The rough treatment by Zimbabwean police of key figures of one faction of the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), received surprising media attention over the past two weeks. Curiously, British and American diplomats were seen delivering food to the injured opposition spokesmen at hospital. Why did the swollen face of MDC’s Morgan Tsvangirai appear all over the media – does it belong to the beleaguered next president of a regime about to be deposed? Unlikely. However, his press conference kicked off a series of events aimed bluntly at accelerating the destabilisation and isolation of Zimbabwe, with acknowledged US and UK support. Within hours of police breaking up his “prayer meeting” protest, Tsvangirai announced to a host of waiting microphones that his beating was the “tipping point in Zimbabwe’s history” and soon after, Zambian president Levy Mwanawasa called Zimbabwe a sinking Titanic. The world’s print, radio and TV media dutifully launched a debate over Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s ability to hold onto power. Many repeated Condoleezza Rice’s latest warnings and, echoing Tsvangirai himself, called for intensifying sanctions against Zimbabwe. Britain suggested that South Africa cut off all electrical power supply to Zimbabwe. US officials even proposed barring students from studying in the West. SADC (Southern African Development Community) leaders were persuaded to meet within the week to discuss greater pressures on Mugabe. This was followed by a not very successful two-day “stayaway” (shutdown) in Zimbabwe coordinated with a small demonstration by South Africa’s ANC-led trade union federation in Johannesburg.

According to British spokesmen, Tsvangirai is not a leading option for replacing Mugabe. In 1999 Western governments working directly and indirectly through newly-funded NGOs helped to launch his opposition alliance composed of white farmers, businessmen devoted to liberalisation, trade unionists and some sections of increasingly unhappy urban middle classes feeling the squeeze. But since its initial electoral burst of strength, the MDC has become weak and divided. Current British strategies seem to favour seeking to widen the political cracks within ZANU-PF itself (Zimbabwe African People’s Union – Patriotic Front), the party that has ruled since independence in 1980. In response, ZANU-PF has just endorsed Mugabe as its candidate for the 2008 presidential elections.

The crisis in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe is living through a severe economic (and financial) crisis. The imperialists themselves unleashed much of its dynamics some time ago, and they are actively continuing to fuel it today. This has led to a barely tenable economic situation. International loans have been blocked. Multinationals have suspended credit, preventing needed imports, and the resulting severe shortages include fuel and other basic inputs for agriculture. The Zimbabwean state is trying to work around the obstacles, grow more of its own food and develop new trade arrangements. Basics like oil, sugar, and bread are in short supply and the staple maize crop is expected to be very insufficient for 2007 after a relatively good season in 2006. Businessmen are ignoring price controls and profiting from spiralling inflation by pricing limited goods out of reach for most people. Some companies are closing and unemployment is rising rapidly. All this is creating a very difficult situation for the masses, especially the poor. Large numbers of people are leaving the country, primarily to much richer South Africa, to look for work. While through the press the imperialists wince at the suffering they are helping to cause, with the prospects of worse, their concerted, somewhat successful attempt has been to blame Mugabe’s government and “governance” for all that has happened.

Today’s political and economic crisis is not entirely made by the imperialists, but neither can it be separated from their continued domination of Zimbabwe since independence and their continually seeking better terms for this domination as the government’s reluctance and popular dissatisfaction grew over the past decade. Until the late 1990s Mugabe at the head of the ZANU-PF state went along with those relations. Its reform-based but non-revolutionary post-independence programme never fundamentally challenged them. Rupturing with imperialist domination would have meant relying on the masses to chart a different path, notably by breaking up the old settler-colonial landholding system and transforming the agrarian relations it rested upon. This political choice – and thus inability to try to solve things on a revolutionary basis – along with the effects of the economic crisis resulting from dependency and imperialist domination, produced growing frustration among ZANU-PF’s vast rural and land-hungry social base. It also increasingly fuelled organised opposition among the urban classes and privileged white strata, despite those forces’ initial support for hitching Zimbabwe’s development to the West and their relative disinterest in or opposition to land redistribution.

