Review of Pradip N. Thomas and Zaharom Nain (eds), Who owns the media? Global Trends and Local Resistances, Southbound (Penang), Zed Books (London), World Association of Christian Communications.

A couple of years ago I was threatened with arrest as I tried to go through the turnstiles at a major sporting event in South Africa. My offence was that I carrying a bottle of soft drink that was not produced by the company sponsoring the event, the US corporation Pepsico.

So what does this have to do with the media? In our globalised world, absolutely everything.

The event was the cricket World Cup, a tournament most enthusiastically supported in the Indian sub-continent. At the time, Pepsi did not even market its products in South Africa (although they were available at an exorbitant price inside the stadium). The issue was advertising. Pepsi’s sponsorship was an opportunity for it to promote its product to a billion thirsty, cricket-loving Indians. I, with my non-approved soft drink – actually it was just orange juice diluted with Cape Town tap water – might attempt ‘ambush marketing’, displaying the forbidden concoction to the cameras (and presumably shaking the Pepsi empire to its foundations).

The episode was absurd, of course. But it tells us something about how the media work – and that Africa is not immune to these global trends. Progressive media analysts are sometimes fond of talking about the “commoditisation” of news and other media content. But it is really we, the audience, who are the commodity. In this example, one US company, News Corporation, was engaged in a contract with another US corporation, Pepsico, in relation to an event taking place in Africa. News Corp, the broadcaster, was selling Pepsi its predominantly Indian audience.

The timeliness of this book lies in the fact that the rapid consolidation of media ownership into the hands of a small number of corporations – mainly US-based – has been one of the most striking aspects of globalisation. The extent of the reach of these corporations can hardly be exaggerated. Even as I write these dissenting words, I am using software developed by one of these global media corporations. My message will be transmitted using cable or airwaves owned by these same corporations.

The rapidity of these developments is important to note, especially for those readers who may feel that corporate control of the media is an issue of marginal significance for Africa. As Robert McChesney points out in his chapter, none of the nine corporations that dominate the global media market existed in their present form 15 years ago.

When it comes to the question of media ownership, African journalists and media freedom activists typically only look at one dimension: state ownership of the broadcast media. (This is a mea culpa; I was for some years head of the Africa programme at a freedom of expression organisation, where we did precisely that.) Fifteen years ago, as those global media corporations were beginning to form, this was indeed the dominant question in Africa. How could we wrest control of public media from the government of the day? How could we create space for the private media?

The second task has been achieved more successfully than the first. There is still a need to develop a genuine public service model of broadcasting in Africa. But at the same time, the question of who owns the private media (sometimes erroneously described as the “independent media”) becomes increasingly urgent.

This is addressed from slightly different perspectives in three good chapters on Africa in this book. William Hueva, Keyan Tomaselli and Ruth Teer-Tomaselli review the political economy of the media in Southern Africa since 1990. This focuses, inevitably, on the role of South African corporate media in the sub-region.

Mohamed Musa and Jubril Mohammed have written a largely historical review of the development of the media in Nigeria. This provides textured detail on the impact that ownership has on the political character and content of the media.

Francis Nyamnjoh attempts to situate media ownership issues in Africa in the context of globalisation. He concludes that ownership still mainly rests with governments or global corporations, with local capital squeezed between the two. He does not further explore those situations – such as Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa – where local capitalist ownership of the media is far more developed, not necessarily to beneficial effect. His conclusion, however, is encouraging. He stresses the skill of Africans in developing alternative means of political communication, outside the technological and ownership constraints of the modern media sector.

However, those interested in future trajectories of the African media would be well advised to read some of the other chapters in this book. Slavko Splichal’s review of the media in East and Central Europe, for example, presents a picture that may be close to the Africa of a decade from now. Government-controlled state media remain major players. Alongside them are corporate media owned by members of the oligarchy. These owners are either political players using the media to bolster their position or capitalists with political ambitions. Does this media landscape mean that ordinary East Europeans receive good, accurate information through the media? My own recent research in two former Soviet republics suggests a decisive No.

Splichal calls this phenomenon Italianisation – referring, of course, to the ascent of Silvio Berlusconi, media capitalist and now Prime Minister. Might Italianisation be what the future holds in some African countries? It is certainly possible and underlines the need for some hard thinking about the alternatives.

