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Inside Zimbabwe: A Special Report by Sheri Fink
Sheri Fink, The World
August, 2006

http://www.theworld.org/worldfeature/zimbabwe/zimbabwe.shtml

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The southern African nation of Zimbabwe has become an international pariah. Its president, Robert Mugabe, has held onto power since the country's independence in 1980. His government is widely condemned for brutality, corruption and mismanagement of the economy. Many Zimbabweans have fled to other countries or have backed an opposition political movement. But others argue that the outside world has misunderstood their country. They say the nation's woes -- and its demonization -- are relics of colonialism. Correspondent Sheri Fink has this rare look inside Zimbabwe from the perspective of one of its defenders.

Transcript of Sheri's Report
Zimbabwe's current Parliamentary session opened last month with pomp and circumstance and the country's British heritage on display.

President Mugabe arrived in a Rolls Royce to the cannon thunder of a 21-gun salute. Four fighter jets zoomed overhead in tight formation. Standing in the crowd, enjoying the show, was a Lieutenant-Colonel in Zimbabwe's Special Air Services. He calls himself Carlos.

It's not his real name. He's asked me to keep that secret because he takes part in covert operations. Carlos is his nom de guerre, the nickname he took when he fought to liberate his country from white rule. That was back in the late 1970s. Carlos was just a teenager then, and the country was still known as Rhodesia. It was a British colony whose white leaders refused to accept a transition to native African majority rule. Carlos joined the guerillas to avenge the death of his mother. She was killed by Rhodesian soldiers.

Carlos: "These guys came and opened fire on our houses. My mother was shot there. My father was taken prisoner and interrogated through electric shocks."

Carlos's friends view him as a revolutionary hero. They call him Comrade Carlos, or the Godfather. He asks them to call him that.

Carlos: "I'm proud to have fought for this country. And I'm proud to have been born at a time that afforded me the opportunity to liberate my people."

And he remains proud of his country, despite the way the Western world views it. In recent years, stories in Western news outlets have described Zimbabwe as a nation imploding -- a place of violence, corruption, and economic malfeasance. Many in the West who remember Rhodesia as a lush and prosperous country shake their heads at the seemingly crumbling nation that has taken its place. But Carlos complains that people in America and Europe don't have the full story. That's partly because the government rarely gives Western journalists permission to report here. So Carlos has offered to help me enter Zimbabwe and see the country for myself, with no restrictions on where I go or who I meet, regardless of whether their opinions differ from his.

Carlos: "You want to talk to them, you can talk to them in my absence. You will choose. No preconceived ideas."

<Sound of sports club>

First stop, an exclusive but fading sports club in the nation's capital, Harare. Here, middle aged men with rosy cheeks and pot bellies drink and smoke on a week-day afternoon. And some wax nostalgic for the days of colonialism. Take Doc, for example, who doesn't want his real name used.

Doc: "To say that colonialism was bad, yes, it was bad in lots of ways, but there wasn't ANYTHING here before colonialism. If there hadn't been colonialism, well, ya, we might be looking on whether we should make our wheel round or triangular at this stage. "

Statements like that, suggesting that Zimbabwe wouldn't have invented the wheel without colonialism, anger many black Zimbabweans. They say the superior attitudes of whites from colonial days to the present have fueled the country's continuing troubles.

Carlos brings me to meet his friend Andy Brown, a famous musician.

Brown: "The Rhodesians, when they say to you, "Ooh, look what we have done." I swear, they never lifted a finger to build this house, they never lifted a finger to build a road, they never lifted a finger to do anything. We did it! "

Black Zimbabweans also labored on the farms that fed the nation. Yet most of those farms were owned by a small white minority, even after independence. Many black Zimbabweans wanted to reclaim the land that was taken from their forefathers. And six years ago President Mugabe gave them the go-ahead. He authorized the acquisition of thousands of farms. Twenty-seven million acres changed hands in only three years.

Andy Brown has written songs to support the land campaign. His latest song encourages indigenous people around the world to follow Zimbabwe's lead and re-possess the land of their ancestors.

Music: "The land of your forefathers has always been yours..."

White farmers in Zimbabwe decried the campaign to rob them of their farms and livelihoods and deny them compensation. They believed that Mugabe had made them scapegoats for the country's problems. Some farmers gave terrifying accounts of being kidnapped and injured as unruly gangs forced them from their land.

Musician Andy Brown took part in one of those actions, on a farm called "Little England." He and a group of men physically removed the white farmer.

Brown: "He said he was not leaving. So he held onto his fridge in the kitchen. He held the fridge. So being one man holding a fridge, and being many of us, so, we, we pulled him, obviously, we pulled him. And, ya, we gave him a couple of smacks. And we tied him onto the van and we helped him to the road. "

They dragged him to the road. And made him chant a ruling party slogan. Brown was arrested, because land seizures were supposed to be nonviolent. But he says he's proud that his actions paved the way for hundreds of black families to settle on the land. What he didn't know was that four years later, police would force those families off the property. The land would be returned to commercial farming, reportedly for the financial benefit of senior politicians. It's a pattern that's been repeated across the country. Often those with political connections, not the poor, have ended up with the choicest farms. Carlos, the Lt. Col., offers to take me to a prime tobacco farm once owned by a white family. It now belongs to a friend of his. We drive out of Harare, through amber grasslands and into fertile hills.

