South African official defends Zimbabwe's land reform
By Monica Moorehead
A top official of the South African government at a Nov. 16
press conference in Pretoria called upon the Western
imperialist countries to cease their penalties against
Zimbabwe. The remarks by Minister of Foreign Affairs Nkosazana
Zuma come at an important juncture as both the Bush
administration and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have
stepped up their racist attacks on the Zimbabwean government,
led by Robert Mugabe.
This statement also comes at a critical time when the U.S.
is increasing its military presence throughout the strategic
Horn of Africa, sending thousands of Marines and other
personnel there under the pretext of fighting "terrorism."
U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs
Mark Bellamy threatened Zimbabwe with military intervention
during a panel discussion on hunger in southern Africa,
sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies
in Washington, DC, in early November.
Zuma's statement is a major diplomatic victory for Zimbabwe.
South Africa, notwithstanding its own deepening capitalist
economic crisis, is the most industrialized country in
Africa.
Zimbabwean Minister of Foreign Affairs Stan Mudenge stood
next to Zuma as she also called on Britain, the former colonial
ruler of Zimbabwe, to honor the agreement it made at the time
of independence and financially compensate the white farmers
who have commercially controlled 70 percent of the most arable
lands in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe has been carrying out radical land
reform, expropriating their land with the goal of restoring it
to its rightful owners, the dispossessed Black peasant
farmers.
Many of these farmers took part in the national liberation
struggle during the 1960s and 1970s against the apartheid-like
Rhodesian regime led by the notorious racist Ian Smith. To this
day, Smith remains a big landowner in what is now Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe, along with many parts of Southern Africa, is in
the throes of a horrific drought that has brought about
widespread hunger. Half of Zimbabwe's 12 million or more
population is being directly threatened by the famine. But at
this critical moment for the people, the U.S. and its junior
imperialist partners, Britain and other members of the European
Union, have imposed economic sanctions on Zimbabwe as
punishment for carrying out the land reform. These sanctions
include imposing severe restrictions on where President Robert
Mugabe and other government officials can travel outside the
country.
Continuing the horrendous tradition of demonizing Africans
in a racist, dehumanizing manner, these imperialists and their
big business media are blaming the Mugabe government for the
hunger crisis by falsely portraying the white farmers as the
only saviors of the starving Zimbabwean masses and also as
innocent victims of a lawless Black-run government. The truth
is that these wealthy white farmers grow cash crops like
tobacco for the international market and not to feed the
population. The truth is that millions of acres of land were
stolen from the Zimbabwean people beginning in the
19th century when Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, was
brutally enslaved by the British colonialists, led by Cecil
Rhodes.
The imperialists had openly given millions of dollars to
opposition parties in Zimbabwe in the hopes they would defeat
the incumbent government during presidential elections this
past March, but Mugabe prevailed as president. The imperialists
were so furious with the outcome that they deemed the elections
"fraudulent." The South African government, as well as other
observers, countered this attack and defended the outcome of
the Zimbabwean elections.
Besides using hunger as a pretext for bellicose threats
against Zimbabwe, the U.S. government has accused Zimbabwe of
human rights violations in two recent incidents involving U.S.
citizens. On Nov. 18, the U.S. Embassy in Harare accused
Zimbabwean officials of interrogating a four-member group of
two U.S. citizens and two Zimbabweans who supposedly were
conducting a survey to assess the needs of Black workers who
once worked on commercial white farms that had been
expropriated. The U.S. Embassy stated that the interrogation
was "hostile" and that the two Zimbabweans were beaten. It has
demanded that the "party militants" be arrested.
Around the same time, a U.S. citizen from Connecticut was
shot and killed at a police roadblock in eastern Zimbabwe. The
circumstances of his death remain unclear, but one thing is for
certain: the U.S. government has a long, bloody history of
using incidents, planned or unplanned, big or small, as an
excuse to undermine legitimate governments and trample upon the
sovereignty of whole countries. The Bush administration wants
to add Zimbabwe to a long wish list of oppressed countries,
including Iraq, under the heel of the U.S. empire.
Reprinted from the Nov. 28, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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