? Richard Carver is director of Oxford Media Research.
Please send comments to [email protected]

I first met Barbara Harrell-Bond in the early 1980s. I was a researcher who knew something about human rights, but very little about refugees (the two topics of this book). And I was working with Ugandan refugees in Kenya, the two countries studied in detail here.

So, I did not know, for example, that officials of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees were not meant to be part of the status determination procedure in Kenya – rather they should be acting as advocates for refugees. My ignorance was perhaps excusable, since no one at UNHCR knew either. On the evidence of this book, things are just as bad 20 years on. And the status determination procedure is just the start of it.

Barbara dealt with my large areas of ignorance thoroughly and pretty impatiently, which is what she is like. In this book, however, the entire establishment of the refugee industry gets the treatment.

Faced with the task of reviewing a book as good as this one, the contrarian immediately goes in search of what is wrong with it. Actually the main thing wrong is fairly quickly apparent: the Foreword by Albie Sachs.

Justice Sachs seems to have misunderstood an important part of what the book has to say. The problem, he says, is that “Refugee law is glacially trapped in its 1950 format when its main focus was on enabling people to flee from persecution and then simply to survive.” Not only is that quite incorrect. It is almost the precise opposite of the conclusion that Verdirame and Harrell-Bond reach. They note that the scope of rights enjoyed by refugees under international law is fairly extensive – certainly far greater than is generally believed. The problem, documented in forensic detail in this book, is that these rights are widely ignored – by governments, non-governmental organisations and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the international agency with primary responsibility for refugee protection. The word ignore can perhaps be used in both its senses. Refugee rights are systematically disregarded. But they are also too little known and understood (including apparently by South African Constitutional Court judges).

Sachs goes on to a rather extraordinary attack on the book that he is prefacing:

“Do I think the book is narrowly focused and too harsh on those that it criticises? I do. Do I think that this work pays insufficient attention to the dialectic of international responsibility for refugees? I do.”

He then proceeds to recommend the book in these terms:

“One hopes that those who feel that their work has been treated with unnecessary harshness will read and study this book with an appreciation of the importance of dialogue over the issues that it raises.”

Personally, I don’t give a damn for the sensibilities of those criticised in this book. And I hope it gives them many sleepless nights.

So why bother with taking issue with a Foreword? First, for the minor reason that some people may pick up the book and judge it by what is written in the first few pages. But secondly, and more importantly, because in Sachs’s comments one can anticipate the response of the refugee industry to this book.

Is the book “narrowly focused”? The core of ‘Rights in Exile’ consists of two case studies of the treatment of refugees in Africa: Uganda and Kenya. The whole range of refugee rights are studied in those two countries, from rights on entry and through the status determination procedure, to civil and political rights, to economic, social and cultural rights. The authors describe it (rightly to the best of my knowledge) as the first academic work to look at this issue in depth. Of course, they might have chosen countries where the problems were less acute, but what they have succeeded in establishing is that their criticisms of the international refugee regime are not broad generalisations but can be precisely documented.

This is probably a matter of “damned if you do and damned if you don’t”. Had they chosen to carry out case studies of more countries in less detail, they would have been accused of lacking academic rigour. As it happens, ten years ago I was involved in just such a non-academic study of African refugees’ rights on behalf of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. (The study receives a positive mention from Verdirame and Harrell-Bond, so here I must declare my interest.) We visited seven countries: Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Senegal, Sudan and Zimbabwe. With some local variation our findings, though less well substantiated than those of Verdirame and Harrell-Bond, coincided precisely with theirs. Their work has a close focus, but not a narrow one.

Do they pay “insufficient attention to the dialectic of international responsibility for refugees”? This is a curious criticism, since the entire book is about precisely this question. The authors certainly interpret this “dialectic of international responsibility” in a way that is inconvenient and unacceptable to those who wield power over refugees. Such people do not, for the most part, really care for Barbara Harrell-Bond. For the past quarter century or so, working always from the perspective of the refugees themselves, she has described, analysed and theorised on the reality of refugees’ experience and on the real meaning of the measures ostensibly put in place to help them.

