While I certainly cannot attest to how accurate the whole of this is, it is obviously a breath of fresh air compared to the bulk of misinformation coming from the imperialist press.
Macdonald Zimbabwe: One Farmer, One Farm By Angela Clifford Irish Political Review, Sept 2002 The Irish press in general, with the Irish Times in the lead, continues to give a bad press to the efforts of the native population of Zimbabwe, to redress the robbing of their land by fair means and foul over the fast 100 years. One might have expected the Irish press to see the parallels with the situation of Ireland, where communal Gaelic land tenure was forcibly superseded by incoming settlers. It took hundreds of years of land war for the native Irish to get back the land though the tribal form of ownership in common is long forgotten, with the Norman type of individual ownership taken for granted. Possibly the customary forms of land ownership are not so obsolete in Zimbabwe and that is the reason for the vicious propaganda campaign aimed at styming the reform movement which Britain has promoted around the European Union. Like the Whites in Zimbabwe, the incoming settlers brought their 'law' to Ireland with them, which legalised their robbery. That law, too, had to displace what was already in place. When journalists try and condemn by media those in Zimbabwe who fight for what is rightfully theirs, the law they apply is not the customary law of Zimbabwe, but the alien law of the Imperialists. Mugabe and the Zimbabwe independence movement had to promise to make no changes in the inherited forms for ten years, because they like the Irish failed to win an outright military victory against their overlords. Those ten years have been up for quite a while, but it is no easy thing to reverse social facts on the ground. Propaganda What 'the West' fears is that the land revolution in Zimbabwe will succeed and will spread to dispossess white colonists in other former British colonies. So, in the propaganda war to discredit the revolutionaries, any story however disgraceful, will do. Daughters Watch As Mugabe Henchmen Behead Mother. This tale by Basildon Peta picked up a Guardian 'report' and featured in the Independent News Service (London) and was carried in the Irish Independent on 24th April. The story starts: "A 53 year old woman was beheaded in front of two of her daughters, aged 10 and 17, by supporters of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe because of suspected opposition sympathies... by 20 ruling party militants outside her hut in Magunje, north western Zimbabwe... in the most brutal political killing in almost two years of poll related violence. She was killed because she was the mother of a Movement for Democratic change youth activist.. "etc. etc. The English Independent carried the story on the same day. The 'report' was one small part of a propaganda offensive intended to launch the opposition into power in a coup like way and to generate international withdrawal of recognition to the elected Government of Zimbabwe. Undoubtedly this campaign succeeded in getting further European Union and Commonwealth sanctions against the country. Naturally the Zimbabwean Government were concerned at this attempt to discredit the election campaign of President Mugabe. It arrested an American journalist on The Guardian (London), Andrew Meldrum, and charged him with "abusing journalistic privilege and publishing false news". That arrest was reported with some outrage in the Independent on 2nd May, which complained, 'He is the seventh independent journalist to have been arrested under the Access to Information and Privacy Act passed shortly after Robert Mugabe won a new term in the presidential election in March, which according to most international observers was rigged". This was during the period when surrounding Black Governments were being pressurised by Britain to overturn the Mugabe election result. An Irish Times report takes up the story on 16th July, complaining that, though Mr. Meldrum was acquitted on the charge of spreading false news, he was being expelled from the country. After all, hadn't the Guardian published a retraction. And the source of the tale, the Daily News (Zimbabwe) had also retracted, when the story had been disproved. The Foreign Correspondents Association of Southern Africa strongly condemned the Expulsion Order. Having been caught out in barefaced lying, the matter is simply brushed aside. But propaganda of that kind could have led to a war in Southern Africa, if surrounding countries had allowed themselves to be misled by 'Western' pressure. And we can he sure that in Britain and Ireland it is the black propaganda which has lasted in popular memory and not the correction. Indeed, 1 didn't even see a correction in the Irish Independent. Another example of the one sided, pro settler reporting of the Zimbabwean land question, appeared in the Irish Times on 12th August. This personalised report from the Bulawayo based Declan Walsh, buried the essential piece of news which should have been the main point of the story. COMPROMISE It seems that, under the slogan of One Farmer, One Farm, Zanu-PF is now offering the settlers a deal whereby they can retain ownership of 400 hectares of land (about 988 English acres), if they give up their claims on the rest of the land to which they have 'legal' title. In a country where "commercial farmers" (as the usurping white settlers like to call themselves) commonly own huge