• WASTELAND
• Killing the goose that lays the golden egg
• Why the Zanu PF/MDC talks failed
• Children, the innocent victims of the Zimbabwean crisis
• 'We have a right to be heard'
• ZANU PF accused of manipulating food aid
• Zim dollar crashes as forex crisis worsens
• Half of Zimbabwe needs food aid
• MDC readies mass action
• MDC rejects fresh dialogue initiative
• Church warns Herald
• Mugabe's visit to designated Banket farm raises eyebrows
• Journalists return to Zimbabwe court
• Govt threatens eviction on winter crop
• Govt borrows $1 billion a day
• God has spoken
• Obsession with trivia ruins our education
• The way forward, Mr President, is . .
• There's no need to resettle ministers
• Wife of murdered MDC activist fingers out alleged abductor

May 28, 2002 | home

WASTELAND

by PHILIP GOUREVITCH

Comrade Mugabe is clinging to power, and taking his country down with him.

Issue of 2002-06-03
Posted 2002-05-27

Fifteen years ago, Richard Pascall, a professional hunter and safari guide, bought a fifty-two-thousand-acre farm near the village of Turk Mine, in Matabeleland, the western region of Zimbabwe, and began raising a herd of African black rhinoceroses. He went about this in the usual way: fencing in a large patch of bush (eighty per cent of his land), releasing some rhinos onto it, and leaving them to their own devices. That's about all there is to rhino-culture: if water is scarce, as it is in Matabeleland, you pump some of it for the animals, and if poachers are to be feared, as they are wherever rhinos range, you establish patrols to keep them at bay. Beyond that, you stay out of the way and hope the rhinos will be fruitful and multiply, because they are among the most endangered animals on earth. Since 1970, when seventy thousand black rhinos roamed the continent, poachers and habitat destruction have depleted their numbers by ninety-six per cent, and today just twenty-seven hundred survive. By contrast, Pascall started out with eleven rhinos, and by the turn of the century he had thirty. His farm, Gourlays Ranch, where he lived with his wife, Carol, and two daughters, was considered one of the most successful rhino-salvage efforts in Africa—subsidized by foreign investors and contributors, valued at thirty million dollars, and protected under Zimbabwean law as a wildlife conservancy. But two years ago, when a man who called himself Hitler Hunzvi turned up at the gate, leading a gang of more than a hundred armed vigilantes, the Pascalls suddenly found themselves as endangered as their mammoth wards.

Hunzvi claimed the Pascalls' land in the name of the Zimbabwean people, and advised Pascall to surrender if he didn't want worse things to happen to him. Pascall stood his ground. There was a scuffle. Pascall wore a pistol in a shoulder holster, and, as Hunzvi's men grappled to disarm him, the gun discharged twice. Nobody was hit, but the shots heightened the tension. Hunzvi's men entered Pascall's house, where the walls are heavily hung with the trophy heads of big game. They made him open a safe in which he kept his hunting rifles, and helped themselves to a dozen. "I'm a born-again Christian," Pascall told me recently, "and I sincerely believe that day I had angels all round me, because they should have killed me."

Hunzvi's raid on Gourlays was filmed by a cameraman from Zimbabwe's state-controlled television, and in pictures the crux of the confrontation was plain to see: the Pascalls are white, and their attackers were black. Hunzvi was the head of the national association of liberation war veterans, who in the nineteen-seventies had fought for black-majority rule against the white-supremacist regime of Rhodesia, as the country—a British colony—was then known. Independence had come in 1980, but twenty years later, although whites counted for less than one per cent of the country's twelve million citizens, they still controlled most of its wealth, and just forty-five hundred white farmers held title to seventy per cent of the prime agricultural land. In seeking to "liberate" the Pascalls' property by force, Hunzvi purported to be fulfilling the revolution he had fought for—and, as the presence of the state television made clear, he was doing so with the blessing of President Robert Mugabe.

Hunzvi, however, was not a veteran of any combat. He had spent much of the war in Poland, where he trained as a doctor and married a local woman who later left him and wrote a memoir, "White Slave," in which she remembered her husband as a wife-beating, "unfaithful, vain sadist." Back in Zimbabwe, Hunzvi managed in the early nineties to insinuate himself into the state bureaucracy, and, as an assessor for the War Victims Compensation Fund, doled out subsidies to injured veterans. Within a few years, he had bankrupted the fund by awarding huge sums for scurrilous complaints to a veritable Who's Who of President Mugabe's ruling clique. (Mugabe's brother-in-law, for example, received seventy thousand dollars for ulcers and a scar on his left knee.) At the same time, Hunzvi began mobilizing mobs to stage street demonstrations in Harare, the nation's capital, demanding pensions and a host of other benefits for veterans. Many of Hunzvi's followers were plainly too young to have fought in the seventies, but the spectacle of rebellious liberation fighters embarrassed Mugabe, who had come to power at independence as a liberation hero. When the scandal of the war victims' fund was made public, and Mugabe realized how deeply the rot reached into his court, he cut a deal with Hunzvi which has defined Zimbabwean history ever since: every war veteran would get a hefty onetime disbursement, followed by a lifetime monthly check, as well as free medical care and free access to education—and, above all, land.

