During the Zimbabwe election campaign I wrote a letter to the British newspaper The Guardian. A supporter of the ruling ZANU-PF had written an article claiming that two friends of mine had been associated with the Selous Scouts – the elite Rhodesian army unit responsible for gross human rights violations in the 1970s. Both these people are prominent human rights activists (as well as opposition members of parliament) and the claims were demonstrably false.

I was simply writing to set the record straight, but nothing had prepared me for the deluge of emails that my letter would prompt. It was striking that everyone who wrote to me – bar one or two – made an automatic assumption about my political loyalties. Both ZANU-PF supporters and white supporters of the opposition MDC clearly jumped to a set of (wrong) conclusions about my reasons for writing. Everyone ignored the fact that I was defending my two friends from the horrendous allegation that they were Selous Scouts and instead reached the completely opposite conclusion that I was defending the Rhodesian security forces. They also drew a set of related inferences about my opposition to land reform, desire to reinstate colonial rule and closeness to the British Government.

I politely replied that my involvement with Zimbabwe began in the 1970s because I, as a socialist and trade unionist, opposed colonialism and the Selous Scouts and supported land reform. But I also opposed intimidation, election-rigging and telling lies about people. Some of my correspondents appeared genuinely confused by what they saw as a quite improbable conjunction of views.

This was all rather depressing testimony to the success of Robert Mugabe’s strategy of playing the anti-colonial card. The presidential election was as illegitimate as it is possible to imagine. Its outcome was influenced by disenfranchisement, manipulation of the electoral roll, violent intimidation, a government broadcasting monopoly and miscounting. All this has been documented. Yet Mugabe was still able to enlist a good number of African governments to endorse the result. This was achieved solely by presenting himself as the defender of African interests against whites and colonialists.

In Zimbabwe itself the anti-colonial card does not play quite so well, largely because ordinary people can see the reality. They are also bewildered by sheer ludicrousness of the supposed global conspiracy against Zimbabwe. According to the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation and the government-controlled Herald this conspiracy includes, in no particular order: Tony Blair, Tony Leon, former Selous Scouts, members of the House of Lords and their gay lovers, British sea captains blockading the port of Beira, “Terry Blanch” (presumably the khaki-clad Afrikaner neo-Nazi), Peter Tatchell, the BBC, George W. Bush, Israel (except when it is supplying riot gear to the Zimbabwe police) and myself. Actually the list is much, much longer and I am honestly making none of this up.

And what binds us all together, this motley crew of anti-Zimbabwe conspirators? Our skin colour, of course. I had the misfortune to be included on a list of supposed “terrorist apologists” because of something I wrote criticising official media coverage. There were seven of us on the list, five white and two black. But it was the five whites who were singled out, with the rider that we were “assisted by the likes of” the two black journalists. Even the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, is usually only described as being a tool of the conspirators. His crime during the liberation struggle is not that he was a Selous Scout, but merely that he did not fight. (Incidentally, those blacks who were in the Rhodesian security forces, such as ZANU-PF MP Philip Chiyangwa, are never mentioned in this context at all.) This has intriguing echoes of Ian Smith’s belief that “our Africans” were peaceable folk who were manipulated by “Communist terrorists”. Apparently Zimbabweans are still incapable of taking action on their own account – it’s just that the terrorist manipulators have changed.

This is to see Zimbabwe entirely through the prism of race. Why not, for a moment, remove the racial element and see what we are left with.

At independence in 1980 the new government adopted what was essentially a welfarist approach, providing considerable benefits for the people in areas such as health and education, while leaving the structure of economic power intact. In accordance with the pre-independence Lancaster House agreement there was no programme of genuine land reform and land resettlement was marginal. Both commercial and communal farmers benefited from significant real increases in the producer price of maize, while the commercial sector also saw a boost to its export earnings.

By the early 1990s, when the legal constraints on land reform were removed, several other things had happened. ZANU-PF had made considerable strides towards introducing a one-party state, notably by forcing the main opposition party into a merger. The army had massacred thousands of its supporters in Matabeleland. The government adopted a structural adjustment programme, which was causing widespread economic distress. And official corruption was becoming more extensive and more brazen.

