From The Guardian (UK), 26 February

Pressure mounts on Mugabe

Victoria Falls - International pressure is mounting for measures to be taken against the Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, to protest against his assaults on judges, journalists and opposition leaders. The shadow foreign secretary, Francis Maude, yesterday called for a delegation of Commonwealth leaders to be sent to Harare to demand the president's resignation, while the South African president, Thabo Mbeki, said he would meet Mr Mugabe to encourage him to abide by the rule of law.

"It is high time Britain called for the Commonwealth to withdraw the cloak of respectability that its membership gives to Mr Mugabe," Mr Maude said at the end of a two-day visit to Zimbabwe. "Such strong action is needed because of the wholesale human rights abuses, the beatings and intimidation, Mr Mugabe's recent actions to suppress the media, the breakdown of the rule of law, the attacks on the judiciary and his management of an economy which is cratering. The list of objections is a long one."

Moving beyond his previous calls for Zimbabwe to be suspended from the Commonwealth, Mr Maude said the British government should work for international measures to be taken against Mr Mugabe's senior deputies. "There should be targeted action by the international community against the individuals who support Mr Mugabe and who are responsible for appalling conduct. Such action could include bans on international travel, investigations into overseas bank accounts and investigations into past wrongdoings that could go all the way back to the Matabeleland massacres in the mid 1980s." Mr Maude suggested that Britain and the Commonwealth could send a delegation of eminent persons to offer "a dignified exit for Mr Mugabe".

Mr Mbeki said he planned to express his "serious concern" to Mr Mugabe. He said Mr Mugabe's policies had created such chaos in Zimbabwe that it had "impacted negatively" on South Africa. The spectre of Zimbabwe's rapid economic decline and the erosion of respect for the law is widely blamed for falls in the South African currency and a drop in the Johannesburg stock exchange. Mr Mbeki has been criticised for being too soft on Mr Mugabe, despite telling him publicly last year that he should follow Zimbabwe's existing laws to resolve the country's land problems. South Africa's state-owned power company, Escom, provides Zimbabwe with more than 30% of its electrical power. Zimbabwe has run up an estimated $20m debt with Escom, so Mr Mbeki could threaten to turn off the lights.

It's not an easy thing to look back and realise you were personally responsible for putting a man like Robert Mugabe in power but Wilfred Mhanda has had to live with that knowledge for the last twenty-four years. You might think the last year, which has seen thirty two murders, countless rapes, tortures, house-burnings and beatings, all to help Mugabe steal an election, might have made this even harder but the reverse is true. "It's a relief now that Zimbabweans realise at last what sort of man he is", Wilfred says. "It became obvious very quickly that we'd made a terrible mistake - that he was paranoid, authoritarian and ruthless, a man believing only in power. Believe me, he hasn't changed. What's changed is that other people have his measure at last."

You look at Wilfred, roly-poly, 50 and a quality control manager and you don't find it hard to believe that he lives a blameless suburban life with a wife, a little house and a Mazda. Even now the suburbs of Harare - still one of the pleasantest places in the world to live - include a quota of golf-playing, and Daily Telegraph-readers who would not be out of place in Cheltenham or Chiswick. They are also home to many men, white and black, who have, in their time, waded through a lot of blood. But now, with Harare, like the country, crumbling before your eyes some of those men are coming out of the woodwork and, after many years of silence, are willing to say what they know. It's part of the whole atmosphere of fin de regne that this should be so.

Wilfred was the sort of boy who was always going to become a guerrilla. Growing up in Ian Smith's Rhodesia he had a keen African nationalist for a father so that his childhood heroes were not singers or soccer stars but the liberation pantheon of Nkrumah, Toure and Kenyatta. He went to the school at Zvishavane which the former liberal prime minister, Garfield Todd, had founded and which he still often visited though by that time living under a form of house arrest imposed by Smith. By the time he left school he was in such regular trouble with the police that "I would spend all day from 7 am to 5 pm at the police station, sitting there working at my school books for A-levels." The first thing he did at university in Salisbury (now Harare) was to join the Zanu (Zimbabwe African National Union) underground.

From the word go young activists like Wilfred assumed that armed struggle was the only way to change Ian Smith's mind about majority rule. "We used the Student Christian Movement as cover. People would go on SCM "holidays" when actually they were going for basic military training for Zanu's military wing, Zanla." But Wilfred's cell was also organizing demonstrations against discrimination in education and he had to walk 25 miles each way to Goromonzi to organize demonstrations at the school he'd attended there. It all ended up with demonstrations on the university campus itself and the discovery that one of their cell members was a police agent - "My handler was furious. Now you're going to have to run for it because of these stupid student demos, he said, when we wanted you here organizing the military underground." Together with four others of his cell, Wilfred skipped the country and, via Botswana and Zambia, made their way to Tanzania.These were Wilfred's best friends and he looks back sadly now."Two of those guys were killed by Zanla itself, another by the Smith forces and one died in circumstances which are still mysterious. I'm the only survivor."