The demand for land had been Hunzvi's final coup: he threatened to lead his men into the bush to wage war and seize white-owned farms if Mugabe did not capitulate. After all, Mugabe had promised during the independence struggle to grant every black Zimbabwean some acreage as a reward for victory. Over time, however, he had proved less interested in resolving the land issue than in exploiting it as a bully pulpit from which to deflect attention from the predatory corruption of his ruling party, ZANU-P.F. (Zimbabwe African National Union—Patriotic Front). His schemes for redistributing farms had been consistently reckless, illegal, and destructive, each bringing greater suffering than the last to the rural poor it purported to serve. Much of the best land seized by the government wound up in the hands of Mugabe's cronies; farm laborers were left unemployed and homeless; productive farms were laid to waste; and impoverished Zimbabweans who were given plots were not given legal title but were simply allowed to subsist as squatters. Under the circumstances, Mugabe regarded Hunzvi not as a menace but as an ally, and announced plans to nationalize roughly half of the remaining white farmland in the country, without compensation.

The combined effects of the government's payout to the war veterans and the devastating blow to commercial agriculture—which accounted for half the country's foreign-exchange income and more than a quarter of its jobs—plunged Zimbabwe's already beleaguered economy into chaos. The currency lost nearly half its value overnight; international investors and aid donors bolted; and many whites who had been sufficiently content with their privilege that they had stayed out of politics since independence began making common cause with reform-minded black activists. In February of 2000, when Mugabe unleashed Hunzvi's "war veterans" to occupy white-owned farms by force, the action was clearly understood as punishment for white support of the nascent opposition party, the M.D.C. (Movement for Democratic Change), which had just led a successful campaign to defeat a new constitution that would have expanded Mugabe's already extraordinary powers. It was the first time Mugabe had been rejected by voters, and, with parliamentary elections looming in June of 2000, the assault on whites was accompanied by a less publicized but often more brutal campaign of violence against black oppositionists and sympathizers.

Zimbabweans who thought that Mugabe had paid off Hunzvi to keep him quiet found themselves wondering who had ultimately coöpted whom. Richard Pascall had no doubt about it. He was an active M.D.C. supporter, and his farm was among the first in Matabeleland to be invaded. After surrendering his rifles, he had watched Hunzvi's men go on a rampage around his property, looting blankets and radios from the homes of his ranch staff. The staff had fled in terror, but a young black neighbor who wandered into the housing area during the attack was beaten up and carried off by the veterans. Hunzvi himself didn't stay long at Gourlays; he had other farms to invade, and he was busy, too, running a medical clinic outside Harare which was used as a torture center, where naked M.D.C. supporters were beaten on the bottoms of their feet and subjected to electric shocks. Hunzvi died last year, apparently of AIDS and malaria, but his "war veterans" have continued his campaign. More than a hundred of his followers remain encamped on the Pascalls' ranch, claiming patches of land for themselves and selling off plots to local villagers.

"We've had to adapt to a form of coexistence," Pascall told me, when I visited the place one afternoon in February. His safari business had collapsed, but he refused to leave his rhinos. "I speak the language fluently. I grew up here with these people as playmates. So it's a give-and-take, but mostly we give and they take."

Robert Mugabe is seventy-eight years old, and has repeatedly vowed to stay in power for the rest of his life. In this spirit of relentlessness, he has made it a crime, punishable by six months in jail, for two or more people in Zimbabwe to meet and discuss politics without obtaining a permit from the police at least four days in advance. The permit is just a nicety; the Public Order and Security Act (POSA), which elaborates the offense, allows the police to bar whomever they like from attending even an authorized political discussion, or to break it up at any time without explanation. To be sure, the law doesn't prohibit a person from conducting a solitary monologue about politics, but anyone doing so must be careful what he says, since POSA also makes it a crime, punishable by a big fine and a year in jail, to make a false statement "engendering hostility towards" or "causing hatred, contempt or ridicule of" the President, or, indeed, to make any statement "about or concerning" him that is "abusive, indecent, obscene or false." The sharpest sting of this last stipulation is in its tail—in the choice of the word "or" to qualify the word "false"—which tells you that even an irrefutably true criticism of the President is grounds for arrest and punishment.

Comrade Mugabe, as he likes to be called, was running for reëlection when he signed POSA into law, in January, and his message to voters could not have been clearer: Put up and shut up, or else. Zimbabweans were alarmed but not surprised. Officially, Zimbabwe remains a parliamentary democracy, but in reality Mugabe presides over the country as a tyrant in the classical sense of the word: an autocrat who rules exclusively for his own gratification, with contempt for the common good. Although he has continued to stage elections in order to maintain a veneer of international legitimacy, his preferred vote-winning strategies have always been intimidation and terror. Despite the brutal campaign in the parliamentary elections of 2000, however, the M.D.C. had succeeded in sweeping fifty-seven of a hundred and twenty contested seats, and now Mugabe was desperate. The Presidential election was to be held in mid-March, and for the first time in his political career he was running as the underdog candidate, trailing the M.D.C. leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, a former trade-union boss, by substantial margins. Zimbabweans finally appeared to have had enough of a regime that had transformed what was once one of Africa's most prosperous countries into a domain of bloody disorder with one of the fastest-shrinking economies on earth.

The annual inflation is close to a hundred and fifteen per cent. The national treasury is bankrupt. The Army is engaged in a futile intervention in Congo's civil war, at a cost of dozens of lives and an estimated million dollars a day. The health-care system is essentially defunct, and, with a quarter of the population infected with AIDS, the funeral business is among the country's last remaining growth industries. When Mugabe said of Zimbabwe last year, "This is my territory and that which is mine I cling [to] unto death," his subjects might well have wondered whether he was speaking of their death: the life expectancy of Zimbabweans has fallen by some fifteen years during his tenure, and now hovers around forty. Sixty per cent of Zimbabweans are unemployed, and those who have jobs earn, on average, less than they did at independence. The rest of the population scrapes by on less than a dollar a day, which might still buy a bellyful if the crippling effect of the farm invasions—compounded this year by regional drought—hadn't created drastic food shortages, raising the prospect of imminent nationwide famine.

