Robert Mugabe's campaign of demolition is disgusting even members of his own regime. Pearson Mbalekwa, a former MP, resigned his position on Zanu-PF's central committee last Friday in protest at Mugabe's actions. He called the creation of 200,000 homeless "callous", "inhuman", and "barbaric", and disputed the regime's claims that it was an organised resettlement program planned long before the election, pointing out that
"If there was a plan, we wouldn't have people sleeping under trees or next to rivers."
I'm not sure whether he's fled the country yet, but it sounds like he'll probably need to.
So, is this good enough for the Maori Party, or is it all still a giant western media beat-up?
Mugabe has displaced 200,000 citizens by destroying their homes - that's 100,000 less than the city of Bombay displaced in a similar operation last year, and 300,000 less than the US-UK displaced when they razed Fallujah last year.
ReplyDeleteWhy, pray tell, has nobody called for the Lions to be banned from NZ, as a consequence of British actions in Iraq? Because, of course, the hysteria over Zimbabwe is not motivated by any genuine response to oppression and suffering there.
Zimbabwe has been singled out for a variety of reasons, but the most important one is the fact that Mugabe has, in his grotesquely distorted way, attacked the property of capitalists - big farmers, mainly - with long-standing links with Britain and NZ.
Mugabe's parody of land reform is very popular in South Africa, where the UK has huge investments and the black population is simmering after a decade of declining living standards caused the maintenance of economic apartheid by a parasitic black elite. In NZ, the ruling class frets about the possibility of a renewed outbreak of Maori occupations, as the 'Treaty process' is shown to be merely a vehicle for the advancement of a handful of Maori capitalists. No wonder the Maori Party smells racist hypocrisy.
Those who want to oppose Mugabe effectively should stop chasing after a bandwagon being driven by Blair, and instead try to learn something about the history of Zimbabwe, and the legacy of the Landcaster House agreement, which ensured the present crisis by attempting - like the phoney transition in South Africa, and the Treaty 'settlement' process here - to put a black elite in charge of an unmodified capitalist economy dominated by a white elite and foreign imperialists.