ZIMBABWE
THE TERRORIST STATE

 by - Dr Duncan Clarke

The state of political play in Zimbabwe not only raises global concern as it should, but also deeper issues about the nature of the regime - from its origins, through its operational track record, and about its current reign of barely mitigated terror and confiscations.

And new reflections now emerge, requiring clinical objectivity, that readily demonstrate a pattern of violent actions, Presidential irresponsibility and major damaging consequences.

For indeed, at few times and for limited periods in the course of the ZANU-PF era (1965-2001) has unambiguous normality prevailed: whether in times of active “self-legitimated” violence (justified by proponents as “armed struggle”) spanning the pre-Independence Chimurenga, through the early Liberation Years of Gukhuarundi (genocide wrought on the AmaNdebele – justified as “the sweeping away of the ashes”), during the emasculating State-controlled quasi-totalitarianism in the 1980s and 1990s (variously depicted at times as Marxist-Leninism, Socialism and Zimbabweanisation), and now evident in the new wave of State-orchestrated Terrorism (via militias, “war veterans”, land invaders, apparatchiks, youth brigades, and the like) in the late 20th Century and early Third Millennium.

Zimbabwe’s leadership and its now-dominant Party has planted, watered and tendered these seeds of Terrorism, and now created many of the dimensions and foundations of a Terrorist-Sponsored State.

For here is a “Government” – the true use of that epithet is an abomination – and a “President” (much less gracious descriptions come to mind), with anointed Chefs, cohorts and clients, and at least a 21-year liability, that has built its roadmap and survival on a pathway of blood.

Not all acts in the struggle for Majority Rule over 1965-80 (yes, that was what it was called) had the overtones of “acts of war”. Many acts of guerrilla-terrorist violence directed at white settlers, rural Africans and myriad others were quintessentially Terrorist in nature: viz. the casual if calculated infliction of violence for political ends and as a means to inculcate fear and compliance in the minds and hearts of those that might not succumb to ZANU and later ZANU-PF’s dubious electoral charms.

Many of the liberation movement’s victims indeed were inter or intra-Party foes, Dare members, political dissidents, nominated “sell-outs”, ideological “deviants”, Tribal Elders, Official Chiefs, ethnic “others” (whether white, Ndebele, Karanga, ChiManyika, Korekore or Zezuru), Party competitors for position, military threats (inside ZANLA, ZIPRA and ZAPU), and the like. Even the Rhodesian Army remained mostly a partial and episodic target, and one often avoided for much softer opportunities of cowardly intimidation – villagers, the elderly, isolated farms, rival Nationalist Movements, and so on – the list is a long one.

Then to Independence in 1980: power arrived if not at the barrel of the gun, then with up-front threats and armaments in storage, latterly in the form of the Armed State, much augmented beyond reasonable dimension primarily for internal purposes – witnessed rapidly in a Prime Ministerial-orchestrated onslaught by the North Korean-trained 5th Brigade on mostly rural innocents in Matabeleland: a gruesome set of massacres, burnings, butchery and draconian intimidation (much documented by the Catholic Justice & Peace Commission) that has yet to be in any way reasonably atoned or compensated, let alone accounted for in the local or international Halls of Justice.

Throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s the instruments of State (an expanded Army, inflated Central Intelligence Organisation, politicized Police, and State-funded Veterans Association) were augmented at the expense of the population and its normal democratic social and economic interests.

Enhanced State control became the sine qua non of economic and political management. Respect for the Rule of Law became eroded, and manipulated into the contemporary use of Courts and Judges for Party political and Presidential servitude. And so the denial and abuse of human rights became widespread.

A warped One-Party State Ideology dominated common sense – often in even simple and practical matters regarding economic management, social reform, Parliamentary order, and legal status.

Constitutional “adjustments” designed for the powers-that-be were exercised at least 18 times in 21 years. This included the naked if ingenuous disenfranchisement and citizenship-removal of hundreds of thousands born in the country.

Periodic Electoral manipulation served the Masters of Monomotapa. Their Servants (the Povo) were reduced to penury, and thereby made easier to control through the regulation of food (including Food Aid), fear and ultimately famine.