Unable to run on his record, Mugabe sought instead to run from it, by rallying his crumbling black base around the spectre of a common enemy: the whites. He didn't care that ninety-seven per cent of M.D.C. voters and candidates were black. Behind "these human superficies," he told the ZANU-P.F. central committee in July of 2000, Tsvangirai's party represented "the resurgence of white power" and "the revulsive ideology of return to white settler rule." In his view, the new opposition was just the old Rhodesian enemy got up in blackface, an imperialist fifth column, sponsored by London—with help from Washington—"a counter-revolutionary Trojan horse contrived and nurtured by the very inimical forces that enslaved and oppressed our people yesterday." And at his first rally of this year's campaign he declared, "We are in a war to defend our rights and the interests of our people. The British have decided to take us on through the M.D.C. . . . We went to war; we went to prison; we have suffered over the years; but we are not afraid of the struggle. We will not run away. You can count on us to fight."

Tsvangirai, for his part, preached a strict gospel of nonviolence, rule of law, economic reform, pluralism, withdrawal from Congo, friendly relations with Western aid donors, and legal and equitable land redistribution, and he never let Mugabe forget that his status as the incumbent was a staggering campaign handicap. Tsvangirai's rallies—when he was not barred from holding them, as he often was—were defiantly festive affairs, with much song and dance. A burly man, with a fearless, jovial air, he came across as a populist, and drew his greatest support from urbanites and the young. (Two out of three Zimbabweans are under the age of twenty-five, and have no memory of colonialism.)

But the M.D.C.'s mild-mannered message of reform often sounded naïve in the face of ZANU's violence. In the runup to the elections, more than a hundred M.D.C. members and supporters were murdered, and thousands more were beaten, tortured, or raped by ZANU-P.F. thugs, often operating in complicity with the police and with Zimbabwe's Central Intelligence Organization. M.D.C. officials and candidates were arbitrarily arrested, and harassed with absurd criminal charges. (Tsvangirai himself was a target of assassination attempts, and in the final weeks of the campaign was accused of plotting to kill Mugabe, and booked for treason.) Oppositionists' homes and offices were ransacked and, not infrequently, fire bombed. Reporters and editors in Zimbabwe's independent press corps were subjected to the same treatment, while many foreign reporters and their news organizations were either expelled from the country or refused accreditation to work there. As the election campaign intensified, ZANU-P.F. youth militias fanned out across the country, setting up roadblocks, where voters who could not present a party card were beaten and informed that their votes would not be secret: to support the M.D.C. was to risk death, the militia said, and the lesson was underscored by the slogan "Vote ZANU-P.F. and live."

Toward the end of February, with three weeks to go before the voting, I flew into Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second-largest city and the capital of Matabeleland, and was given a two-week tourist visa. As a stronghold of M.D.C. support, Bulawayo was a community suspended between hope and dread. I was curious about the whites, a vestigial population. They thought of themselves as Zimbabweans first and Africans more generally, but although there were distinct differences between their culture and the European culture from which they had derived, the differences between their world and that of their black neighbors and compatriots were even greater. Many were giving up on Zimbabwe, and emigrating; sendoff parties—dour affairs—had become far more frequent among them than births, weddings, and funerals.

Tens of thousands of blacks with the means to get out have also fled in recent years, adding a severe brain drain to Zimbabwe's woes. But many black Zimbabweans in exile hope to return if conditions improve. For whites, departure is almost always permanent—a surrender, or a cutting of losses, and one need not indulge in colonial nostalgia, or overlook the injustice of white affluence, to recognize that the loss is Zimbabwe's as well. For all his fine talk of economic "indigenization" and black empowerment, Mugabe has betrayed the promises of liberation and self-determination, and, faced with the evidence of his failure, he has come to behave toward his country like a vicious child with a toy he has broken, smashing away at it as if to prove that if he cannot make it work he can make sure that it never forgets to whom it belongs.

"You know what's at stake?" the Bulawayo businessman said to me. "Survival." He was in his early forties, a chain-smoker, with a scrappy manner, a small man with a big voice, and he had a habit of setting up his statements with questions. "You want to know how people feel here right now? There's only one word. 'Threatened.' Threatened. Blacks and whites are shit-scared."

"There's another word, too," said his wife, who was the same age and same height as he. " 'Hopeful.' "

"Goddam right," he said. "Shit-scared and hopeful. Blacks and whites."

The businessman and his wife are white. Both were working hard for an M.D.C. victory. We sat in their kitchen, where the traffic was heavy, with dinner cooking, children coming and going, and visitors appearing at the door: a white farmer friend, with news of the latest war-veteran activity near his farm; a black M.D.C. candidate arranging for the businessman to drive him through his rural constituency on a campaign swing; and a white man with a fistful of e-mail-encryption software for the family computer. "Meet the I.T. man for the coverts," the businessman said. "You see, everybody's doing his bit." Every half hour, he jumped up and went into his den to check the TV news headlines.

