Zimbabwe's tyrannical President Robert Mugabe made one big mistake. Instead of following the lead of his comrade and fellow tyrant, Cuba's Fidel Castro, and jailing homosexuals without any fanfare, Robert opened his big mouth. He just had to tell the world how much he hated gays.
According to the president, homosexuals and lesbians were "worse than pigs or dogs", and they could not claim to have "any rights at all". He urged his fellow Zimbabweans to "hunt them down and hound them out". Some did.
Such rabid outbursts created enemies amongst the very people who would normally be his natural allies. Deep concern began to be expressed by people who had no qualms about portraying Mugabe as an African beacon of hope, even after his army's North Korean trained Fifth Brigade massacred many thousands of Ndebele civilians in the 1980s. It is one thing for marxist African leaders to murder large numbers of their own black citizens, quite another for them to act so offensively against an important Western victim-group.
72 radical members of the United States Congress wrote him a letter saying he was "gravely mistaken". Peter Tatchell, the London-based militant gay activist, tried to make a citizen's arrest of Mugabe when the president visited the United Kingdom last year. Even the Australian Broadcasting Corporation began to recognise that Mugabe had feet of clay.
The president's latest barbarity has been to orchestrate veterans of the liberation war against Ian Smith's renegade regime to invade white farms and force the owners off their land. Many of these supposed veterans are actually too young to have fought in the war, which ended over 20 years ago. They are simply paid thugs or opportunists who have come along for a bit of excitement at the white farmers' expense.
Squatters now occupy over 900 farms. Mugabe has defied an order from Zimbabwe's High Court to evict them, claiming that the white farmers are "enemies of the state". Two farmers have already been murdered, and many more have been badly beaten. A far larger number of black workers on the farms have been hospitalised after physical attacks intended to intimidate them against supporting their employers. And even in cases where Zimbabwe's police have not actively assisted these attacks, they have done very little to prevent them.
Wresting farms away from their white owners has long been part of Mugabe's agenda. At present 4,500 white farmers control around half of Zimbabwe's best agricultural land, producing the bulk of the country's export earnings, as well as providing employment for over 300,000 black workers. While some of the farmers may well have attitudes that would not pass muster among the café latte set, many of them are strongly committed to Zimbabwe and to building a harmonious multi-racial nation.
Since shortly after independence in 1980, international donors such as Britain and the World Bank have provided funds to the Zimbabwean government to purchase farms for redistribution to the rural poor. Further attempts by the government to obtain 1,400 farms compulsorily were overturned by the courts in 1997, and a draft constitution which would have allowed farms to be taken without compensation was rejected by Zimbabwe's voters last February.
Many people, including Zimbabwe's opposition parties and white farmers themselves, concede the importance of land redistribution. But a large number of the farms that have been parcelled out through legal acquisitions under the Commercial Farm Resettlement Scheme have not gone to landless peasants.
Margaret Dongo, a genuine veteran of the liberation war, and leader of the opposition Zimbabwe Union of Democrats, recently obtained a list detailing the 400 recipients of more than 270 formerly white-owned farms totalling nearly half a million hectares. Mugabe's mates did well. Among those who are now able to retire to their own farms are the attorney-general, the mines and tourism minister, a cabinet secretary, the speaker of parliament, a provincial governor, and the general who formerly commanded the army's murderous Fifth Brigade.
The current farm invasions have received widespread coverage in the worlds' media. But the international reaction has been most interesting for the light that it throws on the nature of contemporary outrage.
Certainly, Mugabe's actions have been criticised by governments in Europe, North America and elsewhere -- though few in Africa. Denmark and Sweden have frozen aid programs. Amnesty International has sent a disapproving open letter to Mugabe urging him to condemn human rights violations by his supporters, and reminding him of the importance of the rule of law.
But the kind of anger that would be mobilised had Mugabe's actions fitted into the favoured morality play of today's world -- wicked whites against ethnic and indigenous minorities -- is missing. The demonstrators who are usually so strident in their hostility to racism and oppression are mute. Or if they are actually chanting their passionate opposition outside Zimbabwe's many foreign embassies, the world's media is simply ignoring them -- which would be just as disturbing.
I suspect that this silence is not simply because the most visible current victims are of British descent. They also own -- or have mortgages on -- substantial properties, which makes them even more unattractive as subjects for displays of conspicuous compassion. Many on the left seem blind to the fundamental links between the protection of private property, the safeguarding of other human rights, and the attainment of prosperity. They have learnt little from the abject failures of communist regimes on all these counts.
Nevertheless, things could still turn out badly for Mugabe. He had better hope that his thugs are not invading any farms owned by gays. Then he would see some real outrage.
ADVERTISEMENT
No comments:
Post a Comment