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Change Your Life! |
Parliamentary election signals white: Zimbabweans return to politics |
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June 24, 2000
NYATI, Zimbabwe (AP) - An unspoken compromise has governed Zimbabwe since it gained independence from white-minority rule: Whites could keep their farms, their businesses, their economic dominance, as long as they did not interfere with the ruling party's political dominance.
That agreement lasted nearly 20 years - until the economy began a devastating downward spiral that many whites blamed on government corruption and mismanagement.
Now, with parliamentary elections scheduled this weekend, many angry whites have plunged back into politics and put their considerable resources behind the Movement for Democratic Change, the first major opposition challenge to President Robert Mugabe's rule since independence in 1980.
"I was tired of our country being run down and I felt I could do something," said Denis Streak, a 50-year-old cattle rancher in Nyati, about 320 kilometers (200 miles) southwest of Harare.
Though not all whites support the opposition, and the vast majority of MDC leaders and their supporters are black, newly politicized whites have become an important component of the opposition group.
Streak, a former member of the national cricket team, had never cared about politics. But when the ruling party proposed a new constitution that would have further strengthened Mugabe's power, Streak, and many other whites, joined the MDC and campaigned against its passage.
The constitution's defeat in a February referendum stunned the government. Almost immediately afterward, thousands of armed ruling party militants began occupying white-owned farms, demanding the properties be seized and redistributed to landless blacks.
Mugabe agreed and signed a law, which had been rejected in the referendum, allowing the government to seize the farms without compensation.
He recently has begun demanding blacks have more control of mines and other businesses in a country where the 0.5 percent of the population that is white controls a vastly disproportionate amount of the economy.
Mugabe has seized on many whites' public support of the MDC to paint the party as a puppet of the whites and Britain, Zimbabwe's former colonial ruler.
"Zimbabwe will never be a colony again," reads a ruling party campaign slogan that touches a particularly raw nerve in this country.
With independence sweeping the continent in the 1960s, Ian Smith, the white prime minister of what was then Rhodesia, declared unilateral independence from Britain in an effort to ensure the continuation of white-minority rule here. Only in 1980 did the country emerge from 15 years of international isolation and guerrilla warfare as black-ruled Zimbabwe.
This history has made whites, whose population has since shrunk to 70,000 from 270,000, an easy scapegoat for the country's ills, Streak said.
"For 20 years they've been blaming everything on us," Streak said. "It's our fault, the 'no' vote (on the constitution). It's our fault there is no fuel. It's our fault there is no (hard currency)."
The white abandonment of politics after independence further isolated the minority from the rest of the country, said Jim Sinclair, a white farmer who lives near the town of Norton, 60 kilometers (40 miles) southwest of Harare.
"There was a feeling that whites were not participating in the country in general, and politics was a part of that," said Sinclair, 63.
However, with little previous opposition to the government, few people, black or white, took an active interest in politics, he said.
"What's energized people around the country, is that they are just poorer now than they've ever been," he said.
Most whites, however, have remained quiet, especially in the face of political violence that has killed more than 30 people, mainly opposition supporters, Sinclair said.
"People don't like to make themselves targets, and in the situation we have now of intimidation and violence no one wants to put their heads above the parapets unless they are really committed people," he said.
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