Mugabe had just expelled the head of a European Union election-observer team, calling him an illegal alien and accusing him of political "cheek." Just as Africans aren't invited to referee the legitimacy of European elections, the President said, the conduct of Zimbabwe's vote would be judged by observer teams from southern Africa and elsewhere on the continent, notably Nigeria. The European Union had responded by imposing "smart sanctions" against the regime, targeting Mugabe and his inner circle by freezing their assets in the E.U., barring them from travelling there, and sending their children home from some European schools. Too little, too late, argued M.D.C. leaders, who had been calling for such measures for years. The businessman agreed. He considered it racist to suggest that African elections should be judged by "African standards," and it angered him especially that the government of South Africa, the regional superpower, was conspicuously reluctant to criticize Mugabe, even as Zimbabwe's decline was causing its own economy to suffer.

There was never any chance that the election would be either free or fair, yet, between Tsvangirai's popularity and Mugabe's strong-arm tactics, nobody could say what the outcome might be. Early in February, Mugabe's information minister, Jonathan Moyo, had declared, "We should not demean the African struggles for liberation by using the fiction of democracy." The businessman also considered the election to be about something much larger than Zimbabwe—"a make-or-break situation for all Africa"—and he said, "If democracy prevails here, the First World better take note and come to the party, because it's southern Africa that's being saved." Then he said, "You know, the militias are camped two miles from here in a school—fifty or more of them, ZANU-P.F. youth. What's that about? Kids putting up campaign posters? No. Intimidation. It's just total harassment and intimidation."

I'd heard about the militia presence the day before, from Fletcher Dulini, the M.D.C.'s national treasurer, who told me about attacks he'd encountered on a recent campaign swing: a brick through a windshield, a log swung at the door of his car as it passed, the police refusing to intervene when the candidates complained. "This is their strategy," Dulini said of ZANU-P.F. agents. "That sort of psychology that is a kind of mental torture—they do it just to waste our time and keep us from campaigning about the issues." Twice during our conversation, his cell phone rang with reports of attacks on M.D.C. offices in Harare. Dulini spoke of these things with a chipper, goes-with-the-territory air, but the third time his cell phone rang he hung up in an anxious mood, and left immediately. His wife had just seen a militia mob milling near their home.

Half an hour later, as I drove through Dulini's neighborhood, I came around a bend and there they were: twenty or thirty young men on either side of the road, jostling along in a pack at a hurried, agitated pace, silhouetted in the dusk. I drove through the gantlet they formed, and they paid no attention, but a mile farther on I realized that my chest and jaw were still tight. Later still, I met a twenty-three-year-old gardener and M.D.C. sympathizer, who had been abducted by ZANU-P.F. thugs a week earlier from a local shopping center. He and another man were beaten for several hours, then loaded into a truck, blindfolded, and driven into the bush, where they were made to lie on the ground and roll from side to side while ten men took turns whipping them. Finally, they were stripped naked, and left by the roadside. The gardener's back was crosshatched from his shoulders to his waist with stringy scabs that were starting to knit into scars.

"Mugabe's a piece of work, and he deserves to be in prison with Milosevic," the businessman said. Zimbabweans often spoke of Mugabe and Slobodan Milosevic in the same breath, especially to say what the businessman's wife told me: "Two years ago, it was watching Milosevic go down that moved us to think, Oh, maybe that could happen here—nonviolent change."

"Actually, two years ago it was the 'no' vote on the constitution that changed it for me," the businessman said. "People here stood up and said no. Seeing that they could do that—that was powerful."

The businessman and his wife seemed to draw strength from talking of courage and possibility. But toward the end of the evening we moved into the den to watch a special television report being broadcast from South Africa about preëlection violence committed in Zimbabwe in recent weeks by ZANU-P.F. militants. The images were grim: lacerated bodies, punctured bodies, brown bodies bruised charcoal black. There was a woman who had been whipped for trying to protect her husband from a whipping. The woman was carrying her daughter in her arms, and the baby's cheek had been torn open by a barbed-wire lash.

"We have to talk about what to do," the businessman said. "I want the kids out of the country." His wife agreed that if Mugabe remained in power Zimbabwe was no place to raise children, but the prospect of leaving upset her as much as the thought of staying. "What would you do?" she asked.

On the eve of the election, I received an e-mail from the businessman's wife, reminding me of another time when whites and blacks were both scared and hopeful: April 18, 1980, Zimbabwe's independence day. After seven years of war, the white-supremacist Prime Minister of Rhodesia, Ian Smith, had done what he had sworn he would never do "in a thousand years," and yielded to black-majority rule. In Harare, the British flag flying above the state house was taken down—the last time it flew over an African colony—and nobody knew what to expect. Any number of whites, filled with Smith's propaganda images of black Marxist guerrillas bent on avenging historical wrongs, pictured themselves slaughtered in their beds. But Mugabe went on television and read a speech that is still remembered throughout Africa and abroad as one of the great declarations of the age. In the name of reconciliation, he issued what amounted to a blanket amnesty to everyone on all sides of the recent conflict, and declared that he would "draw a line through the past." The businessman's wife's e-mail consisted of a short excerpt from that speech:

If yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend and an ally with the same national interest, loyalty, rights and duties as myself. . . . The wrongs of the past must now stand forgiven and forgotten. If ever we look to the past, let us do so for the lesson the past has taught us, namely that oppression and racism are inequalities that must never find scope in our political and social system. It could never be a correct justification that because the whites oppressed us yesterday when they had power, the blacks must oppress them today because they have power. An evil remains an evil whether practiced by white against black or black against white.