In Tanzania Wilfred showed a great aptitude for all things military and rapidly rose to become a military instructor, a party commissar and a Zanla commander. Zanla's Chinese trainers picked him out for training as a military expert and took him off to China for advanced instruction. "China was a strange, closed society and the Chinese themselves were essentially racist", Wilfred recalls. "If people like me appeared in the street there'd be a traffic jam right away as people queued up to look at blacks like you'd look at monkeys. But I didn't mind: the training itself was excellent and that was what I'd gone there for." The Chinese attempted to insist that Wilfred was too precious to risk at the front but in fact he saw plenty of action, on one occasion living off the land for three months in a protracted operation in north-eastern Rhodesia.

But the preoccupying problem within Zanu was that its leader, Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole, had been in detention in Salisbury for ten years so that none of the younger fighters like Wilfred knew him. Instead they had chosen Herbert Chitepo as interim leader but in March 1975 he was murdered in Lusaka. To this day his assassination remains shrouded in mystery: Wilfred's best guess remains that Smith had him killed but that he must have had help from agents infiltrated into Zanu. Certainly, President Kaunda of Zambia took this as his cue to crack down on Zanla. He closed down all the guerrilla camps and imprisoned the fighters in a remote area.

Wilfred had been on the way to the front in Rhodesia but, hearing that his own camp had been raided by Zambian troops, fled to Mozambique where he conferred with the Zanla commander-in-chief, Josiah Tongogara. It was essential, he argued, that the fighters should not be left on their own for Kaunda was trying to strong-arm them into accepting the leadership of his client, Joshua Nkomo, the head of Zapu (the Ndebele-based Zimbabwe African people's Union): effectively Kaunda was trying to destroy Zanu, calculating that one day he would, through Nkomo, call the shots in Zimbabwe. It was agreed that Wilfred would go back disguised as a simple recruit. This he did and for eight months acted as secretary and assistant to the man the Zambians thought commanded the Zanla forces - though in fact Wilfred, who now ranked second only to Tongogara, gave all the orders.

"Kaunda was pretty ruthless", Wilfred remembers. "The big watchword for all the leaders of the front line states was unity but usually when they said we must accept unity it meant we must simply do what they said. In this case, Kaunda had decided we must all join Zapu's armed wing, Zipra, and decided to starve us into submission." All told there were some 1200 Zanla people under arrest but of these only 400 were seasoned fighters: the rest were raw recruits plus women and children. The Zambian troops denied supplies to the camp and under this pressure 105 fighters defected to Zipra but Kaunda was scared to push starvation tactics too far so instead the Zambian army was sent in to bully the camp inmates into line. Wilfred and two colleagues, whose demand was that they must be allowed to consult their leader, Sithole, before making any deal, engineered a mass escape, effectively daring the soldiers to shoot the women and children - which they didn't. They established a new camp. The Zambian troops surrounded it again so this time Wilfred led a phoney hunger strike ("we had hidden rations and ate in the dark - but the Zambians thought we were starving") until the Zambians finally agreed that they could consult Sithole.

What had happened meanwhile was that Mugabe had led a coup against Sithole in prison. Smith then let Mugabe out to lead the Zanu delegation to the Front Line leaders. But Kaunda, Julius Nyerere (Tanzania), Agostino Neto (Angola) and Samora Machel (Mozambique) were shocked: Nyerere was so angry at the idea of a leader being so obviously sent to them with Smith's collusion that he refused to talk to Mugabe and demanded that he and his followers return to Rhodesia and come back with Sithole. This was, in the end, what happened. Sithole quickly saw what was wanted and agreed to a unity pact with Zapu.

Are you saying that Mugabe was really Smith's man, I asked ? Wilfred looked around at his friends and they all grinned together. We've thought about it a lot, they said. Nothing can be proved, but if you look back you see that over and over again Smith acted so as to create openings for Mugabe. Maybe he thought Mugabe was so extreme that he would destroy African nationalism in Zimbabwe. If so, he was right in the end. Mugabe, they explained, had refused Sithole's instruction to attend Chitepo's funeral ceremony and went off to the Mozambique border where he sat for three months. Samora Machel, who wouldn't let him into Mozambique, said he was a Smith agent. The border was the badlands, the hole in the wall, always swarming with refugees, political pimps, Rhodesian spies. In the end Mugabe got into Mozambique disguised as a refugee: what he wanted was to build a following in the refugee camps there.

