Re-writing history
There was an excellent lunch this week at the CPS at which Peter Oborne led a discussion about Zimbabwe. He, to his credit, has bravely visited the stricken country on numerous occasions and reported on it in a calm and professional manner. Photographs which were taken on his most recent visit were unable to be reproduced because they were so horrifically graphic.
One guest talked of the hue and cry at the time of the forced removal of white farmers as being some sort of throwback to kith and kin sentiments. As the Shadow Minister at the time, I visited Zimbabwe a matter of days before the expulsions took place. We immediately saw what the devastating consequences of this policy would be: who would run the farms in a country where agriculture is so fundamentally important? It was because of this we raised the expulsions so urgently in the House of Commons. I am afraid that the Government did not then remotely understand the significance of what was happening. Our conversations with the South African government yielded nothing either. Of course our stance has been more than vindicated by the economic implosion which followed. Those highly productive farmers were greatly welcomed in other parts of Africa. A desirable potential policy of land reform had been hijacked for wholly political reasons.
Of course, we have to move on. Events are unfolding fast. But the notion that the chaos in Zimbabwe was a direct legacy of a colonial British administration a generation ago is simply insupportable. The terrible maelstrom of horror is unquestionably the product of Mugabe’s rule and the pusillanimous attitudes of some surrounding countries’ leaders.