Mugabe, who was reared in Jesuit mission schools and has half a dozen college and university degrees to his name—three of them earned by correspondence during ten years spent in Rhodesian jails—has always been described as a hard man to know, bitter and secretive by nature. That he is devoid of charm is indisputable. Even on his election posters, he appeared lonely and joyless: an old man, with a thin scolding mouth and frightened eyes fixed behind big spectacles in a blank, distant stare, angrily shaking a raised fist. But, for all his high-blown anti-colonial and Marxist rhetoric, he is famously opportunistic on most matters of political principle, at once hard-nosed and capricious, a man of his word, whose word is forever changing. In his intolerance for dissent, however, he is absolute and unyielding, and, once the Rhodesian state had been dismantled, he recognized that whites were no longer a threat to him. On the contrary, he needed them to maintain the economy while he established his power. Although a hundred thousand whites—half of the white population—had left Zimbabwe by 1985, those who stayed prospered. Anthony Lewis, writing in this magazine a year after independence, described an "Alice-in-Wonderland quality" in the attitude of white Zimbabweans toward Mugabe: "He was the chief villain. Now he is the person on whom white hopes rest, the man of moderation and authority." Mugabe's conciliatory racial stance also served as a convenient smoke screen in 1982, when he sent a special division of his army into Matabeleland, the home territory of the man who was then his chief political rival, Joshua Nkomo, in a bid to silence dissent there forever.

The unit—trained and equipped by North Korea, in a gesture of revolutionary solidarity—was known as the Fifth Brigade, but it is better remembered by the name Mugabe gave it: Gukurahundi, which means "the rain that washes the chaff away in advance of the spring rains." "Some of the measures we shall take are measures which will be extra-legal," Mugabe told parliament as he prepared for the operation, adding, "An eye for an eye and an ear for an ear may not be adequate in our circumstances. We might very well demand two ears for one ear and two eyes for one eye." This proved to be a gross understatement. During the Gukurahundi terror, at least twenty thousand civilians were slaughtered, while many more were driven from their homes, flogged, starved to the brink of death, raped, or, at least, forced to witness such atrocities, and even to pretend to celebrate them in song and dance. ("First you will eat your chickens, then your goats, then your cattle, then your donkeys. Then you will eat your children, and finally you will eat the dissidents," a Gukurahundi officer told villagers who had been deliberately cut off from food supplies.) The dead were generally disposed of in unmarked mass graves, and survivors were assured that if they ever spoke of their ordeal they could expect a similar fate.

The terror was brought to a halt only in 1987, when Nkomo, who had fled into exile, signed a "unity" pact, and what remained of his party was subsumed into Mugabe's, transforming Zimbabwe into a de-facto one-party state. For the next decade—until Hitler Hunzvi loosed his mobs on the streets of Harare—few Zimbabweans dared to oppose the regime, and those who did were easily coöpted, or, if that tactic failed, crushed. Indeed, looking back, many Zimbabweans will tell you that if Mugabe had stepped down, as many in his party had urged him to do, at the time of the last Presidential elections, in 1996, he would probably be remembered forgivingly, as he likes to imagine himself, as a hero of liberation, and an eminent African statesman—if not a Nelson Mandela, whose all-eclipsing nobility Mugabe bitterly resents. He would certainly not rank among the infamous dictators for whom he has expressed admiration over the years: Nicolae Ceausescu, of Romania; Kim Il Sung, of North Korea; Enver Hoxha, of Albania; and Mengistu Haile Mariam, of Ethiopia, who is wanted for crimes against humanity at home and now lives under political asylum in Harare. But ever since Mugabe's pact with Hunzvi and the "war veterans," he has steered a course of pure destruction.

The staple food of Zimbabwe is maize. People eat it as a milled cereal boiled into porridge, and they regard it in the way that Asians regard rice—as essential. But since the farm invasions began, in 2000, commercial farmers have seen their harvests drop by at least forty per cent a year, and by mid-February there was no maize to be found in most stores. (It didn't help matters that war veterans had seized control of grain distribution, and that maize was being trucked to ZANU-P.F. rallies as bait to lure the crowds.) Zimbabwe has long been known as the region's breadbasket, and neighboring countries were also feeling the pinch. "Total food deficit," a white farmer I'll call JoJo said. "It's going to kill southern Africa."

Already, farmers were slaughtering their livestock because the government had proclaimed maize a strategic resource and confiscated animal-feed reserves. "Chicken and egg production is plummeting," JoJo said, adding, "Think of it from a livestock point of view, and it's symbolic of the rest of the country. There are ninety thousand pigs in this country. Slaughter them now, and it'll take four to five years to get pork back up to speed. Same with everything." He went on, "We used to have a strategic reserve of maize of eight hundred thousand tons, and that was untouchable. Last year, the government sold it to get foreign currency to buy fuel. Why did they run out of fuel? The story is they stole it all. Corruption."

JoJo's farm is about fifty miles northwest of Bulawayo, a spread of forty-two thousand acres in the low rolling veldt that flattens out toward the frontier with Botswana and the Kalahari sands. His family has been on the place since 1896, and JoJo figures that three-quarters of it is now occupied, by some fifteen hundred people. Shortly after his land was invaded, in mid-April of 2000, one of his neighbors, a white farmer named Martin Olds, was murdered by war veterans. "We were warned that armed people had moved into the area, and I'd been tipped off that he and I were possible targets," JoJo said. "We all moved into one house here, but he was on his own. We were alerted at 6:20 A.M. that he'd been surrounded. When we tried to get to help him, they had roadblocks in the way and we were shot at. Eventually, the police came and let us in, saying he was still firing indiscriminately. But in fact he was dead." JoJo didn't want to dwell on the incident. "They'd murdered a couple of white guys in the east, in Mashonaland, so they had to murder a couple here to send the message."