In her 1986 book ‘Imposing Aid’ she showed clearly how refugee camps are designed to facilitate the delivery of assistance – to the benefit of the donors, not the recipients. She, and scholars of many disciplines at the Refugee Studies Centre that she founded in Oxford, have scrupulously researched a variety of inconvenient truths. That external assistance often undermines refugees’ own coping strategies. That refugees are the best protectors of their own physical environment, not a threat to it. That integration, not repatriation, is usually the most effective long-term solution for refugees.

This book has a similar disregard for orthodoxies and sacred cows. It is harsh, for example, on the role of many NGOs in delivering assistance – and failing to protect the rights of refugees. The fashionable and poorly reasoned “civil society” orthodoxy is speared almost in passing with an elegant reference to Gramsci.

More obviously, the UNHCR’s reinterpretation of its own mandate – away from refugee protection, towards ”humanitarian assistance” – is exposed as a betrayal of the whole purpose of the international refugee regime.

This regime of refugee protection was always envisaged as part of the international human rights system. This book explains how that link has been broken and sets an agenda for re-establishing it. It would be a mistake to see Rights in Exile as some sort of wacky, left-field contribution to a “dialogue” about refugees. This book sets the terms of the debate.

* Please send comments to

Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) was almost the first thing that outside observers noticed about the Rwanda genocide:

"Hutus could be seen listening attentively to every broadcast…. They held their cheap radios in one hand and machetes in the other, ready to start killing once the order had been given."

Or this:

"Much of the responsibility for the genocide in Rwanda can be blamed on the media. Many people have heard of Radio des Mille Collines, which began broadcasting a steady stream of racist, anti-Tutsi invective in September 1993."

Hence it was hardly surprising (if rather belated) when, in 2003, three Rwandan journalists, two of them from RTLM, were found guilty by the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda of participating in the genocide through their broadcasts.

The verdict of the Arusha tribunal seemed to close that chapter and it would be easy to accept that those found guilty deserved their fate and leave it at that. But what, in reality, was the role of RTLM in the genocide? And what lessons can usefully be learned from it?

The prominence of RTLM in Western media accounts of the genocide can be easily explained. Journalists and editors always love media stories for essentially narcissistic reasons. They are taken with the idea that they have an enormous influence on public behaviour – for good or bad. Here was an example of the immense power of the media.

Yet many of the accounts of RTLM’s role do not stand up to a moment’s scrutiny. Take the example already quoted: did Hutu really stand clutching radios in one hand and machetes in the other, waiting to be “incited”? Which Hutu do we mean (presumably not those who fell victim to the génocidaires)? And if they were so disposed towards genocide, why did they need to wait for the radio to tell them to carry it out?

This version of events rested upon a particular interpretation of why the genocide took place. It assumes that primitive and primordial “tribal” hatreds only had to be unlocked for Hutu to begin slaughtering Tutsi. Yet every serious account of the genocide stresses its highly planned and organised nature. That RTLM and its owners were part of the plot to commit genocide cannot be disputed. However, the assumption that RTLM was a necessary precondition for genocide is unproven and unprovable.

The influence of media content on public behaviour has been a subject for endless and inconclusive academic study over decades. We cannot say with any certainty whether, for example, violent television programmes will predispose children to behave violently. Yet many serious commentators have concluded with certainty that the RTLM broadcasts incited genocide. There were indeed contemporary accounts in the Western media of génocidaires “confessing” that they had committed their crimes because the radio had told them to. Such testimony was plainly self-serving yet was usually taken at face value.

The point here is not to exonerate RTLM from responsibility. However, without examining precisely the nature of RTLM’s crimes we cannot hope to draw any useful lessons.

Even 10 years on, the weakness of most accounts of RTLM’s role remains a lack of concrete analysis of either the content of the RTLM broadcasts or their impact on their audience. The latter is more excusable than the former: it remains almost impossible to conduct any scientific study of how RTLM affected people’s behaviour.

Yet it is possible to analyse RTLM’s output. To some extent this work has been done, although the findings are still often ignored. (In 1996, Linda Kirschke wrote a detailed account of RTLM’s broadcasts based upon tapes and transcripts. I base my observations on RTLM’s output on her research. ) The generally accepted understanding of RTLM remains that cited above: that it broadcast “a steady stream of racist, anti-Tutsi invective”. In fact, the story is more complicated.

