I never like to refer to anyone as evil, not even Thatcher or Morrissey, as it does no good in helping us to understand what actually motivates that person, or explain why they do what they do.
Mugabe is a deeply complex man who has excellent reasons for his behaviour (within his own narrow terms of reference).
We can’t simply dismiss him as evil – was he evil when he led the opposition to the apartheid state in the 70’s? No he was something of a hero. I knew several black Zimbabweans when I was at Uni in the mid-80’s and they – all good intelligent lefty people had massive respect for Mugabe. Why? Because he took on the white state and won, and helped transform the country into one where people didn’t starve regularly, had civil rights, an education, etc etc.
So what happened? The economic collapse a few years ago is probably the most important factor – suddenly you couldn’t simply trade on previous successes because famine was coming back, along with mass unemployment. So some kind of scapegoat needed to be found. Hence, the homophobia and the farm reclamations.
Now the farm reclamations was a brilliant idea, it had always been a sore point – when Carrington agreed to Zanu-PF becoming the new govt one of his stipulations for UK Govt support was that there would be no major redistribution of land. I mean the few whites still there still owned something like 80-90% of the land – all because there great great granddaddies had nicked it. So reclaiming it and giving it to those that thought for independence is RIGHT. And its why Mugabe does still regain a hell of a lot of support. Even good friends here, he just saw him as taking land of white scumbags, thought it was a good idea. Of course its all bull, and all he’s doing is giving the land to his supporters, though I think I’d rather they had it than the old colonialists. And this is partly why mos tof the world aint made tro big a fuss – the issues involved raise to many questions for other countries. I mean, South Africa has yet to deal with land redistribution, and they are gonna have to, and it isn’t going to be prettily done either.
So what can we do? Ummm, not entirely sure no. Support sanctions (the ones in place are so piss poor its almost unbelievable), contribute to the opposition coffers, and work for a government here that will actually try and do some of these things, rather than a government which will talk big but do little.
sorry to go on like
rich
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