Land acquisition was used not as a means to redress ancient injustices, but rather as a further means of enrichment for the party elite. There was an increasing amount of rhetoric about “indigenisation” of businesses. But genuine indigenous capitalists, such as Strive Masiyiwa of Econet, were obstructed bureaucratically because they came from outside the charmed political circle.

Opposition to all these developments was led by the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). Originally this had been under the leadership of Mugabe’s brother, who died mysteriously in the midst of a corruption scandal. Over the next few years the membership wrested control from the party appointees. By the 1990s what could be seen in Zimbabwe was a remarkable manifestation of class struggle, with the organised workers leading opposition to the government on a number of issues.

There was a misfortune and an irony in the success of the civic opposition in forcing a referendum on the constitutional issue in February 2000. If the government had not been defeated then, it is quite possible that the newly formed MDC would have won the legislative elections later that year. As it was, the referendum not only inflicted a psychological shock to the ruling party. It also laid bare the new political demography of Zimbabwe. The urban population was solidly against the government. So was Matabeleland, for reasons that are not hard to divine. But, most significantly, so were swathes of Mugabe’s Shona heartland. Until this point ruling party strategists had assumed that they had an automatic ethnic majority in perpetuity. Yet what had happened was that class politics had asserted itself. The anti-Mugabe rural votes were workers, very often unionised, on the massive commercial farms.

The wave of farm invasions that followed the referendum and that has continued ever since combined three elements. They were an attempt to mobilise anti-white sentiment and a supposedly visceral African attachment to the land. This plays well in Windhoek and Pretoria – less so in Harare, or even Bindura. Secondly, the farm invasions were a way of the political elite getting their hands on new economic assets. And thirdly, they would have the effect of displacing (and thereby disenfranchising) tens of thousands of farmworkers and their families.

And now, in the post-election phase, when international attention has moved elsewhere, it has become clear that this strategy was remarkably successful. Mugabe can rely on the support of his African “brothers” to soften the impact of any international sanctions. The allocation of farms has been a massive new source of patronage whereby Mugabe can reward the loyal. These are not, of course, primarily the “war veterans” who took over the farms in the first place, but party functionaries, government ministers, police and army officers, Mugabe’s family members, broadcasters, judges – all the heroes of what has been labelled, apparently without irony, the “third chimurenga”, or war of liberation.

And the rural workers – Zimbabweans who had the temerity to put class before tribe – have been scattered. Some estimates of internal displacement in Zimbabwe put the numbers as high as 1.5 million. Beyond question hundreds of thousands of people, mainly rural workers have been driven from their homes.

Zimbabwe faces a massive food crisis. Agricultural production, hardly surprisingly, is at an all-time low. This has coincided with famine in the sub-region. Communal farmers are likely to be spared the worst consequences, but it is the urban and rural working class – Mugabe’s opponents – who will be hardest hit. And to make matters worse, provision of food aid at the local level is often only available to those with a ZANU-PF card.

The irony of all this is that Mugabe’s land policy has to some extent brought about the alliance that it denounced. White commercial farmers, always politically quiescent, have been driven into the arms of the MDC as they have seen that they have no political alternative. The whites who have been politically active against Mugabe for years have not, by and large, been commercial farmers or former Selous Scouts, but those same people who opposed Ian Smith before independence. The influx of right-wing whites is not what the party needs if it is to represent the interests of its own constituency – but this because they are right-wing, not because they are white.

As the scale of the Zimbabwean disaster becomes clearer over the next few months, there will no doubt be louder calls for a humanitarian response. But another type of response is needed to. While farmworkers are forced from their homes, public sector workers such as teachers and health personnel are driven from their jobs. And the government promotes its own yellow union, Zimbabwe Federation of Trade Unions, at the expense of the ZCTU. Zimbabweans need solidarity, especially from African trade unions, just as much as they need food aid.

Richard Carver is director of Oxford Media Research.