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History lessons for Zimbabwe's opposition
David Moore and David Sanders,The Globe and Mail
April 17, 2008

View article on the Globe and Mail website

Only Robert Mugabe and his cronies benefit if Zimbabwe's deepening, desperate impasse remains. The concatenation of vote rigging, international intervention and talk of governments-in-exile merely buy time for the dictatorship.

As the regime's sell-by date lingers, Zimbabwe rots. Its whirling decline and rocketing repression bring more brutality, nastiness and pestilence to all but the parasitic elite. Any government of "national unity" - the South African and international community's mutual mirage - will fail unless it encompasses the popular will demonstrated by the Movement for Democratic Change's fourth victory since real electoral races began in 2000.

A unity government will only consolidate Zimbabwe's exchange-rate-rich bourgeoisie. Progressive elements of the MDC and civil society can either accept this blight or halt Mugabeism by other means. Some historical lessons might enable the means and ends to a better prospect.

Zimbabwe's political past tells us that Mr. Mugabe has answered challenges with repression for 32 years now. Back then, he was opposed by constellations resembling today's democratic impulses and radical projects. There were elements of civil society, younger generations, party-building efforts, radical democracy, pushes to national unity - even factions of the military. If the democrats against him now forget this history, they're myopic. If they remember its ideological and political elements but ignore the military, they are utopian. Coercion, consent and negotiation were wrapped up in the war of liberation. The Zimbabwean state's current heavy securitization means the military role still cannot be ignored.

In 1975, efforts by South Africa and Zambia to create a government-in-waiting of national unity among factions of Zimbabwe's national liberation movement (for which Mr. Mugabe was released from Rhodesia's prisons) failed. Zimbabwean African National Union national chairman Herbert Chitepo was assassinated and the party disintegrated.

A group of young Marxists filled the vacuum, restarting the liberation war. Resembling some of today's civil-society activists, they tried to unify liberation armies, establish innovative educational structures and work with progressive regional power-brokers. However, in 1976, Mr. Mugabe travelled to Mozambique to join the eastern flank of the liberation struggle. His move to the top culminated in his alliance with British and U.S. foreign policy makers who sought to stem the rise of Zimbabwean radicalism. By early 1977, those attempting to unify the armies of ZANU and ZAPU - the Zimbabwean African People's Union, led by Joshua Nkomo - were dumped in Mozambique's prisons at Mr. Mugabe's instigation. Hundreds of young supporters were brutally incarcerated in ZANU training camps.

Although these militarily and ideologically savvy young Turks trained thousands of recruits in the Tanzanian and Mozambican camps, they failed to make strong alliances with the core of their army's security forces. Mr. Mugabe brought the leaders of the military's old guard to his side after their release from Zambia's prisons, where they were held under suspicion of having murdered Mr. Chitepo. This was the undoing of the new united army, ZIPA. In 1978, more "dissident" cadres were tortured and imprisoned in Mozambique. After independence, an assault on ZAPU in Matabeleland by ZANU's notorious 5th Brigade logically followed. As many as 20,000 were killed between 1982 and 1986.

In 2000, ZIPA's core reappeared in the Zimbabwe Liberators' Platform, genuine war veterans countering the many posers enrolled in ZANU-PF's land-invasion strategy against the MDC. The veterans' initial activist inclinations were resurrected as they joined the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, which was temporarily paralyzed by secret police infiltrators.

Now back in action, it urged last week that parliament be immediately sworn in to oversee the electoral process's next stage. It called for genuine liberation war fighters and security commanders to "uphold their constitutional duty to respect the outcome of the election as the genuine sovereign expression of the popular will of Zimbabweans. To act otherwise would be a treasonable offence for which they will stand accountable and answerable jointly and severally."

This statement echoes ZIPA's recognition of the importance of the fusion of military, civil and political fronts. Now, civil society and party activists must look to the soldiers and police, most of whom are from the working and middle classes. They suffer along with their families, and most do not support Mr. Mugabe - the forces meting out the current repression are paramilitary and ragged "war vets," not regular troops.

It may be that peace-loving people, including intellectuals, will find it necessary to resist by force the violence of the Mugabe thugs. In any event, the task at hand is to persuade the fusion of progressive fronts to take forward the process begun in 1975.

Progressive Zimbabweans must make strategic alliances and maintain the mobilization. The next stage is just over the horizon.

*David Moore teaches politics and development studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and has been researching and writing on Zimbabwean politics since 1984.

*David Sanders, a Zimbabwean, heads the School of Public Health University of the Western Cape

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