Carlos: "Ya, we're heading to Maryland Farm. We're going to see the commissioner anti-corruption commission, Mr. Johannes Tomana. "

We arrive at the farm of the anti-corruption commissioner, Johannes Tomana. And one of the first things Carlos notices is Tomana's new Mercedes Benz.

Carlos: "He's a lawyer, he likes slick style, you know."

The Mercedes is one of nine luxury cars the government gave to the members of its anti-corruption commission. An opposition newspaper has criticized the government for showering such favors on the commission, while the country is starved for foreign currency.

But Carlos defends the government's actions. He says perks like fancy cars help attract talented people.

Carlos: "Like we say you pay peanuts you get monkeys."

The anti-corruption commissioner, Johannes Tomana, says he didn't always have the good things in life. As a young child, he worked on a white-owned farm, removing worms from tobacco crops.

Tomana: "We were as small kids deployed to pick these things."

Tomana swore that it would be different for his children. He and his family now possess the gracious modern farmhouse that Tomana took from its former white owners. And they have their own workers to tend the tobacco and corn growing in the fields. Two years into Tomana's tenure, some of these workers live in a dark, rat-infested tobacco curing barn, sectioned off with bedsheets.

That's where I found Tomana's foreman, Charles Takawaya.

Takawaya: "This is my home, but no light in it."
Sheri Fink: "I have a flashlight."
Takawaya:"OK, you can use it."
Sheri Fink: "How do you make do with no light; do you have a lantern or something?"
Takawaya: "I just use some matches, but by now I don't have some matches."

No light and no matches, but he says he believes his situation will improve. Under the former white owner here, farm workers lived in mud huts with no running water, no electricity, no toilets. The new black owner, Tomana, is building brick houses for his farm workers.

Tomana says the U.S. and other Western countries should be supporting efforts like his to build a better future for the people of Zimbabwe. But instead, they've cut off development aid and are supporting an opposition political party simply because, as Tomana puts it, Zimbabwe violated the property rights of a few thousand whites. But where, Tomana asks, were the protests of Western countries when he and his black countrymen suffered the abuses of colonialism?

Tomana: "What happened when the very fabric of my existence was actually broken? Where were you with such noble kind of language, such noble spirit? Where were you? Now I assert my right. Now the issues of the niceties of good governance and the law must come into play. Goodness! Those are double standards! "

Mutetwa: "I have a problem with somebody saying because the colonialists were bad we're entitled to be bad, because that contradicts the whole essence of having fought colonialism. "

Beatrice Mutetwa is a human rights lawyer in Harare.

Mutetwa: "We are basically taking ourselves way back to say that injustice is OK if it is committed by our own, but it is not OK if it is committed by a white man."

Mutetwa's views are not popular with those in power here. She's been followed and beaten up many times. She's fought to free journalists who were jailed for criticizing the regime. And her colleagues went to court to challenge the government's latest campaign to remove people from their land-in this case not white farmers, but poor urban blacks.

Last year, the government's slum-clearance program removed hundreds of thousands from their dwellings in the middle of winter. Mutetwa says these injustices and others persist because the government has done away with most checks on its power.

Mutetwa: "The government is able to buy its way to certain people. These people get incredible perks. You know, all judges get spanking new Mercedes Benzes. Of course you'll do everything the government wants to continue driving that Mercedes Benz. The most difficult thing to do in life is to go down, so you want to go up."

But the ruling party retains supporters even among men who wash those luxury cars by hand in the parking lot of a small strip mall.

<Sound of Carwash>

Carlos, the Lt. Colonel, brings his own 10-year-old Mercedes here. He shows the washers a flattering magazine profile about President Robert Mugabe, and that's enough to unleash a torrent of praise from a car washer named Lovemore Nkoni. Nkoni says he's suffered in the recent economic downturn. But he's still better off than under colonialism. Back then, he says, he couldn't even walk freely in the capital.

Lovemore: "Right now, because of him, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, our president, we have taken our land back, and they're putting on sanctions and stuff, but still we are still surviving, though we are crying, we are crying, fine. But we are still managing to do, why? Because now we own our land. "

Carlos gives Lovemore a small amount of money for washing his car. And gets back into his now-gleaming white Mercedes. He drives through Harare and points with pride to its orderly streets, upscale shopping malls and desegregated neighborhoods where once only whites could live.

Zimbabwe is a nation of contradictions. Its regime has shut down newspapers and brutalized journalists, but Zimbabweans still have access to opposing views--Papers criticizing the president and ruling party are sold openly on the streets. And although much of the population is bitter about colonialism, they're also proud of being tolerant enough to have allowed the country's last white supremacist ruler to retire here in lavish comfort. Carlos insists there's still a lot of good in Zimbabwe, yet the Western world seems obsessed with the supposed bad behavior of one man, the country's leader, President Mugabe.

Carlos: "Mugabe's not as important as Zimbabwe. Mugabe's just an individual. Zimbabwe as a country will always be there, even after Mugabe has died. "

This might be viewed as a bold and dangerous statement in Zimbabwe. It's illegal to publicly criticize the president, and at just this moment, the motor of Carlos's Mercedes eerily cuts out.

Carlos: "Ah, what's happening."

He suspects the car has been damaged by the substandard fuel he has to buy on the black market. Eventually Carlos will give up trying to get it running. He'll walk to his destination. He'll leave the old European car behind.

For the World, I'm Sheri Fink, Harare, Zimbabwe

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