Why are the imperialist vultures again circling over Mugabe and Zimbabwe when in Africa alone there are numerous armed conflicts today killing hundreds and thousands, “authoritarian” states aplenty, astonishing poverty and malnutrition levels, child labour, remaining forms of slavery and corruption, all primarily a result of the rich countries’ domination and exploitation of the continent? Why are they so eager to remove Mugabe in particular, who began his rule as one of the model neo-colonial “liberators”, cooperating with the West the moment the agrarian war ended and independence agreements were on the table with Britain?

Zimbabwe’s relationship with the West has been strained for more than a decade. Some of the main developments triggering imperialist efforts to sharpen the crisis include Zimbabwe’s abandonment of IMF-imposed “structural adjustment” schemes, expropriation of large white landowners in a fast-track land resettlement programme, a “Look East” policy in terms of economic cooperation and trade, the regional and continental-level politics – particularly with sub-region powerhouse South Africa. Another irritant has been Mugabe’s friendship with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and flirtation with Iran and other pariah states. However, using an arsenal of charges about violations of human rights and the rule of law, untransparent elections and repressive policing – some legitimate and some exaggerated – the media onslaught has focused mostly on “bad governance” and the need to oust Mugabe from power, and to change ZANU-PF from within since the opposition alliance is in disarray.

Sparring with the West accelerates in the 1990s

Zimbabwe is an agricultural country. About 80 percent of the population lives in the countryside, while there are also several medium-sized urbanised areas in addition to the seat of centralised political power in the capital, Harare. Control over land and full independence from colonial Britain and the defeat of white settler colonial rule in Rhodesia was at the core of the peasant-based national war of liberation fought until 1979. Mugabe’s nationalist forces within ZANU-PF ended the bitter 15-year war by signing a sell-out settlement with the UK that continued to mortgage Zimbabwe’s land and economic development to imperialism in exchange for the right to rule. The liberation war was guided by revolutionary nationalist politics and ideology shared by two rival groups in the patriotic front made up of the pro-Soviet ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s Union) and ZANU. The latter group was more allied with Mao’s China, although both received weapons and training from the Soviet bloc. Those forces espousing a more revolutionary line and programme, inspired by Marx, Lenin and Mao and aiming for more radical transformation of society, were actively suppressed within the peasant army as pressures mounted on the nationalist leaders to settle. Mugabe, from the majority Shona ethnic group, was elected president of the joint independence ZANU-PF government, leaving scars among minority Ndebele supporters who tended to back ZAPU. (This cleavage was then exacerbated by his putting down what he considered a mutinous movement in Matabeleland in the mid-1980s, during which 20,000 people are said to have been killed.)

ZANU-PF inherited a land system in which white settler farmers (2% of the rural population in 1980) controlled over half of the best farming land, while blacks were crowded into densely-populated communal areas (essentially Bantustan-like reserves, but less ethnically-based than in South Africa). So for the rural black majority as a whole, the heart of the betrayal at independence was ZANU-PF’s agreement not to take any land from settler colonial white farmers for a period of 10 years. As a result, land reform relied only on the state buying land from willing sellers or those whites who had fled the country during the war. Soon after independence, poor peasants began to “invade” and “squat” on land they needed and along with rurally-based war veterans who had both made great sacrifices during the war, reacted angrily as white (and a few black) large commercial farmers continued to monopolise the arable land.

The structural adjustment imposed by imperialist financial institutions in the early 1990s was catastrophic for the Zimbabwean people. It is often argued that the current economic crisis stems from that period of rising prices, job losses and cuts in social programmes, the all-too-familiar effects of structural adjustment throughout the third world. The ZANU-PF government did carry out a number of important reforms. It achieved a very high literacy rate, built schools and clinics, and created a basically comfortable existence for the growing urban privileged classes. In the late 1990s, when state coffers were approaching empty and many of these gains were reversed or wearing thin, sections of these classes, along with trade unionists and a section of white farmers and Zimbabwean businessmen, became the base for the current opposition.

