Atlantic Unbound | December 3, 2003
Interviews
Life in Mugabe-ville
Samantha Power, the author of "How to Kill a Country," describes Zimbabwe's descent into chaos
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Spend just one hour with human-rights activist, lawyer, scholar, and writer Samantha Power, and you're bound to come away either exhausted or exhilarated. Power doesn't just move through the moments of her life—she spins, attending to a whirlwind of events with the energy of a kid at recess and the deliberation of a seasoned diplomat. During a recent visit to her office at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard, I watched Power juggle a multitude of matters in our sixty-minute interview. Among these were a phone call from the campaign of presidential hopeful Wesley Clark, the requests of eager students who'd lined up in the hall for a slice of her coveted office hours, and preparations for an afternoon trip to New York for her mother's birthday. Throughout our conversation, Power's assistant knocked on the door several times, always with an "urgent" request. Power handled these interruptions with complete calm, in each instance returning to our conversation with unflagging vigor. On the subject of human rights, Power talks with a rare breed of passion that is impossible to miss. And her work ethic is equally impressive. It's been said that during blustery Boston winters, she often keeps the temperature in her office at 80 degrees. That way, when the heat turns off in the evening she'll still have enough warmth built up to work until the wee hours of the morning.
Combining that passion and work ethic with a deft analytical mind, Power has chosen to focus her thinking primarily on war and genocide. "I find myself most drawn to places where the stakes seem really high in terms of human life," she says, "toward places where there are the largest numbers of preventable deaths." In 2002, Power's book, A Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, explored America's tragic inaction in several instances of preventable death, and won her a Pulitzer Prize. The book in part grew out of Power's September 2001 Atlantic article, "Bystanders to Genocide: Why the United States Let the Rwanda Tragedy Happen," which won a National Magazine Award for public interest.
In "How to Kill a Country" (December Atlantic), Power returns to Africa. This time, she has written about the latest tragedy on there: Zimbabwe. Independent from Britain since 1980, Zimbabwe is a fertile land that has long been considered the "breadbasket" of Africa. Yet in just the past five years, Zimbabwe's liberation leader, president Robert Mugabe, has managed to bring his country to chaos. Power spent a month in Zimbabwe last summer and then wrote a chilling analysis of the "all-systems assault" that Mugabe has launched against his own people. Power observes that Mugabe has compiled a veritable "how-to manual on national destruction" and has demonstrated "how much damage one man can do, very quickly."
Power argues that destroying a country Mugabe-style involves the following ten "steps":
Destroy the engine of productivity
Bury the truth
Crush dissent
Legislate the impossible
Teach hate
Scare off foreigners
Invade a neighbor
Ignore a deadly enemy
Commit genocide
Blame the imperialists
At the center of the destructive campaign is Mugabe's redistribution of farmland from white farmers to blacks. "Redistribution" in this case means outright stealing, which has turned thousands of fertile acres into fallow land under the mismanaging hands of Mugabe's cronies, who have received the farms as gifts for loyalty. It is a move that has devastated Zimbabwe's productivity, pushing much of the country to the brink of starvation. Land reform has been an issue ever since the civil war that led to Zimbabwe's independence in 1980, but almost no one agrees that Mugabe's solution is doing anything but wrecking the country's valuable resources. Last March, Zimbabweans voted Mugabe out of office, only to see him rig the results and jail the winner (Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the "Movement for Democratic Change") on charges of treason. Held completely unaccountable for his actions by local, regional, and international forces, Mugabe has made victims of the very people whose independence he fought to win just twenty years ago. "Every day I was in Zimbabwe," Power says, "I would ask myself, 'how is society going to be here tomorrow when I wake up?' Things have got to change."
I spoke with her on November 3 and 12.
—Steve Grove
[Note: "How to Kill a Country" is not yet available online, but is available on the newsstand in the December issue.]
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There are many places in the world where you could go to explore the violation of human rights. Why did you choose Zimbabwe?
The alarm bells are ringing in Zimbabwe right now in a way that they aren't ringing in many other countries in the world. And in the other countries where they are ringing, we already seem to be involved: Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea. Zimbabwe, it seemed to me, was very likely to get left off the foreign-policy agenda. So it seemed like a good time, with a crisis unfolding, to draw our attention to this tragedy.
But there was another reason I was interested in Zimbabwe. One of the most provocative and intriguing claims in human rights in the last decade is the claim of Nobel Prize-winner Amartya Sen that no country with a free press has ever had a famine: essentially that civil and political rights are what enable social and economic welfare. For a leader to have economic policies that cause mass poverty for his people, and to have 30 percent of the population infected by HIV—and for the local press not to be able to put pressure on him to alleviate these problems—that's a very dire situation. So it seemed like it would be useful—not just for Zimbabwe but for other countries—to try to understand the interplay between these forces.
Foreign journalists have been banned from Zimbabwe since February. How did you get into the country, and how did you manage once inside?