Machel was furious when he discovered Mugabe had got in and put him under house arrest to keep him away from the refugees. What we suspect now, Wilfred says with a sad smile, is that maybe he got some help getting into Mozambique; maybe Smith was still behind him. But meanwhile Wilfred and his fellow Zanla fighters were discovering just how wrong they'd been about their leader, Sithole. First of all he had revealed himself as utterly tribalist. Maybe we all started that way, Wilfred explains humbly, digging the ground unhappily with a stick. Once you became a fighter all you cared about was that your comrades would literally lay down their lives for you and you for them: tribe had nothing to say to you after that. The problem was that our leaders had never been fighters themselves, so they remained tribalists.

By the time he'd said this he'd dug quite a pile of soil and you realise the terrible unhappiness of the thing, the complete devotion of the fighters to their cause, the depth of their betrayal. Maybe they're wrong about Mugabe being Smith's man, maybe that's all post facto suspicion and nonsense, who knows ? But what no one can gainsay is the extraordinary, wrenching sacrifices these fighters made and how little they got out of it. With Sithole it just got worse. The Zambians shot and killed ten Zanla fighters. Sithole didn't protest, didn't wasn't to know, didn't even want Wilfred and his comrades to attend the funerals, visit the wounded in hospital. Sithole believed that he was close to a deal with Smith and the fighters were, at best, an irrelevance. "I will never forget the way he turned to us and said "I can certainly talk to Ian Smith but as for you, my children, I don't know what's to become of you". Our blood ran cold. The final straw was that he wouldn't attend the memorial services for our dead comrades but then said he had to go to the US to see his daughter because she was suffering from headaches."

Wilfred and his friends slowly realised they were in danger. Sithole knew how much they disapproved, saw them as potential mutineers, had arranged with the Zambians to have them arrested. They melted away to Tanzania. Sithole, returning from the US, asked Nyerere to arrest all 42 Zanla commanders. Nyerere refused. The 42 met, voted to depose Sithole and decided, in desperation, to put forward Mugabe as a mediator. They didn't know him but knew they needed a politician of some sort, that a simple fighter wouldn't do. But the Front Line states continued to insist on unity so the fighters united, Zanla and Zipra together forming Zipa - the Zimbabwe People's Army under the leadership of Rex Nhongo. 'Zapu had to have the second position, so I was number three in the command structure" says Wilfred, still digging the soil with his stick. Together they sat down and worked out a new war strategy and in January 1976 resumed military operations as a united force.

Samora Machel, the Mozambican leader, was very unhappy with this outcome. With Sithole out, that just left the Zapu leader, Nkomo, he pointed out - and he, who had always supported Zanu, had no champion. He demanded that they come up with Zanu leaders, so they came up with Mugabe and Josiah Tongogara, the guerrilla leader. Machel was furious: he didn't trust Mugabe and he knew the fighters didn't really trust Tongogara. ("He was quite right", says Wilfred sadly. "We knew Tongogara would be an absolute disaster.) So they picked Mugabe, not really knowing him. "We quickly realised he was paranoid, arrogant, secretive and only interested in power. He was scared that a single united movement might lead to leadership by Nkomo, the senior African nationalist, so he closed down all organisations such as Zipa which united the two movements." By the time Mugabe led the Zanu delegation to the Geneva talks in 1976 Wilfred was so disillusioned that he refused to be a delegate, not allowing for the fact that a paranoiac like Mugabe was bound to take this as a threat at one remove.

The real irony - and the stroke which really sealed Wilfred's fate - was that just as the guerrillas lost confidence in Mugabe, so Machel changed his attitude entirely. Mugabe got enormous international exposure as a result of the Geneva talks and even though they failed Machel became convinced that Zimbabwean independence was now just around the corner. In which case the best thing he could was to get right behind Mugabe and make sure his client became the country's first president. So when Mugabe returned from Geneva where he had been furiously brooding over Wilfred's refusal to join the delegation, he told Machel that he must act swiftly to prevent Wilfred and his friends leading a military rebellion. Machel swooped and arrested 600 Zanla guerrillas including Wilfred and the rest of the high command. Gradually the rank and file were released but the 64 top commanders were kept in jail for three years.