The highly mediatised jousting between UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and Mugabe a few years ago was therefore only the more visible part of an ongoing battle over Zimbabwe’s terms of subservience to imperialism. When the government made moves to acquire land with compensation – that they hoped would be funded primarily by Western governments – and to suspend the IMF structural adjustment programme in 1997, intervened in the Democratic Republic of the Congo war in 1998 and failed to pay a number of the country’s debts, the imperialists tightened the clamps, making debt repayment conditions more contingent on political criteria. Although the UK and US had provided some of their promised money for land reform over the years, they always used it as a carrot in response to Zimbabwe fulfilling conditions that essentially protected the existing land set-up and its 5,000 or so large white commercial farmers, who increasingly were producing higher profit export crops like tobacco and flowers, while turning their underused land over to game ranching. The imperialists began by implementing informal sanctions. This was followed by the UK’s formal suspension of exports of military materiel after 1998, and its refusal to financially back the state’s proposed step-up of land redistribution by gradually acquiring farms and compensating the white owners, many with British or dual citizenship (illegal in Zimbabwe). The IMF cut off borrowing in 1999, restored it in 2000 after the government agreed to its conditions to lift price controls and taxes on luxury items and free up foreign exchange circulation, then suspended loans again in 2001 after the land seizures, but officially because of Zimbabwe’s debt.

Land reform: 20 years late but a novelty (and provocation) in today’s world

The economic crisis of the 1990s caused further social unrest and growing demands for land, especially from the war vets and peasants, who were hit the hardest. Scattered land occupations became more organised and systematic, as did confrontations pitting war vets against Mugabe’s government, even though most voted for or were members of ZANU-PF. A series of militant land occupations by a range of rural social forces took the regime by surprise in 1998. The authorities chased the occupiers off the farms, promising to act, while still hoping money would come from international donors to finance land reform – that is for pay-outs to white farmers for the land and to set up new infrastructure and services for black farmers.

A half-hearted national referendum over central powers was held in February 2000. The opposition defeated it. This referendum included a clause giving the state the right to expropriate land that Mugabe added reluctantly only after multiple protest actions by war vets. Nevertheless, land occupations spread across the commercial farms of Zimbabwe like wildfire, involving not only the war vets and peasant farmers, but traditional chiefs and some local government officials as well, depending on the region. Parliamentary elections scheduled for a few months later undeniably helped to change the government’s stand from repressing occupations to gradually not only recognising them but supporting them. A handful of white farmers and several black farm workers were killed in the process. At the same time, it took several years for the state to fully take over the movement. After winning the June 2000 elections, the government launched its “fast-track” land reform a month later, expropriating very large white (and some black) farm owners and the many who had several farms. The reform compensated the former owners only for capital improvements, rather than the land itself. By 2004, the majority of land, nearly 10 million hectares mostly held by white commercial farmers, was transferred to 130,000 black families of different classes.

Thus, racially, landholding has been significantly changed, striking at one of the major pillars left over from settler colonialism. But the class basis of this shift has not mainly been “land to the tiller”. Workers on commercial farms, some of foreign origin, did not fare well at all. While about 10% of the landless and poor peasant families in the densely-populated communal areas with exhausted soil obtained well over half of the redistributed and subdivided farms in the form of small plots, the policy overall favours a small number of medium and larger commercially-oriented farmers. In addition, since the land was nationalised in 2005 and the problem of white ownership more or less settled, the rural black bourgeoisie is not particularly keen on pushing ahead to reduce inequalities in the countryside. The issue of foreign holdings of the large estates in the rich Eastern Highland area has also not been entirely resolved. With a practically bare cupboard, the state did not put nearly enough money into new infrastructure and inputs that new black farmers need to get started or to expand their operations, which along with the general effects of the crisis on the society, contributed to lower food production levels, aggravated by some periods of drought.

