Welcome to BASE21

Aim is to block land reform
By Deirdre Griswold

The art of public relations goes back a long way, as the old expression "a wolf in sheep's clothing" shows us. Disguise something bad or give it a cuddly name and by the time people find out it has fangs, it may be too late.

A bill called the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZDERA) now making its way through Congress is a case in point. Democracy, economic recovery--who could argue with that? But this bill is an open attack on Zimbabwe's economic and political independence. It was passed by the Senate on Aug. 1 and is now before the House.

Zimbabwe is a long-tormented land in the middle of Africa that was violently colonized by Britain in the 1890s. The British South Africa Company, headed by financier Cecil Rhodes, massacred the Matabele and Mashona people, grabbing their livestock and the best land in the area and parceling it out to soldiers who would settle there, laying the basis for the white-settler regime to be known as Rhodesia.

Zimbabwe has rich farmland, but 60 percent of the best land is still in the hands of descendants of the white settlers--even now, more than 20 years since a united front government of the two main African liberation organizations took office. But now the government of Zimbabwe has passed a law that would redistribute millions of acres of land, currently owned by just 3,500 white farmers, to 5 million Black farmers.

It is obvious that the whites are into farming as a lucrative business, not for survival. The Black people, however, are desperately poor and need the land just to live. The land question has become the focus of a giant political battle.

'Democracy' through bought elections

President Robert Mugabe and the Patriotic Front government are the targets of ZDERA. In the name of democracy, the bill would allow the U.S. Congress to spend $6 million to influence the upcoming national election, in the name of "voter education," and would put sanctions on the country's leaders. While members of the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, would be free to travel around the world, the bill would restrict travel by the leaders of the Zimbabwe government and freeze their bank accounts.

The MDC doesn't hide the fact that it is funded by Britain's Westminster Foundation for Democracy, the political equivalent of Washington's National Endowment for Democracy that has poured millions of U.S. taxpayers' dollars into elections abroad, many in Eastern Europe, to get the results desired by U.S. strategists.

The sanctions proposed in ZDERA are not the only outside pressure on Zimbabwe. A delegation from the European Union, representing the countries that carved Africa up for colonial plunder in the 19th century, arrived in Harare Nov. 22 threatening to suspend beef and sugar trade deals vital to Zimbabwe's economy. But Minister of Foreign Affairs Stan Mudenge told the Herald newspaper that the government was ready for them and wanted to expose the EU's interference in the internal politics of Zimbabwe by funding opposition parties.

There is strong support for the Patriotic Front government in the country's rural areas, where most of the people live. The opposition MDC is based largely in the cities.

Pressure on Zimbabwe from imperialist lending institutions like the IMF and the World Bank became heavy after Mugabe heeded the call of Congolese President Laurent Kabila to defend that country against invading troops from Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, who were funded by the same banks that are squeezing Zimbabwe. Kabila was eventually assassinated. His successor, Joseph Kabila, was forced to come to Washington and make economic concessions to U.S. imperialism in order to end the war. The uneasy truce that now exists in the Congo is proof of the imperialists' responsibility for the earlier war and invasion.

The capitalists of the U.S. and Europe who make tremendous profits from their control over the rich resources and underpaid labor of Africa act shocked and hurt when accused of perpetuating the economic super-exploitation first established under colonialism. But there really is no other word for it.

IMF reforms deepened poverty

The mechanisms in the modern era are more nuanced, of course. But they are every bit as oppressive. Today, 45 percent of Zimbabweans are not able to meet "basic nutritional needs," according to a government poverty assessment survey. Three-quarters of the people live in poverty, up from 40 percent just a decade ago. At that time Western-backed economic reforms, the so-called "structural adjustment programs," forced underdeveloped countries everywhere to sell off state properties and end food and other subsidies. Mugabe, like other Third World leaders, went along with these programs reluctantly, knowing that his government would be up against a full-court press if it refused.

While Zimbabwe has passed its Land Acquisition Act and Mugabe has added a "fast-track" decree giving the white farmers just 90 days to move off requisitioned land, ultimately this issue will not be settled in the courts. The struggle is on the land itself and has been going on for some time.

Over the past 18 months, veterans of the liberation war and other militants have occupied an estimated 1,700 white-owned farms, demanding that they be redistributed to landless Blacks. They have done this in the teeth of virulent resistance by the commercial farmers.

To get a sense of what these farms are like, the Commercial Farmers Union reported Nov. 22 that an ostrich farm in Matabeleland North had been "invaded" by 15 Black farmers. The farm was a joint venture between a white Zimbabwean and an Indonesian investor who had sunk $12 million into the deal.

The people of Zimbabwe have seen what capitalist globalization brings. Land that should be feeding the people is being used to raise ostriches for the exotic food market in Europe and elsewhere. Programs that promise democracy and economic development bring national humiliation and economic slavery.

The struggle in Zimbabwe can only intensify as the world capitalist recession deepens, bringing to the fore the most glaring inequities and contradictions of this rapacious system.

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