The Zambian poll was a travesty but it provoked no western outrage
Jonathan Steele Friday January 18, 2002 The Guardian
It was a disgraceful election which European Union observers and local monitors severely censured. The media were controlled. Criticising the president risked criminal charges. The police regularly moved in to prevent opposition candidates campaigning and the vote-count was marked by irregularities. This sorry spectacle happened three weeks ago in a former British colony in southern Africa.
Statements of indignation from Jack Straw? Not a murmur. Furious coverage in Fleet Street? A few column inches on inside pages. Talk of "smart" sanctions to punish the men who stole the election? You must be joking.
So what is it that keeps Zambia, where this travesty of a poll was conducted, safe from the west's outrage-stirrers, unlike Zimbabwe? Is Zambia (known in colonial times as Northern Rhodesia) richer than Zimbabwe (once known as Southern Rhodesia) so that the west can turn a blind eye to a few electoral peccadilloes since Zambians are at least prospering economically? Unfortunately not. Zambia has seen a catastrophic decline in living standards in recent years with life expectancy down to 43. It has the distinction of being the only country where the mortality rate for the under-fives has gone up.
Is Zambia off Africa's tourist map and therefore of minimal interest to the European and American public? No. It shares the magnificent Victoria Falls with Zim babwe and its game parks rival those of its neighbour. Well then, is it that Zambia is no longer run by the quasi-socialist elite which took the colony to independence, so that Britain's post-imperial resentment has dissipated and the neo-liberal enforcers in the big international financial institutions find the new rulers acceptably pliant?
Now you're getting warmer. Kenneth Kaunda, who ruled Zambia for 27 years, lost power a decade ago and his successor, Frederick Chiluba, has gone along with World Bank demands to privatise the copper mines which used to be the main source of budget revenue and foreign exchange. In Zimbabwe, by contrast, Robert Mugabe, who shocked Whitehall by winning the first majority-rule election in 1980, is still in power. But is that enough to justify the astonishing difference in the attention which Zambia and Zimbabwe get in Britain?
All right, one last guess. White settlers? Is there still a large number of white landowners in Zimbabwe, unlike Zambia which never had many and the few who were there left long ago? Bingo. You've got it. The issue is racism. Zimbabwe's best land is still in white hands, and this provokes inordinate interest in Britain. Mugabe's approach to land reform has been inconsistent and volatile. His methods have often been violent and unlawful. But for largely racist reasons he had very little support from suc cessive British governments. They put a 10-year block on changes in the land tenure system in the constitution drawn up at independence, and have failed to provide much cash for the international fund which they promised to set up to buy the settlers out.
Racism pervades other aspects of Whitehall's approach. The government condemns Mugabe's increasing reliance on political repression but has done its utmost to reject black Zimbabweans who seek asylum here - so much so that even the Tories have challenged this policy from the left. The Home Office took a welcome decision this week to suspend deportations until after Zimbabwe's election but the assessment of Zimbabwe's problems which it gives to immigration adjudicators is flawed. Terence Ranger, Britain's leading academic on Zimbabwe, has pointed out that Home Office reports condemn the so-called war veterans for invading white-owned businesses while omitting the invasions of African- and Asian-owned businesses. They say Mugabe's legislation against dual citizenship is aimed at whites when the main victims will be black farm-workers in Zimbabwe who have connections with Malawi and Mozambique.
The good which Zambia and Zimbabwe share is that both have vibrant civic associations and a long tradition of protest, founded originally on the trade unions and additionally in Zimbabwe's case on the armed peasantry which fought the liberation war. In Zambia post-independence political change came to a head 10 years ago when a disparate coalition led by Chiluba, a former union leader, won the elections. His Movement for Multi-Party Democracy has many echoes in Zimbabwe's main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, and the fact that the MMD in Zambia took a rightward turn after gaining power, developed ideological splits, and disappointed its grassroots supporters by launching welfare and job cuts should be a warning to those who expect great things from the MDC in Zimbabwe.
But the option for change must always be protected. The strongest card which the MDC can play is that every country needs a chance for an alternation of power. Even if the choices facing governments are usually limited, change at the top lessens the corrosive dangers of corruption, stagnancy, and authoritarianism. In Zimbabwe the Mugabe regime has fallen prey to all these ills.
Some form of outside help is needed but peer group pressure is better than selective indignation and big-power bullying. This week's meeting of leaders of the Southern African Development Community did well to get Mugabe to agree to accredit local monitors in time for the elections in March. Zimbabwe's non-governmental and church-based activists did a tremendous job at the last elections and deserve encouragement this time too. Mugabe has also agreed to accept foreign observers. His promises have to be implemented but Zimbabwe should be treated in a regional context rather than as a battle fought by Britain and its allies in the EU and the Commonwealth. We do not expect Zimbabwe to tell EU states how to behave, and the same applies in reverse. Far better, therefore, that foreign observers come from countries other than Britain, the United States, and the EU.
However bad things are in Zimbabwe, they pale beside the problems in Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo which are racked by civil war and outside military interference. SADC leaders rightly devoted most of their time at this week's summit to those. Nevertheless, the degree of ruling-party violence and the scale of other forms of political intimidation in Zimbabwe are rising and have become greater now than at any time since the repression in Matabeleland in the mid-1980s. While violence in the 2000 election mainly targeted black farm-workers and rural activists, this time it is also aimed at urban workers. SADC needs to keep a close eye, but Britain and the EU should stand aside.