« Icebergs and sunsets | Main | Back again »
March 30, 2005
And you thought our elections were bad. . .
You don't hear about it on the news much, but Zimbabwe is on the eve of a new era in its political life. Tomorrow Zimbabwe will host a national election pitting President Mugabe against the opposition MDC party, which bills itself as the "Party of the Poor". Zimbabwe has been a cauldron of unrest and shady dealings the last few years as it attempts to overcome mass corruption, horrific unemployment (close to 70%) and some shady dealings whereby the government has violently seized commercial farms, then chopped them up and distributed the land to "peasants" who actually turned out more often than not to be Mugabe supporters. The breakup of the commercial farms has created an agricultural disaster in the region. It's simple agricultural science that says once you begin to produce on a commercial farm, the processes (fertilization, irrigation, harvesting etc.) drastically change the way the land and crops behave. Simply redrawing property lines and trying to grow multiple crops on the same plot just doesn't work. The land's chemical properties have been changed as years upon years of commercial production have effectively "scrubbed" the soil of unwanted chemicals, nutrients, minerals, insects and other things that aren't part of the commercial production. When you go in and try to plant other domesticated crops without regard to what the soil has been through, you're just asking for massive crop failure, and that's exactly what has happened. In just over five years, Mugabe has turned a nation from the verge of self-sufficiency to one of abject poverty and borderline starvation (something Venezuela should take note of). All that's well and bad though, lets look at the election.
Mugabe says that an opposition victory in the election "will not be tolerated". This is not the statement of a man confident of victory, in fact it is more the statement of a man who's resigned himself to defeat and who is planning to invalidate the election results if things to not go his way. He has bullied opponents in the past and driven opposition parties underground when things did not go his way, and it looks like he is telegraphing that same intent again.
The EU and the British especially are looking closely at these elections, for the EU, it's another European colony in crisis and they feel the need to "put it on the adgenda" if Mugabe doesn't win a majority and somehow puts down the democratic opposition. For the Brits, it's a little more complicated, most of the farms that have been seized in the past few years have been operated by British companies. Britain hopes that with a Democratic government installed, they can possibly reclaim some of these farms and put them back into operation as viable agricultural production entities rather than the dustbowls they are developing into now. While there is some case to be made of British opportunism, these commerical farms were feeding the people, the re-distributed farms are failing miserably and not putting them back on track soon will lead to widespread famine in the region.
One can't predict what will happen over there tomorrow in toto, but we can be sure of a few things. First, that it won't be major news, although it should be, second, that it'll be bloody no matter how it goes, and third, no matter what the outcome, someone will somehow see fit to make sure that Bush gets blamed for causing this upheaval somehow. I know that last one may seem a stretch, but mark my words and we'll revisit this in a week or so.
Norm has a great write up about these elections that I found while searching on this topic. He's focused on the MDC and their efforts to ensure a fair election. It's a good read.
--Jason
UPDATE: If you don't go read Norm's post, be sure to check out this article he links to from the Scotsman.
Posted by JasonColeman at March 30, 2005 3:43 PM