RTLM’s role in the genocide can only be understood in terms of a strict distinction between what was broadcast before and after 6 April 1994. After that date it would be an understatement to accuse RTLM of incitement. The radio station did not try to persuade people towards genocide; it organised them to carry it out. RTLM broadcast the names and vehicle registration numbers of the targeted victims. This was purely a way of communicating intelligence to the militias carrying out the killing, giving them the information they needed to stop the victims at roadblocks.

RTLM’s role during this phase was only secondarily one of propaganda. Under the 1948 Genocide Convention, any external power with the means to do so had not only the right to jam RTLM broadcasts, but the obligation to do so.

RTLM’s output before 6 April 1994 poses questions that are more complex. The ethnic propaganda that RTLM broadcast was much more subtle than most accounts would suggest. RTLM was a slick and youthful station playing popular music. It was apparently the favoured listening of the rebels of the Rwanda Patriotic Front – the very targets of its “anti-Tutsi invective”. The meaning of RTLM’s often elliptical ethnic references would have been well understood by a Rwandan audience. But it was conveyed with a sophistication and wit that contrasted with earlier broadcasts from radio Rwanda, which, unlike, RTLM, was under direct and formal government control.

Retrospectively it is clear that RTLM’s broadcasts between its launch in September 1993 and 6 April 1994 provided evidence of its owners’ complicity in planning the genocide. They may also have helped to create a popular mood more favourable to genocide.

So far, this article has focused on what was exceptional and unique about the Rwandan situation, as most discussions of RTLM tend to. Yet it is also important to note how RTLM emerged in a way that was completely typical of failed democratic transitions in Africa.

In 1989 President Juvenal Habyarimana was edged into a reluctant transition to a multi-party system. Yet this was accompanied by no thorough reform of public institutions in Rwanda, including the broadcasting system. The publicly funded broadcaster, Radio Rwanda, remained under strict government control. There was no transparent and accountable system to licence private broadcasters. Indeed, the only private station eventually to be licensed was RTLM, owned by a group of extremist Hutu allied to a faction within the government.

This scenario – lack of democratic control over broadcasting in a period of political transition – has been played out in countless countries in Africa and elsewhere. While the consequences have seldom been as disastrous as in Rwanda, the practical lessons should by now be well understood. There needs to be an institutional reform of broadcasting that involves mechanisms for genuine public control over public broadcasting, an open and accountable system for issuing private broadcasting licences and space for the emergence of community media.

Rwanda was neither the first nor last time that the media have participated in massive human rights violations or crimes against humanity. The role of Nazi anti-semitic media in the European genocide in the 1940s was addressed in the Nuremberg trials (which provided some precedents for the Arusha tribunal on Rwanda). In the years immediately before the Rwanda genocide, sections of the media in former Yugoslavia had been actively fomenting ethnic crimes. Since 1994, media have tried to incite violence in Burundi, Congo/Zaire and Zimbabwe, among others.

The last of these examples is instructive. The Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe has drawn explicit parallels between RTLM and the role of the state media in inciting violence against the Zimbabwean opposition. Although the scale of the violence is much less, the institutional framework is very reminiscent of Rwanda. The propaganda and misinformation of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation is so potent precisely because there is no alternative. As in Rwanda, the public broadcaster is under tight government control and there is no space for independent private radio.

The Zimbabwe example is also relevant because MMPZ have tried to explain what is the significance and impact of the hate messages in the government media. They have concluded – unlike the simplistic initial analyses of the Rwanda genocide – that the extreme language and baroque, fictitious conspiracies in the official media are not aimed at convincing the general public that the opposition are a tool of Zimbabwe’s imperialist enemies. Rather they are intended to fire up the relatively small numbers of members of ruling party militias and security forces actually engaged in carrying out human rights violations. Most ordinary Zimbabweans know from their own experience that the ZBC talks lies; a small band of ruling party loyalists uses these propaganda messages to reinforce them in the correctness of their own brutal measures.

Such a thesis is very difficult to prove without conducting a type of sociological research that would be impossible in present-day Zimbabwe (or Rwanda). But it may also provide a useful understanding of how RTLM functioned in preparing the genocide. On this hypothesis, RTLM was not primarily concerned with convincing ordinary people to participate in genocide; it reinforced the conviction of those who were already part of the conspiracy to commit genocide.