You know, we journalists sometimes mythologize the dangers of our movements, creating images of "deep throat" meetings in a variety of settings. When I went to Zimbabwe I was definitely afraid, because of all I heard. I had all my contacts buried in very discreet places in my baggage. I expected to get searched, and I expected my itinerary to come under scrutiny. But when I walked in it was like, "hey, mon." Literally, there was a sign that said "Tourists," and so I went through that. It's a lot harder if you're a photographer, especially if you're a video photographer. But print journalists can easily get in.
In terms of getting around, initially I was very careful. I was worried about being followed, so I stayed out of the city and out of the main hotels and took a variety of precautions. But it got to the point where I started to be a little bolder. I wanted to see the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Morgan Tsvangirai (pronounced chang-er-rai), so even though I knew that his house would be watched, going there was a risk worth taking. There were enough foreigners and enough Caucasians in the country that I could have been an NGO worker, a lawyer, a local white—there were a lot of things I could have been. But what never got easy was actually getting people to trust that they would be secure in talking to me. I could get people to talk to me at length about their frustration and suffering, but when it came to taking names and so on, there was still a real fear that there would be accountability issues.
You knew you were headed for a country that was in bad shape, but what surprised you about Zimbabwe?
I'd never been to Zimbabwe before, and I'd been hearing so much about how awful and screwed up the place was. So I was actually shocked at how much possibility was there. The fertility of the land, the industriousness of the people, the education and the literacy, the role of religion and sense of community that was still maintained... all of this really blew me away.
Of course the corollary to that is the enormous lengths that someone had to go to screw a place like Zimbabwe up. And so that was the second thing that surprised me—the "all-systems assault" Mugabe has launched. The inflation was so bad that I had to carry the cost of one night's stay at a guest house—maybe fifteen U.S. dollars—in a pillowcase: it was that many bills. I've been to a lot of countries that are going through or have just been through war or genocide, but I've never been to a peacetime country where civilians are suffering as they are in Zimbabwe. And again, this is all the more striking because you can see that it doesn't have to be that way. Sometimes, you go to a country and it's so overpopulated or it's so poor that you know that the cycle of despair is very long-standing, and it's hard to find hope. But in Zimbabwe, this turn of events is so recent, so rapid. It wasn't long ago that Zimbabweans considered themselves to be the success story of southern Africa.
It seems almost insane, the lengths Mugabe has gone to destroy his own country. Your piece points out that after independence, Mugabe was initially doing some positive things for Zimbabwe, including an education drive that brought the literacy rate up to 85 percent. But then, in the past five years, he's begun this wholesale destruction of his country. I'm confused. What exactly happened to Mugabe?
Yeah, that's something I didn't try to explain in the piece. First, destruction like this tends to happen incrementally. Shockingly incrementally. Of course Mugabe didn't write a manual called "I want to destroy my country." So what happened is that at a certain point, something became more pressing to him than the welfare of his country—and I think that's personal power.
When he took over, Mugabe built on the education system and the transport system, and built up the infrastructure of Zimbabwe. But the war veterans who'd helped him win the country's independence in 1980 were not compensated for their sacrifices. Through the 1980s and 1990s, they were clamoring for compensation, which Mugabe had promised them. Meanwhile, Mugabe had surprised many by allowing the white farmers—often seen as vestiges of England's colonial rule—to maintain their farms. As time wore on, these white farmers appeared to sort of be "living high on the hog." This became politically embarrassing for Mugabe.
Then Mugabe invaded the Congo: a single decision with big consequences. He sent troops to the Congo partly to try "African solutions for African problems," but once he got there, the spoils of war became everything. Army officers took what they wanted, and Mugabe had to hold his cronies at bay back at home—they ran the country's ministries and were the people who could challenge his power. So he started to buy them off with these spoils. Well, then the still-living veterans from the war of liberation said, "wait a second, how come the veterans of this blunderous war in the Congo get these jewels and riches, and we're still left seventeen years after liberation with nothing?"
So in a sense, the invasions of white farms were Mugabe's attempt to kill three birds with one stone—to get the war veterans off his back, to further satisfy his cronies, and to get rid of the white farmers, who had begun teaming up with the black opposition as a political force. So I think you can see there is no one answer to how Mugabe became this way—he certainly didn't roll up his sleeves one day and say, "I've had enough of running the jewel of Africa, now I want my country to become the joke of Africa." But everything sort of fed on itself, and the only unifying theme through it all is his personal power. Power comes first, second, third, and last—and nothing can stand in its way.
One of the casualties of Mugabe's personal power struggle that you mention is the Daily News, an independent newspaper in Zimbabwe. Once an important voice of dissent, their printing presses were bombed in January 2001; then this past September Mugabe denied the paper a license to print, shutting it down. If Amartya Sen's claim is true—that a free press will always provide the dissent necessary to prevent a famine—then this development is especially troubling. Did you meet any Daily News reporters while you were in Zimbabwe? Are they hopeful that they'll find a way to start up again?