latifundia of many thousands of acres of the best land, compromise offers such as this are regarded as derisory. The group, Justice For Agriculture, has urged rejection of this offer. But this offer is a very fair deal indeed and far more than the interlopers have a right to and the Imperial media, including the Irish Times, should be urging acceptance. Early on in the propaganda war over the land, the Commercial Farmers' Union realised that the way to maximise international pressure on the Government of Zimbabwe was to gain some black allies and find some blacks who were suffering in the land war, who could be featured by their allies in the media. What was important was to cloud the essential settler- native issue, with its history of oppressive white racism. Morgan Tsvangirai of the Zimbabwean Trade Union movement was flattered and courted to join the settler side (though he is not much good as an asset since involvement in a plot to assassinate Mugabe). And some black towns folk who have suffered from the devaluation of the local currency by the financial markets in a move to punish Mugabe have been seduced into voting for the neo-colonial coalition. The privations of black farm workers on white farms resulting from the Land war have been regularly featured and this fits in with the general Imperial tactic of boasting of the numbers of 'jobs' created in various backward parts of the world. What no one seems to realise, however, is that, while the people retained the land on a tribal basis, they had no need of jobs, nor of economic migration. They had their own subsistence and their own satisfying culture and money was irrelevant. The solution to the plight of the black workers on the settler farms is for them to return to their own areas and be given the means of subsistence there. It is certainly doing them no favour to facilitate their further employment by settlers for derisory wages in a process which destroys their lifestyle and accustoms them to the consumer good, market culture of 'the West'. Similarly, Imperial interference in the former colonies is often justified by emphasising the low per capita incomes these countries have. But, again, such figures are meaningless in pre-capitalist societies, particularly in the countryside. Unfortunately the programme of the do-gooders in Ireland and Britain amounts to helping such countries to become capitalist to raise their per capita income. But the price for 'civilisation' of this kind-loss of a way of life is simply not worth paying. CRONIES A common complaint in the Irish and British media, which is made to rubbish the Land War, is that "cronies" of President Mugabe are amongst those who get prime pieces of the white owned real estate, once it is restored to native hands. No doubt there is some truth in this assertion. However, since when have the dispossessed been prevented from organising themselves to disinherit their oppressors? Just as the disenfranchised get the vote by agitating, and the homeless get homes by organising, so the landless get land by political action. A whole generation of Irish volunteers, after they had fought to put out the British, took over the rule of their country. They were elected to positions and politicians appointed those who had elected them to various positions of influence and made sure that what jobs were going went to their sympathisers. Was that 'corruption'? No doubt some will claim it was. In my book it is a natural and necessary part of the revolution by which the people took back their country. And even if it were simply a matter of the Zimbabwean leaders taking land for themselves, so what? If white ownership of the land is fundamentally illegitimate, at least justice is half done if the land passes into native hands. It will be up to the next generation of Zimbabweans to remedy any injustices they perceive amongst their own. The fact, however, is that this element of the land revolution is a very small part of the whole. Most of what is being done aims to give the means of self support to those deprived of it by white settlement. FAMINE Another way of discrediting the land revolution is to blame the food shortages in Zimbabwe and other parts of Southern Africa on the unrest. The facts are otherwise. Some 25% of the small, black farmed land the bits not fertile enough for the kith and kin originating in Britain and Ireland to steal grows three quarters of the food eaten by Zimbabwe blacks. The 'commercial' farms concentrate on export crops which keep Zimbabwe dependent on the vagaries of the world market. Mugabe has targeted 2,900 farmers, about two third of the total of white farmers. George Monbiot who has studied the situation himself in Africa and the author of a book on the country confirms this is so/ He says: "...the 4,500 white farmers there own two thirds of the best land, many of them grow not food but tobacco. Seventy percent of the nation's maize its primary staple crop is grown by black peasant farmers hacking a living from the marginal lands they were left by the whites. "...Every year, some tens of millions of peasant farmers [all over the world] are forced to leave their land, with devastating consequences for food security. ..."Ten years ago, 1 investigated the expropriations being funded and organised in Africa by another member of the Commonwealth. Canada had paid for the ploughing and planting with wheat of the Basotu Plains in Tanzania. "Wheat was eaten in that country only by the rich, but by