These Mugabe apologists keep posting their Mugabe propaganda on UK Indymedia.

Lets get one thing clear. Mugabe is a dictator and ZanuPF a dictatorship, it's anti-imperialist stance a justification for their brutality of their downtrodden citizens - who they have taken for granted. The logic - we're going to brutalise you into accepting your economic plight for the sake of the revolution! It has been an misconceived vanguard that, in the absence of Soviet patronage which may have helped them to a limited extent in the 1980s, considered itself entirely independent of the world economy. This may have been possible if the agricultural sector was producing enough food for it's own needs, but it plainly wasn't. Zimbabwe's plight may well have been made far worse because of sanctions, but it primarily came about because of the loss of food security/economic depression, and that depression and drop in food output has come about because of the way Mugabe's government handled the land reform process. He corrupted the land redistribution process, and his greatest crime has been to not have mediated this process to retain a level of food production in the country when the UK and other donors were negotiating the recontinuation of the financial assistance package for land reform back in 1998. Infact, Mugabe was ill-prepared to drag his country further into the war state because he'dd neglected to nurture the domestic economy and domestic food producing capability of his own country; he under-invested in agricultural capacity, and it's infrastructure from before the IMFausterity measures of structural adjustment came into play by 1990 (even then, he didn't consider the priority of it; instead, limited government finances was fritted away on the state bureacracy). Mugabe and Zanu PF have always taken their population for granted. The withholding of food aid to punish anticipated voting trends towards the MDC in 2002 was a crime against humanity, and makes a nonsense that the 2002 elections were fair.

In 1998, the UK government started to exert entirely reasonable conditions of commitments to poverty alleviation and transparency in the disposal of funds regarding the continuation of a financial assistance package for land redistribution, ZanuPF rejected the deal (after initially agreeing) primarily because Zanu PF's political elite became aware that the principle of transparancy would see an end to the appropriation of some of this money which they had been benefiting from for a number of years until 1996. Zanu PF also realised the commitment to transparency would neccessarily make it difficult to easily deliver land to all members of it's support-base. With pressure coming from Zanu-PF's knife wielding powerbase - the war veterans - who were increasingly getting impatient with Mugabe and Zanu PF to deliver land redistribution, Mugabe then exploited the political capital out of resisting this whole arrangement with the UK just as Zanu PF's own domestic mandate was under threat from the resergent MDC.

The rushed land redistribution process a huge drop in total farm output and during the drought in 2002/3 - famine. A staggering 45% of the population is considered malnourished. International communists will say, "the country is poorer, but freer - independent of Imperialism". Well, where is their food coming from? That's right, the United States.

The upper echlons of Zanu represent a cowardly bourgeois and petite bourgeois, propped up with their support base including the war veterans in tow. The army have assumed a ever-increasing role in the governace of the country. Mugabe has, infact, only held onto power so long because there are some army generals who are afraid of Morgan Tsvangarai's pronouncements that he will form a commission which could convict generals if they were to be found guilty of human rights abuses, going right back to the civil war in Maatabaleland. A deeper, less propagandist reading of what has been happening in the country from independence onwards points one to consider that Zanu PF hold on power, necessarily steadfast because of their foremost role in the independence struggle, subsequently led to their own concentration of political power.
Extracts from "Zimbabwe and the strategy of resistance" by Dale T. McKinley*
"There has never been any meaningful degree of ideological consonance amongst left forces/individual activists in Zimbabwe. For the first decade or so, the institutional existence and political dominance of a 'socialist' political party in the form of ZANU-PF, engendered a 'civil society' that was effectively confined to the margins of key political/ideological and social debate and contestation. While opposition to the negative effects of SAPS and a subsequent raft of neo-liberal policy prescriptions in the early-mid 1990s fostered union-based, student and other smaller-scale resistance, eventually leading to the formation of the NCA and then the MDC, the dominant strategy of this accumulated resistance was bounded within a dominant constitutional and legal framework - i.e. to seek, through existing societal and state institutions, an expression of growing popular demands for changing the character and content of those institutions. This strategic orientation, and the tactics employed to pursue it (e.g., the formation of a political party to contest representational power through the existing institutional and legal framework) was understandable given the existence of political-social space at the time, the fact that the MDC was the first, meaningful and mass-based political challenge to the post-independence hegemony of ZANU-PF and the subsequent 'victory' of the nascent opposition forces in the constitutional referendum."

