WHAT’S GOOD FOR MUGABE IS GOOD FOR THE GANDERS

Friday’s declaration by the International Bar Association that Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe should not be allowed to elude international justice, should be extended to include United States President George W Bush for ordering the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. In turn, it should be extended to include any living former United Kingdom Prime Minister who presided over the retention by British farmers of rich agricultural land which had earlier been seized in Zimbabwe and Kenya by British farmers.

The recent ousting of the constitutionally elected head of the government of a Caricom country, Haiti, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, by the United States, as President Aristide has repeatedly charged, should also be looked into. What is good for the goose should be seen as equally good for the several ganders of the world. I merely seek to urge on the association that it extends its focus to other presidents and heads of government (incidentally not titular) who presided over injustices in many lands. And if it has not already done so, then the International Bar Association may wish to take a continuous look at the denial of human rights to the scores of persons the United States holds captive at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, under well known inhumane conditions, and without access to legal representation. The prisoners are manacled, shuffling around, virtually forgotten by history and long deprived of the right to a fair trial or, for that matter, any trial at all and the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The International Bar Association,  may wish, too, to deal with the issue of the US invasion of yet another Caricom country, Grenada, in October of 1983, in which a hospital was bombed and several patients killed and in which countless numbers of innocent Grenadians were also dispatched. And just in case the United States may wish to repeat its well known misrepresentation of events to the International Bar Association that it was invited by Caricom countries to invade Grenada I wish to point out, as I had pointed out on occasion before, that a former prime minister of one of the Caribbean countries involved had advised me early into the US invasion that the US had requested of them that they invite it to invade Grenada. I was at a function and had earlier been advised of the American duplicity. Perhaps, the association may be interested in looking into the possibility of a case being made out for reparations to be paid to countries which were victims of the vicious slave trade, enslavement, colonisation, barbaric treatment, the rape, murder and abduction of their people, the seizure of their lands, agricultural and mineral wealth and of a denial of their human rights for centuries. But I move on now from the International Bar Association to other matters.

Robert Mugabe and Zimbabwe, of which he is president, are products of an embittered past. Many persons and groups have spoken in severely critical terms of the “injustices” obtaining today in Zimbabwe. How many of them have criticised the United Kingdom and the white settler farmers, who according to K Eicher in “Zimbabwe’s Maize-based Green Revolution: Preconditions for Replication” published in World Development Volume 23, No 25, of May 1995 had seized the best agricultural land in Zimbabwe. This had been made possible through a succession of land ordinances “that guaranteed white economic domination and black poverty during the 90-year colonial period” (1890-1980). Eicher would further state that when Zimbabwe gained its political independence, half of all of the country’s arable land was controlled by approximately 5,000 farms owned by white settlers, while the other 50 per- cent was occupied by 700,000 indigenous farmers!

That clearly unjust state of affairs was not considered wrong by the United Kingdom, the United States of American and by several European countries, but when Mugabe sought, after independence, to right, to reverse the wrongs, the injustices of British colonialism, the US, the UK and Western Europe began making the utterly absurd claims that this was a violation of the white settlers’ human rights. I may not agree with all of what Mugabe has done and continues to do, but then I am not in his shoes. And when readers of this column understand that the British did everything possible, and more, to frustrate every Zimbabwean attempt at upward mobility, to lift themselves up and out of poverty and to build themselves economically, they will recognise why I cannot and will not side with the accursed imperialists.

In 1973, seven years before Zimbabwe achieved independence, E A Brett writing in his remarkable work, Colonialism and Underdevelopment in East Africa: The Politics of Economic Change, 1919-1939, would state: “It is important to emphasise that the failure of Africans to move upwards did not stem in any way from any of the attributes supposedly associated with “traditional values” — indeed the full power of the colonial state had to be brought in to eliminate small Asian and African middlemen who were competing only too effectively on the market where the opportunities existed. Their failure stemmed directly from the limits imposed on the free operation of the market system by the state....The nature of the colonial presence had precluded the development of authentic capitalist revolution in the rural sector and by so doing created a situation which inhibited long-term structural change in social and economic relationships.” When a generation of Jews seized lands in Palestine, in which neither they nor their ancestors had lived on for close to 2,000 years, and killed and maimed and denied even elementary human rights to Palestinians residing there, as had their forebears for almost 2,000 years, the United States and the West applauded.