HEIDI HOLLAND

Zim’s future rests with its past

Britain created Zimbabwe and Mugabe is cast in the dye set by Rhodes and Smith. Accepting that fact is the only solution

Zimbabwe is in the throes of an agonising replay of its own history. As stubborn and self-obsessed as his predecessor, Robert Mugabe would much rather continue to fight than hand over power in response to his failed leadership. Almost half a century into the country’s relentless political strife, with both of its premiers having championed freedom to the hilt yet shown no commitment to yield to the will of the people, it is hard to tell whether Zimbabwe is closer to the end of its problems than to the beginning.

With Zanu-PF’s foot soldiers intimidating the population and Mugabe baulking at announcing the presidential run-off, the country is as far away today from the notion that everyone is entitled to a vote of equal value and the right to take part in politics as it was with a whites-only franchise during the Smith era. Nobody in either Rhodesia’s or Zimbabwe’s governments ever really believed in democracy.

The air up north is so thick with accusations of conspiracy and treachery that time might as well have stood still in the years since Smith published his aggrieved memoir, The Great Betrayal, which accused South Africa as well as Britain of foul play towards his beleaguered country. While the cards have been reshuffled somewhat, the blame game goes on apace.

Mugabe feels grievously short-changed by Britain, and forsaken by the West in general. Gordon Brown’s government appears to have amnesia when it comes to Britain’s legacy in Zimbabwe. Among many issues, it bears a grudge against the former Rhodesian freedom fighter, presumably because Mugabe benefited from the support of many in the Labour Party during the Seventies yet went on to betray their trust. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change blames its manifest problems on South Africa and, of course, on Bad Bob. South Africa, meanwhile, points fingers at the US as well as Britain in condemnation of their regime change machinations. White southern Africans blame everybody except themselves.

While all those with power claim to be victimised by the plots of others, the real victims – Zimbabwe’s poor and marginalised – are fleeing for their lives.
All that has changed in nearly fifty years of an apparently insoluble colonial quarrel are the names of some of those shouting the odds. If they are, as Mugabe says of Brown, merely dots in the universe, perhaps it is time to join them up. Only once Robert Mugabe, Morgan Tsvangirai, possibly Simba Makoni, Gordon Brown and Thabo Mbeki can collectively envisage a negotiated deal emphasising reconciliation and the future will there be any hope of a lasting solution to the vendettas of the past.

Not that such a negotiated solution is without precedent in Zimbabwe. The Lancaster House all-party conference held in London in 1979, which brought Mugabe to power a year later, was considered a great success at the time - sunset clauses and all. It gave rise to the British-sponsored idea of a best-person government, which Mugabe not only embraced but led constructively (leaving aside the horrendous Gukurahundi massacres for which apartheid South Africa bears partial responsibility, though you’d never know it to talk to our self-righteous white citizens) until former white Rhodesians voted racially against him.

Gaining consensus on the need to talk to Mugabe is a major hurdle in itself. How does one persuade the various players to take responsibility for their parts in the Zimbabwean tragedy, an essential step in setting up a negotiated settlement? The next problem is that Mugabe must always be right and cannot be wrong: he is unfortunately hard-wired that way so any viable deal would have to include him initially, as well as sunset clauses. If a compromise solution of any sort is possible, it would also have to take account of Mugabe’s oft-stated conviction that he can negotiate only with the British, who alone in his view have wronged him. This would involve the former colonial power participating in peace-making with a despised autocrat, assuming Brown genuinely wanted to avert a further deterioration of the dire situation in Zimbabwe.

Unless Britain can be persuaded to regard Zimbabwe’s 84-year-old tyrant as the regrettable embodiment of colonialism - bearing in mind not only that Ian Smith’s violent era occurred under Britain’s watch but that much of Mugabe’s bile is the result of the pent-up hurt, grief and rage he has tried to suppress over a troubled lifetime - Brown will continue denouncing and humiliating Mugabe. This is partly perhaps because Zimbabwe’s despot is the image of Britain’s guilt but also because the Labour Party sees its role as simply dispensing compassion, in the form of aid or regime change, abroad. A more subtle position than support for the MDC in Zimbabwe would surely baffle British policymakers.

However, the current impasse - given Africa’s impotent mediation and an increasingly militarised Zimbabwe - calls for a more ingenious British response than the pro-Tsvangirai, anti-Mugabe stance adopted so far. If Brown like Blair before him continues to do nothing but urge Africa to deal with Mugabe (as much because Britain does not know what to do about him as because of the peer review mechanisms and other sensitive issues pertaining to African pride) the Zimbabwe tragedy will continue unabated. Mugabe will remain defiantly anti-colonial – and in power.

Should the situation be left to deteriorate, Brown may eventually be obliged to address Britain’s post-colonial responsibilities in Zimbabwe in far less auspicious circumstances. Accusations of British indifference to the suffering of ordinary Zimbabweans will surely attend a descent into civil war in the country and cost Brown much more than a grand gesture of human tolerance generously given before rather than after the current alarming escalation of violence spirals out of control.

At this critical juncture in the country’s history, the righteous rhetoric espoused by all the powers concerned will not bring peace and prosperity to Zimbabwe. It was Britain’s government that created modern Zimbabwe. Mugabe is cast in the dye set by Rhodes, Smith and the race politics that defined the colonial empire. Real conciliation will begin only with real acknowledgement of this history. Political polarisation and aid will never correct the wrongs of the past.