Great Britain in particular considered the expropriation of white settler farmers a provocation. In addition to the media attack – mounted together with the Rhodesian diaspora and growing urban middle class opposition to land reform and to Mugabe’s rule after 1999/2000 – the UK stepped up sanctions and outright punishments against Zimbabwe. Examples among many others include blocking food aid during some periods, imposing more conditions on World Bank and IMF loans, travel bans to European citadels for government diplomats, freezing officials’ assets and suspending Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth and other meetings like the Franco-African summit. As part of the destabilisation and isolation process, the US Congress passed the reactionary Democracy and Economic Recovery Act in 2001 to prevent any extension of credit to Zimbabwe and to release funds for new independent media, which flourished inside the country. Bush’s Global Fund barred money for AIDS drugs to Zimbabwe in 2004 for political reasons, although the country has one of the world’s highest rates of HIV/AIDS. These measures are completely bound up with the broader pressures exerted by the imperialist states that aim to help the government stumble so badly it can no longer stand.

The West seized on the growing difficulties it was instrumental in creating to hammer home a message that expropriation-based land reform in today’s world by regimes led by disobedient and “undemocratic rulers” like Mugabe can only bring disaster and suffering to the people. It is hard to say which is more hypocritical: the imperialists’ sudden posturing of concern for the plight of the Zimbabwe masses after decades of plunder, land theft, barbaric settler colonial rule and suppression of national sovereignty followed by more plunder, financial domination, etc.? Or their masking of their own hand in the whole spiral of economic punishment and crisis that has characterized Zimbabwe’s downward plunge in the 1990s and recent years? “When white farmers controlled agriculture” (that is, under conditions of “normal” economic dependence between southern Africa and the industrialised “North”), “Zimbabwe was the breadbasket of Africa”, so the articles go. “Now you can’t even grow enough maize to feed your people, let alone foreign-currency earners”, as though Zimbabwe’s problems exist completely in a vacuum, unconnected to the workings of globalisation.

“Looking East” and especially towards capitalist China

In the context of growing contention with China in Africa over raw materials and geo-strategic control, another policy that annoys the imperialists is the Zimbabwe government’s “Look East” strategy, based on shifting investments away from past Western trading partners to those in the East. At the top of the list is now-capitalist China, which for several years has been investing heavily in Africa, in exchange for badly-needed minerals, oil, timber and cotton. In Zimbabwe, China has offered better terms for extracting the country’s minerals – platinum, uranium, coal, gold and recently diamonds. It also invests in energy, transport, telecommunications, agriculture and other areas, to the extent that sceptics and Western hypocrites alike have questioned whether China has already been given control of strategic sectors. It has sold Zimbabwe buses, jet fighters, commercial airliners, and a host of other products. In addition this rising capitalist giant often co-finances projects with the Western banks – so it can hardly be argued that Zimbabwe is avoiding the grip and conditions of Western imperialism, even if the brokering for plunder is handled indirectly by Chinese “friends”.

Although Mugabe maintains cordial relations with Iran, Venezuela and other anti-Bush governments, unlike his friend Chavez, he does not even speak of “socialism”, however re-defined by Latin American populists today. His speech is much more rooted in bourgeois nationalist jargon with, at best, emphasis on building up the home market, greater state intervention and a restructuring with mining and agriculture at the centre. Despite his rhetorical appeal to strong existing anti-imperialist sentiments in Zimbabwe and Africa more generally, it is certainly clear that Bush and Blair’s current favourite target among African ruling circles has not changed paths to a revolutionary one. Far from it. However, his nationalist “Attitude” towards the West, his refusal to play the game on the imperialist-run field according to the normal rules governing neo-colonial relations, has set Zimbabwe increasingly on a collision course with the big powers in today’s world and their priorities. It is crashing into the hard-wall realities of 21st century imperialist domination and its logic, including the imperialists’ increasing unwillingness to tolerate even the lightweight, somewhat non-conformist Mugabes of this world. The Zimbabwean state says it is trying to hew a different path to economic independence by relying on lesser capitalist countries, who in appearance offer better terms of sale – or terms that can return money more rapidly to state coffers for national development. But this attempt to break away from the West is not breaking away from the laws of capitalist exploitation at all, and is certainly not guided by a revolutionary perspective that seeks to challenge all that by relying on the masses of people to uproot old social relations and thoroughly transform that society in their interest.