"However, the 'spaghetti mix' (as left Zimbabwean activists have called it) of the MDC meant that once Mugabe and ZANU-PF had connived to steal the 2000 parliamentary elections, and in the process begin to close down the institutional and legal space for political dissent and opposition, there was no dominant ideological foundation to act as the basis for strategic and tactical re-assessment. As a result, the strategic 'line' remained the same - to gear up for contestation of the presidential elections in 2002 and continue the demands for a new Constitution, using the MDC as the main driver/vehicle and allied 'civil society' formations as fellow passengers,. Tactically, the main emphasis was on using the available (but fast-closing) institutional and legal space to launch strikes and stay-aways (by a diminishing number of employed workers and an increasingly survivalist general population), mobilise international opinion and support and embark on a standard electoral campaign to influence and mobilise support amongst the Zimbabwean population. Under such a strategic rubric though, there was little the oppositional forces could do once Mugabe and ZANU-PF began to unleash their war veteran-driven 'land reform programme', youth militias and institutional/legal manipulation as a means of consolidating power (especially in the rural areas) and covering the creeping dictatorship in the cloak of an incomplete 'national democratic revolution'."

"In 1998, the UK government started to exert entirely reasonable conditions of commitments to poverty alleviation and transparency in the disposal of funds regarding the continuation of a financial assistance package for land redistribution......."

This reads like some uk government press release - care to reveal your source and what the 'entirely reasonable' conditions were?

"I should make it clear that
we do not accept that Britain has a special
responsibility to meet the costs of land
purchase in Zimbabwe. We are a new government
from diverse backgrounds without
links to former colonial interests. My
own origins are Irish, and as you know, we
were colonised, not colonisers."

Remind us when the British state stopped being linked to colonial interests mark. After all, thats the basis of dictating the terms for land redistribution (erm exert(ing) entirely reasonable conditions of commitments to poverty alleviation and transparency in the disposal of funds regarding the continuation of a financial assistance package for land redistribution), is it not?

Thank for showing us your stupidity, Mark, You are a real asset to the MDC and the privatisation neocolonials govts funding the counter revolution. The mainstream media with its lies has totally seduced you.

It looks impossible to educate a middle head like you, but you might like to lpoko thru the following:
 http://www.raceandhistory.com/Zimbabwe/

'Looking For Evil In All The Wrong Places
There are dozens of US client states whose leaders fit the description "cruel dictator" who most people don't know rig elections, jail opponents, close newspapers and start wars. On the other hand, there are a few leaders, invariably elected, who preside over governments that pursue traditional leftist goals of socialism or escape from neo-colonialism or both who many people understand incorrectly to be cruel dictators (Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Alexander Lukashenko, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Robert Mugabe.) Government officials, news media and even many leftists in the West reserve the term cruel dictator for the opponents of imperialism, while saying virtually nothing about the real dictators who defend and promote Western strategic and economic interests at the expense of their own people. This essay focuses on Robert Mugabe, one leader the West vilifies as a cruel dictator, and compares the accusations made against him with the records of such US allies as Hosni Mubarak, Meles Zenawi, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, Mikheil Saakashvili and Pervez Musharraf.

By Stephen Gowans
etc
 http://www.trinicenter.com/articles/2007/211107.html

'What the West Doesn't Want You to Know, Professor
By Navaya ole Ndaskoi
September 27, 2007


I am responding to a putrid article on Zimbabwe by Dr. Richard E. Mshomba, Professor of Economics at La Salle University in Pennsylvania U.S.A., published in Arusha Times on July 14, 2007.

Professor Mshomba wrote, 'President Robert Mugabe has single-handedly ruined Zimbabwe with his mismanagement of the economy and his iron-fisted rule.' You do not mean it, Mshomba! One man cannot single-handedly ruin such a huge economy.

Mr. Professor, a fast rewind of history is inevitable if we are to fairly discuss the Zimbabwean predicament. In 1492, Columbus, the other Mshomba who doesn't ask for directions, got lost and 'discovered the New World.' He was soon followed by swarms of Europeans who could no longer withstand abject poverty, bitter winters and wars.

When these poverty driven Europeans arrived in America, they found Indians living on the land well endowed in all types of natural resources. The European cavemen gunned down Native Americans just like wild dogs. Europeans invasion of Africa was also followed by massive cruelty. Millions of Africans were enslaved, raped and murdered. The dimension of man-inhumanity-to-man in that era has had no equal anywhere since.

In Southern Africa, the pink men led by Cecil Rhodes invaded Zimbabwe. Zimbabweans fought against this beastly occupation. The British won only because of the superior gun. The unfortunate leaders of the Zimbabwean defense forces of the 1890s were hanged from treetops. That was how the British took land and 'ruined Zimbabwe.'

The fighters, led by a commandant called Gabriel Mugabe went to the bush and inflicted serious pain on Brits and their kin and kith in Zimbabwe. The British government got up from a deep good sleep and saw crystal clearly that they will never defeat the determined African liberation forces. Safe haven for the traumatized Brits? The Lancaster House Constitutional 'talks.' Thinking that Africans were fools the British government made evergreen promises. African heads of frontlines states made a technical retreat in Lancaster, especially on land. They knew the double standards of the British government.

