ROBERT: TERRORIST OR LIBERATOR?

PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe is an outlandish amalgam: One in whom is trapped two stark different beings who are forever involved in a fierce tussle for recognition; a character with a fundamental crack cutting across his entire being.


There is this tiny well meaning, homely, cultured, astute charming man, a cordial and jocose tea-serving gentleman who is a meticulous dresser. This is a fake Mugabe, a product of strict and religious teachings of an over-loving mother.

There is something forced about this character, epitomised by the irony of a rural herd-boy with love for a largely urban and aristocratic game of cricket. But this is the character which the Zimbabwean ruler is striving to promote and project always although he long ago lost ground to the real man.

The genuine Mugabe comes out naturally -- a volcanic, sabre-rattling and quarrelsome loner with a frosty inner weather ever more ready to fight and ‘crush’ than to chatter a discourse.

The latest round of state instigated violence add another link to a clear pattern of thuggish belligerence in the face of popular will; the kind that has been built carefully and nursed skilfully over a quarter of a century.

Essentially he is more of a terrorist than a liberator. A terrorist is a person who seeks to control a people through fear. Constantly he issues out a diet of threats which he occasionally commutes into reality in a calculated manner aimed at achieving devotion.

When a whole machinery of state apparatus (public media and the security services included) is complicit in violent action under the cover of a panoply of discredited rules, it is called state terrorism.

So a terrorist is a terrorist; it doesn’t matter whether they are a black African revolutionary or an Arab or a president.

In this regard President Mugabe scores excellently on the qualities of a terrorist.

Listen to him.

"We are Zanu PF, and please check our record when we are challenged," he thundered in the aftermath of the universal condemnation of the round of terror which saw brazen beatings of peaceful protestors and opposition politicians.

To see this "record" which he is proud of, and in order that we may establish a pattern, let's rewind to an earlier era.

"ZAPU and its leader (Joshua Nkomo) are like a cobra in the house. The only way to deal with a snake is to strike a crush its head," he once said.

That was at independence when Mugabe sounded the tone of what was to befall the opposition. His troops soon raped, killed and maimed their way across Matabeleland.

More was to come twenty years later during the violent land invasions.

"We must strike fear into the heart of the white man, our really enemy. Make him tremble!"

There it is in a nutshell. So nothing is done with a view to serve a particular constituency or delivering justice but everything is carried out with a cold, selfish determination to subdue and render somebody pathetic with a lingering feeling that they are in the jaws of danger.

For example, land is not redistributed in order that an imbalance may be corrected, but so that the white people may feel the reverse pain of loss; in order for them to feel and know that not only black people can bleed.

Just listen to the language: "strike fear", "crush", "tremble", and "enemy". The consistency in Mugabe’s terminology over a stretch of three decades establishes a pattern of heavy inclination towards violent action.

Not only is there a connection in the language, but also in the action taken against selected recipients of varying dosages of violence. Dealing with Nkomo entailed a ghastly project in brazen defiance of modern conscience. Death camps were erected across the Matabeleland and the Midlands regions where thousands were hacked into pieces before being thrown into the mineshafts. Countless others fled into exile.

As they say, what goes around comes around. This violence is meted against powerless unarmed civilians and against politicians seeking to exercise their basic rights enshrined in the national constitution, as well the farmers and their workers.

All these activities are not supposed to be seen as terror tactics. And even today, when one labels them as such, they are frowned upon as the term lost its real meaning when it was used by the colonial regime describing the freedom fighters.

We are supposed to believe that the victims of terror are "dissidents", "puppets" and "sell-outs" fronting colonial interests in Zimbabwe.

In all this, the supine public media is deployed to deny the carnage as it helps to promote the fake Mugabe -- a democratic gentleman and liberator who is tolerant of the opposition. Even people like Thabo Mbeki, Kenneth Kaunda and Frederick Chiluba have become victims of this propaganda drive.

To them, the mayhem in Zimbabwe is essentially of a racial nature with its roots in the colonial era finding currency in neo-imperialist interests. It doesn’t occur to them that Mugabe is an exponent of Zanu PF's sabre-rattling politics largely characterised by terror, selfishness, tribalism, bloodletting, vindictiveness and paranoia.

For the African leaders to say they "regret" the Zimbabwean situation is to suggest that there is war yet there isn’t anything like that. They should condemn state terrorism which is different from a war.

It is apparently clear that the educationist and liberator who opens school gates to all will proceed to ambush the graduates and "crush" them as they walk out of the classroom expressing their thoughts.

The gentleman who serves tea in his office will soon send his shock troops and thugs to bash his guests as they walk out. He will go on to bomb the newspapers and hurl petrol bombs at houses and claim that the opposition is responsible in order to justify repression.

This pride in the "record" of savagery stems from the fact that in its entire 44 years of existence, Zanu PF has been about violence, propaganda and less about liberation. Think of Gukurahundi, land invasions, Murambatsvina and the current wave of repression.

So when Mugabe boasts about his record, we should shudder and begin to gird our loins. He is today the only existing founder member of Zanu PF still in the thick of the things. Others have either died or have been pushed, leaving him to virtually seize control to become the memory and sole custodian and engineer of the pulverising machinery.

Nobody can dare oppose Mugabe openly or dare resign without the master’s agreement. Even ex-minister Nkosana Moyo had to skip the country and fax his resignation letter from South Africa because he understood what might have befallen him if he had resigned from within the borders: total humiliation, public denunciations and painful isolation such as befell Senator Dzikamai Mavhaire and ex-finance minister Simba Makoni.

There is ubiquitous fear spread all over from judiciary circles, cabinet, public sphere and the Church. The signs of a schism within Zanu PF should not delude anybody into imagining that fear has suddenly evaporated.

Kidnappings, disappearances and bashings in open space are commonplace.

Mthulisi Mathuthu is a New Zimbabwe.com columnist. He can be contacted at: thuthuma@yahoo.com

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