Mugabe should never have ruled Zimbabwe says former British Foreign Minister David Owen

Mugabe’s victory should have been no surprise to anyone. ZANU politically and ZANLA militarily had been building up strength steadily over the years. Initially Mugabe handled almost every aspect of his Prime Ministership in a spirit of reconciliation that surprised everyone including me. It was, in many respects, an even greater reconciliation than that which followed immediately after Mandela’s walk to freedom in South Africa. But there was one hurdle Mugabe could not personally surmount. Doran writes,

“While overtures to the whites were unambiguous, the signals given to ZAPU and other minority black parties were more equivocal and complex. This was a theatre whose language was poorly understood by Western observers, most of whom were impressed and distracted by Mugabe’s temperance towards the white community and its institutions. After discussions in the ZANU-PF central committee, Nkomo was offered the titular presidency.” It surprised nobody when Nkomo rejected it as it was widely seen as “a symbol of impotence among African liberation movements.”

Mugabe’s fatal decision, which was inherent in his deeply conflicted personality, was when he met with the North Korean leader, Kim Il-sung, at Tito’s funeral in Yugoslavia in May 1980. A meeting which the Korean Vice Premier, who visited Zimbabwe that July, told the Rhodesian Herald had “recorded a new chapter in the history of [bilateral] … relations” and that he had come to have further discussions when under the leadership of Mugabe the Zimbabwean people were “unfolding a dynamic struggle to consolidate their independence”.

Addressing ZANLA ex-combatants in August 1981, Mugabe announced the formation of 5 Brigade to be a “special unit” used to “deal with dissidents and any other trouble in the country”. It was to be trained and equipped by the North Koreans. Mnangagwa, who later in 2017 supplanted Mugabe as President, told the House of Assembly that 106 Korean instructors had arrived in Zimbabwe and would stay for 8-12 months. Zimbabwe’s own military intelligence in December 1981 reported that 5 Brigade was structurally ill-equipped for any serious military role and that “this Brigade to all intents and purposes non-integrated, has become a symbol of the One-Party state”.

Estimates of the total death toll attributed to the 5 Brigade’s operation in Gukurahundi in Matabeleland between 1983 and 1984 vary widely. The most accepted number is 20 000. The term genocide has also often been applied. Doran is careful, as befits his disciplined research, emphasising that “a charge and finding of genocide are dependent not only on extensive expert debate but also on a legal process”. The fact is that the world turned aside from putting its full weight behind a proper international investigation but Doran is clear that it was “motivated by political objectives and ethnopolitical animosity”.

“The depth of the attitudes and emotions that fed such actions were not possible – and nor are they comprehensible – without context of equal measure. In the same way, it was not possible to bring such a mindset to its logical conclusion during the formative years of the post-colonial nation-state without such events leaving an ineradicable mark on perpetrator, victim and nation. Yet the massive violence of the Gukurahundi and its proximity to independence do not on their own explain its defining character. Rather, the nature of the ideology itself was necessary: the vision that fed the Gukurahundi was not a tempestuous and untamed philosophy which impinged itself temporarily if devastatingly on the nation; the killings were instead an expression of a perverse ideal – of what ZANU-PF believed the people and their rulers were meant to be.”

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