Leaders of the African liberation movement knew that if they maintained their hard position that land must be fairly distributed to all Zimbabweans they could be making the liberation struggle in South Africa and Namibia very difficult. The 'whites' in those occupied territories would have appealed to their European and American allies to prevent another Zimbabwe. Obviously 'whites' must have thought that so long as they retained land and controlled all wealth in Africa, there is no problem if an African is President.

African leaders advised Mugabe to ignore the land question until when South Africa and Namibia were freed. The land issue was put to rest for a while. Without the wisdom of Nkurumah, Nyerere, Kaunda, Mugabe, Obote and millions of Africans, Mandela would have been hanged by Boers and today South Africa would still be under apartheid. That is why whenever I read Crusaders for Liberation by J.K. Nyerere my heart swells in anger, especially when I see Mandela, Nujoma, and all other South Africans, Namibians and Angolans not helping Zimbabwe out of economic hardships imposed by the UK and the US! The Kiswahili saying is correct after all, 'help a donkey and its thanks are kicks!'

On 16 October 1997, Nyerere addressed the South African Parliament in Cape Town. He reminded the parliamentarians: 'When we were struggling here, South Africa still under apartheid, and you being a destabiliser of your neighbours instead of working together with them to develop our continent, of course that was a different thing. It was a terrible thing. Here was a powerful South Africa, and this power was a curse to us. It was not a blessing for us. We wished it away, because it was not a blessing at all. It destroyed Angola with a combination of apartheid; it was a menace to Mozambique and a menace to its neighbours... When we had the Cold War, boy, I tell you, we couldn't breathe.'

History is a good subject Mr. 'Professor of Economics'! Namibia became independent in 1990. South Africa was also finally freed in 1994. Mugabe revived the land issue promptly. The conservative British government refused to honor its own promises.

By 1997, around 4,000 white commercial farmers still owned 70 percent of the best land in Zimbabwe leaving nothing to ten million Africans. In 1997, the Labor Party assumed power and Tony Blair became Prime Minister. Mugabe's actions were immediate. He reminded Blair of the vacuous promises made by the British government at Lancaster House. Clair Short, UK Secretary of State for International Development, wrote a poisonous letter in 1997 to the Zimbabwean government distancing Brits from the stinking mess created by their ancestors. Then the West declared Mugabe 'a dictator.'

Sure, African leaders have been unable 'to hold Mugabe accountable and pressure him to respect the rule of law and democratic processes.' The reason is that they have fresh memories of the criminal plunder of Zimbabwe and thousands of Zimbabweans killed by Smith, backed militarily and economically by the UK, the US and the West generally.
etc
 http://www.raceandhistory.com/Zimbabwe/2007/2709.html

Any government or group of governments which direct terms of a financial assistance package are not being "dictators" or "imperialist". Under the auspices of the UNDP, the post-1998 land redistribution plan was to be rooted in Zimbabwe's 1992 Land Acquisition Act which ditched the previous "willing seller, willing buyer" clause, allowing them to buy land compulsorily for redistribution, and a "fair" compensation was to be paid for land acquired, instead of the market price compensation requirement of before.

Brian, you put more emphasis on the sanctions regime having destroyed the economy than the collapse of the agricultural sector after 2000. You don't seem able to answer the charge that Mugabe neglected to invest in the domestic food producing capability of his own country; he under-invested in agricultural capacity, and it's infrastructure from well before the IMFausterity measures of structural adjustment came into play by 1990 and shrunk state spending (inadequate investment in technical support, credit, seeds, fertilizer, irrigation, marketing and the like). Mugabe's populist land strategy was mainly about trying to restore some legitimacy amongst the vast rural population, whom he'd ignored for two decades, - at a time, in early 2000, when he faced certain electoral defeat. Now in the last few years, financial mismanagement (maintaining high salaries and payments to his patronage networks from an increased stock of printed currency) has led to over-supply of currency and hence inflation. Patrick Bond: "According to Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono, 67 trillion Zimbabwean dollars (US$33 million at the effective exchange rate in January) were in circulation but could not be traced inside the financial system.The banks had only Z$2 trillion cash on hand. Said Gono, "The rest of the money is with cash barons who have opened mini-central banks at their houses. Unfortunately the people doing that are influential citizens with leadership positions."

Sever doubts about the MDC stem from their privatisation agenda and plan for restructuring the economy show a slight return to the damaging policies brought in by the IMF and World Bank when they called the economic-policy shots during the early 1990s.

I put my stock not in some discredited tin-pot dicatorship, but the civil society of Zimbabwe, expressed within the National People's Convention. Key groups included the trade unions, Women of Zimbabwe Arise, the National Students Union, National Constitutional Assembly, Christian Alliance, Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, and Lawyers for Human Rights.

Good report Mark.