Whites Who Bleed - State murder in Zimbabwe - farms taken away from white farmers

National Review, May 22, 2000 by John O'Sullivan

A TRUCK pulls up in an African village in Zimbabwe and out jump black "veterans" of the 1970s Rhodesian civil war, all coincidentally supporters of President Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF party. Armed with automatic weapons and studded clubs, they spread through the huts looking for leaflets, banners, or other evidence of opposition-party loyalties. When they find it, they beat up the unfortunate dissidents, burning some, raping others, murdering the supposed ringleaders, letting some escape in the general mayhem.

Hours later in a New York television studio or print newsroom, an analyst explains these scenes as a regrettable abuse of human rights, of course, but in part an understandable response to the seizure of African land by white farmers several generations ago, and anyway terribly complicated, something to do with decades of entrenched hatreds, like Yugoslavia.

Pity the poor liberal American journalist. In his carefully objective way, he is so used to stories arriving in the already packaged form of a liberal psychodrama-oppressors, usually white and male; victims, generally black or brown; historical causation, centuries of racial and/or colonial oppression-that when one comes along outside this framework, he is reduced to a wary puzzlement.

In Zimbabwe the first victims of Mugabe's pogroms seemed to be the white tobacco farmers. White tobacco farmers! Merchants of cancer? Surely they couldn't be victims simply because they were being attacked and killed. Victimhood should not come that cheap. One was reminded of the exchange in the television sitcom Yes, Prime Minister when Sir Humphrey was seeking to persuade Jim Hacker not to give a bishopric to a moderately conservative clergyman:

"And then he's against oppression in Africa."

"But we're against that too."

"Yes, but he's against it when it's carried out by black governments as well as white ones."

"Oh, you mean he's a racist."

"Exactly, prime minister."

It was with some relief that reporters discovered that most of the victims of the gangs roaming through the Zim babwean bush were black farm workers. These promptly became the "real" victims of Mugabe. In an otherwise admirably hardheaded column in the London Times-coverage in the British press has been both more extensive and more considered than that in the American media-Simon Jenkins argued that to concentrate attention on the white farmers was "racist" since they were just Zimbabweans with white skins.

To be sure, black farm workers are the more numerous victims of the current attacks. Unlike white farmers, many of whom were born in Britain or have some sort of claim to British passports, they have "nowhere else to go" as a way of escaping Mugabe. We should realize that arranging relief flights and aid packages will do them no good at all. The only way to help them is either to get rid of Mugabe altogether or to limit his power to wreak violence on his people. Neither solution seems readily available soon.

But that should not be an excuse for failing to help the dictator's white victims in the meantime. Even white tobacco farmers can reasonably plead that "if you prick us, do we not bleed?"

One might argue, of course, that the failure of Western governments and the Western media to highlight or denounce Mugabe's pogroms in the early '80s against Matabele villages that supported his rival Joshua Nkomo showed a racist unconcern with black lives. Several thousand opposition supporters were then killed by Mugabe's government with the fraternal assistance of the North Korean army. But was racism really the reason that the West overlooked it? Surely it was a blinkered leftist desire not to give aid and comfort to white South Africa by legitimizing its fears that black government would be dictatorial, kleptocratic, and genocidal. As long as apartheid existed, the West took Sir Hum phrey's view that to oppose black oppression as well as white in Africa was, ahem, "racist." The technical term for such a bias is "anti-racism," which is a variety of racism rather than a rejection of it.

What about the beleaguered white farmers? What, for example, is their importance to Zimbabwe? They provide 40 percent of the country's exports; and 23 percent of developed land produces two-thirds of the country's food. Most observers agree that agricultural exports and productivity would suffer greatly if, under "land reform," the economically productive farms (owned by whites) were divided up into small holdings and distributed to their farm workers.

Why is that an irrelevant consideration? Easy: The farms are not going to be divided up into small holdings, but distributed intact to friends and political allies of President Mugabe-and to the president himself who, as Simon Jenkins has written, is so lacking in embarrassment that he even "wins" the state lottery. The present crisis is not about land reform but about political power. Mugabe is seeking both to intimidate his political opponents-some white farmers and many farm workers support the opposition-and to create a political issue that will win him support in the forthcoming election: namely, a racially tinged campaign to "restore" white-owned property to the veterans of a civil war that ended 20 years ago. Many of the "veterans," of course, are too young to have fought in the war.