JoJo had been heavily involved in the parliamentary election campaign in 2000 as an M.D.C. activist, but this year he said, "We're lying low. If we didn't, we'd be slaughtered." He said he'd lost count of how many times his family had been threatened, but as part of his survival strategy he has learned over the past two years not to blame the squatters personally for their presence on his land. After all, he said, "Not one resettled African has title. It's a monumental cock-up. They're just being dumped on the land. They're victims, in their own way, as much as we are." Still, he took some pride in comparing the squatters' drought-stricken maize patches—sunburned leaves rattling on dry, stubby stalks—with his own well-irrigated acreage, with its tall, fat-eared yield. "They don't know what they're doing," he said, adding, "What I hate is how impotent I feel—impotent because we've been closed down to help people that are starving, impotent to help development, impotent to get out and help the opposition."

JoJo lives in a house that his grandparents built in the nineteen-twenties, a place redolent of the colonial idyll, with floors carpeted in leopard skins and a maid who brought tea in a Spode china pot ("rosebud chintz") with a Wedgwood cup, saucer, and sugar bowl. At night, JoJo produced some port, and said, "I think every Zimbabwean white farmer appreciates by now the need for major land reform, but none of us can identify with the way it's being done." He told me that he'd have no problem giving up as much as half of his land, as long as he could give his expertise along with it, so that resettled blacks had some hope of agricultural success.

In the morning, he drove me for several hours around his property: chicken houses; maize fields; a large area of low sandy soil laced with drip-irrigation hoses, where paprika, a highly lucrative export crop, is grown; a refrigerated room where fresh peas awaited shipment to London green markets; a machine shop; the farmworkers' housing; and a school and medical clinic. It was a small village. I was amazed at how much of it remained operational after two years of occupation, but JoJo said he'd been reduced to little more than subsistence farming.

"It cannot be in the national interest to destroy this," he said. "We've had sixty to eighty of these war-vet guys beating at the gate with axes, and I'll sit down and offer them tea and talk to them, because what are your alternatives? If you lose your cool, that's what they want. I think the government is terribly frustrated that we're still here. They thought we'd all just pack up and leave." He'd been tempted. "I was offered six million U.S. dollars for this property four years ago, before all this started, and we debated it. But we're Africans. This is our life."

One afternoon, in Bulawayo, I stopped by the office of David Coltart, a constitutional and human-rights lawyer, who is also an M.D.C. parliamentarian and the party's shadow minister of justice. Coltart is the only white in the shadow cabinet, and he takes evident pride in the fact that the constituency that sent him to parliament is ninety-five per cent black. He had just come off a campaign swing, and was wearing a bulletproof vest, but he seemed less concerned by his personal danger than by the number of people he had encountered at his rallies who expressed a desire for revenge against ZANU-P.F. in the event of an M.D.C. victory. "What we face at many political meetings is people saying, 'Will you please just look the other way for forty-eight hours?' " he said, adding, "We simply can't start off in the same way that Mugabe left off."

So far, M.D.C. supporters had, with relatively few exceptions, abided by the party's strict policy of nonviolence, and Coltart believed that revenge attacks could be prevented "if a firm clear message of change is articulated." Washington Sansole, a local black lawyer and an M.D.C. supporter, wasn't so sure. "The ordinary people who have been subjected to these beatings and intimidations—they are going to be thirsting for blood," he had told me. Paul Themba Nyathi, the M.D.C.'s shadow minister for local government, took a middle view. The appetite for revenge was great, but he said, "I think it can be prevented, because it comes from a sense of helplessness that makes people seek satisfaction by inflicting pain back on their tormentors. If we can give them some hope as an alternative to Robert Mugabe, who always built the country on hate, I think it's possible to keep from mayhem. But it's going to be very difficult."

Coltart was busy designing a legal framework for an M.D.C. government to address the abuses of the old regime. Mugabe had always been a champion of amnesties and pardons; he had issued them in the name of "unity" after each phase of bloodshed in his political progress: at independence, following the Gukurahundi massacres in Matabeleland in the eighties, and after every national election in the past decade. Coltart was eager to bring this "culture of impunity" to an end, but he said, "Regarding Robert Mugabe himself, we've been placed under enormous pressure by the international community to insure that he is allowed to retire peacefully here." The international pressure came from other African countries. Tsvangirai had made it clear to Mugabe that he would be allowed to exit without humiliation, but Coltart remained troubled by the prospect of "a policy that results in relatively low-level people being prosecuted when the top architects go scot-free."

To address that tension, at least partially, Tsvangirai had promised to establish a truth commission. The idea, Coltart told me, was not only to hold hearings on the Mugabe era but to examine the country's vexed history all the way back to November 11, 1965, when Ian Smith issued a unilateral declaration of independence from the British Empire and declared a state of emergency, in a bid to preserve white rule forever. On that day, Coltart said, "The white government became illegal, and many of the crimes committed since then are better understood in that context." He felt that the time had come "to bring whites to speak and make whites reckon with their part in abuses."

