Don't Forget Zimbabwe

From: The Spectator, UK - 9^th June 2002

Readers may remember the story of Tom Bayley, an 88-year-old Zimbabwean farmer whom this magazine interviewed in mid-April. He was then sitting in the living-room of his homestead at Masowe, near Harare, where he had been under siege by Robert Mugabe's thugs for more than a month. With tears running down his cheeks, the old man explained that he had come to Rhodesia in 1930, and bought his first small plot of land for £5. He described how he had built up the farm, to the point where he had generally been able to expect a thousand tons of maize every year. This year, though, there will be no harvest at the Bayleys' farm.

After 35 days in which neither he nor his wife was able to leave their house, Tom Bayley has died, bullied to death by a dozen or so malodorous 'war veterans'. They illegally invaded his property, and illegally prevented the visits of their children. They ate the seedcorn, butchered the cattle, and kept up a nightly barrage of threats and taunts. One day in May the old white farmer fell, broke his hip, and died from complications in hospital. When he spoke to this magazine, he described the last years of his life as a 'torture'. 

He felt cast adrift, abandoned by Britain. As for the Zimbabwean police, it was clear that they actively connived with the brigands. They wanted the Bayleys off the land, thought to have been earmarked for an important member of the Mugabe regime, and they did no more to help Mr Bayley than they helped Charles Anderson, who became, on Sunday, the twelfth white farmer to be killed by the mobs.

After two years of pogroms, Mr Mugabe has now succeeded in expelling 3,000 white farmers from the land they cultivated. All the rest are in theory due to leave by 10 August, or else face a two-year sentence in prison. It would be naive, of course, to think that it is only whites who have suffered. A total of 800,000 black workers have also lost their livelihoods; and since the land has been given over to a total of 560,000 invaders, there has been a substantial net loss of employment for black workers, too. 

The damage to the Zimbabwean economy has been incalculable. This was once among the most robust economies in Africa. It is now on the brink of starvation, with six million in need of food aid. In the space of the last two weeks, the Zimbabwean dollar has depreciated from 250 to the US dollar, to 500.

It is not just the chaos and bloodshed that should make us angry. It is the seeming indifference of the British government, and of the media. Britain has just celebrated 50 years of the Queen's rule; indeed, the Jubilee has gone stunningly well, a devastating rebuke to the republicans. What we seem to have forgotten, in this jovial orgy of self-congratulation, is that there are British people, with British passports, who are being killed and driven from their farms in what was a British colony. 

Why is it that we were prepared to spend three months bombing Serbia and Kosovo on behalf of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which now turns out to have links with the al-Qa'eda network, when we do absolutely nothing to help people like Tom Bayley? There are supposed to be some EU sanctions in place against Mugabe. They are a joke. With the explicit knowledge and connivance of the British government, Mugabe's chief of police, Mr Augustine Chihuri, was allowed recently to attend a meeting of Interpol in Lyons. 

What price the travel ban on senior members of the Mugabe regime? Where was the outrage from Jack Straw? Chihuri is a man whose corrupt and sniggering police have overseen the robbery and murder of white farmers, and he is waved through by the French without a blink, and shown to his table in the restaurants of Lyons.

It is arrant nonsense to say that Britain can do nothing. It remains true now, as it was in the 1970s, that the Zimbabwean economy is dependent on South Africa. If he so chose, Thabo Mbeki could pull the plug on Mugabe overnight, just as John Vorster eventually pulled the plug on Ian Smith. Britain is the single biggest investor in South Africa, and remains hugely influential. And yet we are doing nothing to put pressure on Mbeki to end the madness north of the Limpopo.

South Africa must be made to see that it was not enough to suspend Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth; and that the agricultural catastrophe in Zimbabwe is affecting the whole of southern Africa. This month Mbeki will be at the G8 summit in Canada, holding out the begging bowl for the New Project for African Development. He should not get a penny until he shows a firmer resolve in dealing with the election-stealing thuggery of Mugabe.

The reason so much of black Africa is a disaster is nothing to do with colonialism, or droughts. The trouble is the despotic behaviour of Africa's rulers. It suits Mbeki, and it suits Blair, quietly to forget about the horrors of Zimbabwe. They must not be forgotten.