Control of the Press and later its intimidation and attempted repression (fire-bombing, arrests, deportations, torture, and use of legal fiat) was implemented as a necessity for the retention of fading power and diminished legitimacy. Propaganda in the form of the Ministry of “Information” took on a grotesque and Kafkaesque quality.

The loss of any residual compassion by the inheritors of a once viable albeit imperfect “democratic order” was rapid and pervasive. The use of racism and ethnicity (vis-à-vis whites, democrats, civil society, Gays & Lesbians, others) as a tool of separatism invited the spectre of divide-and-rule strategies, ethnic-cleansing, and measures whose results have led many to vote-with-their feet (in emigration, skills flight, and displacement across the Limpopo – Southern Africa’s Rio Grande), while forcing others to become “internally displaced persons”, especially so in the case of now multitudes of both local and foreign-born farmworkers (“They – the latter - have no Totem”, was the President’s ultimate cultural insult). The million-plus Ndebele and many others displaced into South Africa constituted another category of the discarded and neglected.

The elected Opposition by definition has been depicted as inherently “disloyal” (its leader made a target of assassination attempts), and thousands of MDC supporters made the subject of continuous attacks by State-assisted and armed militias in complicity with organs of the State (Army, CIO and Police). The use of what has been widely-perceived as periodic targeted political intimidation (with beatings, burnings, whippings, detentions, imprisonments) has not escaped this unhappy landscape. Ishe Komborera Zimbabwe (God Bless Zimbabwe), it might be said, because no one else in authority will.

Confiscation of lands, assets and properties has continued unabated as only an extension of a long record of larceny. The theft of State funds by a corrupt Presidential entourage and Party elite (raised to an art form, resembling advanced Kleptocratic States elsewhere) has become de rigeur.

State-mandated evictions from commercial farms has been “sold” as “land reform”, indigenisation and the finale of a long-lost “Revolution”, thinly disguising the primary aim of securing private wealth for Party stalwarts and Civil Servants, as well as above all else the retention of permanent tenure in Office for the President and Party.

Any semblance of reasonable macro-economic management has been sublimated to the dictates of guaranteed penury for the population and privilege for the Party. That Zimbabwe will not now ever recover to its Independence level of real income per head, appears to be of little concern to the interests of “Ministers of State”.

The Spokesmen for this State (Ministers, High Commissioners, Others) peddle inanities grossly at variance with the appalling record, as sycophants to His Master’s Voice. A few have taken the courage to abandon the rotting Ship of State, and flee abroad. Detachment from the facts has unhinged their cognitive abilities.

Truth in any relativist or objective sense has now become a prisoner to political convenience, and Zimbabwe’s History reduced to acts of crude revisionism.

Hopes that any minimal moral compass might yet guide the affairs of State have been deeply and irrevocably compromised by increasingly desperate measures designed to perpetuate a new paradigm built on this evident History of Terror.

That all this has led to rampant disorder and anarchy, amidst deep fear amongst the many, should not disguise how such a status quo aids and supports the now much-threatened and incumbent regime, regaled in the trappings of a pseudo-legitimate State.

The State has no need of its even flawed democratic institutions (and so it undermines them), goodwill in the form of regional advice and cooperation (which it regularly resists), international agreements it strikes (which it dismisses, or finesses with threats), reasonable international legitimacy (which it ignores), or normal legal constraints (which it breaches).

Mugabe has been disposed more than once to reject support from the IMF-IBRD and Aid Agencies with all manner of fallacious rantings about Neo-Colonialism and conspiracy. The “Government’s” failures to execute agreed Structural Adjustment Programs has had little to do with “conditionalities”, and everything to do with its own narrow political agenda.

This regime does not seek respect, except its own, and it does not respect its inhabitants. It has no apparent need of an economic future for its people (which it leaves to chance, and at best The Hand of God). It is focused solely on its own survival at all cost, especially where any liabilities can be met by others. It now preaches little but hatred since it has no other currency of worth. Its alienation from principle and self-pity run extraordinarily deep. It envisages no way forward other than through accelerated continuity along a bloody path long trod.