Ian Smith, who is now eighty-three and still lives in Zimbabwe, is unrepentant for the brutality of his apartheid-style police state. At Oxford two years ago, he stated his position plainly: "The more we killed, the happier we were. We were fighting terrorists." Smith's undimmed extremism can seem like a template for Mugabe's own racist outbursts, but his defiant posture is almost universally reviled by the fifty thousand or so whites who have chosen to stay on in Zimbabwe. Indeed, everyone I spoke to—black and white—agreed that, despite Mugabe's best efforts, there is very little overt racial conflict in Zimbabwean life.

"The truth of the matter is that blacks know that whatever hardships have come about in the past twenty years have not come about because of whites," Washington Sansole said. "That race thing is a red herring." Coltart went further. He suggested that Mugabe's attacks on whites had actually served to make many whites feel more Zimbabwean than ever—albeit defensively. "That's been, I think, the miracle of what's happened in Zimbabwe," he said. "For twenty years, the vast majority of whites were completely disengaged from political life in the country and disengaged from the vast majority of black people. They lived in little white islands, and, quite frankly, I think racist beliefs were deeply rooted and remained unchallenged. The irony is it's taken this drama for people to realize that there are just some absolutely outstanding black people."

Certainly, it is a faith akin to Coltart's that had kept farmers like JoJo, and Richard Pascall, the rhinoceros rancher, on their occupied land, and dreaming of developing it further once Mugabe was gone. Down the road from Pascall's place, however, I met a couple whose farm had been so thoroughly pillaged by squatters that they had no hope of restoring it. They'd had no income for a year, and had just enough savings to keep themselves in Scotch whiskey until the election. The only reason they stayed on, they told me, was that they had nowhere to go. In anticipation of escalated violence in the event of a Mugabe victory, many farmers were sending their wives and children to safe houses in town, but this couple refused to consider such a separation. "I will never leave my husband. If he goes, I go," the woman told me, and the man said, "My wife doesn't shoot so good, but she's a helluva good loader."

If it came to such a battle, the couple had no doubt that they'd lose. But the fantasy of taking a stand was all they had left. "One thing Mugabe has done is teach people to hate," the woman said. "Forty years in this country, and even with that bloody war I didn't hate them. Now I hate them. I had two boys hanging off the back gate last week, begging for food. They were so bloody hungry—and I turned my back on them. I did, and it's a bloody shame, and it's Mugabe's prime achievement."

Mugabe is not one for admitting to error, but a week before the election he held a rally in Bulawayo, where he confessed to having made the great blunder of his political life, when, on assuming power in 1980, he gave his famous speech, seeking reconciliation with whites. "We made a mistake when we showed mercy," he said, adding that he had acted "as a fool" but was "wiser now." And, at his inauguration, two weeks later, he made sure not to repeat the mistake of magnanimity in victory, although he did offer Zimbabweans an opportunity to submit to his domination once again in the name of unity.

The election itself was a mockery, even by Africa's degraded standards. As many as a million potential voters had been systematically excluded by the government from voting, while voter rolls were inflated in ZANU-P.F.strongholds, and the violence and intimidation continued right through the balloting process: hundreds of opposition poll watchers were arrested, and hundreds more were beaten or otherwise physically prevented from going about their task. In the end, on March 13th, Mugabe claimed victory by a margin so preposterous that it was apparent his ballot-box stuffers had been overzealous, and only the most jaded and cynical of foreign observers—notably South Africa's mission, whose members seemed to have forgotten that they themselves had been assaulted during the campaign by ZANU-P.F. thugs—found qualified terms for approving the vote as free and fair enough.

"Well done, Zimbabweans. . . . We have dealt a stunning blow to imperialism!" Mugabe declared, as he promised to accelerate his land-redistribution program, and made special thanks to the African leaders who had stood by him in solidarity. The next morning, Zimbabwe awoke to the news that another white farmer had been shot dead by war veterans—this time on a farm that Mugabe's sister had been making moves to acquire—and the following afternoon the country was suspended from the British Commonwealth. In the weeks since the vote, Zimbabwe has fallen out of the international headlines, but it has not fallen quiet. If anything, the level of state-sponsored violence has escalated. M.D.C. activists and independent journalists are arrested almost daily, more than two hundred white farmers and twenty thousand black farmers have been expelled from commercial farmlands, food supplies have been kept from tens of thousands of people in areas that voted for the opposition, while thousands more have been displaced from their homes by the violent rampages of vengeful war veterans, police, and soldiers.

Not long ago, I received another e-mail from the wife of the businessman in Bulawayo. In earlier post-election messages, she had sounded depleted but upbeat, convinced that the outrageousness of Mugabe's victory, combined with the fact that change had to come someday, meant that change would still come sooner than later. Now she didn't sound so sure. Without preamble, she wrote:

I WANT TO LIVE IN AFRICA, FUCK IT!!! The uncertainty of tomorrow and the broken dreams of what could be are soul destroying. In the meantime I've been on a rampage chucking out all unnecessary clutter, accumulated over seventeen years of life. Is this my subconscious speaking? How does one discard Ovid's "Metamorphoses"—1984, University, Professor Budick?!? I remember one of the farmers' wives saying she had twenty minutes to pack. She stood before her cupboard and finally left all but the photographs. That's all we need really.

