BEYOND TEARS

"Beyond Tears" - The preface by Bill Saidi of the Daily News

Cathy Buckle could easily have written this book from exile. After she had been driven out of her Stow Farm near Marondera, she could have packed her belongings and her family and headed for either South Africa, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia or New Zealand. These are solidly democratic Commonwealth countries who would have given her sanctuary.

She did not flee from the country of her birth. Her first book was a bold attempt to narrate the terrifying events that occurred in Zimbabwe after the 2000 constitutional referendum, the first in independent Zimbabwe. What followed the result of that referendum has been chronicled elsewhere. But Cathy Buckle's latest book has the immediacy of an eyewitness account. She does write with passion and emotion. It would take superhuman control of one's emotions to be able to write of the events since 2000 without a display of passion. People have been killed, most of them unarmed and innocent, men, women and children. Women have been raped, some by people young enough to be their children. Men have been bludgeoned to death for no other reason than that they have dared to raise their voices against a tyranny that nobody had foreseen at independence in 1980.

The promises of a land flowing with milk and honey have almost been dashed. A regime so wrapped up its own importance has unleashed a reign of terror which has left few sectors unscathed -- farmers, journalists, the clergy, trade unionists, lawyers, judges, politicians, bankers, business people, human rights activists, gays and lesbians, novelists, actors and playwrights. Add to that list ordinary people going about the business of trying to survive a political and economic system steeped in terror and you have a country teetering on the brink of civil war or total economic collapse.

It is important to remember that had the people not rejected the draft constitution proposed by President Mugabe's Zanu PF government in the referendum of February 2000 the bloodshed of the last two years would not have occurred.
Zanu PF had ruled the country for 20 years without so much as a whimper of protest from most of the people. Attempts had been made by courageous men and women of principle to remove the Zanu PF government from power through the ballot box. Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo had tried, but had failed. In the end, declaring he would not become another Jonas Savimbi, the Angolan rebel who led his Unita movement in a 27-year guerrilla war against the MPLA government, Nkomo left Zimbabwe. [end of sentence missing?]. After a brief stay in exile in the early 1980s, Nkomo returned to the country for which he had sacrificed the comforts of life, to sign a unity accord with Mugabe in 1987, ending a bloody civil war which had raged in Matabeleland and Midlands.

Mugabe consolidated his power by a constitutional amendment that made him an executive rather than a ceremonial president. The rest is history: as Edgar Tekere once protested, before he was kicked out of Zanu PF, 'democracy is in the intensive care unit'. In 1990, Tekere himself stood against Mugabe in the presidential election and lost. His performance was by no means lacklustre. In many ways, he showed that the beast that was Zanu PF could be destroyed in its lair.

Zanu PF had become a political beast, lashing out at voices of dissent, including the unions, the media and the clergy. By 2000, enough dissent had built up for the government to be forced to stage a constitutional referendum during which the people were to decide how they wanted to be governed in the future -- whether under the straitjacket Marxism-Leninism of Zanu PF or under another political system which could ensure their freedom from being butchered or imprisoned if they so much as whispered dissent against Zanu PF.

The people said No to Zanu PF, but particularly to Mugabe's continued presidency. Like me, Cathy Buckle must remember the moment of Mugabe's moment of utter humiliation with some relish. The giant had been reduced to a dwarf. All the quiet braggadocio which he displayed every time he appeared on TV had been dissipated by the rejection of his draft constitution by the people. There had been a revolution against his revolution, which had brought independence to Zimbabwe in 1980. The people had said No to his proposal to tie them hand and foot to his regime with its demand for total and unquestioning loyalty to, basically, the one-party system of government.

Cathy Buckle has catalogued with relative dispassion the brutality with which the so-called war veterans went about terrorising the commercial farmers and their workers. But in the whole country itself ordinary people felt the wrath of the rejection. By the time the June 2000 parliamentary elections came around, the country was totally polarised. As a journalist at the only independent newspaper in the country, the fledgling Daily News, I too felt the heat, along with such gallant journalists as Geoff Nyarota, the editor, and his deputy, Davison Maruziva. Our reporters and photographers bore the brunt of the wrath of the so-called war veterans. They were a ragtag group ostensibly faithful to the principles that had driven them to the struggle. But in reality it appeared that all they were after were the spoils from the seizure of the farms. They killed and raped with an impunity matched only by the government's utter refusal to rein them in.

But in the middle of all this mayhem, people of courage emerged and it is to these people that Zimbabwe might eventually owe its survival from the brutality of Mugabe's regime. The same people he has persecuted, including the likes of Cathy Buckle and other whites who have remained in the country and decided its future is worth fighting for, may turn the tide against the state terror unleashed on the country. International action in solidarity with the people has been essential. There are many who believe that the United States, the European Union, the Commonwealth and indeed the United Nations itself should have acted more decisively against the Mugabe regime. Smart sanctions have not really hurt the regime. Mugabe would be justified in borrowing a phrase used years ago by a British Member of Parliament to describe an attack by a political opponent as 'like being savaged by a butterfly'.