Mugabe’s quasi-Stalinist symbols (Heroes Acres, Presidential photos in all public places, self-aggrandisment in Presidential motorcades) are not merely those of the flawed 20th Century but of a long bygone era much discounted on the world stage, and one rejected in much of Africa as long forgotten images of a flawed passage. The recent demented Presidential retreat to “Socialism” is only one manifestation of the archaic and nostalgic cause.

It is a sad and heart-rendering feeling to know that the attributes of the Terrorist State and State-Sponsored Terrorism have manifested in several deeply embedded ways: facts-on-the-ground, philosophy and values, violent actions, and numerous self-serving edicts – illustrated inter alia by a litany of State-influenced acts:

1. An impoverishment of its people whose lives and hopes have been wantonly and irresponsibly destroyed by the negligence and decisions of those in power;

2. By murders, rapes and brutalities perpetrated by unchecked and endorsed militia leaders (Chenjerai “Hitler” Hunzvi, only one amongst others) and “so-called veterans”, often aided and abetted by a politicized “Police” (or at generous best, unconstrained thereby), their negative impact exhibited in spreading acts of needless and senseless violence, in the tradition of all cowards, mostly against the weak and vulnerable;

 3. Through the evidence of centers of crude torture (one run by Hunzvi in Harare, and most recently in the Matopos) left to function without any interdiction or cessation let alone proper judicial invesigation;

 4. Via the prominence of selected “mafiosa” (both Presidential relatives and others) hoisted into key positions of patronage, dependent by acceptance on an increasingly gerentocratic and unbalanced leadership, to the detriment of the populace;

 5. By the non-Parliamentary approval and execution of a “private” war waged in a foreign African land, contributing to the ongoing tragedy of the DRC, for the singlular benefit of a small political elite and their economic interests;

 6. By established fiefdoms in “Government” and its parastatal agencies, designed for little but to serve entrenched pecuniary personal interests;

 7. Through authoritarian measures taken against local and foreign NGOs, the domestic independent and foreign Press (with torture but one instrument of management), and alienation of much-needed International Aid Agencies;

 8. By self-created de-linkage from the regional and global world, along the lines of North Korea, Kampuchea and other Bastard States.

 9. In the enunciation of numerous and pervasive “conspiracies” discovered for all that inevitably goes wrong – blamed with much convenience on the usual suspects: the MDC Opposition, “Rhodesians”, white Zimbabweans, Churches, NGOs, South Africans, Foreign Governments (typically British and American Imperialists) - indeed the more the merrier, all of whom it seems have had no other mission in life but to awake each morning and calculate, plan and plot against ZANU-PF and Mugabe.

It can be no surprise that Zimbabwe’s “Government”, and the de jure and de facto Head of State, attract few reasonable friends, and are aligned with those on the wrong side of the civilized global community.

Nor can one but read into Mugabe’s regular “escape” through persistent taxpayer-funded foreign travel as but a flight from the consequences of his many “irrational” deeds, and self-help therapy for an increasing chronic pathological behaviour. The troubled soul needs its refuge, and Mugabe’s has sought balm in foreign climes where ignorance has too often allowed the trappings of power to cloud any judgment of the facts.

This State of Terrorism has many deep and historical roots, but even more contemporary manifestations. They need acknowledgement.

Those in the Zimbabwe political hierarchy (ZANU-PF, Politburo, Central Committee, and other “clandestine” extra-Parliamentary cabals), with so much blood on their hands, have become much accustomed to its presence, and disinclined to wash the past, and now the present, in the light of any acceptable contemporary standards of governance and civility.

“Smart sanctions” sound deeply implausible as any panacea for all this, while “quiet Diplomacy” has died a predictably quiet death, and yet still the Terrorist State appears immune - except for the rumblings of a potential civil war that might yet come, and could last many a year.

It is already extremely late. A Terrorist-Sponsored State is in advanced birth on the doorstep of democratic South Africa, and looks increasingly like it may haunt History and The House of Stone for some time to come.