arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

But instead of acknowledging their own responsibilities and helping overcome
the legacy of the past, the British government and media - and their friends
in the white Commonwealth - are fostering a flagrantly partisan mythology
about the conflict in the country, while intervening in support of a
privileged white minority and international commercial interests.

Take the continued white monopolisation of Zimbabwe's best land, which is at
the heart of the upheavals and is routinely presented in Britain as a
spurious pretext to keep a despot in power.

In reality, the unequal distribution of land in Zimbabwe was one of the
major factors that inspired the rural-based liberation war against white
rule and has been a source of continual popular agitation ever since, as the
Government struggled to find a consensual way to transfer land.

My grandfather, Mhepo Mava-kire, used to farm on land which is now owned by
a commercial farmer. It was forcibly taken from the family after the Second World War
and handed to a white man. Many of my relatives died during the Zimbabwean liberation
war, trying to reclaim this land.

I joined Zanu-PF, which played the central role in the war, in the late 60s
and there was never any doubt in my mind that it was both a duty and an
honour to fight for that land.

Land reform is now a socio- economic and political imperative in Zimbabwe.
The land distribution programme of President Mugabe's Zanu-PF Government is
aimed at redressing gross inequalities to meet the needs of the landless,
the smallholders who want to venture into small-scale commercial farming and
indigenous citizens who have the resources to go into large-scale commercial
agriculture.

These are modest but worthwhile objectives.

The Western-backed Movement for Democratic Change opposition, by contrast,
is very reluctant to be drawn on how it would resolve the land question.
Although middle England continues to be fed the tale that nothing was done
about land until the MDC began to challenge Zanu-PF's power base, the truth
is that the white-dominated Commercial Farmers Union has fought the
Government's strategy for land distribution at every stage since the 80s.

The CFU and members of the defunct Rhodesia Front, strongly represented in
the MDC, could not care less who governs Zimbabwe as long as they can keep
the land and continue to live in the style to which they have become
accustomed.

The lack of money for land acquisition, cumbersome legal procedures required
by Britain in the independence negotiations and the withdrawal of
international donors in recent years - as well as the explosive political
restiveness and farm occupations - have all combined to force the Zimbabwean
Government to speed up resettlement.

But, of course, a process of land acquisition and resettlement of indigenous
landless people cuts across the networks that link the farmers, the
producers of agricultural inputs, the banks and insurance houses, all
dominated by the white minority. And this network also spreads into the
international capital arena.

Many poor Zimbabweans believe that the interests of this white network have
been allowed to overshadow the morally legitimate cry of the impoverished
and landless majority in post-colonial Zimba-bwe.

While I unreservedly condemn all forms of political violence and criminality
that have come to dominate the contemporary political culture of Zimbabwe,
violence is, in fact, being perpetrated by people with links to both sides
of the political divide.

In the last couple of weeks alone, three people have been killed by MDC
supporters, who also went on a rampage in Harare, petrol- bombing shops
belonging to Zanu-PF supporters. Senior MDC figures have been implicated
in the murder of a Zanu-PF official, Gibson Masarira, who was hacked to
death in front of his family.
And in Kwekwe, suspected MDC supporters burnt three Zanu-PF officials'
houses. None of these events has been reported in the British media.

Such MDC violence echoes the activities of the Rhodesian police and
notorious Selous Scouts in the late 70s - which is perhaps hardly surprising
since several are now leading lights in the MDC. It was the Selous Scouts who
killed refugees, men, women and children at Nyadzonia, Chimoio, Tembue,
Mkushi, Luangwa, and Solwezi, where they still lie buried in mass graves.

David Coltart, an MDC MP for Bulawayo South, was a prominent member of the
Rhodesian police and he and his bodyguard Simon Spooner - recently charged
with the murder of Cain Nkala, leader of the war veterans in Matabe-leland -
were attached to the Selous Scouts. The deputy national security adviser for the
MDC, who rose to the rank of sergeant in the Rhodesian police, was likewise a
handler of Selous Scouts operatives while based in Bulawayo.
Mike Auret, another MDC MP, was also a senior police officer.

You would never know from the way Zimbabwean politics is usually reported in
Britain that Zanu-PF supports a broadly social democratic programme, focused
on the empowerment of the landless and poor, and is opposed by supporters of
neo-liberal economic policies.

Among Zanu-PF's often overlooked achievements is a massive expansion in
education in the past 20 years - from one university to 14, and from a
handful of secondary schools to hundreds of sixth-form colleges.
Sadly, the enormous progress that had been made in public health has been
reversed by the HIV/Aids pandemic, which is reducing life expectancy.

Nevertheless, the Zimbabwean Government has constructed 456 health centres,
612 rural hospitals and 25 district hospitals, as well as providing one
provincial hospital in each of the country's eight provinces.
Eighty-five percent of Zimba-bwe's population are now within eight
kilometres of a health facility. The 25 percent coverage of immunisation at
independence has now been boosted to 92 percent, while antenatal coverage
has risen from 20 percent at independence to the present 89 percent.

The MDC has no corresponding programme for mass public health or education,
or rural electrification, or the economic empowerment of indigenous people.
The MDC remains silent when asked about what it will do with the more than
130000 families who have been allocated land through the fast-track process
if it wins the presidency. (Incidentally, beneficiaries of this process
include known members of MDC, not just "friends and cronies" of President
Mugabe.)

Contrary to the received wisdom in Britain, the best chance of completing
the  unfinished business of land reform, and for improvements in public
services, housing, education, clean water, support for people living with
illness and dying of Aids, lies with a President Mugabe victory in the
presidential elections.

The past few days of vigorous cross-party debate about the freedom of the
Press in Zimbabwe's parliament have shown what a vibrant democracy the
country in fact has, with Zanu-PF reflecting a broad range of political
allegiances.

The longer-term challenge Zanu-PF faces is to rethink itself, in the new
conditions its victory might help to bring about.

George Shire is an academic working for the Zimbabwe Open University and a
Zimbabwe liberation war veteran