Regime change strategies

Mugabe, demonised as “liberator turned dictator” by the Western media, turned up the volume of the anti-imperialist and defence of national sovereignty parlance he took up with a vengeance since the upsurge of the war veterans’ movement for land and against his government in the late 1990s.

Many people among Zimbabwe’s highly politicised and educated population and much of Africa’s intelligentsia strongly resent the fact that neo-colonialism preaches Western-style democracy while continuing to rape Africa as before. Consequently, while the “way out” Zimbabwe is trying may not be at all clear (much less liberatory) to many of those who hate imperialism, the Western powers have found it more difficult than they imagined to turn the tide of public opinion against Mugabe, at least within Africa.

Inside Zimbabwe, the political situation is definitely polarised, but probably not to the extent or in the way that the UK, US and other Zimbabwe detractors would like. For this reason, the British and Americans in particular are floating out ways to accelerate the destabilisation process and pressures to get rid of Mugabe. Why do the police then clamp down with such a heavy hand, seemingly falling into the trap of stirring up further anti-government hostility and fear of repression? However minor compared to the wanton murder carried out on a world scale by the imperialists or even the bloody reactionary regimes in Africa, the West has cashed in on this in a big way, running repeated exposures of violence, beatings in police custody, media censorship, etc. Although African regimes routinely attack the urban poor by razing illegal shacks and stalls (Zambia did it last week), operation Murambatsvina (“restore order”) in June 2005 was particularly brutal and on a large-scale, provoking widespread denunciation and even a UN investigation.

South Africa’s electronic daily, the Mail & Guardian suggests the US and UK are actively building an opposition camp while continuing to press South African president Thabo Mbeki and other African leaders to definitively choose sides and turn up the heat on Mugabe. Some media question whether Mugabe is in total control. Still others claim that the recent beatings reflect dissidence already operating within the security forces, hinting that recent events may have been somewhat planned. The Zimbabwe state press, The Herald, wonders aloud whether the government can really completely control desires for retaliation against bombings and other violence perpetrated against the state and its institutions, which they blame the opposition parties for. Although US and UK diplomats remain in Harare, the BBC was long ago expelled for its inflammatory defence of white farmers during land redistribution, along with CNN and the UK Guardian (all of whom continue to vengefully report on Zimbabwe from the safety of Johannesburg’s upper-class white suburbs). The BBC recently announced that Western governments are drawing up so-called “principles of re-engagement”, ostensibly for a post-Mugabe Zimbabwe after hopefully engineering his exit through encouraging a dissident faction within ZANU-PF, which they consider the most likely departure scenario.

Despite the crisis the imperialists have done their best to encourage and the recent series of seemingly un-spontaneous events, British authorities reportedly don’t put much stock in a “civil explosion”. At the same time, article after article expresses disappointment with SADC leaders and Mbeki in particular for not agreeing to apply more pressure, and warn that all this political manoeuvring could end up reinforcing Mugabe’s (inflated) status as liberator still standing up to the imperialists among Africans, rather than condemning him. British Ambassador Andrew Pocock is under orders not to speak out publicly, the BBC admits, so as not to provide any further political ammunition for Mugabe supporters in this strident battle for public opinion. The president’s insults – inaugurating Blair toilets in his country, warning US Ambassador Christopher Dell he may wind up in “hell”, declaring “Bush can go hang”, etc., are part of his appeal. But it will take a lot more than that to break out of the imperialists’ grip