The people of Zimbabwe, reeling under the ravages of an economy run by a political party willing to squander every state cent on its own survival in power, are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. They have endured so much pain and suffering under this regime that real tough and unrelenting sanctions would not cow them, if they would eventually lead to the destruction of the regime, or its capitulation. As they have said in Shona many times Kusiri kufa ndekupi? (Would any other death be different from this?)

One misconception among some people around the world is that the conflict in Zimbabwe is utterly racial in nature. This is not necessarily true. What is true is that Mugabe and his party 'tried' in vain to whip up racial emotions to win their battle.

The last chapter of Cathy Buckle's book narrates her disappointment with people she had not expected to rejoice at the illegal seizure of farms from white commercial farms. For me, this made very depressing reading. But this is the truth. Mugabe has managed to convince some black Zimbabweans that as long as his action consists of depriving whites of property and giving it to the blacks, it can be justified on the grounds that this is an essential rectification of a colonial wrong -- white took from black and now black must take from white what he took from him.

Some quite intelligent blacks have been taken in by this ruse. Others, more perceptive, and the majority, have managed to see beyond this simplistic and bogus theory. What they know is the character of the regime, that it is so determined to remain in power, it will do absolutely anything to achieve this goal, if it means killing, raping and maiming as many people as are willing to throw themselves in its path towards its goal.

Such people know that, like all dictatorships in the past, this regime will fight to the last breath before it gives up power. What it needs to force it to capitulate is the people's absolute resistance to its every attempt to cow them. In their favour must be the history of the liberation struggle itself. Contrary to the attempts by Zanu PF to portray itself as having won the war entirely by itself, the people know that without their active support, in the cities and towns and in the villages, the freedom fighters would never have achieved the successes which later convinced the Smith regime that only dialogue would end the war. But it is true, as Cathy Buckle's last chapter shows poignantly, that there are people, black and white, quite willing to blithely ignore the lessons of history and sup with the devil in the forlorn hope that they too can benefit from the spoils.

People like Cathy Buckle, white, young and well-educated, could easily have decided to go with the flow, to let sleeping dogs lie, to do what they could to extract from the situation what they could and hope to continue their lives with the same luxury to which they were accustomed -- and to hell with the rest of the people. Fortunately for Zimbabwe, there are many like Cathy Buckle.

At the time of writing, the government had spoken of the final chapter in its land reform programme. By August 2002, there will be very few white people farming in this country. In July, most of them were expected to have ceased farming and to be confined to their homesteads on the farms. By August, they will be expected to have left the farms, leaving them to the settlers -- and heaven knows what fate for the future of agriculture in the country.

But the more immediate question must revolve around the political future of the country. The international community needs to maximise its sanctions against the regime. Travel restrictions are a cosmetic and utterly ineffective way of punishing Mugabe for claiming to have won a free and fair presidential election. It is time for the United Nations Security Council to be brought into the picture. There are provisions which can be used to suspend Zimbabwe's membership from the UN, and thus prevent him from using the UN to travel around the world as if he did not carry this political and highly contagious virus of despotism and brutality against his own people.

As a journalist working in Zimbabwe under a law which makes my profession a crime, I might be accused of being unfairly biased against the Mugabe regime. But I am forced to recall how journalism was during my early career, in the late 1950s. Yes, the regime then was racist, but the African Daily News, on which I cut my journalistic teeth beginning in 1957, enjoyed much more freedom than the Daily News does today in Zimbabwe.

It may sound like a horrible thing to say today, but most people in this country are not excited about their political independence as long as Zanu PF is in power. This party has made independence a symbol of black-on-black repression which has persuaded many blacks to believe that not all black leaders who led their countries to independence should be allowed to continue their leadership after independence. Was it not Nelson Mandela who said former liberation war leaders make the worst post-independence leaders in Africa? And would anyone in Zimbabwe today disagree with the observation by Desmond Tutu that Mugabe is a caricature of the African leader?

For the record, at the time of writing I had never met Cathy Buckle in person, but since we started publishing her column regularly I have come to respect her, not only as a woman who has endured and survived torture of the worst kind, but also as a commentator with compassion and the sharp wit to make the reading of her column enjoyable, even if the subject is one sad enough to bring tears to your eyes. I am confident that this, her second book on the terrible state of our country, will inspire all of us in Zimbabwe to believe that the future is not entirely lost yet. The milk and honey is bound to start flowing again soon.

BILL SAIDI, Assistant Editor and columnist, Daily News, Harare