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UNITED NATIONS — It takes a while, but when Canada gets upset with a Third World country, something must really be amiss. Ottawa's not changing course on Castro's Cuba but rather having the very belated relationsation that Zimbabwe's Marxist regime has just gone too far, by allowing a crude assault on the Canadian High Commissioner and Director of CARE by government thugs. Canada has imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe accusing Comrade Robert Mugabe's regime of harassment. Millions of Zimbabweans have known this for years.
Beating up diplomats and international aid workers in broad daylight in your capital city is not exactly the way to get good press — but its precisely the tactic being deliberately used by Comrade Bob to intimidate diplomats and the country's white and Asian micro-minority. In recent weeks 200 white and Asian businesses have been attacked. The British Council has closed. People are getting the picture.
Intimidation works so pleasingly well especially when the victims can't fight back. It also sends a chilling message to the silent majority that they better stay silent.
It's all about power and the regime's slipping grip on it. Despite formal independence from Britain in 1980, Robert Mugabe still goes through the charade of elections — fixing the results have proven increasingly more difficult. In the past year, Mugabe has taken a few bad electoral slaps from a growing trade union based opposition the Movement for Democratic Change led by Morgan Tsvangirai.
Though the MDC has garnered large portions of the vote in the capital Harare and cities such as Bulawayo, Comrade Bob holds rural areas not through any genuuie support but by the old combination of favors and fear.
It's a well known tactic that letting loose the mob to occupy white owned farms and businesses had its effect — land and money for the masses always has a revolutionary ring from Robespierre to the Russian Revolution and former Rhodesia..
One of the militants leaders "Hitler" Hunzvi has taken it upon himself to bring "liberation war" veterans as a kind of Red Guard to seize, occupy, and intimidate. That most of these "veterans" were not even born during the 1970's conflict with the Rhodesian rule of Ian Smith, is a minor point.
As the Economist opines, "There is a method to the madness. The MDC, Mugabe calculates, is dependent on private sector support; the factory invasions he hopes, will make donations impossible. The war veterans also hope to undercut the trade unions by promising workers they can get raises and better conditions by appealing to them rather than their unions."
That the once strong economy is in freefall should come as no surprise. Sadly this bountiful Southern African land is being wrecked by sheer political expediency and hate. When Zimbabwe's farms no longer produce sufficient food and unemployment becomes the norm, it will be too late for this land of twelve million. Already the economy has eroded dangerously — GDP fell 5 percent last year and could slide down to 10 percent this year, according to the IMF. Inflation is 55 percent.
South Africa and Britain have likewise protested concerning the trashing of the rule of law in Zimbabwe. Donor nations have cut economic aid. Yet in a strange sense this is what Comrade Bob wishes — the justified ostracism plays into his hands as elections must be held within a year. He'll posture as the candidate of the masses and force noisy confrontations with foreign countries, especially Britain.
But the problem goes well beyond the proletarian policies which have served Comrade Bob so well in the past. The rule of law has been dangerously diluted. Telling the truth more difficult, with the harassment of the still unflaggingly free Daily News paper. Moreover the irreparable damage being done to the economy and tourism, will not only hamper any future democratic government which may someday emerge in the wake of Mugabe's misrule.
London's Daily Telegraph advises editorially, "Mugabe appears to have bewitched the world into silence and inaction. What are the likes of threatened judges and editors of a once-free press in Zimbabwe expected to make of this?' The Telegraph adds, "The supine passivity of the West in the face of Mugabe's campaign of terror will not soon be forgotten or forgiven by Africans who have been risking life and freedom to resist him."
John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.