planting that crop, rather than maize or beans or cassava, Canada could secure contracts for its chemical and machinery companies, which were world leaders in wheat technology. "The scheme required the dispossession of the 40,000 members of the Barabaig tribe. Those who tried to return to their lands were beaten by the project's workers, imprisoned and tortured with electric shocks. The women were gang raped. "For the first time in a century, the Barabaig were malnourished. When 1 raised these issues with one of the people running the project, she told me: "] won't shed a tear for anybody ifit means development. " The rich world's press took much the same attitude: only the Guardian carried the story." After referring to Andhra Pradesh (India), where a UK funded scheme is dispossessing 20 million people, Monbiot continues: 'These are dark skinned people being expelled by whites, rather than whites being expelled by black people. They are, as such, assuming their rightful place, as invisible obstacles to the rich world\s projects. Mugabe is a monstrosity because he has usurped the natural order. "Throughout the coverage of Zimbabwe there is an undercurrent of racism... Readers are led to conclude... the only people who know how to run Africa are the whites. "But, through the IMF, the World Bank and the bilateral aid programmes, with their extraordinary conditions, the whites do run Africa, and a right hash they are making of it." "...the rich world has... been using 'food aid as a political weapon'. The United States has just succeeded in forcing Zimbabwe and Zambia, both suffering from the southern African famine, to accept GM maize as food relief. "Both nations had fiercely resisted GM crops, partly because they feared that the technology would grant multinational companies control over the food chain..." Monbiot adds that Malawi was also forced to take GM maize after being instructed by the IMF and EU to privatise their food reserves which led to their being sold off. These bodies also are forcing African countries to open their markets to imports from abroad, including cheap food imports which distort the home market. He concludes: 'Land distribution is the key determinant of food security. Small farms are up to 10 times as productive as large ones... Small farmers are more likely to supply local people with staple crops than western supermarkets with mangetout. 'The governments of the rich world don't like land reform. It requires state intervention, which offends the god of free markets, and it hurts big farmers and the companies that supply them..." (13th August 2002) Unfortunately, Monbiot - along with a lot of other well meaning people on the Left feels obliged to intersperse his criticism of the policies of 'Western' Governments with criticisms of Mugabe. Perhaps he has to do that to get a hearing in the Guardian which is, after all, the paper of Manchester Capitalism, in origin at least. But others not so constrained should have no truck with any sort of equivalence between the Imperialist 'West' and those who strike out, however crudely, for some justice. -- Angela Clifford PS by Editor: BBC Radio5Live is basically a Sports channel. With large chunks of time to fill in the mornings, it runs lengthy phone ins on affairs of the moment, and things get said in these that are never beard on the more structured media. On 20th August Roy Bennett, a Zimbabwe MP who was said to be "on the run " from the Mugabe Government, had Radio 5 given over to him for an hour. (It turned out he was speaking from Britain.) He said he was a fourth generation white in Zimbabwe. He declared that neither land nor race was an issue in the present conflict, because all racists had left Zimbabwe in 1980, and the commercial farmers were in favour of land reform, provided it was done right. The only issue was democracy. He was asked why South Africa did not intervene in support of democracy, and he said it was because the African National Congress would lose power in a properly democratic election in South Africa. As an example of the methods of intimidation used by the Mugabe regime, he said that the war veterans had held a political rally on his farm and when they left they took his Personnel Relations Officer and nine of his security guards with them. So here was a " farmer" with a PRO for handling relations with his workers and more than 9 security guards. Later on, to show how damaging interference with "commercial farming " was, he said, "I have 1,500 workers that work with me" and their livelihood was being endangered. And he said he was elected by blacks. Another "commercial farmer" came on the radio a couple of weeks later, to explain how well the black workers were treated. He had only 500 workers -- a small farmer! -- but the employment he gave supported a community of about three times that number. And everything that community needed was supplied to it through the farm. Multiplying Roy Bennett's workforce by three gives a community of close to 5,000 that was economically dependent on his will. There was a time when Trade Unions had to campaign against capitalists who aspired to make their workers absolutely dependent on them by means of company unions, company housing, company shops, company welfare etc. Is that how the Cecil Rhodes settlement in Zimbabwe should be described? Or is it just feudalism? _______________________________________________ Leninist-International mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
