3
the United Kingdom to compensate commercial farmers for their land, failing which the State
would be entitled to acquire these farms without compensation. This clause became the
cornerstone for the electoral campaigns for the next three years as well as for the highly
successful international campaign waged by Mugabe, a campaign that enabled him to return to
the Liberation War, colonialism, imperialism and globalisation.
As with all good strategies, the land problem was very simple and capable of extension into a
wide variety of other areas. It allowed for a wide variety of tactics to be employed in its pursuit,
and, above all, could be maintained over a very long period. This last was the greatest value of
the strategy: by changing the goals, refusing to allow its solution, and by dragging in an
increasing number of protagonists, the land problem could be used infinitely v. Scarcely surprising
that Mugabe had kept this problem in reserve for all the twenty years of his rule: it had been on
the stove quietly simmering, never wholly turned off or completely cooked vi.
The “land problem” thus had the possibility of being linked to other problems in very useful ways,
and the most important was its linkage to the war veterans, the Liberation War, and the colonial
past. For this allowed Mugabe to insert the militia programme right into the centre of the
election. Here it must be remembered that the war veterans had become deeply discredited in
1997 by the revelations of massive corruption in the pension awards under the War Victims
Compensation Fund. The Chidyausiku Commission produced huge public interest, and the
testimonies of those called to account before the Commission were undoubtedly humiliating to all
those who felt that there had been great honour in fighting for the liberation of the country from
colonial rule. When, after all the tackiness and humiliation of the Chidyausiku Commission
hearings, the war veterans began to assert themselves against the party, Mugabe solved the
problem in characteristic fashion: he paid them all a substantial pension. That the wage bill led
directly to the collapse of the Zimbabwe dollar in November 1997 and food riots the following
year was less serious than the binding of the war veterans to Mugabe directly. At the time, many
speculated that there would come a time when Mugabe would demand payment for his support.
Thus, there was little surprise when the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association
declared that its members would be campaigning for ZanuPF in the 2000 Parliamentary Election.
This perhaps was another indicator ahead of the Referendum that there was a strategy in the
offing for this important electionvii.
The primary targets of the “land reform” were ostensibly the white commercial farmers, but in
reality were the commercial farm workers in the three Mashonaland Provinces, since this group,
under the auspices of the General Agricultural and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe
(GPWUZ) had been extremely active under the NCA in the constitutional process. GAPWUZ
represented a substantial block of voters from amongst the 350,000 families working in
agriculture, and a very large proportion of these were found in the three Mashonaland Provinces.
Their votes cast in favour of the MDC would certainly have spelt defeat for ZanuPF in three
crucial Provinces, and hence it was essential that this threat be neutralized. There was not an
equivalent threat in the Matabeleland Provinces, where commercial agriculture was mostly
livestock rearing and the number of workers involved was considerably lower. There were
pockets of large numbers of farm workers down in the low veldt at Triangle and Chiredzi, and
these areas did become targets too.
The strategy, like all effective strategies, was supported by a highly effective marketing
campaign: the rhetoric of the Liberation War. The land issue was marketed as a liberation war, or
rather the unfinished business of the Liberation War. The enemies were those who held the land,
and coincidentally these were the “same people” against whom the original war had been fought.
The age-old colonial and imperialist powers supported these “people”, and the two had now
combined to set up a political party - the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) - to drive their
The Perpetrators of Gross Human Rights Violations in the current violence in Zimbabwe.