Wilfred is a thoughtful, educated man and he had read about conditions on the slave ships during the dreadful Middle Passage. It was with this simile that he explained the nightmare of the next six months. They were kept packed like sardines and naked, sleeping on cement floors. There were no toilets so they had to defecate on the floor and then eat and sleep amidst their own filth - the cells were cleaned just once a month. They were infested with lice, had so little food that they would put sand in their rice to bulk it out, had malaria and other fevers and froze in winter. It was a nightmare without end. "I read a book by a Holocaust survivor", Wilfred says, matter of factly. "He said that those who hadn't experienced it couldn't believe it and those who had couldn't understand it. That's exactly right." Luckily, Nyerere then heard of their conditions and prevailed on Machel to relocate them to a remote camp in the country where life was hard but bearable. In the end they were freed only because Lord Carrington insisted that all political prisoners had to be released at independence.

Wilfred returned to a Zimbabwe in which Mugabe was treated on all sides as a magnanimous conquering hero. Samora Machel tried to insist that the prisoners must all return to Zimbabwe by joining Zanu-PF. Wilfred and 26 others refused - which meant that in the first week after independence they were arrested again and spent ten days on hunger strike before Nkomo intervened and got them out. But all doors were barred to them and getting a job was impossible. After a year Wilfred met the man in charge of the President's security who told him that he "must be mad" to hang around, that this was only looking for trouble and that he would quite certainly get it if he didn't leave the country quickly.

He got a scholarship to Germany, studied biotechnology, acquired a German girlfriend, was offered a university lectureship in West Berlin: as far as he was concerned he'd emigrated and would never see Zimbabwe again. But the Zimbabwean authorities intervened, told the German he was a communist, the lectureship was withdrawn, he shuttled around Europe, wasn't allowed to stay and crept back into Zimbabwe in 1988. For ages he could get no job but in the end a deal was arranged whereby he's allowed to work provided he stays strictly out of politics. This deal he has now broken by coming out openly against Mugabe. "I've got to", he says. "Most Zimbabweans agree with me now - and it's important that we stand up and say we are the real war vets, not these criminals who are occupying farms and terrorising the farmers and their workers." He is now passionate about all the liberal verities - about the importance of the rule of law, of a strong opposition, of free speech and all the rest. He sympathises with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change but is quick to say that if they win power he wants to see a strong opposition to them too - "as long as it's not Zanu-PF".

It's hard to know what to make of such a biography. Wilfred doesn't regret being a guerrilla or fighting for independence but it's hard, as you listen to him, not to wonder at the sheer mad frenzy of it all. Smith and his supporters fought for a white supremacy which was both morally and practically mad. (I talked to Smith a year ago and it's obvious that he accepts universal suffrage as perfectly normal now: so what was all that murderous lunacy about ?) Mugabe and his ilk fought for a "scientific socialism" which was merely a cover for self-enrichment and a brutal authoritarianism. The one thing that both sides had in common was a complete contempt for democracy and for the mass of the African people. Ignorant armies clashed by night and Wilfred - bravely, naively - led one of those armies until his usefulness was over because he hadn't understood the real rules of the game.

Listening to him you think of Rupert Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, soldiers caught up in a wild and senseless struggle, somehow achieving a strange nobility of spirit amidst it all. But what use is that against the Gatling, the Maxim or the Kalashnikov ? What you do descry is a fearful symmetry. In the 1970s a white elite and a crowd of African nationalist wannabes (then disguised as socialists) fought a bitter war. The actual battlefield lay among the rural peasantry who paid a terrible price as both sides bullied, tortured and killed them in order to win their hearts and minds. Now, a generation later, the wannabes have turned into fat cats: they have had the cream and nationalised the cream factory. Their control is contested by a new black elite, the trade union and middle class "outs" supported by the white remnants and by the mass of the poor who have derived no benefits from independence. Once again the battlefield is in the countryside and once again the people who are getting beaten, tortured and killed are primarily the rural poor. Because, once again, when power in Zimbabwe is at stake - though only then - it is their hearts and minds that are crucial.

It is tempting to imagine what might have happened to Wilfred if he hadn't stuck to his guns and fallen out with Mugabe. Wilfred was second only to Rex Nhongo in the Zanla high command and Nhongo went on to become head of the army and the biggest landowner in Zimbabwe. Wilfred also trained the men who are today the heads of the air force and the police: he could have had their jobs, been a cabinet minister or run one of the big state corporations. But he says he has no regrets about anything and neither then nor now did he have the slightest wish to go into politics: he had simply grown up with the mystique of being an African freedom fighter like some boys grow up on the mystique of soccer and never considered being anything else. He seems content enough today with his middle management job and is more concerned to rescue that mystique than anything else. Like not a few of us he's had to change many of his ideas in order to keep his principles.