Zimbabwe (WW)

["Macdonald Stainsby" <mstainsby@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Apr. 27, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
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EDITORIAL: FOR THE OPPRESSED OF ZIMBABWE

The most important question regarding land redistribution
in Zimbabwe is: Who are the oppressed and who are the
oppressors?

Unless you start from this question, you can wind up
misled by what will certainly be an all-out effort by the
imperialist media to demonize the liberation war veterans
and Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe.

A little history is in order. From the end of the 19th
century--when Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Co. stole
the region from the Africans--until 1965, Zimbabwe was a
British colony called Southern Rhodesia. In 1965 right-wing
settlers declared "independence" and allied with apartheid
South Africa.

Guerrilla warfare by Black revolutionaries forced
concessions that led to African-governed independence in
1980. Mugabe, as the leader of that liberation struggle,
became president in 1980 and has remained in office since.

But the struggle ended in a compromise, and the settler
farmers still held all the best land that had been stolen
from the African people.

This land was supposed to be turned over to the
population, especially to the liberation fighters.
Thousands of their brothers and sisters had been
slaughtered by the racist settler government in the fight
to win the land. But 20 years after liberation the best
half of the farming land is still in the hands of 4,500
European settler farmers, while 10 million Africans farm
the more barren half.

So it is clear. British imperialism and the European
farmers are the oppressors. The African war veterans now
squatting on the land are the oppressed.

Anyone who is for the poor of the world, anyone who thinks
the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are
oppressive instruments, anyone who fights for civil rights
and for freedom, has to be on the side of the squatters and
against the settler-farmers and their backers in London and
Washington.

President Mugabe has spoken out in favor of the squatters
and has called the settler-farmers "the enemies of
Zimbabwe." If he stays consistent in his support of the
poor, the big-business media in Britain and the U.S. will
attack him in the same way they do Slobodan Milosevic,
Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein. They will make him out to
be evil because they want to intervene against him.

And they won't only attack Mugabe. They will also attack
the squatters and call them terrorists, just as the
slaveholders in the United States vilified those who led
slave revolts.

It is important, as a struggle starts, to know which side
you are on. In this struggle anyone fair will be on the
side of the liberation struggle veterans in Zimbabwe.

_______
Macdonald Stainsby
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