Zimbabwe tightens Mugabe's grip

<i>Zimbabwe MPs have passed changes to the constitution to strengthen government control over land redistribution.

Another clause will allow President Robert Mugabe's government to confiscate passports of those deemed to pose a threat to national security.

Critics have condemned the proposals as an attack on fundamental rights.
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<i>The bill has raised serious concerns among human rights groups and the political opposition, who are worried about how the draft puts certain actions of the government beyond the reach of the judiciary.

The government will now, for example, be able to expropriate land without being challenged in court. </i>

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4196228.stm

I have no clue why anyone here actually defends the SOB. Apparentely according to some it's OK to be a militantly homophobic totalitarian trade union buster as long as you spew Marxist rhetoric and piss off Western businesses.

neoliberalism. They're the most extreme and authoritarian examples of each.

But Mugabe and Bush definitely aren't fighting for the same causes.

Mugabe is only fighting for Mugabe's personal interests
and Bush is only fighting for Bush's personal interests.

The land that has been transfered and is subject to this law was promissed to Zimbabwe in an agreement signed by the British decades ago. The British never met any of the milestones promissed under that agreement. Despite the fact that, hypothetically speaking, all this land was subject to a ticking time clock for transfer, the values of the land (albeit low, because it was originally aquired by force and not by paying FMV) never decreased. You know this because there were so many stories about people buying land right up to 1999 and then expressing outrage that it was confiscated, in what was, to me, a Captain Renault-like (in Casablanca) sense of shock. I'm shocked, shocked! that we have to keep our promise to give the land to the people from whom we took it by violent, murderous force as late as 1960s! I'm shocked that our promises are binding!

So, notwithstanding what should have been assumed to happen eventually due to an international treaty and human justice, nobody whose power derived from imperial relationships with the former colonizers (ie, western corporations) believed that this land would ever by transferred. That's a very interesting commentary on things. Now, Zimbabwe's new laws are sort of the flip side of the attitude expressed by the tobacco farmers and artichoke growers connected with western corporations. Whereas nobody believed the law would be followed before the late 1990s, now Zimbabwe is saying to the same people, don't believe for a second that the law will be undone (with the purpose of making sure that the current uses of the farms won't be undervalued because of uncertainty of title).

Setting degrees of authoritarianism aside for a moment, this is the opposite of Bush (and western, post-colonialism, and neoliberalsm).

Also, from a purely economic point of view, you have to appreciate why they are doing this. Say you were a colonial farmer in 1776 America. Say you wrenched the land away from Britain. Now you want to farm it. To do that you have to build barns and invest in machinery to get the full value out of the land. If there were any doubt about whether the title to that land would go back to Britain, not only would you personally be reluctant to invest your sweat and whatever capital you have in that land in order to extrat its full economic value, it would probably be hard to get a bank to give you a loan. What you'd need was a clear, legally binding (ideally, constitutional) rule that title has transferred and that there has been a final, unappealable judgement to that effect.

Now, it helps Mugabe I guess in an abstract sense that these land title transfers happen and are final. But I don't believe that this helps Mubabe personally more than it helps all of Zimbabwe on a macroeconomic level. Mostly this is about making sure that people feel that they can start putting resources into the land without having to calculate-in the chance that they'll lose the land.

I think that's probably the other side of the story you're not going to get from the MSM.

You could say the same thing about Stalin and Pinochet. One was communist, one was anti-communist. Most extreme examples of both.

But they were both still scum. Same with Mugabe and Bush.

the new rules are, in fact, not realy new. The new laws are meant to clarify where existing provisions conflict (ie, they're removing one of two rules where two rules conflict). He said that they've been applying the superceding rules for a while now and wonder where the outrage was before.

The official also said the primary point of the new legislation was to clarify that once title has passed according to the procedures established, title won't be returned. The point is to make sure that land values aren't lowered by a false hope among the former owners that they'd get the land back somehow.

So now, if there is a coup to remove Mugabe in order to take back control of the land (think of, as a model, the Reagan/Bush government invading and arresting Noriega in order to get the Panama Canal back in US control after Carter negotiated a treaty to give it to Panama), they'll probably have to make some very serious high-level changes in the legal system, which will be harder to achieve.

It's about General Omar Torrijos of Panama. I suspect it will be informing my posting for a few days.