Aside from the conclusion that a proper political transition should include democratisation of the media, the practical conclusions to be drawn from the RTLM experience are equally tentative. The criminal prosecution and conviction of the RTLM journalists was immensely important. It establishes the principle of the accountability of journalists for the consequences of what they broadcast. It does not, however, show what steps should be taken to prevent such material from being broadcast in the first place.

Freedom of expression advocates have always been rightly wary of any suggestion of prohibiting “hate speech”, however obnoxious it might be. They argue that violent and intolerant views should be combated by allowing tolerant and pacific opinions to compete. In practical terms that is saying that a plural media environment is the best way of neutralising RTLM and its kin.

Any call to prohibit “hate speech” must be treated with the utmost care. To whom is such a call addressed? In the case of Rwanda it might have been directed to the very government that was promoting and encouraging “hate speech”. Anti-hate speech laws notoriously have the opposite effect from that intended. The African state with the most extensive battery of laws prohibiting “incitement to racial hatred” was none other than apartheid South Africa. The laws were used, of course, against opponents of the apartheid system.

Or perhaps the call was directed to the “international community”. I have already suggested that RTLM’s broadcasts after 6 April should have been jammed. At that stage the radio station was being used to organise the genocide. The fact that these orders were being issued over public airwaves gave them no privilege. This was not, by then, a freedom of expression issue.

But we should be very careful not to predate such a call to cover RTLM before 6 April. Giving powerful governments a general mandate to shut down broadcasting stations is an extremely dangerous precedent. An outcry over the role of Serb broadcasting in the former Yugoslavia effectively legitimised NATO’s bombing of the official Belgrade broadcasting station in 1999. This was done to further NATO war aims in Kosovo. It was a war crime. We should beware of what we wish for in case the wish is granted.

Neither “hate speech” laws nor international military action are the answer. The practical lessons from the RTLM experience are more prosaic. Pluralistic and accountable broadcasting is an indispensable part of building democracy and the voices of hate can only be neutralised if they are confronted with a variety of alternative points of view.

* Richard Carver is director of Oxford Media Research. He wrote “Broadcasting and political transition: Rwanda and beyond” in Richard Fardon and Graham Furniss (eds), African Broadcast Cultures: Radio in Transition, James Currey, 2000.

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.

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.

I have spent most of the week since the terrorist attacks in the US attending exhumations of massacre victims in Matabeleland in Zimbabwe. Not only did Firoze Manji articulate perfectly my own reactions to the attacks and the US response; every individual here who expressed a view shared the same sentiments. This is hardly a scientific cross-section, but it suggests that many of the natural constituency of your newsletter is at one on this issue. So it is disappointing that you felt unable to publish Firoze’s article as an editorial.

No one suggests that the US supported the Matabeleland killings in the 1980s (which claimed many more lives than the recent terrorist attacks), unlike the apparently endless list of atrocities where there was US complicity: Angola, Chile, Guatemala, Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor and so on. But Mugabe’s regime was until very recently regarded as a reliable military ally in the region. The extermination of thousands of his own (black) citizens was a little local difficulty and certainly no business of the US. Recent attacks on white farmers are of course a different matter. But I suspect that even white corpses are less important to the US than the tottering Zimbabwean economy and the rapacity of the leadership here when it comes to strategic minerals in the DRC. The US is anxious to see the back of Mugabe now and is promoting the idea that he should be granted an amnesty for past human rights violations. My guess is that next time a US diplomat proposes that line to a Zimbabwean human rights group, s/he will be asked about the prospects of an amnesty for Osama bin Laden.

There is of course a difference between the two cases, but is not the one that the US draws. Zimbabweans propose that Mugabe should be dealt with judicially, reinforcing the rule of law. The US intends to kill bin Laden without any legal sanction or process. I understand (though mercifully I have been beyond the reach of CNN et al) that Bush has refused to give the Taliban evidence of bin Laden’s involvement in the attacks as a precondition to expulsion or extradition. After all, who needs evidence? As Firoze correctly points out, the US has shown contempt for international legal and human rights standards and refuses to respect court judgments against it. It has done its best to sabotage the development of institutions such as the International Criminal Court, which might offer a means of tackling certain types of terrorism.

People here feel a sadness and empathy over the killings in the US. I don’t presume to speak on their behalf, but Zimbabweans have known too much violence and tragedy over the generations to do anything other than share in that loss. It is a pity that the West – or at least its official spokespeople – are apparently incapable of exhibiting that same common humanity.