethnic separatist strife are all part of the campaign.

Guerrilla campaigns and terrorism can all follow, until a government acceptable to the US and British replaces ZANU and Mugabe.

At the Congress of the Socialist Party of Serbia in Belgrade in March, the ZANU delegation told me that their border patrols had only recently stopped a "very large" truck that was attempting to enter the country with a full load of "the most sophisticated weapons -- enough for a small war".

West's formula
"The Washington Post" has spelt out a formula for outside interference: "Now Western governments must keep pressing for economic reforms, help Zimbabwe's growing democratic opposition maintain its new-found unity and do whatever is possible to prevent Mr Mugabe from manipulating the parliamentary vote in April. If all goes well, Mr Mugabe will have a chance to graciously concede after that election."

Already committees of support for "democracy" in Zimbabwe are springing up which will echo the media campaign of the western powers. Such a committee is being formed in Australia.

While the white planters are resolutely opposing land reform, determined to hold onto the plundered African land that they now "own" by right of British conquest, rumours are circulated (and then reported as fact) that land compulsorily acquired from white farmers last year for distribution to landless Africans had been given to "members of ZANU and government officials".

Many landless Zimbabweans are members of ZANU, but such assertions are part of the deceptions and aim to soften up public opinion to lay the groundwork for overt or covert intervention in Zimbabwe.

Britain's Tories are calling for "strong action" from their government to stop what they are predictably calling Mugabe's "ethnic cleansing".

Britain's Labour Government, an ardent supporter of colonialism and aggression against smaller states, has urged the Government of Zimbabwe to "send a delegation to London to open negotiations".

Zimbabwe is now an independent country but the British Foreign Office still thinks Zimbabwe is a colony.

Foreign Office Minister Peter Hain offered spurious financial support for "a program of genuine land reform" but was careful to stipulate that "we wouldn't give the money to the Government [of Zimbabwe]".

The British Government's "land reform" would leave the white settlers in control -- it would be no reform at all.

A serious, dangerous situation is developing in southern Africa which could destabilise the region and provide an opportunity for Western meddling, not only in Zimbabwe but in southern Africa as a whole.


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