Yes, I met a lot of them. The Daily News was the liberalization force. I don't think any of them were really prepared for this ploy by Mugabe. They would say, "I don't know why he lets us publish," but then they would say, "He has to let us publish."
I've been in e-mail touch with some of them since I've come back. They're pretty much on their own—they're fighting it out in court. Some sound very relieved in the most basic sense to still be getting paid their salaries. The publisher and the owner have taken it upon themselves to keep people afloat.
When the Daily News was operating, did it reach the rural areas of Zimbabwe?
Generally, the rural areas are still pretty cut off—and they're very dependent on state television and radio, which are of course in Mugabe's hands. There is the sense that Mugabe has given up on the cities, but that the rural areas are still his stronghold. Rural Zimbabwe voted with Mugabe in the presidential election; even their parliamentary seats went to Mugabe's party. So that's the key—Zimbabweans in the city say that's where they have to get their message.
And that's the irony of the international aid programs like the World Food Program: the rural areas are more likely to be fed by international aid givers than people in the cities, which appeases some of the discontent that might be brewing out there, in terms of malnutrition and so on. This helps Mugabe to keep the rural areas at bay.
It all feeds on itself. The activists in the cities, who are strong MDC supporters, might have wanted to ship the Daily News to rural areas. But because there's no money, and because there's no fuel being imported because the state has such a huge external debt and doesn't have the foreign currency to buy fuel, the activists' means of transport—of literally getting out there to sow unrest and expose people to a new way of thinking—has been taken away by the economic hardships. So it's this quasi-stalemate.
Mugabe has also attacked the other source of dissent you mention, the MDC. Despite winning the last election by all "unofficial counts," Tsvangirai is in court battling charges of treason. Does the MDC have a chance as the future of Zimbabwe's government?
Everyone you meet who isn't in the ruling party wants a change in Zimbabwe, so they're all invested in the MDC. The MDC has positioned itself as a "come one, come all" kind of umbrella coalition—and that's what's scary. Teachers, farm laborers, shopkeepers, Ndebele speakers, Shona speakers, white farmers... it's huge. Too huge, of course, to be a governing body. If the MDC was tasked with governance, the divisions among its constituents would make themselves apparent, and many would feel betrayed. So I guess one of my fears is that all civil society groups have been completely absorbed by the MDC. If the MDC does finally defeat Mugabe and come to power but appoints all the civil-society leaders in government, then who's there to keep Tsvangirai honest? The fear is that again, the society will invest all its hopes in one man. It's dangerous. One of the ways to inoculate Tsvangirai from Mugabe-style tendencies would be for civil-society organizations to be developing independent of the political party. And right now, that's not happening.
Despite those problems, you mention your admiration of the many Zimbabweans who are speaking out against their leader. Given that 70,000 people, according to Amnesty International, were killed or tortured by Mugabe last year, aren't Zimbabweans afraid? What fuels this voice of dissent?
I asked myself that same question, because it is striking, given the brutality, that people remain willing to take tremendous risks. I think right now that hope lies in history. In many cases people have a fresh memory of prosperity, and of basic respect for their rights. I mean, Mugabe's crackdown on the country is so new that I think that a lot of the protest is incredulity, it's "what's happening?" In addition, there's a huge Zimbabwean exile community or émigré community abroad, which reminds those who've stayed behind that not everyone is living as they are, hand to mouth, or without the ability to speak out. I think these things have emboldened Zimbabweans and caused them to reject the inevitability of what's being done to them.
On the other hand, one of the impressions I got in Zimbabwe that I didn't write about in the piece was the patience of the people. You see people waiting in these bank lines that go around block after block after block—they're waiting to take out money that is no longer worth anything, money that basically just pays for their bus fare home. And they're there the next morning to wait again. And so there's a strange endurance. It's a weird combination, I think, of expectation for something better but patience with something quite dire.
Patience? How?
Maybe the patience comes from the belief that this can't continue. The whole country is frozen in this moment of expectancy. No one believes it can get worse. How can you get worse than 80 percent unemployment? How can you get worse than 500 percent inflation, and rising every day? How can you get worse than having your highest bank note so devalued that it doesn't even buy you a loaf of bread? They've never experienced anything like this before, so they just assume it can change. It's got to change!
Even after all of this intimidation—the posting of armed agents at the polling stations, arrests, torture, shutting down the newspapers—they know they still defeated Mugabe in the election last year. They voted the MDC into office in all the major cities and then basically voted Morgan Tsvangirai in as president. That not only shocked Mugabe—that shocked Zimbabwean voters. They realized, "Whoa, we are a force." So the country right now contains parallel universes: one is the universe as it ought to be, and the other is the universe as it is, which is Mugabe-ville. In Mugabe-ville, none of the facts that they've created on the ground have translated into much. So the people feel like, "Well, we won the elections, so we're just waiting for the world to come around and recognize it."
END OF PART ONE |
