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Paul R. Hollrah
When Liberals Care
October 6, 2008
On Tuesday
evening, October 11, 1978, I attended a reception at the International
Club in Washington, DC, a reception welcoming Prime Minister Ian Smith,
longtime leader of the white minority government in Rhodesia (now
Zimbabwe), and the Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole, described by one Washington
newspaper as "the most radical and dangerous of Rhodesia's black
nationalist leaders,” who had joined the Smith regime in designing a
peaceful transition to majority rule.
Smith and Sithole were
in Washington to announce that white Rhodesians had bowed to the
inevitable and were working with black leaders to bring an end to
apartheid. And since Ian Smith was politically "radioactive” outside
Rhodesia, he and Sithole were unusually accessible. Two friends and I
spent a good part of the evening seated at a table with Smith and
Sithole and were able to hear a firsthand account of political
developments in their country...a country torn by a bloody eight year
civil war and suffering painful economic hardships under U.S. and
British-led economic sanctions.
Although Smith had
agreed to end white minority rule and to hold free elections, he was not
a complete proponent of one-man, one-vote. He told a Washington
newspaper, "I have always believed in qualifications for the vote — a
kind of meritocracy, as opposed to democracy. I think it leads to better
government. I am critical of the system in which a man who is an
absolute ‘rotter,’ a crook, has the same say as the best man in your
land, the most brilliant man. I wonder whether democracy will survive
under those circumstances.”
Smith explained that
the settlement negotiated with moderate black leaders provided the white
minority with a strong position in the government for a period of years
until majority black rule could become fully functional. Whites were
guaranteed 28 seats in the 100-seat parliament for a period of 10 years
in order to give them confidence and to encourage them to remain in the
country; they were guaranteed
one-fourth of the cabinet appointments in the new
government; plus control of the police, army, civil service and the
judiciary.
What Smith and Sithole
could not understand was the reasoning behind the Carter
Administration’s support for the Marxist guerrillas, led by current
President Robert Mugabe, who refused to participate in free elections.
As we left the
International Club later that evening we found the streets outside the
building filled with a shouting, screaming mob. And as my companions and
I walked to a waiting taxi through a narrow cordon of DC police, their
arms linked together to prevent the mob from physically assaulting us,
one of the leftist demonstrators, a young man dressed in ragged
military-style khakis, made an end run around our police protectors,
fell to his knees on the sidewalk in front of us, and snapped our
photograph. As he did so, he hissed, "NOW WE’LL KNOW WHO YOU ARE... YOU
RACIST PIGS!”
I looked over at my
female companion, the chairman of a major federal regulatory agency, and
asked, "How does it feel to suddenly become a ‘racist pig?’ ”
Prime Minister Smith
and the Rev. Sithole returned to Rhodesia. The civil war came to an end
in 1979 and free elections were held. Robert Mugabe, the leader of the
Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), who had fought a guerilla war
against the Smith regime for many years from bases in Mozambique,
returned to a hero’s welcome.
He won the
general elections of 1980, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, white landowners
were driven from their lands, the farms were given to black Zimbabweans
who had no knowledge of economics or farming methods, and the rest is
history.
In its October 2, 2008
edition, the New York Times describes life in Robert Mugabe’s
Marxist paradise thirty years later. The Times reports, "Zimbabwe
is in the grip of one of the great hyperinflations in history,” a
staggering 40 million percent. It tells the story of the Moyo family,
who calculate the cost of goods by the number of days Rose Moyo must
stand in line at the bank to withdraw enough cash to buy them: one day
for a bar of soap; one day for a bag of salt; four days for a sack of
cornmeal.
According to western
economists, "Zimbabwe’s economic collapse is gaining velocity, radiating
instability into the heart of southern Africa. As the bankrupt
government prints ever more money, inflation has gone wild, rising from
1,000 percent in 2006, to 12,000 percent in 2007, to a figure so high
the government had to lop 10 zeros off the currency in August to keep
the nation’s calculators from being overwhelmed.”
The Times
reports, "Basic public services, already devastated by an exodus of
professionals in recent years, are breaking down on an even larger scale
as tens of thousands of teachers, nurses, garbage collectors, and
janitors have simply stopped reporting to their jobs because their
salaries... no longer cover the cost of taking the bus to work.
The people of Zimbabwe
know what happened to them. One man waiting in line at the bank,
Stanford Mafumera, a 35-year-old security guard who now sleeps under a
canopy in a mall because he can’t afford the bus fare to go home to his
family, blames the government’s land reform program He told the Times,
"It chased away the white commercial farmers who had made the country a
breadbasket... A lot of people got farms, but they can’t produce
anything and this is what is causing the poverty and hunger...”
According to the
Times, Zimbabwe’s economic unraveling began in 2000 with the
chaotic, often violent invasion of thousands of white-owned farms by
Mugabe and his supporters. The big farms now produce less than 1/10 the
corn they produced in the 1990s.
Now, Mr. Mafumera buys
a pack of cigarettes each day and spends his day selling them one by
one. He makes an extra 20 to 30 cents on each pack, but it was not
enough to take his 5-year-old daughter to the doctor recently when she
got diarrhea after drinking water from a polluted well.
And what of the
screaming, shouting leftists in the streets of Washington, DC in October
1978 who wanted to tear my friends and me limb from limb? Well, now that
they’ve shown the people of Zimbabwe how much they care, they’ve
probably gone off to help someone else. They can probably be found
waving "Change We Can Believe In” placards at the Obama campaign
rallies... just a bunch of tired old "hippies” trying to turn America
into another Zimbabwe. |
