It must be galling for a man who last autumn offered himself as Africa’s saviour to be so publicly rebuffed by Africa’s leaders. Isolated with Australia and New Zealand in a gang of three mainly white states, the prime minister insisted: ‘This type of behaviour has got to stop.’ What entitles Zimbabwe’s former colonial master to insist on a change of government in Harare was not explained. But since Blair’s ministers began openly to champion the cause of the white farmers who made up the backbone of the former Rhodesian regime – while denouncing the black leadership which defeated it as ‘uncivilised’ – British interference in Zimbabwe has been ceaseless.
Perhaps taking its cue from the government, most mainstream British media coverage of the Zimbabwean crisis has now abandoned even a veneer of even-handedness, as reporters and presenters have become cheerleaders for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. In a BBC television interview on Sunday with Foreign Office Minister Baroness Amos, David Frost talked blithely of ‘100,000 people being killed by Mugabe supporters over the last two years’. In fact, human rights groups estimate the total number killed on both sides during that period at around 160. Frost and the shadow foreign secretary, Michael Ancram, went on to denounce Mugabe as a ‘fascist dictator’ and ‘black racist’, both urging more decisive British action. The same day an unrelentingly hostile BBC ‘Correspondent’ programme passed without a single balancing interview.
There is little sense in any of this of Britain’s responsibility for the rapacious colonisation of Zimbabwe and the continuing grotesque inequality of land ownership two decades after independence, which has left 6,000 white farmers in control of half the country’s 81 million acres of arable land, while around 850,000 black farmers are crammed into the rest. It was after all a British Labour government which refused to put down Ian Smith’s white racist rebellion in 1965 because of fears that the army would balk at acting against their ‘kith and kin’, provoking a war which cost 40,000 lives. It was a British Tory government which imposed white parliamentary quotas and a ten-year moratorium on land reform at independence. Now the British government (through the Westminster Foundation for Democracy) and the Tories (through the Zimbabwe Democracy Trust) – along with white farmers and corporations – are all funding the MDC, committed as it is to free-market policies and the restoration of white farms to their owners.
It is impossible to sustain the case that Zimbabwe has been singled out for international denunciation by the British government because of political violence, intimidation or restrictions on democratic freedoms, alarming as these are. Such factors are common to other African states supported by Britain, such as Kenya and Zambia (where an election was rigged earlier this year). And Blair is bosom buddies with dictators such as General Musharraf of Pakistan and the Saudi royal family. In Zimbabwe, the liberation war leader Mugabe is at least holding an election of sorts; there are anti-government newspapers and a parliamentary opposition.
There are only two possible explanations for Britain’s role. One is a racist concern for the privileged white minority. The other is that, unlike Zambia and Kenya, Mugabe is no longer playing ball with the West’s neoliberal agenda and is talking, credibly or not, of taking over private businesses and a return to socialism. That cannot be tolerated and, in the New World Order, the US now appears to have subcontracted supervision of Africa largely to the former colonial powers, Britain and France.
The struggle over power and land has brought Zimbabwe to a virtual state of civil war. Unemployment and inflation are rampant; living standards have plunged, while Aids is taking a horrific toll (and Mugabe promotes a grim homophobia). Zimbabwe needs to find its own way to a peaceful political evolution and a return to the progressive reforms of Mugabe’s early years in power. But these are issues for Zimbabweans to settle. Outside interference can only make that process more difficult – and Britain is the very last country to dictate to its once-captive subjects.8
(7/3/02)
Catastroika has not only been a disaster for Russia
Throughout the past decade, it has been an article of faith in the West that the implosion of the Soviet Union represented a liberation for its people and an undiluted boon for the rest of the world. At a stroke, the evil empire had been miraculously swept away and the ground laid for a great leap forward to freedom, peace and prosperity.
There was rejoicing across the political spectrum, from free-market conservatives to the far left. The nuclear threat had lifted and a new world order of democratic global governance had been inaugurated. History had come to an end and the long-suffering East European masses would at last be able to step out from under the Communist yoke to enjoy the liberal capitalism (or genuine socialism, in the leftist version) which was to be the fortunate lot of all humankind.
This weekend, it will be ten years since the comic-opera coup which precipitated the downfall of Mikhail Gorbachev, the banning of the Soviet Communist Party and the dissolution of the USSR. As the dust and debris have cleared from the convulsive events of 1989–91, the real nature of what they brought about has come into focus. For all the action on the streets, the changes were mostly engineered by sections of the nomenklatura that realised the old system was in crisis and saw the opportunities for enrichment.
Far from opening the way to emancipation, these changes led to beggary for most citizens, ushering in the most cataclysmic peacetime economic collapse of an industrial country in history. Under the banner of reform and the guidance of American-prescribed shock therapy, perestroika became catastroika. Capitalist restoration brought in its wake mass pauperisation and unemployment; wild extremes of inequality; rampant crime; virulent anti-Semitism and ethnic violence, all combined with legalised gangsterism on a heroic scale and the ruthless looting of public assets.
The scale of the social disaster that has engulfed the former Soviet Union and much of eastern Europe in the past ten years is often underestimated outside, or even by visitors to Moscow and other relatively prosperous cities in the former Soviet bloc. Some of the more startling facts are set out by the US professor of Russian studies Stephen Cohen in his book Failed Crusade,9 a savage indictment of Western blindness to what has been inflicted on the one-time communist world.
By the late 1990s, national income had fallen by more than 50 per cent (compare that with the 27 per cent drop in output during the great American depression), investment by 80 per cent, real wages by half and meat and dairy herds by 75 per cent. Indeed, the degradation of agriculture is, Cohen argues, in some respects worse even than during Stalin’s forced collectivisation of the countryside in the 1930s.
The numbers living below the poverty line in the former Soviet republics had risen from 14 million in 1989 to 147 million, even before the 1998 financial crash. The market experiment has produced more orphans than Russia’s 20 million-plus wartime casualties, while epidemics of cholera and typhus have re-emerged, millions of children suffer from malnutrition and adult life expectancy has plunged. As this human tragedy was unfolding, Western politicians and bankers harried Russia’s leaders to push ahead more energetically with the ‘reform’ and privatisation treatment producing it: a transition in many areas to a premodern age.
Only with the rise in oil prices, the devaluation of the rouble and the merciful departure of Boris Yeltsin has the economic slide begun to be reversed. And in eastern Europe, only star performers like Poland have managed to return to the output levels achieved before 1989 – and even then at a cost of millions of unemployed, widespread poverty and social regression.
Some who have championed the lurch from a centralised, publicly owned economy to the robber-baron capitalism of today’s Russia will doubtless comfort themselves with the thought that the grim figures exaggerate the costs of change and ignore the greater freedom, democratic structures and better quality of goods now available.