She's still there, but a week later I received four e-mails at once from exactly the sort of farmer's wife she described—Carol Pascall, of Gourlays Ranch. The first e-mail said:

The squatters disarmed us yesterday. They now have in their possession four shot guns, two .308 rifles, one .22, and one handgun. The police were notified and their reply was that they had no vehicle. We contacted them this morning once more and once more there is no vehicle available. Last night one of our sheep was slaughtered and a few more are running around with stab wounds. My daughter Juliet leaves for university in South Africa today. All that keeps me going is knowing that there are many people out there who are going through absolute horror, something I cannot even begin to imagine and I will not let evil rule the day. We need to make a stand.

The next e-mail said:

As I sit and write this now, we are sitting a hundred and twenty kilometres from town, the police are not responding, and we have at least two hundred and fifty squatters, youths and war vets on the farm who are threatening to kill us. They have successfully chased away all our labor. They are at this very moment putting grass and branches around the compound houses in order to burn them down. The roads are barricaded. Please pray for us. I am sorry this is disjointed, but at this moment all I can think about is that we are most probably going to be killed tonight. Not a nice thought.

The third e-mail said:

We had the remainder of the workers sleep in our house and cottage last night. We armed as many as possible and we all took it in turns to be on guard. The workers' houses were not burned down last night. This morning at first light we once more phoned the police for a reaction. They said at 5:30 this morning that they were coming, we are still waiting. In the meantime the remainder of the workers have left without their belongings as the squatters have forbidden them to take anything with them. We have been told that we must leave without anything. We are stalling for time, hoping and praying that the police will react. In the event that they do not, not only will we lose everything but the workers stand to lose all their worldly belongings as well. I wish I could describe the looks on their faces. . . . The roads are still barricaded and manned by the squatters. They have moved more people onto the farm. . . . Richard seems to be spending all his time puking his heart out. What do we do? . . . I believe that we must remain strong and remain here. . . . What started all of the nonsense is that we are a black-rhino conservancy. . . . A big bull died last week due to fighting, as the animals are now compressed into a small area and the bulls' areas are overlapping. We did what we were supposed to do according to the law and contacted a government vet and National Parks. The vet came out to ascertain the cause of death, and National Parks collected the horn. That was on Sunday. On Monday all hell broke loose as the squatters now decided that they own the rhino and they want the trophy fee for these animals and we should have consulted with them prior to calling the vet and National Parks.

The fourth e-mail said:

The police arrived here and attempted to keep the peace. They said that they could not sort out this matter, as it is political. We need to talk to the local squatters, as this is where all land problems etc. are now sorted out. This came as a shock as this means that we no longer have a government or law and order. Some of the youths exposed themselves to my daughter and once more we are told it is political. The squatters and war vets are now running the country. We have managed to buy ourselves time and will be off the farm in seven days' time. All our workers have left. . . . I must admit that last night the demonic forces were tangible. Our lock and chain on our security gate has been stolen. . . . The squatters have told us that we are to hand all our weapons in to the local police. I do not feel safe about that. Today one of our horses came in with two cable snares around her neck. Another horse came in with evidence of having had a snare on her neck. This has all happened since Monday, as this is when our game guards were disarmed and called in. I shudder to think what will happen to the black rhino and game left on the farm.

Beneath this last message, Carol Pascall had pasted an article by Chris McGreal, the Guardian's southern Africa correspondent. Under the headline "ZIMBABWE STRUCK BY NEW REIGN OF TERROR," he described the ordeal of a black woman near a town called Nembudziya, who had been taken from her home by a soldier. The soldier threatened to shoot her, but forced her instead to perform oral sex on him, while her two-year-old watched, then smacked her in the face with his pistol, and so on. McGreal provided a litany of such abuses, performed by soldiers on house-to-house rampages across Zimbabwe: "Six people have been murdered in political violence in Zimbabwe since the election, but a reluctance to kill outright—perhaps because torture and rape attract far less attention—is the only restraint shown by the troops and militia." Men, too, were forced to have sex with each other; others were branded with hot irons or hung upside down from trees. All of this had been going on before the election as well, and with the desired result: Mugabe had outpolled Tsvangirai in this district by two votes to one.

It struck me as remarkable that Carol Pascall, holed up in her farmhouse at her computer, with a mob raging at her gate, should have bothered to attach this story to her own. By comparison with what her black compatriots were suffering, her own plight seemed almost comprehensible, and that seemed to be exactly her point.

Thursday, 30 May, 2002, 05:41 GMT 06:41 UK

Journalists return to Zimbabwe court

The case will indicate the extent of Mugabe's control on the press

By the BBC's Alastair Leithead

Two journalists charged under Zimbabwe's press and media law will appear in court again on Thursday accused of abusing journalistic privilege.

Britain's Guardian correspondent Andrew Meldrum and Lloyd Mudiwa of Zimbabwe's Daily News have been told to expect their trial to go ahead.

If found guilty, they face up to two years in jail.

The case centres on a story alleging that supporters of President Robert Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF party murdered a woman.

Setting a precedent

The two journalists were charged under Zimbabwe Government's draconian Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act.

If the trial goes ahead, it will set a precedent for the laws which critics say are aimed at stifling free speech and suppressing dissent against the government.

If found guilty, the two journalists face up to two years in jail

Both Andrew Meldrum and Lloyd Mudiwa were arrested after they published a story about a woman allegedly beheaded by Zanu-PF supporters.

The report provoked a shocked reaction across the country but, when the Daily News investigated the story further, it found there were inaccuracies and apologised.

The two men have been charged with abusing journalistic privilege.

Other journalists also charged under the act will be waiting to see how the trial is handled, as it is an indicator of how determined the government is to influence the press in Zimbabwe.